Darius Cooper
L
et us turn our moist eyes on Bimal, Ghatak’s first monsoon male protagonist of Ajantrik. When we first meet Bimal we learn that he has abandoned all contact with humanity around him. He is already a disproportionate character living in an absurd world of fellow cab drivers, and the people of his village, who elders and children alike, openly make fun of him. The cause of their constant mocking is Bimal’s obsessive love for Jagaddal, his 1920 Chevrolet jalopy of a cab. For Bimal, his cab is “the son of a tiger”–hence the name. He takes offence at the slightest disrespect tossed at his mechanical beloved. Bimal is ‘married’ to his old cab. He talks to it, washes it, shelters it, and keeps it in top running condition. Only one little boy, a kind mechanic’s ward, understands Bimal’s extraordinary love for Jagaddal. This is because he is a child, and it is the child’s wonder in him that can identity totally with another child-like man who believes that this ancient piece of machinery that miraculously still works as is as human as he is. The other folks that understand Bimal and his great passion for his cab are the Oraons,tribal people who live in this hilly tract of Bihar. They were the original owners of this land where the story is set. These extraordinary people do not think and feel like the normal village folks. For them Bimal is not a crazy man in love with a machine. Not only have they accepted Bimal’s passion as authentic, but they can assimilate it and understand it as well.
What Ghatak creates is a powerful affinity between their pathetic fallacy and Bimal’s. That is why when the normal world becomes too hostile for Bimal and his cab, he temporarily abandons it and retreats into the world of the Oraons. He eats and drinks and stays with them, recharges his batteries and defiantly enters the normal world to ply his trade all over again.
The idea of disproportionality that creates this emotional nexus for us is evoked by Ghatak by having a human being associate himself in a disproportionate way with a machine. Man has always been suspicious of machines because a mechanical object is quite capable of devouring all that is good, contemplative and spiritual. It stands for trouble. It reaffirms the blacksmith’s smithy where its mechanical organs have been originally forged. It promises you, brimstone and ashes. What can a sane man see in it? He has to be mad to love it as a human being with all his thoughts and emotions. So the theme for Jagaddal’s agnition is fatally set. Machines get old eventually. They need constant repair. Like the ‘tiger’ that it is, it will grow weak and, one day when that happens, it will be ruthlessly hunted down and killed.
Bimal and Jagaddal encounter a wide range of passengers from the city who descend on his small village to experience the region’s tribal life in a landscape that is being threatened by the rapid growth of industrialism that is slowly changing, marginalizing, and diminishing tribal customs and tribal traditions. The one experience that touches Bimal the most involves a lively young city girl who responds with wonder at the ‘glimpse of the sky,’ through the rough tear in the hood of the cab and ‘the tribal comb’ she enthusiastically buys from a roadside vendor. Abandoned cruelly by her city boyfriend, she is ferried by Bimal to catch the Calcutta-bound train. He runs after the train to hand her the ticket she had neglected to buy as she boarded the train. Back in his cab, watching the train leave, he suddenly discovers that the girl has left behind her tribal comb. Hoping to give this to her, he forces Jagaddal into a race with the train, and it is here, that the first misunderstanding between man and machine occurs. Jagaddal’s jealousy will not allow Bimal to return the comb to that pretty intruder who had so recently become its rival for his affections. Jagaddal refuses to start, and once it does, it deliberately breaks down in the middle of the road allowing the train with its pretty rival to disappear.
Mud-splashed and battered by a group of wild village children, Bimal and Jagaddal were already punished many times before they took this other punished passenger, the weeping girl, to the station. All three had suffered cruelty under some form of human authority starting from the village children’s atrocious assault and followed by the boyfriend’s cowardly abandonment of the girl.
But this punishment of a misunderstanding is more painful and invites our tears because Bimal is suddenly confronted for the first time with Jaggaddal’s jealousy. In the past, his cab had always raced and allowed Bimal to accomplish many goals involving his city-bred passengers. But this time Jagaddal is all out to get revenge for Bimal’s transgressions with the weeping girl. Its mechanical heart, like the tin man’s in the Wizard of Oz landscape, has been hurt, and it is determined to fall apart rather than help his besotted master make such a big fuss over a lousy tribal comb. There is something pathetic, true, but something also very moving in the way Ghatak presents this. This is a unique degree of punishment and certainly requires from us a unique emotional response as well.
Jagaddal’s mechanical breakdown is now going to lead toward the cab’s catastrophic demise, and Ghatak establishes this by first evoking Bimal’s pride and silence. Bimal is determined to bring Jagaddal back to life again. Submitting for the night to the rhythms of a tribal festival, he gains enough energy from them to push his broken down car, the next morning, all the way back to the garage where both are assaulted once again by a chorus of merciless mocking by the other cab drivers and the usual crowd assembled at the taxi stand.
