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A River Called Titas
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River of No Return
A River Called Titas begins with a dedication
to “the myriad of toilers of ever-lasting Bengal”. But is there anything
ever-lasting in the cinema of the great Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976)? His films
track the slow, painful deterioration of places, communities, personal
relationships; his characters separate (less by choice than circumstance),
wander, go mad. Even that mighty river of the Titas begins “behaving strangely”,
as if in response to the general disintegration of all things; in haunting,
indelible images, Ghatak shows us its increasingly visible, dried-up bed …
But, although Ghatak offers us the sad spectacle of
the passing of a way of life – in this case, the fishing industry in the
village of Gokannaghat on the banks of the Titas – he is not nostalgic or
sentimental. His films are dedicated to dramatising and revealing the reality
of incessant change, on both personal and social levels. Change registers as
invariably tragic in his work, but also inevitable, unstoppable. Ghatak’s
viewpoint was, in his time, unique; as the scholar Moinak Biswas has observed, Ghatak
takes a long, hard look at the ravages wreaked by modernity (the many, complex
alterations to the social fabric introduced throughout the 20th century)
– but he does so precisely as a modernist, an artist who passionately believed
in the salutary shock of newness, of perpetual innovation, and of political
revolution.
By 1973, however, the socialist and communist ideas of
social reform that nurtured Ghatak’s young adult sensibility had evolved into a
complex, often paradoxical mixture of commitment – he always proclaimed his
belief in a useful cinema that would,
in some way, serve and help the dream of a better world – and disenchantment. This
bittersweet mood, peculiar to his films, doubtless prompted his reflection that A River Called Titas amounted to the
lesson that “history is ruthless” and that, of the world he recreated there,
“it is all lost. Nothing remains”. A river of no return.
Ghatak’s life and his sensibility were marked by
historic trauma; this trauma became the basis for, and the substance of, his
work in all media: theatre (like Mrinal Sen, he worked with the Indian People’s
Theatre Association in the 1950s), writing (his Stories appeared in English in 2002), film. He spent his
adolescence in East Bengal, and witnessed throughout the 1940s a rolling series
of momentous crises: the Bengal Famine of 1943-4, World War II, multiple riots,
strikes, and rebellions, the Independence movement, and finally the Partition
of August 1947. After the dissolution of the British Indian Empire, the
Partition split India, on the basis of religion, into the Dominion of Pakistan
and the Union of India; it involved the uprooting of millions of people, many
of them dying in the process. Ghatak – as the opening titles of A River Called Titas plaintively inform
us – was preoccupied by these masses of often forgotten, anonymous “little
people” in Bengal’s turbulent history.
Partition: the word itself has come to symbolise
Ghatak’s cinema, at all its levels. Has there ever been a filmmaker so
intensely, single-mindedly focused on every conceivable variation of rupture,
abandonment, fragmentation? And not only at the levels of the immediate plot,
or the overarching socio-historical context; Ghatak also enacted the tearing
sensation of rupture in his highly composed frames, in his radical use of music
and sound, and above all in his rigorous, ultra-modern editing style. How often
does a scene of high drama seem to end too soon in Ghatak – the picture, music
and gesture suddenly terminated, rudely snatched away from our contemplation?
Indeed, what some people in decades past saw as signs
of Ghatak’s directorial inexperience, or perhaps as the limitations of the
technology at his disposal, now appears to 21st century eyes (and
ears) as evidence of a film language every bit as sophisticated and restless as
that of Jean-Luc Godard or Lynne Ramsay. Ghatak was a poet of rupture. By 1960
and his The Cloud-Capped Star, he had fully married
what are often seen as two opposing tendencies in filmmaking: a mise en scène approach based on the
placement and movement of figures within the composition of the static or
mobile frame; and a montage method
highlighting the graphic clash of one shot against the next. In fact, Ghatak
brought the montage principles of Sergei Eisenstein – whom he revered above all
other masters to emulate – into both phases of the filmmaking act: every frame
staged a war, and every cut tore the scene apart further.
A River Called Titas is based on an
autobiographical novel by Advaita Malla Barman published in 1956, five years
after the writer’s death; his reputation derived from the fact that he had
struggled up from the type of extreme poverty we see depicted in Ghatak’s film.
The story is set in the early 1930s, and therefore is not literally a tale of
the Partition years; however, it is a characteristic trait of Ghatak’s work
that he projected the trauma of
Partition, diffusing it throughout the entire history that he had seen and
lived. In fact, on one level, the film was very close indeed to its
contemporaneous reality: Bangladesh had at last achieved its independence from
Pakistan (another partition of sorts) only two years prior, in 1971. However, to
some of Ghatak’s colleagues from the 1950s onwards, he seemed overly fixated on
this single moment of the historic Partition: as Biswas notes, he “went on
extending that event into a metaphor for everything that was alienating and
destructive in the experience of his community, and talked about the pervasive
degeneration of his country sometimes solely in terms of it”. Yet Ghatak’s motivation
is clearer to us now: on the one hand, he was fighting the enormous fog of
denial surrounding the tragic upheavals triggered by Partition; on the other
hand, he opposed the simplistic celebration of progress that drove the social
modernity of India.
