Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, gender and art [1 ed.] 9781138953901, 1138953903

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‘This book comprises the first major study of Rituparno’s oeuvre, examining the art of his filmmaking, as well his bold and unprecedented engagement with diverse forms of Indian sexuality.’ – Rachel Dwyer, Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema, SOAS, University of London ‘The distinctive voice of Rituparno Ghosh comes alive again in this rich collection of essays and interviews. A very fitting tribute.’ – Rosie Thomas, Director of the India Media Centre, University of Westminster ‘Aspects of Rituparno Ghosh’s erudite and complex life are captured with care and sensitivity in this book. The fine essays ranging from across the arts and humanities discipline have been brought together and shaped with skill and scholarly flair by the editors. This is a must-read for all interested in the legacy and impact of Ghosh’s work.’ – Rajinder Dudrah, Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies, University of Manchester

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RITUPARNO GHOSH

An iconic film-maker and inheritor of the legendary Satyajit Ray’s legacy, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the finest auteurs to emerge out of contemporary Bengal. His films, though rooted firmly in middle class values, desires and aspirations, are highly critical of heteropatriarchal power structures. From the very outset, Ghosh displayed a strong feminist sensibility, which later evolved into radical queer politics. This volume analyses his films, his craft, his stardom and his contribution to sexual identity politics. In this first scholarly study undertaken on Rituparno Ghosh, the chapters discuss the cultural import of his work within the dynamics of a rapidly evolving film industry in Bengal and, more largely, the cinematic landscape of India. The anthology also contains a conversation section (interviews with the film-maker and with industry cast and crew) drawing a critical and personal portrait of this remarkable film-maker. Sangeeta Datta is an independent writer, film-maker and cultural commentator, based in London. Kaustav Bakshi is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Sanskrit College, University of Calcutta, India. Rohit K. Dasgupta is Lecturer, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK.

SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE Series Editors: David Washbrook, University of Cambridge, UK Boria Majumdar, University of Central Lancashire, UK Sharmistha Gooptu, South Asia Research Foundation, India Nalin Mehta, Asia Research Institute & Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore This series brings together research on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences, and provides scholars with a platform covering, but not restricted to, their particular fields of interest and specialisation. A significant concern for the series is to focus across the whole of the region known as South Asia, and not simply on India, as is often the case. There will be a conscious attempt to publish regional studies and bring together scholarship on and from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and other parts of South Asia. This series will consciously initiate synergy between research from within academia and that from outside the formal academy. A focus will be to bring into the mainstream more recently developed disciplines in South Asian studies which have till date remained in the nature of specialised fields; for instance, research on film, media, photography, sport, medicine, environment, to mention a few. The series will address this gap and generate more comprehensive knowledge fields. Also in this series ‘HOW BEST DO WE SURVIVE?’ A MODERN POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE TAMIL MUSLIMS Kenneth McPherson 978-0-415-58913-0 HEALTH, CULTURE AND RELIGION IN SOUTH ASIA Critical Perspectives Editors: Assa Doron and Alex Broom 978-81-89643-16-4

GUJARAT BEYOND GANDHI Identity, Conflict and Society Editors: Nalin Mehta and Mona Mehta 978-81-89643-17-1 INDIA’S FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1947–2007 Jayanta Kumar Ray 978-0-415-59742-5 LAND, WATER, LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN ANDHRA Regional Evolution in India Since 1850 Brian Stoddart 978-0-415-67795-0 SCORING OFF THE FIELD Football Culture in Bengal, 1911–80 Kausik Bandyopadhyay 978-0-415-67800-1 RELIGIOUS CULTURES IN EARLY MODERN INDIA New Perspectives Editors: Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook 978-81-89643-18-8 ESCAPING THE WORLD Women Renouncers Among Jains Manisha Sethi 978-0-415-50081-4 SOUTH ASIAN TRANSNATIONALISMS Cultural Exchange in the Twentieth Century Editor: Babli Sinha 978-81-89643-20-1 MINORITY NATIONALISMS IN SOUTH ASIA/SAHC10 Editor: Tanweer Fazal 978-81-89643-33-1 INDIAN SISTERS A History of Nursing and the State, 1907–2007 Madelaine Healey 978-0-415-71040-4

TELEVISION AT LARGE IN SOUTH ASIA Editors: Aswin Punathambekar and Shanti Kumar 978-81-89643-35-5 GENDER AND MASCULINITIES New Perspectives Editors: Assa Doron and Alex Broom 978-81-89643-3

