Nagarik
Encyclopedia
Nagarikalso spelled as Nagorik, The Citizen in English, was the first feature-length film directed by India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n director Ritwik Ghatak. Completed in 1952
1952 in film
The year 1952 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* January 10 - Cecil B. DeMille's circus epic, The Greatest Show on Earth, premieres at Radio City Music Hall in New York City....

, it preceded Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature...

's Pather Panchali
Pather Panchali
Pather Panchali is a 1955 Bengali drama film written and directed by Satyajit Ray and produced by the Government of the Indian state of West Bengal. Based on Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's 1929 Bengali novel of the same name, the film was the directorial debut of Ray...

as perhaps, the first example of an art film
Parallel Cinema
The Indian New Wave, commonly known in India as Art Cinema or Parallel Cinema as an alternative to the mainstream commercial cinema, is a specific movement in Indian cinema, known for its serious content, realism and naturalism, with a keen eye on the sociopolitical climate of the times...

 in Bengali cinema
Bengali cinema
Bengali cinema refers to the Bengali language filmmaking industries in the Bengal region of South Asia. There are two major film-making hubs in the region: one in Kolkata, West Bengal, India and the other in Dhaka, Bangladesh .The history of cinema in Bengal dates back to the 1890s, when the first...

, but is deprived of that honor, since it was released twenty-four years later, after Ghatak's death. On 20 September 1977, it finally premiered at the New Empire theatre in Kolkata
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...

, India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. Ritwik Ghatak only completed eight feature films, but is generally regarded as one of the few truly original Indian talents in cinema by directors such as Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature...

 and critics such as Derek Malcolm
Derek Malcolm
Derek Malcolm is a British film critic and historian.Malcolm was educated at Eton College and Oxford University. He worked for several decades as a film critic for The Guardian, having previously been an amateur jockey and the paper's first horse racing correspondent. In 1977, he was a member of...

.

Cast

  • Satindra Bhattacharya as Ramu
  • Prova Debi as his mother
  • Kali Banerjee
    Kali Banerjee
    Kali Banerjee was an Indian film actor, who worked in the 1950s-70s in Bengali cinema. Most known for his work with film directors like Satyajit Ray's Parash Pathar and Ritwik Ghatak's Nagarik and Ajantrik ....

     as his father
  • Sova Sen as his sister, Seeta
  • Ketaki Dutta as Uma
  • Geeta Shome as Shephali
  • Ajit Banerjee as Sagar
  • Keshto Mukherjee
    Keshto Mukherjee
    Keshto Mukherjee was an Indian actor. He specialised in comic drunkard roles in the Hindi films. Though he was famous for his drunkard typecast role in Hindi films, he used to share a very good relation with the iconic Ritwik Ghatak and had very tiny but important roles in the maestro's films...

     as Jatin

Crew

  • Direction and Screenplay, Ritwik Ghatak
  • Cinematography, Ramananda Sengupta
  • Editing, Ramesh Joshi
  • Sound, Satyen Chatterjee
  • Narration, Ritwik Ghatak
  • Music, Hariprasanna Das, Ustad Bahadur Khan
  • Lyrics, Govinda Moonish
  • Art Direction, Bhupen Majumdar
  • Production, Film Guild

Synopsis

Ramu, a fresh graduate is searching for a job like many others in post-Partition
Partition of India
The Partition of India was the partition of British India on the basis of religious demographics that led to the creation of the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India on 14 and 15...

 Kolkata. He lives in a lower-middle class neighborhood with his mother, father, and sister. Ramu's sister, Seeta, is dressed up and paraded in front of prospective in-laws who humiliatingly examine her. The mother is yearnful of older times when the family used to live in a better house, but she bears her suffering quietly, for the most part. The father is myopic and full of cynicism for he does not share the idealistic aspirations of his two children that better times will come. The light of Ramu's life is his girlfriend Uma, who lives in an equally precarious situation with her sister Shephali and her mother. Jatin is an even poorer minor character living near Uma's dwelling who Ramu avoids because he cannot help the former out financially. To make ends meet, Ramu's mother takes in Sagar, a poor chemist, as a paying guest. Ramu does not get a job and cannot pay rent even with the meagre money that he gets from Sagar and is insulted by the landlord. Ultimately the family is evicted.

Just before the family has to leave to go stay in slums, Ramu visits Uma and tells him they are moving. Uma offers to help them set up in the new dwelling, an obvious sign of humanism on Ghatak's part. Shephali, her sister, cannot bear to live in poverty any longer, so she leaves home with a shady man. Seeta confesses that she loves Sagar, a love that Sagar reciprocates. However, Sagar, is now rendered homeless and destitute and mentions that he does not have the audacity to expect them to even be united. Ramu overhears parts of Sagar and Uma's conversation and is touched by the moment. He appeals to Sagar for him to come and live with the family. The film ends with the characters walking out in the rain, a symbolic sign of hope and renewal.

