Challenging Reason, Identities, and Nations: Situating Ghatak’s Jukti Takko Aar Goppo—Sujato Datta and Ananyo Chakraborty

“And somewhere under some new moon we shall learn that sleeping is not death.”

Remembering Ritwik Ghatak on his 95th birth anniversary warns against deifying him as a cult figure. “Pakami korona” (Don’t try to be too smart) would have been the spontaneous retort, if the man had been alive to see the flood of tributes coming from different sections on social media. His life can easily be termed as dialectical, where he questioned and counter-questioned himself as a man, as an artist, and as a social being at every step. His last film, Jukti Takko Aar Goppo (Reason, Debate, and Deliberation, 1974) is a culmination of his commitment to dialectics. As the rising tide of right-wing political groups seek to reduce pluralistic ideas to a homogenized singularity, a closer look at Ritwik and his last film might help us make sense of the decaying times that we inhabit.

At the time when Ritwik was making Jukti Takko Aar Goppo, he was nearing the end. Perhaps, like all great men, he sensed it and hence decided to put together a masterpiece which argued, critiqued, and interrogated the foundational premises of the nation-state, citizenship and identity. The film is titled appropriately as it is not simply a linear story, but a compilation of deliberations that India and Bengal were facing at that time. The questions sprang from the rootlessness inhabiting post-Partition Bengal, the emotional and moral inconsistencies of society, the absence of any visible prospects for the youth and an utter confusion stemming from the disillusionment of the post-colonial, post-Independence dream. Jukti Takko Aar Goppo is the culmination of Ritwik’s cinematic genealogy which had been asking questions of identity throughout—who was an Indian? Who was a Bengali? Who was a refugee? Who was to be blamed for this painful predicament? A lot of literature is available about the film, so let us try to circumvent oft repeated readings. Tropes like the Mother archetype, displacement and nostalgia are present in this film as in any other work by Ghatak, but what questions would remain unasked if not for Jukti Takko Aar Goppo?

The film follows a non-linear narrative, perpetuated less by the narrative itself than by the advanced cinematography and uneven editing. His technique forms an important part of both the text and the context that the film embodies. The narrative is carried forward through scenes which appear to be out of synchronization and rather disjoint. However, the cleverly curated scenes cancel against each other, conveying a sense of intense conflict to the audience. This peculiar use of montage seems to be chiefly inspired by the likes of soviet filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Jukti Takko‘s montage brings out the disturbed state of affairs in a Bengal ravaged by poverty, hunger, caste violence, unemployment, and the influx of millions of refugees from the newly-formed Bangladesh. Towards the end of the film, Neelkantha, the ‘broken intellectual’ protagonist played by Ghatak himself, talks about the betrayal of the people by the bourgeois ruling class after 1947 and questions the meaning of ‘Independence’. The baul singer at Princep Ghat sings “Nomaj aamar hoilo naa aday” (I couldn’t offer my prayers), hinting at the communal violence that robbed millions of Hindus and Muslims of their homeland, communitarian identities and spiritual freedom.

The filmmaking and the internal conflicts of the characters intensify the dialectics of the film. Neelkantha (Ritwik himself) is in conflict with his own long-standing ideas while looking at the damages inflicted upon his motherland. Nachiketa is in conflict with his pursuit of material comforts and his reverence towards Neelkantha and Durga. Nachiketa is an allusion to the eponymous mythical character, who reasons with Death. In the opening sequences of the film, Neelkantha asks Nachiketa, “What prospects does the Indian state offer its citizens?” he asks this in the context of Nachiketa’s relentless search for employment. This one question is as important right now, as it was back then. The prerogative of deciding who is a citizen has always been an entitlement of the state. However, in order to ensure that the category of the ‘citizen’ is not merely a juridical one, the state had to ensure that some prospects were exclusively available to its citizens and not to non-citizens. The Indian state has consistently failed to deliver on this. Thus, the only determinants of non-citizenship remain a border drawn by a colonial official and the whims and fancies of the government in power. When Ritwik was making this film, wounds of Partition were still visible. One failed to find a coherent definition of what it meant to be an Indian. If one looked back at history, all immigrants and refugees would count as full citizens but for all references to the present and the future, they would not be Indians. In the absence of a coherent definition, ‘citizenship’ remains a tool for the state to produce dissident groups as ‘others’ or as they say today, anti-nationals.