RITUPARNO GHOSH Cinema, gender and art

Edited by Sangeeta Datta, Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Sangeeta Datta, Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta The right of Sangeeta Datta, Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book. ISBN: 978-1-138-95390-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-66676-1 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgements About the contributors

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The world of Rituparno Ghosh: an introduction

1

RO H I T K . D A S G U P TA, S ANGE E TA DATTA AND KAU S TAV B A K S H I

PART I

Reading Rituparno Ghosh and his texts 1 Invoking love, death and an elsewhere: searching the auteur in Rituparno Ghosh’s Abohoman

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S A N G E E TA D AT TA

2 Rituparno Ghosh and the pursuit of freedom

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WI M A L D I S S A N AYAKE

3 Locating Rituparno Ghosh in Tollywood

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AN U G YA N N A G

4 ‘Just like a film star!’: the style of being Rituparno Ghosh

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SUMIT DEY

5 The endangered city in Rituparno Ghosh’s early cinema of confinement S AYA N D E B C H OWDHURY

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104

CONTENTS

6 Borrowing, becoming and the question of the self in Sob Charitro Kalponik

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S R I M AT I M U K H ERJ E E

7 En-gendering the detective: of love, longing and feminine follies

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M A D H U J A M U K HE RJ E E

8 Closeted desires and open secrets: Raincoat and Noukadubi

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RICHARD ALLEN

9 Beyond the binary: (trans)gender narratives and class distinction in Rituparno Ghosh’s later films

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A N I R U D D H A D UTTA

10 ‘Kissed on one cheek and slapped on the other’: Rituparno Ghosh’s Chitrangada as an allegory of oppositional readings

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DAISY HASAN

11 A room of hir own: the queer aesthetics of Rituparno Ghosh

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K AU S TAV B A K S HI AND PARJ ANYA S E N

PART II

The director’s voice

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12 Shohini Ghosh in conversation with Rituparno Ghosh

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13 Kaustav Bakshi in conversation with Rituparno Ghosh

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PART III

Cast and crew speak

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14 Interviewer’s note

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S A N G E E TA D AT TA AND ROHI T K. DAS GUP TA

15 Cast: Sharmila Tagore, Jaya Bachchan and Aparna Sen x

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CONTENTS

16 Crew: Avik Mukhopadhyay, Arghyakamal Mitra, Indranil Ghosh and Debojyoti Mishra Filmography Index

265 279 281

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FIGURES

I.0 I.1 I.2 I.3 PI.1 1.1 1.2 2.1 3.1 4.1 5.1 6.1 7.1 8.1 9.1 10.1 11.1 PII.1 12.1 13.1 13.2

Rituparno Ghosh: The Auteur Rituparno Ghosh and crew of Chokher Bali A young Ghosh on set A working still from Dahan with Suchitra Mitra and Indrani Haldar Rituparno at his monitor Rituparno Ghosh at a script discussion in his study Ghosh with the author Sangeeta Datta on the sets of Raincoat Aishwarya Rai and Raima Sen on the set of Chokher Bali Aishwarya Rai rehearsing with associate director Sangeeta Datta Rituparno Ghosh, the style icon A postcard with a still from Utsab Ghosh briefing Bipasha Basu on the sets of Shob Choritro Kalponik With crew members and cast on the set of Shubho Muhurat Poster of Raincoat Working still from Arekti Premer Golpo. Ghosh with Indraneil Sengupta Poster for Chitrangada Ghosh with Deepti Naval on the set of Memories in March Rituparno on location in Benaras on the set of Chokher Bali Ghosh with Sharmila Tagore on the set of Shubho Muharat Ghosh on the set of Chokher Bali. Set design Indranil Ghosh The director’s vision

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xx 4 5 22 27 30 31 52 66 84 113 124 150 155 177 192 207 225 235 241 243

FIGURES

PIII.1 Rituparno, Aishwarya and unit members looking at a sleeping owl on location at the set of Chokher Bali 14.1 Ghosh in his study at home 15.1 Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore and Rituparno Ghosh in Tollygunge Studio for Shubho Muhurat 15.2 Ghosh briefing Amitabh Bachchan. Working still from Last Lear 15.3 Ghosh with Aparna Sen and Kalyan Ray 16.1 Ghosh with Avik Mukhopadhyay on location for his last film Satyanweshi 16.2 Young Ghosh sharing a lighter moment with his Mother 16.3 Rituparno sharing a laugh with his crew. With Bibi Ray, Jaisri Bhattacharya, Sushanto Pal and Karna Basu

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249 252 255 260 261 268 273 274

