In this profound essay, writer and filmmaker Sharad Raj explores how Ritwik Ghatak merged Marxism, Jungian psychology, and Brechtian alienation to depict the anguish of Partition, reshaping Indian cinema into a politically charged, emotionally transformative art form.

Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema stands at the confluence of politics, psychology, and aesthetics—bridging Marxism, Jungian archetypes, and Brechtian alienation to portray the trauma of Partition. In this essay, Sharad Raj examines how Ghatak’s masterpieces like Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha, and Jukti Takko aur Gappo revolutionized Indian cinema through emotional depth, intellectual rigour, and stylistic defiance. The article traces how Ghatak’s “mother figure” became a metaphor for the violated nation and how his unconventional visual language reshaped cinematic grammar, cementing his place among the world’s greatest auteurs.

The Partition of India was perhaps the greatest human tragedy to happen in the Indian sub-Continent. The far-reaching human repercussions of it cannot be fathomed by anyone. It is all very easy to be empathetic in hindsight towards a momentous human tragedy in the history of civilization if one has not experienced it, but the great Indian auteur Ritwik Ghatak had. But he did not stop there, he internalized what he saw and the human cost of the tragedy and transformed it into art, a cinematic form that made us experience and realize that Partition was not just a line drawn between countries by the political class but had real cost in terms of the lives of the people of our country.
Ritwik Ghatak never could come to terms with it. Much like a fellow Marxist Bhagat Singh, Ghatak was deeply critical of it and called independence mere “transfer of power”.

The great Robert Bresson had once said an artist should feel and respond, Ghatak did just that. But when it is said “just respond” that does not mean you pick up a camera and start to shoot or start writing a script. It means internalizing it, articulating it and then adapting it to cinematic form that requires a lot beyond just a sensitive response. It needs both emotional depth and intellectual height to transform that response to cinema. Ritwik Ghatak had both. He was a member of the Communist Party of India but was expelled in 1955.

Besides, he was a short story writer, a playwright with deep understanding of allied arts like music and fine arts. Whether it was the music of Allauddin Khan or the sculptures of Ram Kinker Baij, Ghatak was entrenched in the arts and literature of the world, not just India.

The Archetypes of Partition and the Feminine

Ghatak connected his Marxist critique or understanding of society to Carl Jung’s concepts of “collective unconscious” and “individual consciousness”. For him, the Marxist principles were a key to understanding the exteriority of man’s social condition, while Jungian theory of consciousness threw light on the interiority of people. He worked with the concept of archetypes that according to Jung were universal, innate patterns of thought and behavior that exist in the collective unconscious of all people. For instance, the “Hero”, an “ally” or most importantly for Ghatak, the “mother figure”.

Ghatak drew a connection of the “mother figure” with the “motherland” that now after Partition stood violated and fractured—the country at large whose individual manifestation comes in the house of Nita (Supriya Choudhary) in Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud Capped Star, 1960), where Nita’s existence and desires have been subsumed as she adopts the role of the “mother” to her family despite having her own mother.

Ira Bhasker interprets that Ghatak plays musical chairs with the mother archetype in Meghe Dhaka Tara. Nita assumes the role of the mother figure—the nurturer, while her mother is the nurtured or in need of nurturing, for she and her whole family depend on Nita. Nita’s family and her lover become a microcosm of the partitioned land, where despite being attacked and broken, the land continues to inhabit us, but not without consequences, much like Nita.

The mother analogy goes deeper in Subarnarekha (1962); the protagonist Sita (ma), played by Madhabi Mukherjee, finds herself in a brothel in the service of her own brethren, both metaphorically and in her case really, when Sita’s own elder brother (Abhi Bhattacharya) lands at the brothel with tragic consequences. Subarnarekha becomes a scathing criticism thereby of the rapacious model of capitalist development of our country after Partition, where the “mother” has been mauled due to greed and her commodification.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernist masterpiece La Notte (The Night, 1961), a year before Subarnarekha, echoes similar criticism of post-war Europe and Italy in particular. Personally, I have always felt that Subarnarekha is our La Dolce Vita, the Federico Fellini’s brilliant critique of modernity made two years before Subarnarekha. It is as civilizational in its expanse as La Dolce Vita is.

Ghatak reveled in Indian mythology but stayed away from literary symbolism. Instead, his archetypes went beyond due to their contemporary interpretation and use. My own film Ek Betuke Aadmi Ki Afrah Raatien was replete with the collective and the individual consciousness tussle, such is the far-reaching influence of Ghatak.

Brechtian Alienation and Cinematic Language

With the Jungian component discussed, how can the Marxist component stay behind? Ghatak’s cinematic language is replete with “alienation” devices proposed by Bertolt Brecht in the 1920s as an essential aspect of his “epic theatre” theory as opposed to Aristotelian Poetics of identification and empathy. The use of melodrama, so despised by the westernized aesthetes as an alienation device, is unique to Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema. Look at the over-the-top response of Nita’s father, for example, in Meghe Dhaka Tara. Ghatak followed no rules except his own.

In his cinema, you will find spatial disorientation, for Ghatak neither follows the 180-degree continuity cinema rule; he continuously jumps the imaginary line, thus displacing both the characters and the audiences at the same time. There is extensive use of wide-angle lens distorting the image to the extent that the proportion of the character and the object is distorted way beyond the realm of representational realism. Look at the opening shot of Meghe Dhaka Tara, for instance, where the tree is humongous in relation to the character Nita, or Ghatak’s own frontal shots in his prophetic last film Jukti Takko aur Gappo (1975). These all work as “alienation devices” in the Brechtian tradition of “epic aesthetics”, for they disorient the viewer, thus making him or her an objective viewer of the film, indulging in critical engagement with the proceedings on the screen rather than empathetic passivity of the Aristotelian kind.

The Iconoclast of Indian Cinema

Ghatak’s compositional choices, in fact, can only be matched perhaps by Jean-Luc Godard, who much like Ghatak had disdain for cinematic conventions. In Ghatak’s films, you will find a character entering a frame from the lower corner of the frame instead of left and right of the frame, or exiting from the lower horizontal of the frame! He would cut across the imaginary line but not just jump it, but also change the spatial arrangement of his characters. Ghatak’s cuts and compositions and his soundtrack follow a thematic chain of thought rather than a grammatical procedure.

It is never easy to articulate Ghatak’s cinema, for it has layers and layers of worldviews, thoughts, and a form that is iconoclastic. Viva maestro!!!