Ritwik Ghatak—Jinxed Maverick or Enfant Terrible Of Indian Cinema? In his centenary year, MONOJIT LAHIRI tries to outline what made this catharsis specialist so uniquely different from every other director on planet earth!

Ritwik Ghatak remains one of the most fiercely original voices in Indian cinema, remembered for his raw emotional power, fractured narratives, and political urgency. As global audiences rediscover his work in his centenary year, his legacy continues to influence filmmakers, cinephiles, and cultural theorists alike. His films—marked by displacement, identity, memory, and national trauma—offer a cinematic experience unlike any other, making Ghatak not just a filmmaker but a movement. Today, he stands as a rare cinematic visionary whose artistry transcends time, borders, and ideology. 

What better way to introduce Ghatak than Jacob Levich’s wonderfully descriptive passage? “If Ray was the Suitable boy of Indian arthouse cinema [unthreatening, focused, reliably tasteful, exquisitely classy] Ghatak was its Problem child!

Where Ray’s films are lyrical with conventional narratives that aim for nuance and psychological insights, Ghatak’s are ragged, provisional, intensely personal yet epic in shape, scope and aspiration. With Ray you feel safe in the hands of an omniscient, authoritative master. Viewing Ghatak is an edgy engagement with a brilliantly erratic intelligence in an atmosphere of enquiry, experimentation and disconcerting honesty. The feeling can be invigorating but deeply uncomfortable.

Legacy in Shadow and Fire

Looking back, it’s fair to say that Ghatak (1925–1976) largely spent his film career in Ray’s shadow. While the towering inferno was hugely hymned and celebrated in the international market, Ghatak struggled to stay above water, eternally fighting political and personal demons. He never really managed a legit hit in his lifetime (although critical acclaim was always there), yet didn’t seem to give a damn to meaningful connect with friends, political comrades, business, trade or media community. He forever left films unfinished, bartered film rights for the bottle and alienated everyone who mattered. He was a soul in self-appointed exile, passionately romancing doom and self-destruction.
Amazingly, despite all these glaring negatives, he managed to seduce a very loyal following amongst intelligentsia.

Ghatak’s stint as the Vice-Principal of the renowned FTII, Pune, found him mentoring a bunch of bedazzled new-wave progressive filmmakers—Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani leading the pack-who were responsible in keeping his legacy alive. Each film of his, alas, only 8 in number, is a work of genuine distinction marked by ingenious daring, intellectual vigor and powerful emotional wallop. Some are masterpieces whose stature has only increased with time.

Critics believe that in his most memorable and celebrated film Meghe Dhaka Tara [The Cloud-capped Star], his potent and unapologetic use of melodrama brilliantly harnessing its metonymic force to connect the personal with the political, takes your breath away! Audience sees a range of emotions not histrionics. Nothing stagnates and no one is readable briefly. There is no surrender to cliches, Ghatak is not an easy director and its enjoyable only if you enjoy surgery without anaesthesia.

Late Recognition, Lasting Impact

The first real occasion a group of Western critics were able to look at his body of work was at the Madras Film Fest in 1978, two years after his death. Recalls renowned film critic Derek Malcolm, “the prints were tattered, subtitles practically unreadable, but the impact of the films on all those present was considerable. As a radical intellectual who had destroyed himself through self-indulgence, was arrogant, overbearing and hopelessly unreliable, he was also much loved, admired as a restless iconoclast whose dreams were never likely to be fulfilled, but still worth dreaming in the fractious society which he seemed to epitomize. The Partition clearly was a leitmotif in his life and works and that sense of longing and loss never seemed to have left him. It was a badge he carried right through….”  

What better way to call this homage curtains than echo critics of Partha Chatterjee’s superbly insightful epitaph? “You were either singed by the fire of his genius, overwhelmed by his passionate humanism and touched with childlike simplicity…or simply repelled by his arrogant manner, class speech and melancholic posturing of a prophet. Either way, you had to react to the mesmeric quality of the man his films”.

Amen.