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was conceived as a series of conversations and discussions with Rituparno while he was still with us. Sadly it only began to take shape after he left us. But the need for critical work on his oeuvre was even more urgently felt at this stage when this prolific and inspiring artiste was suddenly gone. This book would not exist without the hard work of the contributors. We have been extremely lucky to work with a group of generous and exciting academics. The book has been equally enriched with the contributions from the distinguished cast and crew of Rituparno Ghosh’s unit – Sharmila Tagore, Jaya Bachchan, Aparna Sen, Aveek Mukhopadhyay, Arghyakamal Mitra, Debojyoti Mishra, and Indranil Ghosh. We would like to thank Sharmistha Gooptu and the series editors at SAHC for commissioning this book. The editors are indebted to many people who have over the course of time helped shape the various elements of the book. For the images and helping us secure permission we would like to thank: Sanjib Ghosh, Venkatesh Films, Karna Basu, Indranil Ghosh, Abhishek Dutta, and Tapan Biswas. Rosie Thomas and the staff at the India Media Centre at the University of Westminster for providing us with archival copy of Rituparno Ghosh’s masterclass in 2011. Darshan Shah and Weavers Studio Centre for the Arts for archival support. We would also like to acknowledge the help and support of the following people who peer-reviewed the chapters for us and provided significant feedback and suggestions: Professor Rachel Dwyer, K. Moti Gokulsing, Dr Adrian Athique, Dr Shamira Meghani, Anindya Sengupta, Dr Shoma A. Chatterji, Dr Smita Banerjee, and the late Professor Jashodhara Bagchi. Sangeeta would like to thank her co-editors, family and friends. She would specially like to thank her friend and colleague Rituparno Ghosh for the long and exciting work association on Chokher Bali, Raincoat, Antarmahal, The Last Lear, and Jeeban Smriti. xv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Kaustav like to thank friend and confidant Rituparno Ghosh with whom each adda session taught him more about life and cinema than any university lecture. He is also thankful to would his co-editors, Utsav Dan and Anindya Sengupta. He would also like to thank Ma for being always there; and Baba, who always frowned if he caught him watching films, but, was never disapproving of his unending fascination with Ritu da’s cinema. Rohit would like to thank Moti Gokulsing, Debanuj Dasgupta Paul Boyce, Maa, Baba, Rittika, Tim, and his co-editors. He would also like to thank his colleagues at WSA, University of Southampton. Finally we dedicate this book to the multifaceted and inimitable friend, ally and artiste par excellence, Rituparno Ghosh, whose legacy keeps growing by the day. Sangeeta, Kaustav and Rohit London and Kolkata September 2015

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Richard Allen is current head of Tisch School of Arts at New York University. His numerous publications include Projecting Illusion (1997) and Film Theory and Philosophy (1999). He collaborated with Professor Ira Bhaskar on curating a film festival in Abu Dhabi and New York – ‘Muslim Cultures of Bombay Cinema’ – and publishing a book titled Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (2009). Kaustav Bakshi is assistant professor, Department of English, Sanskrit College, University of Calcutta, India. He has co-edited two anthologies, Anxieties, Influences and After: Critical Responses to Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism and Studies in Indian English Poetry. His articles have appeared in several international journals, namely South Asian Review, the Melus Melow Journal, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, and in the MacFarlane anthology Muses India: Essays on English Language Writers from Mahomet to Rushdie. He has received the Charles Wallace India Trust Research Grant 2014 to further his research in the United Kingdom on Sri Lankan Expatriate Fiction, the subject of his doctoral thesis. Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches literature and cultural studies at the School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, New Delhi. His MPhil dissertation investigated into the subjectivities/subject positions under communism that came under heavy critique in post-communist literature/ fiction. He is working on his PhD proposal that broadly concerns the Politics and Representation of Cultural Memory. He has several publications in international journals and film magazines, including Film International, Moving Arts Journal, Caravan Magazine, and so on. Rohit K. Dasgupta is lecturer, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK. He has previously taught at the University of the Arts, London, and University of West London. He is currently completing

