Ritwik Ghatak and the Cinema of Praxis

In a significant departure from other works on Ritwik Ghatak, this book establishes him as an auteur and a maestro on par with some of the great film directors, like Sergei Eisenstein, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Kenji Mizoguchi and Luis Bunuel. Based on in-depth research that follows Ghatak’s journey within the context of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, it fills an important gap in the scholarship around Ghatak by offering crucial insights into Ghatak’s unique vision of cinema embedded as it is in the cultural psychic configurations of the people. It analyses Ghatak’s practice by minutely tracing formal similarities across the language of his cinematic oeuvre in the domain of cinematography, lighting, music, and sound. The book develops the way in which cinematic technique enters the domain of conceptual constructs and abstractions. It moves on to chronicle Ghatak’s political odyssey as reflected in his cinema. Moreover, it charts the manner in which Ghatak, through his cinematic idiom, offers a polemic of cinema that further adds to his notion of praxis – a thoughtful Marxist paradigm organically associated with the culture and context of India. By locating Ghatak within the discourse of nationalism, the book brings to the surface Ghatak’s critical insights related to the independence of the nation and the trauma of the partition of Bengal. Ghatak’s cinema served the crucial function of chronicling the mass tragedy of partition and its impact on the human psyche. This book appeals to scholars of film studies and filmmaking as well as to researchers and general readers interested in debates pertaining to culture, politics, art, psychoanalysis, partition and refugee studies, cinema, theatre, and ideology.