New York City’s Film at Lincoln Center recently commemorated Ghatak’s 94th birthday through Poetry and Partition: The Films of Ritwik Ghatak (November 1–6, 2019), a retrospective presenting seven of his eight feature films in new digital restorations and with greatly improved subtitling.

Ghatak’s response to these calamitous events was to commit to Marxist thought and praxis, which he did by working with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) - the artistic and cultural organ of the Communist Party of India - in varying roles as an actor, director, and playwright from about 1946 to the mid-1950s. He experienced firsthand the successive migrant and refugee crises resulting from the British-engineered famines of 1943, which directly caused approximately three million deaths and led to generation-spanning conditions of catastrophic poverty widespread social upheavals due to World War II followed by massive violence along communal lines during the Partition of India in 1947, when, as part of Britain’s relinquishment of control over India, the nation was carved up into India and Pakistan, while the province of Bengal was sundered into primarily Hindu West Bengal and primarily Muslim East Bengal. However, where Zola’s famous cry elicited fierce responses both celebratory and condemnatory, Ghatak’s politics of despair imagined a fate worse than either: how does one adjudicate blame and point the finger when there is no singular figure to embody the crime?īorn on November 4, 1925, in Dhaka (East Bengal, present-day Bangladesh) to an upper-middle-class family, Ritwik Ghatak received an education and came of age as a refugee in the colonial Calcutta, India, of the 1940s.

AT A CRITICAL POINT in Meghe Dhaka Tara/ The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), the Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s best-known and most commercially successful work, the aged patriarch of the family at the center of the film turns directly toward the screen and, in a moment of unexpected theatricality, shouts, “I accuse…!” The force of these words, hurled (in English, breaking from the film’s vernacular Bengali) at the audience and punctuated by the speaker’s gesticulations and a pointed finger, is almost immediately blunted when his son retorts: “Whom?” The old man despondently lowers his finger and mutters, “Nobody.” It is highly unlikely that Ghatak was unaware of the historical resonances of the J’ accuse at the heart of Meghe Dhaka Tara.

Pather panchali movie summary