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

a PhD on Digital Queer Cultures in India from University of the Arts, London. He has co-edited (with K. Moti Gokulsing) Masculinity and its Challenges in India and was the assistant editor of The Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas. He was recently awarded the Sir Peter Holmes Memorial Award by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. Sangeeta Datta is an independent writer, film-maker and cultural commentator based in London. She runs a film company and is artistic director of the arts organisation BAITHAK UK. She has taught literature and film at Birkbeck College and has been research fellow at the University of Sussex and at SOAS. She has been associate director with Rituparno Ghosh in Chokher Bali, Raincoat, Antarmahal, and The Last Lear. She was commissioned by BFI to write a book on Shyam Benegal for their World Director series (2002). She has just finished co-editing a book on Cosmopolitan Tagore. Sumit Dey is a senior PhD scholar, working under the supervision of Professor Ira Bhaskar at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He completed his MPhil from the same school and his dissertation is titled ‘Defining the “Rituparnoesque”: Rituparno Ghosh and Auteurism; Sexuality and Stardom’. He is also working on an ‘Audio-Visual Cultural Archive’ project at Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, New Delhi. Wimal Dissanayake teaches at the University of Hawaii. A few of his publications include Melodrama and Asian Cinema, New Chinese Cinema, Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, Indian Popular Cinema amongst others. His most recent book is the Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas (co-edited with K. Moti Gokulsing). He has recently received the Sahitya Ratna, one of the highest national lifetime awards from the President of Sri Lanka. Aniruddha Dutta is assistant professor in the departments of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Iowa. Dutta’s current research project examines how institutionalised gender/sexual identity politics in India challenges, reconfigures or reproduces structural hierarchies of class/caste and unequal access to citizenship. Shohini Ghosh is Zakir Hussain Professor at the A. J. K. Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia University, India. She was previously a visiting professor at Cornell University and is the author of Fire: A Queer Film Classic (2011).

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Daisy Hasan is research associate at the India Media Centre, University of Westminster. She has co-edited a special issue of the South Asian Popular Culture Journal (Vol. 9, No. 1, 2011). She has most recently authored an introductory essay for the book Meena Kumari, the Poet: A Life beyond Cinema (2014). Madhuja Mukherjee teaches at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, India. Recently, she received the prestigious FTII Golden Jubilee Fellowship for writing histories of regional cinemas. She has published articles on Bollywood, gender, media, urban cultures, New Indian cinemas, Indian studios, sound practices, film music, and playback systems at Tasveer Ghar, Journal of the Moving Image, and elsewhere. Srimati Mukherjee is associate professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her most recent articles and essays have appeared in The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Jump Cut, The International Reception of T.S. Eliot, Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, and Scritture Migranti (Italy). Her short fiction has been published in Feminist Studies. Anugyan Nag is assistant professor in the Department of Journalism at Lady Sriram College, Delhi University and senior research PhD fellow, working under the supervision of Professor Ira Bhaskar, at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He finished his MPhil in 2012 from the same university and his dissertation was on ‘The contemporary Bengali film industry: from Tollygunge to Tollywood’. Prior to this, he had a master’s degree in Fiction Film Production from the University of Salford, UK. He is also recipient of the Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Fellowship 2016–17. Parjanya Sen is assistant professor in the Department of English at Sonada College, North Bengal University. He is pursuing his PhD at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. He has various papers published in national and international journals, notably in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film and Journal of Art Historiography.

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Figure I.0 Rituparno Ghosh: The Auteur Photo Credit: Sanjib Ghosh

THE WORLD OF RITUPARNO GHOSH An Introduction Rohit K. Dasgupta, Sangeeta Datta and Kaustav Bakshi

❦ The game changer Rituparno Ghosh (1961–2013) was a film-maker, lyricist and writer, who emerged on the cultural scene of Bengal as a copywriter of a Kolkata-based advertising firm in the 1980s. He made a mark for himself in the world of commercials, winning several awards for Response, the agency he worked for. After directing two documentaries for Doordarshan (National television), he graduated into filmmaking with Hirer Angti (Diamond Ring, 1992), which was critically acclaimed but failed to get a commercial release. For his second film, Ghosh collaborated with Aparna Sen and Renu Roy to form Spandan Films which produced Unishey April (19th April, 1995). The film won the National Award for the Best Film, and when it hit the screens in the summer of 1995 it remarkably changed the experience of cinema for the middle class Bengali bhadrolok.1 Ghosh arrived at a time when Bengali cinema was going through a dark phase. Ray had passed away in 1992, leaving behind him a vacuum which seemed difficult to fill. Although Goutam Ghose, Aparna Sen and Buddhadeb Dasgupta tried to carry forward the legacy of ‘intellectual’ cinema represented by Ray and Mrinal Sen, they made films far in-between having little bearing on the commercial market. Tollygunge, where the main studios are located, had been taken over by film-makers who were mostly remaking Tamil or Hindi films. They worked within severe budget constraints, and the financial and intellectual impoverishment was glaringly visible on screen. The Bengali middle class audience, unable to relate to 1