Bimal, however, is not affected by this treatment. He realizes he is better than them and is determined to prove that even Jagaddal is better than all the other so-called modern cabs lined up outside. So he makes a last determined effort to revive and renew his old friend. His moral infantilism is touching because it embraces the sublimity of tragedy and it has every right to be washed repeatedly by our tears. He invests all his savings to buy new parts and works night and day like a maniacal Frankenstein to pump new life into this stubborn heap of sulking metal. We find this effort poignantly moving because he is not being guided by any ‘interest’ but solely by ‘conscience.’
In Freudian terms, Bimal’s id is on a reckless mission here. It will not listen to the reasonable principles of his ego. He will not rest till he has proved to that super ego community outside that his love is not yet dead or ready to give up the fight or the ghost of his ancient machine. His heart swells with the pleasure principle when he finally brings the resurrected Jagaddal out for public scrutiny with its brand new painted looks and its brand new mechanical parts. He has built a new hierarchy with his restored machine. But once he tries to take responsibility for it, the result is traumatic, but it manages to set up our catharsis in the predictable Ghatak way.
The new car’s trial run on the hills fails. “I’ve given you all I had and still you won’t give me your heart” moans Bimal as he breaks down and cries. We are moved and crying for Bimal but we are also angry at Jagaddal’s refusal to make its master proud. We are angry at its one-sidedness in not forgiving Bimal for his temporary romantic lapse. The car is determined to break off all relations with Bimal and turn him into an orphan. But in doing so, it dooms itself to final disintegration and dismemberment as a mass of scrap loaded onto a scrap dealer’s cart. But the reality of defeat is avoided for Bimal as he suddenly sees and hears, at this powerful tearful moment, a little boy trying to honk the car’s disembodied horn, capturing its entire life and reminding us, once again of a dying girl’s cries of wanting to live, even when it was too late.
*****
In Ghatak’s last film Jukti Tako ArGappo, we meet Nilakantha Bagchi (played by Ghatak himself) an alcoholic and frustrated intellectual, on the floor of his small flat in Calcutta, drunk. His wife Durga and son Satya, are at the point of leaving him. Tired of his drunken tantrums and wayward ways, Durga has secured a teaching job in a faraway village. Fearing that there will be nothing left in this flat eventually, since Nilkantha has sold everything for the bottle, Durga warns her husband not to follow them. The drunken man finally agrees and requests her to leave the ceiling fan so that he can sell it for his next bout of tippling. Durga leaves asking Nachiketa, an unemployed engineer, to look after her drunken husband. Meanwhile, a young woman from Bangladesh suddenly strays into Nilkantha’s flat. Her father has just been killed and she knows no one in Calcutta, so she takes sudden shelter here.
This startling opening sets up the accustomed disproportionate history favoured by Ghatak. The traditional family’s break up is now substituted by this trinity of strangers forced in disproportionate ways, to form a new family. One is a hopeless middle-aged alcoholic; one is a bitter jobless youth; one is a terrified woman recently orphaned of parent and country. We feel for them because we have just witnessed something unjust and painful, something that should not have happened. All three have been suddenly punished. For Nilkantha alcohol has emptied not only his flat but also the redeeming presence of a wife and a son. The young man’s hard earned education has still not provided him with a decent job, and the woman had to leave her country, lose her father and find herself with two complete strangers in an empty flat. These are no ordinary punishments.
The stage for the belated agnition is set. This set of strangers figure that there is nothing left for them in this accursed city. They resolve, therefore, on taking a nomadic journey that will take them as far away from the city as possible. What is so moving with this premise is that this trinity never appears as individuals trying to carry out certain intentions. They, in fact, are subjecting themselves to a chain of causes and events that are completely beyond their control. This is powerfully moving because they are then visualized as victims of that unknown reality they are getting ready to step into. Their disproportionality is not only made clearly visible but Ghatak maintains it as we sorrowfully follow them into the abyss.
Nilakantha looks at his two young wards and bestows on them a spontaneous metaphorical significance. He defines them as “the new Bangladesh, yet unborn but inevitable.” These two objectives are deadly in inspiring more tears to well up in us because both are idealizations which will never see the light of day. The histories of India and Bangladesh will not allow them to materialize. But these impossible idealizations come from the lips of a defeated alcoholic and that is why it is moving because it is uttered out of a desperate moral speechlessness freed by the liberating fumes of alcohol. There is also a touch of moral infantilism in the child-like protectiveness this alcoholic shows to these two young children that he is leading from the inferno of his city not knowing what exactly lies ahead. They are alone, so they have to build a hierarchy and create one or many possible worlds and learn to take responsibility for them, angry, drunk, or sober. And they also have to be prepared for the traumatic results that this diaspora will force upon them.
