Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958) begins with an almost indecent display of the exposure of a car engine that literally refuses to start. At first, we hear the decrepit taxi Jagaddal, and then we have a glimpse of it. It is not a grace, it is a sneeze, a screech. The taxi does not glide in the frame with the ease one would expect of a symbol of progress. It arrives as fatigue. The driver, Bimal, talks to it as if it were a pet mule. He coaxes, scolds, consoles. The villagers laugh. To them, it is transport in the disguise of a scrap, but Ghatak’s camera does not mock. It sits on the dents in its rattling metal, on the fact that the car’s chassis seems to shake when it is burdened. The scrubbed quality of the image does not isolate matter in life; according to Jane Bennett, it is not willing to conceive of things as a conceptual background. Jagaddal is not a portrayal of human emotion, but a participation in it.
The taxi obstructs, distorts and diverts. It breaks down at the most inopportune moment, reorganising labour and temporality. It plays its role, in Bruno Latour’s terms, not by acting with intention but with force. The machine is not merely a metaphor; here, the machine is an actant that alters the state of affairs. This untrustworthy car keeps changing how Bimal earns his living, his emotional state, and even his reputation in the village. Agency exists between machines and humans. But if it is a matter that is vibrant, Jagaddal is vibrant only in decay. The memory rusts and assumes the nature of rust. Rust would be a suggestion of obsolescence in another film – a warning of a story about the new exerting its tendency at the expense of the old. In this case, corrosion becomes temporal. Even after its shelf life, it will still exist. Its resistance is almost reproachful.
To Walter Benjamin, history was not a process of progress but rather a series of disasters upon disasters. In his ‘Angel of History’, he is hurled backwards into the future, gazing at the debris. Jagaddal is part of that debris field. It is an element of the industrial modern already self-categorised as ruin. The transgressional chassis of the taxi comes up against the mineral landscape of Chota Nagpur, excavated with the colonial infrastructural memory of an uneven history. The development has come, but equality has not. Freeways separate over-harvested land. The machines revolve, their promises rust out the shine before rust actually forms. The genius of Ghatak does not consist in addressing the automobile as an allegory. Jagaddal is not only India but also the ruins of the process of development. It thereby remains particular: the metal stretched by use, the gears worn flat, the paint peeling. The camera explores it with a patience which belongs more to a documentary. The whiny metal engine voice is literally spoken word in a sequence, not through fantasy, but acoustics. The boundary between organic and inorganic sound is porous, and sound design makes such mingling palpable.
Timothy Morton is of the opinion that ecology is not a harmonious background but rather a system of an intimate mesh of relations where nothing is distinct. Jagaddal appears in this mesh-within-mesh. Machine and driver and road and dust and air, all of them bleed into one another. It is not necessarily the car that is malfunctioning, but a signal in a chain of signals within a linked mechanism. It creaks and represents the history of extraction, manufacture and circulation. The plateau mineral and the metal body are genealogical cousins. Ajantrik begins to register what Rob Nixon would call a ‘slow violence’. The destruction is not dramatic. It is attritional. Metal fatigue, infrastructure laxity, and economic marginalisation are not new. Erosion of Jagaddal occurs across horizons on a timescale far beyond the drama of the moment. Its downfall does not end with a bang; it whimpers. It manifests as wear. But still, the film does not sentimentalise the machine. Neither a villain nor a victim; it is Jagaddal. The scene is thus not melodramatic when the car disintegrates permanently and is dismantled in a scrapyard. It is a systematic breaking down. Bolts loosen. Panels detach. The body is torn into bits. It is the kind of moment when an artefact removed from the web of progress glows with historical truth, which Benjamin would likely call a dialectical image.
It is the coda, however, that saves the film from gloom. A child picks up the car’s severed horn and squeezes it. There is a shrill, comic accent that cuts the uncomfortable silence of the scrapyard. Laughter erupts. The fragment sounds again. As Bennett talks of “thing-power,” this is its mischievous afterlife. The machine continues even after its use-value. It exceeds ownership. Its strength exists, though in its diminished yet nonetheless undeniable form. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro refers to ontological frameworks in which what modernity calls an object may instead serve as a centre of experience. Ajantrik approaches the realm of animism, but it does not fully cross the boundary; it undermines the post-Enlightenment belief in the voiceless matter. Although Jagaddal is not given the interiority, it is given irreducibility. It is not entirely conducive to symbolism or usefulness. It lingers as excess.
And it is in this lingering that the film still quietly expresses its politics. What colonial-modernity bequeathed to the postcolony was infrastructure designed for extraction, not equity. Machines became entangled in neither the history of liberation nor that of equal trade. This inheritance is reflected in Jagaddal’s obsolescence — into the past, too old to be in the future promised, yet too deeply ingrained to fade away in a proper and graceful way. But Ghatak is uncongenial to nostalgia. There is no nostalgia for a pre-industrial purity. Instead, it is vibration, vibration to the disintegration, to fragments that will always disrupt work. The film asks us to tune in another way. Not the sound of the musical droning of progress, but the intermittent noise of its waste.
At the end, Jagaddal does not die. It disperses. Molecules dissolve, disintegrate, reassemble, and circulate. The horn survives as play. The destruction is the reincarnation. Benjamin reminds us that monuments are not the only rubble in which history is written. Ghatak also suggests that debris is not a corpus. It hums, rattles, insists. And how matter is impervious to our quotidian life tells us that the taxi will not die. Rust is one of the forms of decay, but decay is a duration. Breakdown is not just the opposite; it is a gradual process of change. The machine is shaky on the fringe of the abyss, and in this trembling, something is alive, not hope in itself, but survival.
And the sound lingers…
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