Ritwik Ghatak between the Messianic and the Material1

Parallel to the largely melodramatic and formulaic production of commercial Indian cinema, there emerged what has come to be since known as the "alternative cinema" in India. While Satyajit Ray, India's best known filmmaker, put Indian "art" cinema on the map with films such as the Apu Trilogy, Jalsaghar, and Charulata, yet another director, Ritwik Ghatak, emerged in the post Independence era to provide a different kind of cinema. Rooted in Indian traditions and making a break with the romantic lyric neo-realist style of Satyajit Ray, Ghatak's more intellectual and more sensuously grounded cinema gave rise to a different paradigm of filmmaking for subsequent film-makers. His works have included the two masterpieces, Megha Dake Tara and Subarnarekha, the focus of this paper.