Among the 50 fragments that make up this book is one from Nabarun Bhattacharya – the brilliant agent provocateur of Bengali late modernity, and Ghatak’s great-nephew. Bhattacharya writes, “One of the people Ritwik loved listening to was Mozart. I had read a biography of Mozart where it was mentioned that, one time, he had just finished a symphony in a concert and the crowd was giving him an ovation, and saying, ‘Long live, Mozart’; he heard ‘Long starve, Mozart’.” For Bhattacharya, the interchangeability of thriving and starving was a fate that awaited a number of intellectuals who had made up what can broadly be called the ‘Ritwik generation’. In fact, hunger was a dear companion of this generation; but not only the hunger that comes from denial of a meal but also from a fundamental desire to matter, to storm into history and force it to reckon. To that end, to have misheard starving for living was perhaps a fait accompli for those who chose to remain politically committed to their art.Much of the 50 fragments that make up this book are about that insatiable hunger. For one like Ghatak – agile, recalcitrant, self-loathing, unmoored, and unschooled, in order – artistic gratification was the name of the ever-receding horizon, always in view, but never quite reachable. His film-making process, as revealed by many here, was a bit of a tumult and not easy to break down into discernible methodical set-pieces. But the gestalt had the tell-tale marks of a vision. This part of Ghatak, through biographical remembrances and sketches, the cheers of the peers, the reckoning of the collaborators, and Ghatak’s own writerly doodles and letters, is brought to relief most poignantly in this volume.‘Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments,’ Edited by Shamya Dasgupta, Westland, 2025.So the question is not if the usually maudlin image of Ghatak as the misunderstood poète maudit is well and finely mirrored in the book. Rest assured that it is. The question is, does it still give us a fresh, detached, unsentimental estimation of Ghatak?For a readership not native to the Bengali tongue, yes, it does. There are new revelations, especially about Ghatak’s early days; and many anecdotes of his working life, his days of cultural reconnaissance, his shifting between theatre, writing and then cinema. Unless one is deeply immersed into the cultural politics of the time, these will certainly be comparatively new insights. This is also because a very good number of entries are reprinted, whether they have been translated or were originally written in English. Usually editors/writers who are writing for a national audience are bat-blind to references in the vernacular, notwithstanding the fact that the vernacular is often a more sincere source to gain access to the world of practitioners than the so called ‘anglosphere’. Dasgupta has not erred in this matter. In fact he must be wholly credited for falling back, repeatedly and rightly, to the rich archives of the Bengali print culture. He has been able to bring together a robust body of writing not only in Bengali (several, including by Mahasweta Devi) but also Kannada (Jayant Kaikini), and have also been able to involve Ghatak’s protegees, including Kumar Shahani, and the reclusive John Abraham. Without this editorial digging, one would not have heard the voices of, say, Ghatak’s early producer Pramod Lahiri, his collaborators Dinen Gupta and Mahendra Kumar, or Habibur Rehman and Bhaskar Chandravarkar. This has also meant that films like Nagarik and Bari Theke Paliye, which are outside the usual Ghatak canon of the Partition Trilogy, are here remembered more thoughtfully than usual.But not all such archival estimations are necessarily meaningful; for example, the hyperboles of Safdar Hashmi and Arun Khopkar are rather misplaced – the first claiming, erroneously, that Indian cinema did not have a language before Ghatak; while the latter unnecessarily comparing Ghatak to the Bengal tiger. So, detached and unsentimental the book is certainly not. And perhaps it was not the intention either. Dasgupta is part of Ghatak’s extended family. The book is aimed as much as a homage, as it is about bringing together disparate, distant, but discerning voices together. And to newer generations, many of these names – Jahnu Barua, Ketan Mehta, Kumar Shahani and the world they inhabited – may not be as familiar as they are to those who grew up in another era. So there is a lambent presence of a broad cultural milieu of a time and history, even though they converge into a single figure. Needless to say, in the end, Ghatak towers over his work and that of others.At the same time, the book is saved from getting swamped by unwarranted exaggeration by the comparatively detached voice of tempered appraisal from academia. Many of them are also reprints rather than written for this anthology, but that is secondary. Maitreesh Ghatak talks about the ‘moral economy’ of Ghatak’s cinema, Moinak Biswas highlights the ‘spaces’ of history in Ghatak, Brinda Bose writes a very readable critique of Ghatak’s literary works; while Sumana Roy’s eco-critical immersion into Ghatak’s scenographic texture provides new insight into his cinema’s charged habitats.In the end, one must realise that the poète maudit, in this case the auteur maudit, who died having internalised the practiced insouciance of his public, is now being publicly exhumed for veneration. Those who have to tolerate the dangers of gentrification in their afterlives, most often have to also pass through the gates of deification. Ghatak is a classic example. His centenary is saturated with hagiographic dross. This book is already ample evidence of how the ‘long starving’ may have become an exemplar of the ‘long lived’. And precisely that is why it is worth asking, if the volume has walked into a morass of mythification, as is often unavoidable in an exercise of this nature?That would depend on the questions one is likely to ask. This is because there is a significant dose of irony in the way that afterlife has reconstituted Ghatak. Frankly, except Salil Chowdhury on the broader national circuit, and Hemanga Biswas within the Bengali-speaking cultural sphere, most of the people who constituted the leftwing artistic world that Ghatak was part of, have largely been deposited in the ranks of the almost-forgotten.Ghatak was not so much ‘formed’ by Partition as much as he was by the incredible (and flawed) richness of the Indian People’s Theatre Association and other leftist collectives who could reimagine the art of resistance. And one of the key constituting ideas of that practice was to let the collective dominate the definition of progressive art, not the individual. Hence, Ghatak’s revival as a global auteur from the 1990s raises a fundamental problem about our relationship with progressive art.Does the constant recalibration of an individual into some sort of mythical maestro endanger the very essence of a practice aimed at collective trauma, crisis, guilt and romance? The perpetuation of a potentially pervasive individualism that accompanies centenary festivities begs the question if such individuation stands scrutiny from the vantage of progressive art. This book brings back that question to the very centre of Ghatak’s legacy. So even if it avoids mythification in the narrow sense, it only adds to the not-so-happy conundrum of a socialist artist becoming much larger, and his afterlife becoming much longer than his art.Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches at Krea University, Sri City.