Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, 1974
[Reason, Debate and a Story]
A
frail, elderly villager seeking shelter from the burning sun inside
a makeshift hut stares inexpressively into the camera as a trio of
faceless, black-cladded apparitions perform a vibrant, ritualistic
dance before him, perhaps in anticipation of the old man's inevitable
death. The dreamlike, surreal episode seemingly provides an allegorical
- and intrinsically operatic - framework for the terminally unemployed
intellectual, Nilkantha's (Ritwik Ghatak) gifted, but equally encumbered
(and squandered) life. As the story begins, Nilkantha lies abstractedly
crumpled on the floor of an empty house under the numbing haze of
alcohol as his long-suffering wife Durga (Tripti Mitra) meticulously
removes any tangible object, including his prized phonograph records
and books, that he may (and undoubtedly will) eventually sell or
barter for a drink before leaving with their young son Satya (Ritaban
Ghatak) and arranging for the sale of the house in order to start
a new life in the rural town of Kanchanpur far away from him.
Dispossessed of everything, Nilkantha finds an enabling protector
in his former student Nachiketa (Saugata Burman), an engineering
university graduate unable to find employment in the uncertain
economy and turbulent political landscape of 1970s Calcutta.
Sending the obliging Nachiketa on an errand to buy a bottle of
liquor (using the house ceiling fan as trading fodder), Nilkantha
soon finds himself joined in the empty room by a young woman named
Bangabala (Shaonli Mitra), a refugee from newly independent Bangladesh
who has entered the home in search of shelter under the mistaken belief
that the house had been abandoned. Believing that she is the soul of
his beloved homeland and touched by her traumatic plight, Nilkantha
takes Bangabala under his wing. Forced to vacate the premises with
the arrival of the new owners, the three begin to wander through the
streets and, after rescuing an eccentric Sanskrit teacher named Jagannath
(Bijon Bhattacharya) who coincidentally hails from his ancestral village,
Nilkantha decides to lead his ragtag band of displaced brethren to a
journey into the country, away from the cold, impersonal streets of
Calcutta, in search of an elusive place called home.
Marking the final film by Ritwik Ghatak,
Reason, Debate and a Story poignantly (and provocatively) encapsulates
the recurring, overarching themes that have come to define the filmmaker's
passionate and indelible cinema: dislocation, exile, factionalism,
division, cultural dissolution. From the opening sequence of marital
separation (and Nilkantha's subsequent eviction from home), Ghatak
provides an intrinsically personal, allegorical framework to the
sequence of traumatic history that have plagued the Bengali people
(and culture) throughout the course of the twentieth century: the
man-made Famine of Bengal in 1943 that decimated communities and
ushered a wave of refugees struggling to survive, the Partition of
Bengal in 1947 between India and Pakistan that further caused the
forcible uprooting of families from their native homeland (often
resettling in Calcutta in search of economic opportunity), the struggle
for independence from Pakistan in East Bengal that led to the creation
of the separate nation of Bangladesh (and further dissipating any
hopes for the reunification of the two Bengals), the rampancy of
political agitation from the contemporary Naxalite movement as insurgents
strive to incite a peasant revolution (and consequently, land reform)
throughout the region. By incorporating his own personal struggle
with alcoholism into the story, Ghatak provides, not only a semi-autobiographical
context to Nilkantha's travails, but more importantly, introduces
the idea of self-inflicted destruction that, in turn, serves as an
allegory for the Bengali people's own complicity in the dissolution
of their homeland and culture through petty self-interest, abandoned
ideology (note Nilkantha's encounter with the former intellectual
turned underground pornographic novelist, Shatrujit (Utpal Dutt)
in an open field), and resigned complacency. It is this acceptance
of individual human frailty in the face of a formidable social struggle
that is reflected in Nilkantha's comment, "Somewhere, at some
new day, we shall learn that slipping is not death", a sentiment
of untiring activism and defiance against the extinguishing of a
humble ideal - a unified homeland - that is reflected in his faltering
words to his beloved wife Durga, "I have to do something, don't
I? I have to do something."
© Acquarello 2004. All rights reserved.
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The
opening image of Ritwik Ghatak's first feature film, 
In
an impoverished refugee village in Calcutta, an attractive and industrious
young woman, Nita (Supriya Choudhury), breaks a sandal while passing
through the market square, and without complaining, continues barefoot
on the graveled street, unable to buy a replacement pair of sandals
for the walk home. Patently aware that Nita has received her monthly
salary, her talented, but indolent older brother Shankar (Anil Chatterjee)
pays an unexpected visit, and encountering Nita absorbed in reading
a personal letter from a suitor named Sanat (Niranjan Ray), playfully
snatches the note and reads aloud its affectionate contents, before
asking her for spending money. Meanwhile her younger sister, Gita
(Gita Ghatak) and brother Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal) brazenly plead with
their desperate and resourceless mother (Gita De) for new articles
of clothing, before re-directing their vain and selfish entreaties
to Nita. Having spent her entire salary on her burdensome, coddled
siblings, her embittered and insecure mother then vociferously complains
to her father (Bijon Bhattacharya), an underemployed school teacher,
that Nita has squandered the monthly household budget. Bound by a
selfless sense of familial duty, Nita has decided to postpone her
marriage to Sanat until Shankar realizes his ambition to become a
classical singer. However, as Nita perseveres in her sacrifice for
her ungrateful and demanding family, her own prospects for happiness
proves ever increasingly bleak.