Ritwik Ghatak never missed the innuendos of life and simple emotions which always went unnoticed in the conflicted society struggling to fight against the political whirlwind. And whirlwind it was that sucked life out of a breathing man but left his soul to linger by the banks of the Padma.
The director, playwright, writer and several such titles can be put together to introduce Ghatak, once again, but there is no perfect title that can define the man who followed the ‘milky way’ in the sky over the Padma and whose heart bore the scar of Bengal’s Partition, the great famine and of an irreparable loss that haunted the genius for the rest of his life. It also had its reflection in his works, films, plays and stories.
Ghatak is a lesser known short story writer among the mediocre followers of his works. But to an ardent devotee, Ghatak’s short stories would be a precursor to his timeless cinematic works.
Ritwik Ghatak Stories, a collection of short stories by the master and translated from Bengali by Rani Ray, an expert who has given a new language to the works of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore among others, strings together lives which are victims of the villainous system.
The first story is about a tree that was once an intrinsic part of the village life. But development comes with a cost and so the “banyan tree lay tumbling down on the banks of a little river”. Until that day, even villagers do not realise what the tree meant to them.
As development stirs up the uncomplicated life in Bengal’s villages, somewhere in the city, a soul is lost in the elitist sham.
Shikha, a tiny tot of seven years, cries for the homeless and the destitute. She peeks at the real struggle from behind the comfort of her life. Even at that age she has a fair knowledge about the two classes, the rich and the poor, and the curse that befalls one if he or she belongs to the latter. So a distressed ‘Shikhamayi’ (flame), whose pure heart is yet to be corrupted by the world outside, wants to give away all her father’s wealth to the poor when she grows up. She is adept at befriending the workers at the coal mine where her father is a manager and welcomes them into her life.
The narrator of the story, Shikha’s youngest maternal uncle, remembers Shikha as a compassionate child and finds no similarity with the woman called Shikha. The uppity of the bourgeois class puts Shikha far away from the chasms of life and moulds her into a different person. The flame in her was doused but the fire that burned inside Ghatak is spit out at the society that imitates life.
The author’s protest against crony capitalists hits a reader hard in his stories A Fairy Tale and Comrade.
The editor of a newspaper in A Fairy Tale finally cuts himself loose from the puppeteer’s string and takes up weapon, his cane stick, and attacks the owner of the media house who, for years, has exploited his employee’s power of words to safeguard his various business interests.
“Another person had joined the ever-expanding band of men; another soldier was added to the resistance army,” the author writes.
Class struggle is the soul of Ghatak’s tales and the proficiency with which the master delves into the Delphic subject has always surprised his devotees.
It is this struggle that forces the trade union leader in Comrade to end the conspiracy that the potential to extinguish the fire of revolution.
Ghatak was a dreamer rooted to reality. The tremendous quest in him to find the El Dorado reflects in some of his short stories like Solstice. He is also a master craftsman who puts the soul in knots with internal conflict and finds a way out of it. And the protagonist in Deposition follows Ghatak’s string and does what is best to set his unrequited love free from her gruelling married life.
It is this internal conflict that takes the protagonist in the story Raja back to his past and then cruises him down to his penury and a life of decadence. In this to and fro journey of Raja, Ghatak immaculately canvases human instincts largely driven by materialistic existence.
Ghatak’s short stories are over half a century old but still resonate in today’s society. These tales are more than mere fiction. They are narrations from life. The year mentioned after each story makes it easier for the reader to have an idea of the socio-politico-economic churning of the time but even without the dates, the stories remain as relevant.
Ghatak wrote about a hundred short stories, and at least two novels – from 1943 onwards and many of his stories were published in leading Bengali literary magazines. The translated collection of short stories is an addition to the publisher’s Ghatak archive.
The translation by Ray is lucid and preserves the power in Ghatak’s words. As aptly said by Sumanta Banerjee in the introduction, “… these stories are not to be celebrated as mere museum pieces in a Ritwikiana, but need to be recognised historically as the first artistic steps that led to Ritwik’s entry into the portals of cinematography.”
~ NM
Book: Ritwik Ghatak Stories: Translated from Bengali by Rani Ray; Publisher: Niyogi Books; Pages: 223; Price: Rs 350