Critical analysis

Nagarik is considered a prototype for Ghatak's subsequent films since all of the main ingredients are present. The tone is deliberately didactic and the treatment melodramatic, elements which Ghatak in no way considered inferior to realism. The pain of the Partition is poignant among the protagonists, all refugees from East Bengal
East Bengal
East Bengal was the name used during two periods in the 20th century for a territory that roughly corresponded to the modern state of Bangladesh. Both instances involved a violent partition of Bengal....

, now suffering from the loss of homeland and livelihood. This is a theme that Ghatak helped portray when working on Chinnamul, and one that would permeate most of his later creations. The film is not a study in pessimism but ends on a positive note with a speech by Ramu hoping for a new future. This has been considered overtly Marxist considering Ghatak's involvement with group theatre and the IPTA
Ipta
IPTA can refer to:* Indian People's Theatre Association* International Pulsar Timing Array...

. The film is thought to be well scripted, acted, and filmed with scenes that show unique visual and aural registers. However, it is also criticized as being slow and long-drawn. Although the film shows the influence of French director Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...

, it lies very much in a developing tradition of Indian film. Its film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...

 feel and stylised manner has something in common with contemporary works in Hindi cinema by Guru Dutt
Guru Dutt
Vasanth Kumar Shivashankar Padukone , popularly known as Guru Dutt, was an Indian film director, producer and actor. He is often credited with ushering in the golden era of Hindi cinema...

 and Kamal Amrohi
Kamal Amrohi
Syed Amir Haider Kamal Naqvi popularly known as Kamal Amrohi or Amrohvi in Urdu was an Indian film director, screenwriter, and dialogue writer. He was a Shi'a Muslim and an Urdu and Hindi poet. He is most known for his Hindi films such as Mahal , Pakeezah and Razia Sultan...

. It particularly shows the influence of the latter's Mahal
Mahal (1949 film)
Mahal is a 1949 Indian Hindi film directed by Kamal Amrohi and starring Ashok Kumar and Madhubala....

(1949) in its use of narration, use of music, stylised direction of the acting and in several verbal echoes. It was also clearly known to Ghatak's Bengali contemporary Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature...

 and strongly influences his Apur Sansar
Apur Sansar
Apur Sansar , also known as The World of Apu, is a Bengali film directed by Satyajit Ray. It is the third part of The Apu Trilogy, about the childhood and early adulthood of a young Bengali named Apu in the early twentieth century Indian subcontinent...

 (1959), the third in the Apu Trilogy
Apu trilogy
The Apu Trilogy is a trilogy consisting of three Bengali films directed by Satyajit Ray: Pather Panchali , Aparajito and Apur Sansar . The films — completed 1955-1959 — were based on two Bengali novels written by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay: Pather Panchali and Aparajito...

. Nagarik is, therefore, a pivotal work in the history of Indian cinema
Cinema of India
The cinema of India consists of films produced across India, which includes the cinematic culture of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. Indian films came to be followed throughout South Asia and...

.

Remarks

----

" in stead of blind imitation of the realism, the artist here explored the inner essence of the realsitic situations. That shows the class of his artistic self." -- Joshodhra Bagchi

" No matter how much flaws it has, Nagarik(Citizen) is the reflection of what profound depth an artist's love and honesty could go. If the artist's responsibility is to true to life, being responsible to time,and to guide people on their path, Ritwik's 'Nagarik' not only in 52's context, but equally acceptable in today's generation." -- Somnath Mukhopadhay

" The conflict we get in the 50's star-studded so-called unreal 'social' films, was all love or family-centric; mostly stuffed by the conflicts born out of personal feeling or emotion. Material world was almost unsed safeguarded backdrop. In 'Nagarik', Ritwik bound time, soiciety and character in an organic relationship." -- Someswar Bhowmick

" Gifted as he was with a historical vision Ritwik made pioneering use of sound as an instrument of structuring his film in a dialectical framework. In his hands, for the first time,, sound in Indian cinema graduated from merely amplifying dialogue and 'effect' music to becoming a conscious part of the whole design serving as much as to heighten as to comment, analyse and throw into analytical perspective the immediate dialogical and narrative context.Another innovation...in 'Nagarik'...was the device of using deep focus to place his characters firmly in their social environment." -- Safder Hasmi

" Nagarik...was not so clearly the product of natural film-maker. But its story of a young man in search of a job, based on the plot of a didactic play, is by no means lacking in interest...the central character reflects the perplexity of Bimal, Ghatak's lower caste taxi-driver, and unquestionably the same feeling for individuals caught up in the toils of a fragmented society is there." -- Derek Malcom.
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