Ritwik Ghatak centenary | Why filmmakers after him, from FTII and beyond, are drawn to the rebel auteur

For Ritwik Ghatak, the Draupadi-like Neeta ( Meghe Dhaka Tara / The Cloud-Capped Star , 1960) was the critical lens to observe the dialectical contradictions of social conflicts: tradition vs modernity, individual vs collective, myth vs history. For his Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, protégé John Abraham — no, not the beefed-up Bollywood actor but the maverick Malayalam director — a donkey becomes a dialectical symbol (both sacred and profane) in the Tamil film Agraharathil Kazhutai ( Donkey in a Brahmin Village , 1977). The Tamil film, which was inspired by Robert Bresson’s French film Au hasard Balthazar (1966), was banned in Tamil Nadu to not upset the Brahmins.

The spiritual reminiscences of Abraham’s donkey to Ghatak’s Neeta are hard to miss — they are