After spending a night in the park, our misfits are joined by an unemployed Sanskrit teacher, Bhattacharya, who signifies the complete bankruptcy of India on both the highest cultural and social level of Sanskrit, and the more pragmatic level of industry and engineering. Such deliberating conditions can force one to embrace the bottle or run away as a complete orphan. Our mourning, however, has to fit all of these dimensions that we are being presented with. Ghatak’s grip on us and our expanding sorrow is relentless.
Ghatak then arranges the first of his devastating roster of punishments. It starts with encounters between our disgraced marginals and a group of Calcutta’s respected intellectuals who slouch around drinking hooch and discussing the disintegration of contemporary Bengali society and culture. Their serious intentions have been compellingly destroyed and all that they circulate now is a noisy and argumentative frivolousness which becomes the slender thread that makes them cling to their lives precariously.
Nilakantha, tired of this aimless wandering, and inspired by a song that Bangabala sings, suddenly decides that he wants to see his wife and son again. In Freudian terms, this is offered as a reassertion of the reality principle by his exhausted ego. “Think. Practise. Thinking,” he admonishes his companions for that is the only way to protect and preserve their dignities especially in these agonizing times.
While leaving the home of Panchanan Ustad, an exponent of the Chau dance form, and after witnessing a Chau performance of Goddess Durga destroying a demon, our quixotic group accidentally plunges into a super-ego political conflict where the tribal poor are seen fighting with the powerful landlord and his thugs over possession of the land. The abandonment of the reality principle pushes the arrogant landlord into a sudden state of panic, and in a wide-angled shot of powerful hysteria, he accidentally shoots and kills Jagannath, the very source from which Indian culture in all its powerful and respectable illuminations once emerged.
When our exhausted family arrives at his new home, Durga is not happy, but she welcomes them, prepares a last meal, and insists that they leave. Her super-ego responses come from her wounded morality where she had once been trapped, and now that she has achieved some kind of liberation, mainly from her husband’s id filled liquor bottle, she will not allow her ego to make any reality based compromises. She has a child to bring up, and she prefers to do it as far away from the child’s father as possible. Our tears offer no excuses on her behalf. She is a strong woman. We know what happened to Neeta and Seeta. Durga is determined not to follow in their footsteps. And we will not allow our tears to nudge her into their ill-fated directions.
Outside her place they have to pass through a sal forest which is a hideout for the rebellious extremists, the Naxalites. Our group’s meeting with the Naxalites is offered by Ghatak as the next punishment which is first enlarged as an extended political argument that crops up between Nilakantha and the young Naxalite leader. Despite Nilakantha’s arguments, the Naxalite has only disdain for him. He sees him as having sold out to the establishment and mocks his addiction to liquor as a hopeless exhibitionistic display of overt victimization. He dismisses him even when Nilkantha reminds him, “But I spoke the truth when I said that I am confused. Maybe we are all confused. We are all groping.”
Our catharsis begins at this point. It is affected by the complete breakdown in communication that Nilakantha’s words are hinting at and prepares us for the final catastrophe that begins when the police, surrounding the group, open fire on them as dawn breaks. The Naxalite boys are ‘younger’ and they are guided by ‘conscience.’ But while Nilakantha’s conscience often emerged from a liquor bottle, the collective conscience of these young boys emerges from the barrels of their guns. Our mourning has to embrace both because ultimately their conscience will also lead them to their annihilation. The discontent in civilization always succeeds in claiming its victims. So, in the crossfire that now erupts Nilakantha is fatally hit by a bullet. He dies spilling the last drops of his alcohol on the camera lens. As he lies dying, he tells Durga the story about Malan the weaver. “I get rheumatic when I don’t weave so I just ran the empty loom for a while. I have to do something, don’t I. I have to do something”–and after this last moving offering, he dies exactly like Neeta, like Seeta, but hearing Jagaddal’s horn! The ridiculous alcoholic takes this miraculous leap and embraces the sublime here. Our catharsis has to react and it does with the proverbial flood that now echoes Prufrock’s final words–
“till human voices wake us/and we drown.”
Notes. Also read on Ritwik Ghatak:Mourning and Melancholia: Ritwik Ghatak’s Cinema-IVisual SpacesRITWIK GHATAK’S ‘MYTHIC WASTELAND’ Literary TrailsDarius Cooper teaches Critical Thinking in the Humanities at San Diego Mesa College, California, USA. His essays, poems and stories have been widely published in several film and literary journals in USA and India A sample: Between Tradition and Modernity: the Cinema of Satyajit Ray (Cambridge University Press).In Black and White: Hollywood Melodrama and Guru Dutt(Seagull Publications).Beyond the Chameleon’s Skill (first book of poems) (Poetrywalla Pub).A Fuss About Queens and Other Stories (Om Books). Read his review of Kedarnath Singh's poetry 'BETWEEN THUMBPRINTS AND SIGNATURES'. Also, read his essay on Coming Home to Plato's Cave in Personal Notes.
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