Komal Gandhar is the film Ghatak made after Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star, 1960) in what was the most unremitting productive phase in his career. It is also an ignored work. This stems from the film’s inclusion in Ghatak’s partition/exile trilogy and in which much of the critical dialogue has balanced on Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread, 1965). The film’s unacknowledged position in Ghatak’s oeuvre is largely unjustified. Whereas Megha Dhaka Tara’s emotional dynamics of a displaced Bengali family was borne out of a personal trauma, similar thematic interests resurface in Komal Gandhar but the major narrative focus is centred on a political engagement with key creative ideas, namely theatre, which shaped the ideological mind-set of Ghatak as a young man.
Rajadhyaksha & Willemen (1999) argue this was a film that got Ghatak into a lot of trouble as his criticisms of the theatre group in the film was in fact a thinly veiled attack of the IPTA and its inability to function decisively and coherently as an organisation. Ghatak had left the IPTA in 1955, a few years after joining, citing political differences, namely his Trotskyite views. The ideological split, along Marxist lines, in the IPTA, is reflected in the story of rival theatre groups in Komal Gandhar, and eventually the difficulty with reaching a consensus and working together is characterised in the film’s ending which sees a rupture that is nonetheless sanguine. All of this is framed against the unsettled romance of theatre artists Ansuya (Supriya Choudhury) and Bhrigu (Abanish Banerjee) who grow closer to one another over the course of the narrative. It becomes clear their affections are conjoined by a historical connection; they are both refugees living in a kind of traumatic exile expressive of Ghatak also.
This is arguably one of Ghatak’s most musical of films. Although the songs used do not last very long they are deployed experimentally, disrupting yet enunciating the sense of radical tryst that characterises the theatre group. Like Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ghatak uses the visual metonymy of the train and railroad tracks to express partition as irreparable. Another similarity Komal Gandhar shares with Meghe Dhaka Tara is the cast and crew, with many working across both projects. In many ways, Ghatak was assembling a formidable team of regular collaborators but unlike his contemporaries such as Ray who worried less when it came to finance, Ghatak would go on to complete only three more feature films.
Movie Mahal 