"I can say that there is no love lost between me and the film medium. I just want to convey whatever I feel about the reality around me and I want to shout. Cinema still seems to be the ideal medium for this because it can reach umpteen billions once the work is done. That is why I produce films—not for their own sake but for the sake of my people."

On the 75th anniversary of his birth and the 25th anniversary of his death, perhaps it is time to forget Ritwik Ghatak. There is a strange paradox that surrounds the man. On the one hand, his work has simply not been seen by enough number of people in India and abroad, though he is without

any doubt amongst the masters of world cinema. Even in his own lifetime, Ghatak’s films did not get the sort of exposure they deserved. Today, a quarter century after his death, the situation is not much better, in spite of the best efforts of many of his friends and admirers. As a result, Ghatak and his films have not been the subject of as much critical and theoretical writing as one would expect. But even more sadly, his wonderful films have not been seen by the masses of people for whom they were made.

On the other hand, however, stories about Ghatak’s passionate and often quirky personality abound. There is the aura of the maverick that surrounds his name. His brushes with the Communist Party hierarchy, his alcoholism, his stint at the mental asylum, all these are perfect ingredients to create the picture of the tragic, doomed, temperamental genius. What is more, this knowledge that we have about his life, and his personal tragedies, sometimes starts to overwhelm, so that we look at everything he created from almost exclusively that perspective.

It is time, then, to forget Ritwik Ghatak, and understand his work. Much has been said on Ghatak’s films, and much will doubtless continue to be said. His films will be analysed from this perspective and that; reams of paper will be used in writing about the centrality of the Partition of Bengal in his films, or about his use of sound-track or the close-up, or about his engagement with mythology, or about his return to the epic form, and so on and so forth. All that is as it should be, and we are certainly not trying to suggest that this sort of rigorous theoretical analysis is of no worth. Far from it. Film theory has done injustice to Ghatak by ignoring him to a great extent, and it is time this wrong is rectified.

What we would like to emphasize here, and the reason why his work needs to be celebrated, is something else altogether. And that is his political partisanship . Politics is of course a bad word these days, and partisanship even worse, but if we truly wish to understand his work, we have to understand his politics. Ghatak’s mastery over the film medium was phenomenal, his innovations many and varied, his formal experiments breathtaking. But all this was, in a sense, forced upon him. He had things to say about the reality he saw around himself, he wanted to shout , but found that the formal, technical, and economic resources he had at his command were simply not sufficient for the purpose. So he simply had to innovate. It was a question of life and death. And the same can be said about his narrative style. His appropriation of the melodramatic form, his interest in myth, his engagement with the epic, his forays into documentary, all this was because he wanted to reach out to his people. In other words, these were not experiments for the sake of form. Rather, they were efforts to evolve a film language most appropriate for his immediate need, the need to communicate with his people.

For Ghatak himself, then, his commitment to the people, the millions of toiling people, was more important than everything else in life. Even cinema. why his work needs to be celebrated, is something else altogether. And that is his political partisanship . Politics is of course a bad word these days, and partisanship even worse, but if we truly wish to understand his work, we have to understand his politics. Ghatak’s mastery over the film medium was phenomenal, his innovations many and varied, his formal experiments breathtaking. But all this was, in a sense, forced upon him. He had things to say about the reality he saw around himself, he wanted to shout , but found that the formal, technical, and economic resources he had at his command were simply not sufficient for the purpose. So he simply had to innovate. It was a question of life and death. And the same can be said about his narrative style. His appropriation of the melodramatic form, his interest in myth, his engagement with the epic, his forays into documentary, all this was because he wanted to reach out to his people. In other words, these were not experiments for the sake of form. Rather, they were efforts to evolve a film language most appropriate for his immediate need, the need to communicate with his people. For Ghatak himself, then, his commitment to the people, the millions of toiling people, was more important than everything else in life. Even cinema.

In this issue, we have put together some material on and by Ghatak. Naturally, what has been included is only a small part of what is available. And more than the film expert or scholar, the issue is addressed to the interested layperson who may have heard of Ghatak, but may not have seen much of his work. The criterion we have used more or less consistently in making the selection is, therefore, to leave out the denser writings from the academic discipline of film studies, and to include writings that are more readily accessible to the nonexpert. Secondly, while there are inevitably pieces of personal reminiscence and anecdote, we have taken care to include the ones that also illustrate a larger point about his work.