“Of all India’s many comparatively unsung directors, Ritwik Ghatak (1926–76) was possibly the most obviously talented. . . . Here was a passionate and intensely national filmmaker who seemed to have found his way without much access to the work of others but who was most certainly of international calibre. Arrogant, overbearing and hopelessly unreliable, he was also much loved and admired as a restless iconoclast whose dreams were never likely to be wholly fulfilled but still worth dreaming in the fractured society which he seemed to epitomise.”

“[Ritwik Ghatak’s] films are not cathartic. They speak to the enduring violence that’s caused by forced exile and to the global crises and conflicts—neoliberal economic reform, armed insurgency, civil war, an ongoing refugee crisis, the global war on terror, the global water crisis, authoritarian challenges to democracy—that extend well beyond the subcontinent. These films rattle with and against their subjects, pulping atrocity to find the agonized pith within. Ghatak’s singular filmic vision depicts the implacable, everyday groping toward hope, if not a home, that can and will encumber a life lived in exile.”

“In portraying the trauma of the loss of homes among refugees from East Pakistan, which recurs in most of his films for instance, he tried to turn it into a metaphor for the universal sense of rootlessness and alienation suffered by individuals and communities.”

“For Ghatak, it was the loss of subjecthood experienced by a nation’s people, newly divided along arbitrary lines—a condition imposed as the very criterion of claiming a newly conceived citizenship—that became a recurring obsession. Rather than try to dramatize all the physical brutality of Partition, Ghatak sought to understand the violence done to human subjecthood and relations by the machinations of the nation-state as it draws, and redraws, lines on a map. The specificities that ground Ghatak’s films—from matters of Bengal’s history (and the larger history of British colonialism in India), to subtleties of Bengali social hierarchies; from India’s vast cultural trove of mythology, folklore, and music, to their brilliant, if erratic, allusions to Buñuel, Eisenstein, Brecht, and any number of European figures of the avant-garde—are what make them resistant to easy assimilation into Euro-American canons of global art cinema founded upon historicist ideologies.”