Few Indian directors have spent as much of their career inside villages as Goutam Ghose. His first feature was set among the peasants of Telangana, his best-known film follows a boatman on the Padma, and his documentaries have repeatedly gone into rural India to record hunger, displacement and craft. Born on 24 July 1950, he came out of the Bengali intellectual milieu of the mid-twentieth century and turned his camera, almost immediately and almost permanently, towards people who had never been the subject of one.

Photojournalism and the First Documentaries

His father, Himangshu Kumar Ghose, was a professor, and his upbringing was academic. He graduated from the University of Calcutta and was involved in the city's group theatre movement, then a serious training ground for a whole generation of Bengali filmmakers and actors. Before he made films he worked as a photojournalist, which explains a good deal about how his films look: he composes for the still frame and trusts the image to carry the argument.

He began making documentaries in 1973, starting with New Earth. Three years later he made Hungry Autumn, about famine conditions in West Bengal, which won the main prize at the Oberhausen short film festival and announced him internationally before he had made a feature. Documentary remained a parallel career for him throughout; he has made films on Ustad Bismillah Khan and on other figures and subjects, and he has never treated the form as an apprenticeship to be outgrown.

Maa Bhoomi and the Political Features

His feature debut, in 1980, was Maa Bhoomi, made in Telugu rather than Bengali. It dramatises the Telangana peasant armed struggle against the landlords of the Nizam's dominions, the same uprising that shaped a generation of communist organisers in the Deccan. Made outside his own language and outside any commercial system, it is now regarded as a landmark of Indian political cinema and one of the defining works of Telugu parallel cinema.

He followed it with Dakhal in 1982 and then, in 1984, with Paar, made in Hindi. Paar follows a landless Dalit couple driven out of their village who must, in its famous final sequence, swim a river herding a drove of pigs in order to earn their fare home. Naseeruddin Shah won the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival for it, and the film remains one of the most physically punishing depictions of rural destitution in Indian cinema.

Antarjali Jatra, in 1987, moved to nineteenth-century Bengal and the practice of marrying a dying man to a young girl on the cremation ground. In 1992 he adapted Manik Bandopadhyay's novel Padma Nadir Majhi, an Indo-Bangladeshi co-production about fishermen on the Padma river, which won him the National Film Award for best direction.

A Long Second Act

Ghose did not settle into a formula. Patang, Gudia and Abar Aranye took on communal violence, the aftermath of militancy, and the passage of time, the last of these being a return to the characters of Satyajit Ray's Aranyer Din Ratri a generation on; it won him another National Award for direction. Moner Manush in 2010 was about the Baul mystic and songwriter Lalon Fakir, and became one of his most widely seen films. Shankhachil in 2016 returned to the India-Bangladesh border and what a line drawn on a map does to a family that needs a hospital on the other side of it.

He has worked as cinematographer and music director on his own films and has acted occasionally in others. That range is unusual even among directors of his generation.

A consistent thread across the work is the border, in both its political and its human senses. He has made films on either side of the India-Bangladesh line, in Bengali and in Hindi and in Telugu, in co-production with Bangladeshi and Italian partners, and he has repeatedly returned to the question of what partition did and continues to do to ordinary families in the delta. He belongs to the generation that came after Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, and he has been open about working in their shadow while refusing to imitate them; where Ray composed and Ghatak raged, Ghose reports.

Standing and Honours

He has won multiple National Film Awards across categories including direction, screenplay and cinematography, and his films have been shown and honoured at festivals across Europe and Asia. In 1997 he received the Vittorio De Sica Award in Italy, and remains the only Indian filmmaker to have been given it. In 2006 Italy made him a Knight of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity. He was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2017, and has served as chair or member of international juries, including at the International Film Festival of India.

His son Ishaan Ghose has also become a filmmaker. Goutam Ghose continues to work from Kolkata, and continues to argue, in interviews and in the films themselves, that Indian cinema has an obligation to the parts of the country that its industry never visits. That obligation, more than any single film, is what his four-decade body of work amounts to.