What, precisely, is the theme? It is a river – Titas. Our East Bengal has a river-based civilisation. I do not know how much of East Bengal you have actually seen, or into what depths of its life you have really entered, but I went deep into its life. Titas is a river, it is a sustaining force. The river is dying – and one day it dried up and the island that raised its head belonged no more to the fishermen. The peasants then came to the forefront… everything is shattered down. My hint at the end is at the new order, the new life that is struggling to be born …Individuals are mortal but humanity is immortal.

Ritwik Ghatak, Arguments/Stories, Screen Unit, Bombay 1985

Based on the Bengali classic novel of the same name by Adwaita Mallabarman, Titas Ekti Nadir Naam is a poignant, lyrical elegy to the passing of a way of life that follows the ebb and flow of the Malo fishing community whose existence, survival, and traditions are deeply intertwined with the Titas River. Set in pre-Independence East Bengal (now Bangladesh), the story is pure melodrama, a form that Ritwik Ghatak made unmistakably his own, beginning with the marriage of a young fisherman, Kishore, whose bride Rajar Jhi is abducted the day after their wedding night, on their journey home, setting off a chain of separation, loss, and wandering that spans years. Ghatak builds the narrative out of multiple, loosely connected storylines in an episodic structure that jumps across time and space, shifting across different characters and even across generations as their lives intersect indirectly. Scenes often feel like fragments or memories placed side by side and characters appear and disappear without explanation. What binds these strands is the river connecting disparate stories into a collective narrative that flows and pauses like a poem. As always, the film is an allegory of the trauma of Partition. Ghatak repeatedly returned to themes of rupture, displacement and fragmentation of identity and community in his work. As the narrative expands in the film across multiple characters and generations, it portrays the gradual disintegration of the community under social, economic, and environmental pressures. The drying of the river ultimately mirrors the collapse of their way of life, turning the film into a haunting meditation on memory, displacement, and cultural erosion.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur

If you were eighteen years old, growing up in New Delhi, a student of cinema, a cinephile or a plain film snob, it was given that you would swoon over the film-maker Ritwik Ghatak and spend endless hours in the Delhi University canteen discussing his films, his alcoholism, and his eventual death from Tuberculosis. An ‘avant garde’ writer and director, Ghatak had caught the imagination of many of us who carried Mao’s Red Book and quoted liberally from it (in English) at the drop of a hat. After all, didn’t Ghatak (a card carrying Communist) film the extreme poverty and the cultural extinction of Bengal by Imperialism? Because of the political ‘din’ surrounding much of Ghatak’s work, ironically the work itself, as opposed to the man’s personality and politics, got neglected by the legion of his die-hard fans (me included!). It was only years later when I saw his epic, A River Called Titas, that I swooned for totally different reasons. The film is a work of pure genius. A passionate elegy for a dying culture, it moved me profoundly, and continues to haunt me to this day. Based on a novel by the Bengali author Advaita Barman and adapted for the screen by Ghatak, A River Called Titas, tells the raw and powerful story of a dying river and a dying culture.

Deepa Mehta