With Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, with which it coincides chronologically and thematically, Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik was a seminal force in the revaluation of the Indian cinema. Both films portray the disintegration of rural Bengal and the social and political tensions in that “orphan state” in Eastern India, now Bangladesh. But a more oblique and yet more intense approach was taken by Ghatak, an influential cult figure among the new generation of Indian filmmakers, who died in 1974.
Ajantrik is characterized by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice as “rapid-fire jive of a working-class Warners comedy within a neorealist, distinctively Indian milieu.... The unsentimental pathos of this gritty parable is unique....” The setting is an area in which mining and industrial areas are juxtaposed with pockets of tribal culture. The film follows the efforts of a taxi driver named Bimal to integrate himself, in his lonely way, with his surroundings. Bimal relates to the world via his taxi - which is his best friend, his only love, and a pile of junk compared with the array of contemporary Chevys and Pontiacs on the road. Bimal's life is a series of episodes consisting of brief encounters with his fares - a young woman deserted by her lover; an elderly man urgently trying to catch a train in time to see a dying loved one; a group of tribals on their way to a secluded village, in whose idyllic surroundings Bimal chooses to lose himself. When his old taxi finally sounds its death rattles - against protestations and promises of a resurrected life from Bimal - the haunting intensity of Ajantrik reaches its climax.