The plot of A
River Called Titas is pure melodrama – a form that, in the Indian context,
Ghatak proudly claimed as his “birthright”. As often happens in his films (such
as another masterpiece, Subarnarekha aka The Golden Line, 1962),
everything – all passions and problems – begin in the formative years of
childhood and adolescence. We are introduced to a young girl, Basanti (played
as an adult by Rosy Samad), pining to one day marry Kishore (Prabir Mitra) – who
is always in the company of his friend, Subol. The two men travel along the
river to another village, Ujajinager, where Kishore is promptly paired off with
Rajar Jhi (Kabari Choudhury). In their one, fleeting night of marital intimacy,
they will conceive a child – but Rajar will hardly see her husband’s face. Back
on the river, disaster strikes this union: Rajar is kidnapped. She survives and
washes up on a shore, but Kishore – who has lost his mind as a result of the
incident – will never know it. Basanti, meanwhile is married off to Subol – who
dies the very next day. And this takes us only 30 minutes into a 158 minute
film!
Not all narrative events are shown on-screen;
sometimes we learn of them only retroactively (as is the case with Bisanti’s
marriage). Ghatak was fond of using great leaps forward, ellipses in time, to
shape his stories. The powerful, over-arching rhymes – such as the words that
young Basanti hears at the start of the film about the “last drop” of the
Titas, “without which our soul cannot depart”, words that return to her in the
final scene – are more crucial than plodding through every detail of the
action. In fact, Ghatak’s stated aim was to heighten the devices of melodrama –
the outrageous developments (such as Basanti and Rajar becoming friends,
completely unaware of each other’s past), the agonising coincidences (Rajar falling
for the mad Kishore, again unaware of who he really is, and hoping to replace
his “lost soul mate”) – and bend them in the direction of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic
Theatre. Everything in melodrama that removed events from the conscious will
and power of the characters – that delivered them over to the infernal cycles
of chance or Fate – had a potentially political significance for Ghatak. He was
interested in forces larger than the individual consciousness – forces that
are, at the same time, only graspable through these human intermediaries, these
long-suffering victims of history.
A poet of rupture, Ghatak gave his films a palpable
texture of constant shock that is almost neurasthenically intense. He was (as
everyone around him knew) an alcoholic virtually from the time of Ajantrik (1958), his second feature
film; prone to bouts of deep depression and periods of institutionalisation, his
death at age 50 came at the end of a long string of illnesses. These facts are not incidental to his achieved
work as a film artist; indeed, there is something in the temperamental
disposition of an alcoholic that helps to explain why Ghatak’s surviving œuvre
remains so remarkable to us today. Ghatak was at once a sharply rational man,
and a completely, uncontrollably emotional one: the dimension of melodrama that
pushes towards constant hysteria offered him a way to fully enact, on screen, over
and over, the traumatic experience of Bengali history.
History almost claimed Ghatak as a victim in another
sense, too. At the time of his death in 1976, his final and most experimental
film, Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (Reason, Debate and a Story, 1974), could
not find a theatrical release – his wife, Surama, later regretted not imploring
Indira Gandhi (a Ghatak fan) to intervene on behalf of this cinematic
testament. And, while there were isolated pockets of critical discovery of his
work around the world, especially from the 1980s onwards (as in, for example,
the appreciations by Charles Tesson in France), his work
as a whole, and the physical elements of its image and sound tracks, fell into
a state of neglect. Thanks to the work of the Ritwik Memorial Trust (especially
the tireless efforts of Ghatak’s son, Ritaban), the original but incomplete
camera and sound negatives held by the National Film Archive of India, plus a
complete positive print provided by the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Berlin), A River Called Titas was restored by Martin
Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation at Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata
laboratory in May 2010. This digital restoration – which includes a recreation of
the opening credits – produced a new 35mm internegative.
Access to important works from the past often prompts
a revision of film history – especially national cinemas – that takes the form
of a polemical backlash: if only we had known decades ago that Mikio Naruse is
better than Yasujiro Ozu, Boris Barnet is better than Sergei Eisenstein, and
Ritwik Ghatak is better than Satyajit Ray! In reality, there is no need for
such stark (and frequently absurd) oppositions, and especially not the contest
between Ghatak and Ray – who admired each other’s work – to filter our appreciation
of Indian cinema. But a distinction between them can still be usefully drawn.
Ray’s work was an art cinema largely distinct from popular Indian fare, defined
by a humanism and realism that easily travelled the world in its day. Ghatak
was out on a farther margin: the avant-garde of this art cinema (and, in this
quest, he inspired the formation of a veritable Ghatakian school, including
figures such as Kumar Shahani). Although he explored popular forms, Ghatak
never achieved, in his lifetime, much more than a cult reputation among
artists, intellectuals and students; and he received little recognition beyond
his home country.
It has been a long and winding road for this œuvre to
become available in an optimum form, and for Ghatak’s artistic stature to be
acknowledged worldwide. Surama Ghatak, recently looking upon her former
husband’s burgeoning fame, wondered whether he was a soothsayer who had divined
his own, better future beyond the grave; how well this image suits the maker of A River Called Titas, in which (in a
ghost-story touch) “after death, the mother becomes an enemy”, because she
envies the living and wants to bring them to her level. Ritwik Ghatak was a
troubled soul in his lifetime; now he is the spirit that haunts world cinema
with his seismographic renderings of trauma.
© Adrian Martin August 2013 |