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the films, which lacked originality, turned away from the theatres to the small screen. Bengali television consciously promoted classics of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s fuelling nostalgia for a lost golden era. This dark phase lasted for more than a decade, after the sudden demise of the matinee idol Uttam Kumar in 1980 (Gooptu, 2011). Rituparno Ghosh arrived in the early 1990s, taking over the reins of a struggling industry. With a persuasive style of storytelling as his forte, Ghosh thoughtfully merged the distinct categories of art-house and commercial cinema, reviving the middle-of-the-road genre. With several years of experience in a top-notch advertising firm, Ghosh was adept in understanding the pulse of his target audience. Quite effortlessly, he tapped the sensibilities of the educated urban audience by reviving through his films not only Ray’s intellectualism and art of storytelling, but also the simplicity and candour of commercial Bengali cinema represented by the likes of Ajay Kar, Tapan Sinha, Tarun Majumdar as well as the Bombay-based Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee. Ghosh continued to replicate the success of Unishey April, and within a few years became a matinee idol of sorts. Ghosh mostly confined himself within the comforts of the bourgeois living room, such as Unishey April, Dahan (Crossfire, 1998), Asukh (Malaise, 1999), Utsab (Festival, 2000), or invoked nostalgia for feudal opulence in his period pieces, such as Antarmahal (Views of an Inner Chamber, 2005) and Chokher Bali (The Passion Play, 2003). As Sayandeb Chowdhury writes in his paper in this volume, ‘The Endangered City in Rituparno Ghosh’s Early Cinema of Confinement’: Ghosh managed to start a new dialogue with the urban middle class, a segment that was itself consistently on the increase throughout the first decade of liberalization . . . Ghosh’s greatest joy was to throw a group of middle and upper middle-class characters into a tightly-controlled domestic eco-system in which they were tested, tensions would mount, passions would play their turn and the possibilities of melodrama were to be fully realised. In most of his films, Ghosh worked within a strictly realistic mode. However, with Sob Charitro Kalpanik (Afterword/All Characters Are Imaginary, 2009), he began experimenting with his style – when he shifted to surrealism. In Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012), he experimented even further pushing the boundaries of form and style. While Ghosh was criticised for unabashedly conforming to bourgeois values and celebrating ‘good life’, he was also widely applauded for bringing out in open subjects barely discussed in middle class society. His narratives explored transgressive 2

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social codes, marital rape, same-sex desires, and moral hypocrisies of the new middle class. Of course, Ghosh had a precedent in Aparna Sen, whose films had repeatedly addressed such mature issues as premarital sex, adultery, divorce, and remarriage. Ghosh heralded a new era of Bengali Cinema, making films in quick succession which were commercially successful and critically awarded. His films self-consciously targeted a generation of educated upper middle class and middle class Indians savouring the fruits of economic liberalisation, generating a sizeable number of Rituparno Ghosh loyalists. Very soon, a host of young film-makers, experimenting with novel subjects, followed in his footsteps. In his 20-year career as a film-maker, Rituparno Ghosh directed 20 feature films, 3 telefilms, 1 television serial, and wrote the script for another. For several years (1997–2004), he edited Anandolok, a popular Bengali film magazine, and later, a cultural supplement to the Bengali daily Pratidin, entitled Robbar (2006–2013). As a talk show host, he ran two extremely popular shows, Ebong Rituparno and later Ghosh & Company. He made a foray into acting with Kaushik Ganguly’s Arekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story, 2010). Following the success of the film, he played protagonist in two other films, Memories in March in 2011(directed by Sanjay Nag) and Chitrangada, which he himself directed. Ghosh enjoyed a remarkably rare stardom, barely achieved by any other Bengali film-maker. Rooting his argument in Christine Geraghty’s theory of stardom, Sumit Dey, in his essay in this volume, observes: ‘Through his multiple role playing and different discourses around them, Ghosh quite unequivocally embodies all three aspects of stardom as explained by Geraghty: a celebrity, a professional and performer’. Ghosh’s popularity was not only confined to India, he also got international recognition quite early in his career. To a great extent, Ghosh’s international reputation was built with the enthusiasm of the Bengali diaspora. After winning two national awards for Unishey April and Dahan, Ghosh was invited to North America by cultural organisations in Los Angeles, New Jersey, and Houston where his films were screened and discussed. Tapan Biswas, the producer of Utsab, arranged a world premiere in North America even before its release in India in 2000. Bengali cinema appeared to have a world market to tap into. In 2001, Sangeeta Datta invited Ghosh to a four-city tour of the United Kingdom with a special focus at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His introduction to the London audience was followed by a regular participation at the London Film Festival – the first international film festival to screen his films. Bariwali (The Lady of the House, 1999) was screened to critical acclaim in Berlin and won the NETPAC Award at Pusan in 3

