Technologies of becoming-imperceptible in Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958)

This article explores Ritwik Ghatak's conception of the automobile in the Bengali New Wave film Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy, 1958) as providing an alternative framework within which to approach the question of technology and its implications for the post-Independence nation-state. The cinematic automobile elaborates a critical optic that reconfigures the machine, including the audio-visual apparatus of cinematic capture itself. In delineating a ramshackle car's errant automobility, Ajantrik articulates a new politics of identity in relation to historical questions of difference, marginality, indigenous sovereignty and emergent subjectivity. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's dromological philosophy and concepts of nomadology, war machine, deterritorialisation and becomings-molecular, I examine Ghatak's engagement with the contested trope of land and its reoccupation through the deployment of gesturo-haptic and kinaesthetic techniques. I link Ghatak's documentary features and ethnographic writing on the Oraons, an ethnolinguistic indigenous community of eastern India, with his exploration of land, technology and subjectivity in Ajantrik.