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Ritwik Ghatak

Filmmaker

Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976) is the unknown great among the independent Indian directors of the 20th century, even though his slim oeuvre includes some of the most significant films ever made in Indian cinema. Ghatak was born into a family of civil servants in Dhaka in what would later become Bangladesh, with the harrowing experience of the partition of Bengal in 1947 following Indian independence and the huge population movements and dislocations that followed leaving a significant mark on his young adult life—a trauma he never managed to shake off and which made its way into every last nook and cranny of his art. He settled in Calcutta, where he joined the Communist Party, wrote numerous short stories and novels, translated Brecht into Bengali, and composed texts on cinema. As a member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which attempted to connect folk theatre traditions with a revolutionary consciousness, he wrote and directed plays and also acted in them. Political differences lead him to leave the IPTA and look to cinema for new possibilities of expression, where he also hoped for larger audiences. Excessive alcohol consumption and self-destructive tendencies repeatedly formed an obstacle to his work, with many of his films remaining incomplete.

(Biography originally published here: https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/arsenal-cinema/past-programs/single/article/6256/2804/archive/2016/november.html)