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2000. Both Chokher Bali and Antarmahal were nominated for the Golden Leopard Award at Locarno International Film Festival in 2003 and 2005, respectively. In 2006, Dosar (Companion, 2006) had a special screening at the Cannes Film Festival, following which he earned high praise from veterans like Mani Rathnam and Javed Akhtar. In 2010, Abohoman (The Eternal, 2010) was nominated for the Best Film at the Deauville Asian Film Festival. Although Ghosh won national awards almost every year, ironically international awards eluded him. He was a serious discussant of cinema and his post-screening conversations were always well attended. By this time, he had also started to grow in profile as a film magazine editor, TV host and stage artist. Chokher Bali marked a new beginning of international interest in his films. The next few films travelled widely to various national and international festivals. Another spate of interest was built with the last films, in which Ghosh stepped in as actor, essaying queer characters. Arekti Premer Golpo opened to critical interest in Berlin. At the London Indian Film Festival, Ghosh spoke about alternate sexual identities and breaking new ground in Indian cinema. At the Hay Literary Festival in Spain in 2011,

Figure I.1 Rituparno Ghosh and crew of Chokher Bali Courtesy of Sangeeta Datta

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Figure I.2 A young Ghosh on set Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

a vivacious cross-dressed Ghosh engaged in a sparkling onstage conversation. By this time, Ghosh was travelling widely from New York to Sydney to Singapore, sharing his thoughts on gendered identity and the artistic process. His onstage conversations and master classes have grown in archival value since. Ghosh’s untimely death brought an abrupt end to a hugely prolific career. Ghosh’s departure saw Kolkata in mourning and a dramatic intervention of the State in his funeral rites. From the arrival of the chief minister to his home, the procession to Nandan (Kolkata’s film culture hub where hundreds queued up in torrential rain) and the final gun salute at Shiriti crematorium (a first time tribute to any cultural icon in Bengal) was telecast live on several television channels. Since then, the city has continued to offer sustained tributes to Ghosh, testifying to his prevailing cultural influence. A memorial tribute season was hosted by the Satyajit Ray Institute in August 2013. The 19th Kolkata International Film Festival 2013 that programmed a special strand of Ghosh’s films, opened with the unreleased Sunglass/Taak Jhaank (production date 2005). A popular Durga Puja pandal in south Kolkata displayed his film stills and memorabilia. A 5

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large section of his books and wardrobe was donated to the Satyajit Ray Film Institute for use in student research and productions. A compilation of his editorial column entitled First Person was published by Dey’s Publishing House during the Kolkata International Book Fair, 2014. Exhibitions of photographs, paintings and sculptures by young artists continue to remember Ghosh. Film schools at Jawaharlal Nehru University (2013) and Ambedkar University (2014), New Delhi, organised exclusive festivals to showcase his major films, along with academic investigation into his works through panel discussions and paper presentations. The Montage Movie Club, Manjeri, Kerala, paid homage to Ghosh in a two-day long film festival, Ritu Parivarthan, immediately after his demise in 2013. Recently, on the occasion of his 53rd birthday, Weavers’ Studio, Centre for the Arts, Kolkata, organised a 10-day long exhibition of his belongings, rare photographs and film stills, in addition to film shows and illuminating panel discussions on his contribution to cinema and music with eminent personalities from the industry and film scholars. Several months after his demise, Ghosh’s absence is too conspicuous and overwhelming; there seems to be no replacement for such a prolific talent.

Intertextuality, freedom and agency Ghosh’s films made a mark in launching an acrid critique of heteropatriarchy, often revealing the reality behind apparently happy marriages, romantic relationships and familial equations. He problematised notions of compulsory heterosexuality and monogamy. His films, time and again, question a woman’s lack of agency within the heteropatriarchal family and the nation state at large. His female protagonists struggle hard to throw off the mantle of patriarchal repression, often abandoning the seeming security of the home and romantic relationships (Datta, 2002). For instance, Ramita (Rituparna Sengupta) in Dahan and Binodini (Aishwarya Rai) in Chokher Bali walk out on their respective husband and suitor to discover a life beyond the restrictive boundaries of the home. In his telefilm, 20 Malaltibala Lane (2006), the protagonist (Soma Chakraborty), having been rejected by several suitors and maltreated by parents and relatives for failing to impress prospective matches, leaves the home one fine morning in search of an identity of her own. In Unishey April, it takes years for Aditi (Debashree Roy) to come to terms with Sarojini (Aparna Sen), her mother, and reconcile herself with the truth that a mother who does not live up to the conventional expectations of motherhood is not necessarily evil. Completely under the influence of an immensely egoistic father, Aditi develops a strong revulsion 6

