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IF SATYAJIT RAY was the suitable boy of Indian art cinema - unthreatening, career-oriented, reliably tasteful - Ritwik Ghatak, his contemporary and principal rival, was its problem child. Where Ray's films are seamless, exquisitely rendered, conventional narratives that aim for the kind of psychological insights prized by l9th century novelists, Ghatak's are ragged, provisional, intensely personal, yet epic in shape, scope, and aspirations. With Ray, you feel safe in the hands of an omniscient, authoritative master. Viewing Ghatak is an edgy, intimate experience, an engagement with a brilliantly erratic intelligence in an atmosphere of inquiry, experimentation, and disconcerting honesty. The feeling can be invigorating, but it's never comfortable.
A committed Marxist, lay Jungian, sometime novelist, and notoriously selfdestructive alcoholic, Ghatak (1925-76) spent his filmmaking career in Ray's shadow. While Ray fairly cornered the international market in Indian cinema, Ghatak struggled to finance and complete his few films, continually wrestling with a variety of personal and political demons. The bittersweet comedy Pathetic Fallacy (Ajantrik, 57) was a modest success with Bengali audiences, but Ghatak never managed to produce a hit. He declined to exercise his considerable charm on international distributors or work the festival circuit. He alienated friends, political comrades, and business connections. He left major projects unfinished, bartered film rights for bottles of booze, and generally made a shambles of his life and career.
Ghatak's already slim chances for fame and fortune were further attenuated by his political convictions. His debut, The Citizen (Nagarik, 52), which critiques the Horatio Alger-esque ambitions of a naive young man in the slums of Calcutta, is an overtly Communist film, ipso facto out of the running for international accolades during the Cold War era. (The Citizen grew out of Ghatak's work with the Indian People's Theatre Association, an essentially Communist theatrical collective briefly the cultural focal point of postwar Bengal - later lovingly caricatured in his E-Flat/Komal Gandhar, 61). Although none of the later films hews to Party line, all are implicitly Marxist and revolutionary in spirit. And the director's lifelong insistence on returning to the ugly facts surrounding Indian Independence particularly the cynical and disastrous partition of Bengal - was as embarrassing to South Asia's cultural gatekeepers and official hagiographers as it was mystifying to the Western variety.