Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is university professor in the humanities at Columbia University and the author of many books. Spivak was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy and the 2025 Holberg Prize. In 2013, she received the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian award. Surya Parekh is assistant professor in the Department of English at Binghamton University. He is the author of Black Enlightenment. Moinak Biswas is an Indian film scholar and professor of film studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. As coordinator of the Media Lab, he researches Indian cinema, edits the Journal of the Moving Image, and is author of Apu and After.

• Foreword by Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakChapter 1. “A River Called Titas: A Mirror of Our World Today” by Ngugi wa Thiong’oChapter 2. “Ghatak’s Alluvial Forms” by Anjuli Fatima Raza KolbChapter 3. “Homeless Intensities: Notes on Narration and the Image in Subarnarekha” by Udaya KumarChapter 4. “Old Sound and New Noise: Listening to Ghatak” by Nora AlterChapter 5. “Feet moving in Ghatak: Cinematic Gesture, Political Emergence, and the Subconscious of Migration” by Stefan JonssonChapter 6. “The Quest for Gold: Exploring Bari Theke Paliye” by Surya ParekhChapter 7. “Komal Gandhar, Autobiography, Performance” by Moinak BiswasChapter 8. “Reverberations of Discord and Harmony in the key of E-Flat: Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar” by Dudley AndrewChapter 9. “Ghatak’s Ajantrik” by Richard PeñaChapter 10. “‘A River Never Lied’: Entangled Agencies in Ritwik Ghatak’s Films” by Gabriele SchwabChapter 11. “The Final Dialogue” by Hari Vasudevan and Satoshi Ukai

“Of all India’s many comparatively unsung directors, Ritwik Ghatak (1926–76) was possibly the most obviously talented. . . . Here was a passionate and intensely national filmmaker who seemed to have found his way without much access to the work of others but who was most certainly of international calibre. Arrogant, overbearing and hopelessly unreliable, he was also much loved and admired as a restless iconoclast whose dreams were never likely to be wholly fulfilled but still worth dreaming in the fractured society which he seemed to epitomise.”