Cinema in an age of refugees

In such a moment, Ghatak and his cinema return as history’s forgotten doubles, illuminating not simply the deeper psychological rupture of Partition but also the shape-shifting forms of exile, displacement and loss through which Bengal continues to imagine itself. Those who believe cinema to be no more than chimera or fantasy will be surprised to discover in Ghatak’s films a world where Kafkaesque estrangement is fused with Fanon’s tragic vision of decolonisation.

Few filmmakers in world cinema have evoked as much passion, and admiration and yet remained so intriguingly neglected as Ritwik Ghatak. During his lifetime, he occupied a curious position on the margins of Indian cinema, revered by his fellow artists and intellectuals but denied visibility and recognition. Yet his apparent marginality concealed an extraordinary influence. Contemporary Indian film makers frequently acknowledge that his work reshaped the possibilities of Indian cinema by combining melodrama, political consciousness, and formal experimentation.

Sudhir Mishra, maker of iconic films such as Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, recently remarked that “every time you make a film, somewhere Ghatak is present,” suggesting that his cinematic grammar has become part of the sub-conscious of Indian filmmaking. Sudhir Mishra’s observation is all the more compelling because Ghatak’s legacy lay not only in the films he made but also in mentoring some of the most influential figures of India’s parallel cinema, including Mani Kaul, Kumar Shaahni and Adoor Gopalakrishnan at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). When Ghatak died in 1976, his cinema lingered on the margins of world film culture. Once dismissed in the West as ‘scandalously obscure’, his films are now widely recognised as masterpieces of world cinema.

Popular imagination often casts him as the tragic Devdas of Indian cinema, a brilliant but self-destructive artist undone by alcoholism, emotional intensity, and professional disappointment. The comparison invokes the canonical hero of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Devdas, a figure of romantic despair who gradually destroys himself. At first glance, the analogy appears tempting. A committed Marxist, maverick Jungian thinker, a poet of rare intensity and short story writer, he spent much of his career working under difficult circumstances and battling personal turmoil. While the films of Satyajit Ray travelled across international film festival circuits and secured global acclaim, Ritwik Ghatak remained on the margins of world of cinema. Yet it was Ghatak who articulated an unforgettable mytho-political cinematic vision of the anguish of a civilisation torn apart by partition, an anguish that neither many of his contemporaries nor the dominant discourse of post-colonial nationalism fully acknowledged.

Film critic Jacob Levich famously contrasts Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak through the metaphor of temperament and personality. In his words, if Ray represented the ‘suitable boy’ of Indian art cinema, Ghatak was its ‘problem child’. For Levich, Ray’s films are distinguished by their formal elegance, psychological realism and narrative coherence, whereas Ghatak’s cinema is emotionally turbulent, formally disruptive and ‘never comfortable’, This formulation captures an important distinction in their artistic sensibilities, but it also risks encouraging a flawed biographical reading in which Ghatak’s turbulent life overshadows the historical catastrophe of partition that shaped both the man and his cinema.

Thus, to remember Ghatak merely as the tragic Devdas or the ‘problem child’ of Indian cinema is to make a biography for history. Unlike Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s hero, whose tragedy springs from personal weakness, Ghatak’s anguish was inseparable from the catastrophe of Partition. While the Bengali bhadralok found comfort in Ray’s refined cinematic aesthetic, Ghatak remained relegated to slums of cinema. As cultural theorist Ashis Nandy’s reflections on the psychological aftermath of Partition suggest, Ghatak’s ‘lifetime of homelessness’ or self-destructive impulses can be understood not simply as personal failings but as the psychic consequences of suffering the disintegration of a shared cultural world.

Oscillating between lyrical nostalgia and revolutionary anger, his emotional and creative volatility can itself be read as a historical symptom, a ‘belated psychosomatic’ response to the violence, displacement and cultural rupture unleashed by the Partition of 1947. It is hardly surprising that Ghatak was one of the rare Indian film makers to engage seriously with the ideas of psychologist CG Jung. His fascination with Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious remained with him throughout his life, often puzzling his colleagues. Yet it was precisely this immersion in the collective unconscious that became the foundation of his celebrated melodramatic imagination of trauma.

Ritwik Ghatak made only a small number of films, including Nagarik (1952), Ajantrik (1958), Bari Theke Paliye (1959), Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973), and Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974). His most celebrated works, however, are the Partition Trilogy — Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961), and Subarnarekha (1962). Among them, Meghe Dhaka Tara is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Centering on Neeta, a young woman who sacrifices her life for her refugee family, the film transforms personal suffering into an archetype of Partition trauma. Her anguished cry, “Dada, ami bā̃chte chāi” (Brother, I want to live), resonates like the climactic line of a tragic poem. Ghatak’s cinematic vision is deeply intertwined with his poetry, which also bears the wounds of Partition and the refugee crisis. The imagery of rivers and lost villages, central to Subarnarekha and Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, transforms the river into a metaphor for history itself, carrying away homes, memories, and identities. The same sensibility appears in his poetry:

My home is no longer a place

It is a wound that travels with me.

Wherever I go,

The border follows

At the heart of Ghatak’s cinema lies the insight that exile is not merely a historical event but a condition of modern existence. In Subarnarekha, the declaration, “who here is not a refugee” extends the experience of Bengal’s partition into a universal meditation on displacement. Drawing on folk theatre, Baul music, khayal, and visual echoes of Buddhist and classical traditions, Ghatak creates an epic poetics of the refugee. In an era marked by mass migration, and the farcical brutality of war, when the word refugee has become both a political accusation and a cry of desperation, Ghatak’s films appear eerily prophetic.

Watching his films, one realises that we live in an age of refugees, an age in which even history seems homeless, wandering through the debris of its own making. As a poet, I find echoes of my own fractured memories in Ghatak’s words:

I walk through streets of strangers

Searching for the sound of my mother

Whether we embrace or resist his vision, Ritwik Ghatak continues to unsettle us, compelling us to confront exile and displacement not as distant historical events but as traumatic conditions of late modernity.

Ashwani Kumar is a poet, political scientist and professor in Mumbai. His most recent book is Map of Memories (2025). He is also member of the governing council at the KR Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Arts (KRNNIVSA), Kerala.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.