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iView Author: Siddhartha Banerjee (Kolkata, India)
EMAIL: sidban1 [at] gmail [dot] com

Title: Ritwik Ghatak, the lone voice

Ghatak’s films were an artist’s rebellious, painful, naked howl that cuts through the entire façade of so called decorative and bourgeois art; screaming with a brave and indifferent ‘I deny’.

Creativity, more than the art-form, is concerned with ideas and thoughts; the medium or the art-form doing as much as to ’support’ the expression. The greatest of the artists (Kafka being a notable example) were almost always spontaneous, where the creative ideas/ inspirations have literally ‘exploded’ out, without any ‘dressing’. Great works of art (like Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’), are in many cases incomplete, yet bursting with inspiration and intensity.

Like Dostoevsky, Ritwik Ghatak too lived his thoughts and ideas in his personal life; suffering not only theoretically, but also physically, from acute alcoholism, alienation, isolation, etc. As …