Bongobala (touted as the soul of Bengal by Neelkantha) is in negotiation with her more secured past and her heavily uncertain present to which she resigns. Jagannath and Panchanan Ostad represent a long-standing dialectical conflict in the Indian subcontinent—one between the “outsider” upper caste Aryans and the “indigenous” outcaste Adivasis. Jagannath is a representative of the ancient ‘Vedic’ civilization and invokes the past power dynamics by blabbering authoritative Sanskrit shlokas. Panchanan, a Chou dancer, is illiterate but has a rich cultural heritage to protect. He calls Jagannath a ‘mleccha’ (outsider), alluding to the Aryan invasion and reflecting the long-standing agony of the indigenous communities. The feuding men are reconciled when Bongobala intervenes, signifying the motherly quality of the homeland to unify antagonistic communities in a bond of fraternity. The Chou performance of Mahishashur Mardini (the slaying of Mahishashur by Durga) symbolizes the attempt of indigenous communities to reclaim their deities against their appropriation by a Brahminical ideology. Feudal violence and conflict between zamindars and peasants also play out in the land grab scene that leads to Jagannath’s death in the crossfire.

The 1970s were more a time of disjunction than convergence. People were finding themselves alienated, more than ever, from their surroundings, from history and from each other. It was not that revolutionaries of the previous generation were all dead, but they found themselves trapped in an inability to understand the ends of the new group of fiery, young rebels. The youth of the 1970s were like the middle children of history, caught between a generation who saw the dawn of independence and the upcoming generations who would observe close at hand, the mechanistic march towards liberalization. The generation before them, had the incidental misfortune of parenting the middle children of history. Hence, in the last sequences of the film, Ghatak shows a full-blown, passionate interaction between Neelkantha Bagchi, and a young Naxalite rebel, where Neelkantha reprimands his own generation as either ‘lost’ or ‘cowards’ and reaffirms his faith in the youth as the ‘cream of the Bengal’ and in their ‘complete capital for the future’. At the same time, Neelkantha is concerned that the youth are utterly misguided. For this, the rebel dismisses him as a lost cause and a remnant of a distasteful bygone era. He argues that Neelkantha has read nothing of recent Marxist literature like Che’s ‘Bolivian Diary’ or CPC’s testament. Throughout the conversation, Neelkantha appears to be a defeated, confused but wise ascetic and the rebel appears to be a strong-willed but impatient fighter. Ritwik, here, wants to talk about himself and people of his generation. Their connection to their past and their homeland had been severed by Partition. Their offspring were their links to the future, whom they could not understand. All they had was an equally confusing and ambivalent present. They did not know who they were but at the same time they did not understand where they belonged, much like the generation after them.

The dialectics of the last scene are very vital. Neelkantha reflects on the futility of his own existence and wants to pass on the baton of the tradition of thought to the young Naxalites. However, he regards them as misguided and blind and tries to remind them the importance of self-reflection and the use of the dialectical method to analyze social conditions. The young Naxal rebel is dismissive of Neelkantha’s injunctions and reveals his deeply indoctrinated political training. This alerts us against dogmatism of thought. Neelkantha says that he is utterly confused, and that others around him are confused too. He refers to a civilizational confusion, where thinking individuals with uncompromising commitments to values and ideas were not able to come to terms with the rapid socio-political and economic decay. The dance of death lurks throughout the film as a haunting reminder of impending doom. The brutality of state violence is unleashed upon the Naxalites in the wee hours of the day, with the police exterminating all the rebels. Neelkantha is killed in the crossfire.

However, there is hope. The journey that Neelkantha undertakes from the city to the village and then to the forest indicates an alternative idea of India that Ritwik believed in. That development must employ a bottoms-up approach, and must not be urban-centric is central to his philosophy. The urban-rural divide is liquidated in the film throughout Neelkantha’s philosophical trajectory. The village and forest, often marginalized in the development discourse of the modern nation state, are rediscovered and shown to be the only sources of hope. He calls the youth ‘the cream of Bengal’ and tells them that they are the only hope left for the civilization to progress. Neelkantha asks Satrajit, his old friend and a popular writer to practice thinking, as he believes that their thoughts, if channeled in the right direction, might inspire a better future. Satya, Neelkantha’s son, would take this tradition of thought forward. Nachiketa and Bongobala unite in the end, and are able to express both their emotions and sexuality even under repressive conditions—reminding us of the soothing quality of love.

Ritwik has always been an excellent storyteller. In Jukti Takko Aar Goppo, he was narrating the nation. He was looking at the nation as an age-old, continuing story. His epic sensibility and sense of history finds vision in his naming of Neelkantha, Nachiketa and Durga. Ritwik is an artist of the voiceless, and his last film seeks not to speak for them, but to alert them about the spaces they can potentially reclaim. At all times, we must make efforts, even painstakingly, to recover the stories that people tell about the nation. Only then, will we be able to learn what the nation means to the people and where we stand in relation to it. In Jukti Takko Aar Goppo, Ritwik tells us that a nation is much more than its political and legal institutions. A nation is its nature, a nation is its folk dance, and a nation is its youth ready to fight for a better future. Ritwik, in his works, argues that the nation is its fertile land and the state is the barbed wire on it.

Sujato Datta studies History at Presidency University, Kolkata.