“I miss my daughter. She left yesterday. My last dear one. She was all I had. My only daughter. That’s the way it happens. It all comes and then disappears again. There’s a spark of life. And suddenly it’s not there. It all becomes untraceable. You were a child yesterday. Today you’re a woman. This ever-flowing river Titas may become bone dry tomorrow. It may not even have the last drop without which our soul cannot depart. Yet these flocks of sails move on and on and on…” (Ghatak, R. (Director). (1973) Titas Ekti Nodir Naam [Film]. Purba Pran Katha Chitra)
For Ritwik Ghatak, Bengali arthouse filmmaker and socialist, the imagery of the river serves as a symbol of both separation and the inescapable flow of life. It acts as a parallel to the sentiments underpinning many of his storylines- the urgency to reconcile a loss of control and locate a personal identity amidst social upheaval. His work is recognised as both feminist and diasporic, often representing the stories of displaced and immigrant women and their efforts to keep the memory of their homelands alive, as they begin to disappear at the hands of industrialisation or occupation.
When I first watched his 1973 feature film, Titas Ekti Nodir Naam (A River Named Titas), at the end of my first year at university, I was immediately captivated, partly because of its serene cinematography, and partly because of how it resonated with me during a critical junction in my life when I was having a difficult time taking ownership of my own identity. My own heritage, from my mother’s side, is ethnically from Kashmir, where my family was never able to find a permanent home amidst decades of violence and instability. For this reason, since my grandfather emigrated to Pakistan in the 60s, no-one in my extended family has been able to visit Kashmir and we have no living relatives there. The military occupation and annexation of Kashmir is a political crisis which remains largely neglected by the international community and obscure to a western audience, but has long remained an unspoken source of pain for me, from afar. The realisation of my underlying disconnect from and anxiety over the future of my country, which for so long I hadn’t been able to find a name for, was prompted by my attempts to make sense of the isolation I had felt during my time at Oxford. This is a feeling unfortunately familiar for so many students from minority backgrounds, and came directly as a result of the multiple racist incidents I had come to face. I soon became deeply concerned with reclaiming my relationship with my homeland, and how I was to preserve it with the few points of reference I had. The idea of my South Asian womanhood became a fixation for me- my life was so tied up in it as a source of pride and identity, yet I so often felt removed from my roots.
So what primarily spoke to me about Titas Ekti Nodir Naam, was its thematic commentary on resisting erasure. The film, like much of Ghatak’s body of work, pays political homage to the concept of the ‘lost home’ following the tragedies surrounding the colonisation and subsequent partition of India. The director’s unflinching focus remains on the unrecognised struggles of the working masses in his own home country, and their fundamental connection with the land. The film’s opening credits read: “Gokannaghat is a small fishing village on the banks of the river Titas. Nobody knows much about the people here. And perhaps nobody even cares to know. This movie is dedicated to the toilers of everlasting Bengal”. By the end of the film, the protagonist, Basanti, reaffirms the link between the river and the community who live off it as fading and reappearing resonances- “I keep thinking of our Titas. Soon it will be a faint memory, like [my child]. The name alone will remain”.
The tension between forgetting and remembering act as the driving force behind Ghatak’s work- he expresses his main influence as a “great betrayal of national liberation”. His work blends elements of melodrama and realism to achieve what he describes as his most straightforward motivation, which is “thinking deeply of the universe, the world at large, the international situation, [his] country and [his] people” (Ghatak, R. (1967) My Coming into Film, Film Forum Festival, Souvenir). This aim carries a specifically gendered element. Criticism of the nuclear family as a carrier of the societal gaze and prescribed gendered roles is a common trope running through his films. Women in his films grapple with the pressure of fulfilling patriarchal expectations of them to sacrifice their personhood to commit themselves to traditional archetypes marriage and motherhood, alongside economic responsibilities to provide for their households.
In Subhanarekha, Sita, a refugee from East Pakistan, takes on the role of sole breadwinner for her family at the cost of her desires and dreams. Due to caste-based stigma, her brother Ishwar compels her into marriage against her will. He does this in an attempt to prescribe her an identity he deems suitable to reflect on his social position. As she is forcefully conditioned into gendered archetypes, she tries to break from this throughout the film through artistic, personal, and political assertions of her own identity. We see this through forms such as her arguing with her brother, protesting social injustices, or simply singing by the field. Throughout all of this, there is an acute sense of alienation and isolation- in one of her songs she laments, “Whom shall I talk to about my sadness?” (Ghatak, R. (Director). (1965) Subhanarekha [Film]. J. J. Films). As Sita’s story ends with her killing herself as a result of her anxiety and shame over the series of sacrifices she has had to make, Ghatak establishes a case for feminism amidst the grief of her lost life. The title of the film, Subarnarekha, or, The Golden Thread, represents the sacred yet unattainable- for Sita that being the dream of autonomy. Her suicide represents the only pathway to freedom from patriarchal control she deemed available to her.
