the primordial jostles with the so-called pressures of progress. In the process human lives are torn apart, but without a final succumbing of the human will. From his first film Nagarik to the final epic about the predicament of our community which he fashioned out of slices of his own life injukti Takkaar Gappo, Ritwik has maintained a heroic stance in his confrontation with reality. Taling of the sequence in Subamarekha when the little girl Seeta meets a man dressed like the goodess of destruction Kali on an deserted airstrip, Ritwik's comment is: I somehow feel the entire human civilization has suddenly faced the archetypal image of the terrible Mother. Today the question of life and death of the entire civilization depends on that confrontation. 82 April'June 1983