Magical Modernity: The Fallacy of Affect in Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik

An innocent child, completely oblivious of the world around him, plays with a car horn that was left behind after the actual automobile has been decimated and taken away. As the child blows on the horn, the familiar shrill sound startles the car's owner who is devastated after the demise of his beloved possession. Bemused by the child's juvenile unawareness, he comes out of his pensive trance and smiles at the child. This scene of infantile play marks the end of Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik (The Pathetic Fallacy, 1957),¹ which is a tale of a lonely taxi driver Bimal's obsession for his dilapidated car, Jagaddal (literally meaning "immovable"). A film of painful and futile attachment ends with an innocent smile.

The child's fascination with this trivial plaything is an apposite miniature of the question this essay addresses: how do we understand human enchantment with an inanimate, mechanical thing beyond the limits of what György Lukács considered "the riddle of commodity structure"? Ajantrik, the second full-length feature film made by Ritwik Ghatak (1925–76), is about a human being's obsession with an automobile. Based on a Bengali short story written by the famous writer Subodh Ghosh (1909–80), the film presents a distinctly uncanny narrative of the relationship between a taxi driver and his car. Through the depiction of a peculiarly passionate relationship between a man and his car, this film not only brought a new theme to Indian cinema but also marked an important moment within the scope of Indian modernism by emblematizing a problematic space within the understanding of modernity in postcolonial India. Temporally situated in an India that had recently come out of colonial rule and a nation that was negotiating its path between an agrarian past and a technological modernity, the film's engagement with the idea of mechanical modernity is not unexpected. As the nation was coming out of two centuries of colonial rule, the foundations of the postcolonial nation-state were taking a more concrete shape. It could particularly be mapped onto the shifting ground of a nation that craved to tread the path of modernization. By engaging with concepts like technological/mechanical modernization and the man–machine relationship and primitivism, the film also questions the postcolonial nation-state's fetishistic investment in technology. Through the figure of a lonely taxi driver, Bimal (Kali Banerjee), and his anthropomorphized car, Jagaddal, the film text invents an affective intensity and magic of enchantment that remains conscious of its unique designation in the context of its ideological milieu and excavates an aporetic space between the premodern socius and mechanical modernity.

The automobile, the "ur-commodity" of capitalist modernity, not only offered the pleasure of ownership but also, as Enda Duffy suggests, the sensual pleasure of speed.² The results produced by this mechanical object—both mechanical and sensory—the speed, the freedom, the rush—have found their place in literary and cultural representations.³ In cinema, especially European and American cinema, the automobile is purportedly projected as "the expressive face of the peripatetic self" of both the actor and the spectator (Orr, 130).⁴ The automobile as the face of the wandering self of the actor and the spectator, as John Orr suggests, works in tandem with the mobile nature of the movie camera (130). Kristin Ross, among other scholars, shows how the automobile in French popular films of the 1950s and 1960s erases social contradictions to project a gleaming postwar French life. These studies have rightly argued that the symbolic value of a shiny automobile extends to suggest that "mobility was the categorical imperative of the economic order" (Ross, 22). It symbolizes an emergent subjectivity whose freedom away from domesticity was indicative of the productive displacement necessary for the order of the capital. Since India did not have a full-fledged indigenous automobile industry and cars were associated with Western technology, when Ajantrik was released in 1957 a car was still seen as a symbol of modernization. In more mainstream cinemas, the car as possession was often projected as symbols of...