We see a similar arc with Nita, the protagonist in Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star), described by journalist and film scholar Chaudhury as “one of the rarest characters in cinema history”. Instead of working to realise her independence, she primarily strives to “sustain her extended family”. The burden of this responsibility on Nita reflects Ghatak’s recognition that as society modernises with industrialisation, the oppression of women does not disappear, but rather takes on different forms. Nita’s father comments on the irony of the illusion of progression, stating “In the past, they married their daughters off to the dying. They were barbarians. Now we are supposed to be civilized. We educate our girl, wring her dry, and destroy her future.”. This points towards a critique of liberal feminism, positing that political and economic equality does not entail an end to exploitation and domination. Nita’s mental and physical health gradually deteriorate as she deals with the trauma of her father’s illness, her husband’s infidelity, and her brother being severely injured working in exploitative factory conditions. Acharyya’s review of this film highlights how “instead of patronising the broken individual”, Ghatak’s portrayal of tragedy “turns his gaze on the wounds as a site of cruelty and violence, simultaneously, usurping the consciousness to rupture the continuum of history.” I believe that Ghatak’s dedication to centering the stories of these individuals in such a frank way represents a radical appeal to forming an empathy-based politics, by forcing us to reckon with the most grim extremities of patriarchal structures. As the film ends and we see Nita on her deathbed, she calls to her brother and by extension, to the audience, for not only our sympathy but also our recognition of her persistence. In one of the most memorable closing dialogues in modern cinema, she cries out,
“Brother, you know I really wanted to survive. I would love so much to be alive. Brother, tell me once that I will live. Brother, I want to go home. I want to live!”
The adversities faced by Ghatak’s female protagonists are far from abstract and fictional; they are reflective of the economic and social concerns many South Asian women living around the world continue to face. His characters’ financial woes represent a disproportionate burden faced by women under the intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism. In the South Asian labour market, this overlap perpetuates a cycle of exploitation and is seen acutely in the sweatshop industry- made clear by the decision of a Bangladeshi factory boss to switch his all-male workforce to a majority female one on the basis that “women are cheaper because they have fewer choices”. Nita and Sita’s struggles with sexual coercion and resultant emotional distress, which are neglected by those in their immediate community, may strike a resonance with the failure of the apparatus and institutions of the modern state to protect women, especially women of colour, against violence. Gill and Harrison discuss a pattern of underreporting sexual crimes in South Asian diaspora communities, partly attributed to hesitancy to approach the authorities out of fear of deportation, as well as a lack of social support after migration. These characters’ trajectories also, however, depict how survival alone in patriarchal and capitalist society can become a form of political expression. This speaks to a rich tradition of South Asian women’s resistance in the shape of formation and assertion of hybrid identities through every-day activities and choices. Tara-Chand writes about this in the context of British-Asian muslim women countering hegemonic narratives during the ‘War on Terror’. This looked like “repositioning fragments of self to reformulate, to create, identity in a climate of hatred and fear” through participation in political education, community discourse, and personal dress.
In his essay “Human Society, Our Tradition, Filmmaking, and My Efforts”, Ghatak writes that he does not believe he has “any right to practice art” if he “cannot articulate the present crisis of [his] country in some form” (Ghatak, R. (1963) Human Society, Our Tradition, Film Making and my Efforts, Chalachitra Autumn Issue). Art, he argues, is “the feeling of being in the presence of living truth” (Ghatak, R. (1963) Film and I, Montage Vol-II No-3, p.6). Ghatak’s work poses the question of the responsibility of art to tell stories like Nita, Sita, and Basanti’s, which resonate with those of marginalised peoples across the globe. He does not only ask other artists if they are willing to “throw up certain ideas”, but if we, as an audience, are willing to “fulfil them”. This symbiotic relationship between the director and the audience is the “ritual” through which filmmaking becomes a “total whole”. Ghatak’s films can be read as feminist not only in their dedication to the working class and women’s experiences but also in the philosophy underpinning the distribution of power to the viewer. A full appreciation of cinema like this must consist of us confronting the structures around us that trap women and obscure their hardships, and facing ourselves, in our inability or unwillingness to challenge them.