Tag Archives: Ritwik Ghatak

The wedding night or the suhaag raat still has a lot of significance in Indian culture. The conservative Indian society still banishes pre-marital sex and thus the wedding night is supposed to be the first time the bride and the groom make their relationship sexual, with the acceptance of the society. Indian cinema has used and abused the ‘suhaag raat’ scene over the decades of its existence. Often, such scenes make for unintentional hilarity. Only occasionally the wedding night scenes have managed to break through the stereotype. Further in this blogpost, I would like to dwell on two such instances wherein I feel the ‘suhaag raat’ scene was thoughtfully done with craft.

Titash Nadir Ek naam ( A River Named Titash)

Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema doesn’t appeal to all. The idiosyncrasies of his films alienates quite a few people. But there are his staunch admirers as well who consider his cinema to be superior to his Bengali contemporary Satyajit Ray. The two Bengali stalwarts, however, were mutual admirers of each other. The use of sound in Ghatak’s films was indeed peculiar. In the below scene from his 1973 film Titash… , Rajar Jhi, a young girl from the village, marries Kishore, a fisherman from the neighbouring village. As the two are left alone to consummate their marriage, the score is dominated by the exaggerated heavy breathing of the newly wed bride. The use of the heavy breathing in the scene depicts the anxiety of the first sexual encounter of Rajar Jhi. It also depicts the concern of living far away from her home and family, with another person who is nothing but a stranger. The score has to be one of the most experimental use of sound for a wedding night scene in the history of Indian cinema. The scene can also be considered to be a fine example of the peculiar use of diegetic sound in Ghatak’s oeuvre as a filmmaker.

Iruvar

In this scene from the Mani Ratnam classic from the late 1990s, loosely based on the MGR-Karunanidhi friendship-cum-rivalry, the firebrand poet Tamilzhselvam (Prakash Raj) marries a simpleton Maragatham (Revathi). The beauty of the wedding night scene is that we get to know so much about the characters. Tamizhselvam, a socialist who doesn’t have faith in the idea of god. A liberal man who treats men and women as equal. And Maragatham, a naïve young lady brought up by her parents as a devout Hindu. The kind of woman who will never question her husband and will always follow his lead. The trope of saree catching fire would have looked cheesy under the hands of an inferior director but not here. Ratnam masterfully uses the trope to further tell us about the characters and also add the much needed sensuality to the scene (it is a wedding night after all). Santosh Shivan’s use of saturated green of the saree, walls and window and contrasting it with Prakash Raj’s bright white clothes and the superb lighting; Rahman’s tender background score; the intensity of Prakash Raj’s dialogue delivery, all do make the screen burn with the raging fire of desire. The scene packs a bigger impact than that of Anadan and his wife between which it has been sandwiched by the editor. This wedding night sequence, much like all of Iruvar, is a masterclass in filmmaking.