Members of Ritwik Ghatak’s extended family have voiced strong opposition to the West Bengal unit of the BJP youth wing’s use of footage from the legendary filmmaker’s work in a six-minute propaganda video on the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the NRC.
In a letter signed by 24 family members, including the popular actor Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Ghatak’s relatives expressed strong objection and condemned the ‘misappropriation and misuse’ of his politics and cinema by the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) to defend the ‘controversial and discriminatory’ CAA and NRC.
“To use any part of his filmography — divorced from its context — to justify laws that will make every citizen of the country pass through an ordeal to re-establish their citizenship and might render millions from one particular community, Muslims, stateless is deemed unacceptable by us,” the Ghatak kin wrote. “It violates the fundamental principles he stood for,” they added.
Asserting that Ghatak’s cinema reflected his deep empathy for the underprivileged, particularly the displaced and marginalised victims of political and social upheavals, they wrote: “He was secular to the bone, as everyone who knew him can attest, and his writings and cinema are proof of this”.
Born in East Bengal, the resolutely leftist filmmaker was a CPI member till he was expelled in 1955 and was also a member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). His celebrated trilogy — Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961) and Subarnarekha (1965) — dealt with the aftermath of the Partition of Bengal in 1947 and the conditions of the refugees who had to leave their homes behind.
The Ghatak family members have demanded that the material spreading disinformation be ‘repealed’ with urgent and immediate effect.