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towards her mother, who has relentlessly pursued her career as a dancer and prioritised it over her responsibility as a mother and a wife. Eighteen years after her father’s demise, Aditi is still unable to forgive her mother, and still blames her for being selfish and career minded. Aditi’s complete interpellation in patriarchal discourses prevents her from fathoming her mother’s struggle to survive as an individual, with an identity of her own. Aditi is eventually confronted by Sarojini on the fateful night she attempts suicide after being rejected by her boyfriend. An emotionally charged exchange between mother and daughter brings about a catharsis, reconciling the two estranged individuals. In Antarmahal, an important film belonging to the second phase of his career, Ghosh unravels a decadent feudal world, its leisurely extravaganza and the sordid state of its inner chambers inhabited by women, childbearing machines for perpetuating the bloodline. Antarmahal makes an inroad into these hidden chambers to reveal the brutality women suffer if they fail to bear male offspring. Revolving around an impotent zamindar’s incessant endeavours to bring forth a son, the rightful heir to his throne, the film completely dismantles the romance generally associated with sex to reveal the crudity of the act. The violence of sexual intercourse with no emotions involved in it becomes almost palpable from the very outset. The two women protagonists’ sexual desire for other men that attributes some agency to both, despite their incarcerated lives under the constant gaze of a repressive patriarch, also appears unsettling to many; for women are usually imagined as sexual objects with no desire of their own. On one hand, Boro Bou’s (Rupa Ganguly) daring act of sexually titillating the hypocrite Brahmin pundit is punished by the community of high-born priests. On the other hand, Yashomati’s or Notun Bou’s (Soha Ali Khan) final act of suicide underscores the impossibility of successfully sustaining a desire that disrupts normative codes. The low-caste potter Brij Bhushan (Abhishek Bachchan) falls in love with her, compelling Notun Bou to take her own life. For, even being desired by a man, other than the husband, was considered a blemish on the woman’s character. In film after film, Ghosh attributes to his female protagonists an agency or reflects on the lack of it, and makes them question their subordinate status. He vociferously challenges accepted dynamics of power equations between men and women, between parents and children, between straight and queer people. As Wimal Dissanayake in his essay (this volume), ‘Rituparno Ghosh and the Pursuit of Freedom’ observes, ‘A central theme informed and guided his work – the quest for freedom. He was always concerned about the lack of freedom that characterized the lives of women in India and elsewhere and later he began to explore issues of 7

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homosexual relations and transgender desires as articulations and effects of freedom’. In Shubho Muharat (The First Day of the Shoot, 2003), a film belonging to the ‘whodunit’ genre, Ghosh very subtly interweaves into the thriller narrative, this pursuit of freedom Dissanayake refers to. A murder mystery, which appears bewildering to all, is solved by a widowed homemaker, who by her sheer astuteness pieces together the evidences and unravels the puzzle. In the process, she rediscovers herself. She admits to the murderer in an emotionally charged moment that she is immensely grateful to her. Had she not been drawn into this murder mystery, she would not have realised that she had an unusual gift of solving riddles that even the police could not untangle. Rangapishi (Rakhi Gulzar), as she is fondly addressed by her niece, thereby finds meaning beyond the mundane monotony of her everyday domestic chores. The film ends with the murderer and the ‘detective’ emotionally connecting with each other, as Madhuja Mukherjee argues in her paper (this volume) ‘En-gendering the detective: Of love, longing and feminine follies’, infuses an overtly ‘masculine’ genre of the detective fiction with a rare emotionality (that supersedes the rationalism of the ‘male’ sleuth’s final revelation of how he arrived at the conclusion) and transforms it completely. In this particular instance, Ghosh’s feminist position also manifests itself not only in his theme and characterisation, but also in his reconstruction of a western hypermasculine genre, by locating the action in familiar domestic spaces of the middle class home and making a sleuth out of an ageing widowed homemaker who barely steps out of the house. Ghosh’s story, inspired by Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, acknowledges Miss Marple to be the inspiration behind the conception of his Rangapishi. Ten years later, Ghosh brought Rangapishi back on screen with his last telefilm Tahar Naamti Ranjana (Ranjana is Her Name, 2013), which was the first of the series of short detective films he had planned for the Bengali entertainment channel Star Jalsa with Rangapishi as the protagonist. Ghosh deals with the idea of freedom and agency in all his films. Vicitimisation and exploitation, especially through parochial conservatism and patriarchy, is not always physical, as he reminds us. In an emotionally charged scene in Unishey April, Aditi asks her mother, ‘Baba ki korto tomay’? (What did my dad do to you?), to which she answers, ‘Kichhu korto na! Tumi ki mone koro mar dhor korlei kharap hoy’? (Nothing! Do you think physical abuse is the only form of abuse?). This unseen violence/exploitation meted out to women has often been brought up by Ghosh. We see this again in Bariwali, where Banalata (Kirron Kher) and Sudeshna (Rupa Ganguly) are exploited by Dipankar (Chiranjeet Chakraborty). In a way, Ghosh directly engages with Sarkar’s (2000) thesis of the neglected bhadramahila whose 8

