This presentation tries to relate Ritwik Ghatak’s (1925-1976) work to a few other twentieth century artists who come from the same region, and speak his language. The premise is that they share a horizon of imagination, which I provisionally call the ‘vision of a land’. The figures that I invoke alongside Ghatak are the filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), the painter Benodebehari Mukherjee (1904 – 1980), and the novelist Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee (1894 – 1950). Ghatak’s films (I use his Ajantrik, 1958, and Subarnarekha, 1962, in the talk) not only make challenging use of cinematic elements, attempt complex experiments with form, they also make larger statements about natural and historical processes. But If he has succeeded in creating lasting impressions of lives in transition it must have also been through what attends such processes artistically in a more perennial sense. I try to make sense of the quality and nature of imagination involved here that narrative dissection or reconstruction of the context do not capture. The collective mind of an era perhaps work most profoundly through these apparently peripheral elements. From an analysis of Ghatak’s framing of human characters in relation to the surroundings I would like to move into the treatment of land and the ‘open’ in film, novel and painting, look into the visualization of the earth that notions of country or nation do not help us understand. Indeed, to the imagination in question even the idea of belonging is not always relevant. I take a cue from the late work of the historian Ranajit Guha to suggest that the historicity of perception involved in these instances escapes historiography as we know it.
Moinak Biswas teaches Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, and writes on Indian cinema and culture.