In the early Eighties, we — by which I mean our little nuclear family at the time; but, effectively, my father — owned a white Ambassador. In retrospect, it’s clear that the last days, by then, of the Ambassador’s long resented supremacy were upon us; but the last days have been with the Ambassador several times; it’s a machine that has digested and outwaited extinction. Luck, in Auden’s sense of ‘divine grace’, had a great deal to do with the workability of automobiles in the India I grew up in. The company my father worked in gave him an Austin in the Seventies, in a city — Bombay — where anything that smelled foreign was a way of according recognition. The trouble it brought! It had a habit of stopping anywhere without warning: on the Marine Drive, in Walkeshwar. Then came, after my father rose to the company’s helm, a Mercedes Benz, about which I was, given my teenager’s acute conscience, always mortified, and am still wary owning up to, except that I can probably do so now in the interests of hinting at the shape of a ‘high’ bourgeois biography from before the days of globalization.

In that pre-globalization age, to retire from the corporate world was to recede — some would say progress — from the superhuman to the human; in Heraclitus’s words, “The immortals become mortals.” The Mercedes disappeared; and a fairly new, but second-hand, Ambassador, which my father bought from the company, materialized one day. Its beginnings in our lives were inauspicious, with infrequent and infuriating breakdowns; its engine was already in decline, exacerbated by the indulgence (so it seemed in those newly post-Nehruvian, but still mildly self-flagellating, days) of having an air-conditioner fitted into the car. The word I’d hear then was ‘load’; when the car went on the blink at a traffic light, the driver would say, “It can’t take the load.”

One of the morals of this small reminiscence has to do with the lives, and especially the afterlives, of machines. There are other reminders — besides the violation notices — of that Ambassador, and one of them comes annually in late November, when, towards the end of the autumn term at the University of East Anglia, I show my MA students Ritwik Ghatak’s film, Ajantrik (which I translate tentatively for them as ‘un-machinelike’). It’s not just the nature of the theme that serves as a reminder; it’s the fact that, by a coincidence, the number of the taxi in the film is also 117. Those numbers are, for me, associated with obduracy and failure, and stir within me — as they probably do in the taxi driver in the film — some unacknowledged spring of affection.

Many of us in this city will be familiar with the film: the taxi driver, so enamoured of his steadfast but increasingly debilitated vehicle that he sees it as a companion; his refusal to sell it, despite all its signs of giving up the ghost, and despite the mockery of the other taxi drivers; the plaintive conversations he has with the car; the threats he hurls at it; the bitter denouement when it’s sold as scrap to a Marwari businessman. Then there are the bare but grand vistas around the Bengal-Bihar border; the landscape of milestones, horizons, and level crossings through which the taxi moves; the long interruption when it and its owner encounter the Oraon tribals dancing — all these comprise, seemingly, a world far removed from the machine.

Yet one senses, somehow, that Ghatak isn’t setting up contrasts and oppositions here — between man and nature, nature and machine — but hinting at a breakdown: not of the machine, but of boundaries. “The people at the Bengali Club say I’ve become a machine,” says the driver Bimal (played by Kali Banerjee), woefully addressing the car by the name he’s given it, ‘Jaggadal’, and as the familiar “tui”. “What they don’t realize is that you too are human.” What’s extraordinary here is not only that the observation is uttered at all, but that the driver doesn’t bother to refute the first half of the statement. In remaining silent on the matter (is the driver part machine?), Ghatak is working towards an alternative autobiography of filmmaking, one that takes the debate from whether ‘we’ use technology, or technology surreptitiously uses us. It’s a line of enquiry that was later opened up — in no simple way, alas — by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose challenging and radical use of the term ‘machine’ suggests — as in the driver’s summation — a flow rather than an entity, a field of relations enmeshing man, nature, and technology.

Not long ago, a young political scientist, Rajarshi Dasgupta, used the term ‘prosthesis’ in the context of Ajantrik, to pinpoint its anomalous portrayal of man and machine. Dasgupta, like me, is probably searching for a vocabulary that would accommodate the intuition that Ghatak is not so much interested in anthropomorphism — that is, attributing human impulses to non-human phenomena — as in redrawing the human itself, and in measuring, poetically, the material parameters of his craft. The ‘prosthetic’, at its most literal, suggests the artificial limb, a mechanical extension of the body. Let’s take this thought a bit further. Neurologists have told us that the brain can make amputees sense appendages they no longer have; for instance, it’s possible to feel like scratching an absent limb. If this is so, then the opposite must also be true: that the process by which we become part-mechanical — prosthesis, or become a cyborg — might well be one we aren’t fully conscious of. At what point — with our romantic dualisms about man and technology still intact — we passed into this stage of evolution isn’t clear; but it’s indubitable that in the filmmaker the 20th century had an entity that was both human artist and machine: part ‘driver’ or ‘pilot’ (the word used in our city buses of the driver) or ‘director’, part slow or hurtling movement, part affect, and part vision.

The cinematic consciousness “is not us, the spectator, nor the hero, but the camera,” said Deleuze, “now human, now inhuman, or super-human.” Both Ghatak and his contemporary, Satyajit Ray, were acutely aware of the camera, and its principal medium, light, but in different ways. This has to do with Ray’s craft originating, at least partly, in Renoir and French cinema, whose use of light Deleuze calls “Cartesian”, a beam-like emanation from the subject, making things luminous; while Ghatak’s debt to German expressionism — which uses light to create movement and conflict, and even to animate inanimate objects — is pretty clear. But there’s also the happy convergence of that “Cartesianism” with the inheritance of Bengal’s ‘enlightenment’, its late 19th-century humanism, for Ray, and it constantly returns him, as an artist and theorist, to the importance of the gaze; the Indian filmmaker “has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears” — thus Ray, in 1948. That “only”, one notices on a second reading, turns the assertion into an understatement: for what could be more difficult, really, than working towards a vision of the world?