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liberation and agency needed to be controlled, manipulated and exploited to maintain status quo at home, which the colonial Bengali male had lost to the colonisers in the public space. Another abiding interest Ghosh betrays is his unwavering fascination with stars and stardom, the film industry and the very art of filmmaking. In Unishey April and Chitrangada, his protagonists are two immensely successful dancers; in Bariwali, Abohoman and Khela (Game, 2008), his male protagonists are all film-makers; Asukh, Shubho Muharat, Abohoman, Bariwali, and his telefilm Abhinay (Performance, 2002) revolve around female stars, their misgivings, depression, insecurities, and struggle to find a place in a male-dominated industry. The Last Lear (2007), on the other hand, tries to explore the scruples of a yesteryear Shakespearean actor (Amitabh Bachchan) who is currently lost in oblivion. In these films, Ghosh delves deep into issues of popularity, loneliness of being at the apex of success, anxieties about waning stardom, ruthlessness of artistes, selfless dedication to art at the expense of jeopardising personal relationships, and various other boons and banes of being a creative artiste. Ghosh took a deeper plunge into the discourses surrounding art, creativity, fame, crossing of gender, and class boundaries in Sob Charitro Kalponik, one of the most complex films he ever essayed. His protagonists are a couple, both of whom are poets. Indraneel (Prosenjit Chatterjee) is a successful poet, but is often reprimanded by his wife for being blissfully unmindful of the material needs to run a family. Radhika (Bipasha Basu), the wife, is the breadwinner, who has never seriously pursued a career in poetry. Poetry has taken a backseat in her life, for she has to earn a livelihood for the family. Apparently another story of a mismatched couple smarting under the drudgery of everydayness, Sob Charitro Kalponik becomes increasingly intriguing as it philosophises on art, inspiration, intertexuality, plagiarism, and the honesty one needs to have towards one’s art. Srimati Mukherjee in her paper, ‘Borrowing, Becoming, and the Question of the Self in Sob Charitro Kalponik’ in this volume, writes how the film breaks down lines of class distinctions between the economically privileged and the destitute homeless; boundaries between the normative and the mad; and more implicitly, gender divisions as well, through the medium of poetry and of course film. In its early and middle sequences, the film dramatizes possibilities of the breaking up of the poetic ‘I,’ crossovers, and inhabiting an other via the character of Indraneel. Yet, as Sob Charitro moves through its middle sections and queer desire and transsexuality are represented, Ghosh also destabilizes certainties in his audience by 9

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having us question whether the perspective is Indraneel’s or Radhika’s. This blurring of distinctions between the two perspectives is accentuated by the juxtaposition of their two poems at the end of the film, Ghosh coming full circle to the concept of poetic borrowing and poetic license. Art, the idea of freedom, dynamics of personal relationships, politics of the home, identity, and sexuality continued to inform Ghosh’s films throughout his career. While being strongly rooted to a local Bengali culture, his films were also remarkably global in execution and appeal. His films carry in them easily identifiable markers of a cultural milieu, in which Ghosh had matured as an artist while displaying an intense awareness of international cinema, art and literature. The next section is going to look into the major inspirations behind Ghosh’s films.

Influence and inspiration Once crossing the crowds of Trafalgar Square in 2002, watching children frolicking in the fountains, Ghosh responded to a Tagore song playing in the car exclaiming, ‘I can now begin to see the expansive span of these words, Anandadhara bohichey bhuboney’ (The stream of happiness runs through life). If there was one singular lifelong influence on Rituparno Ghosh, it was Rabindranath Tagore. Brought up in a middle class Bengali home, an avid reader with a photographic memory, Ghosh was intimately familiar with Tagore’s oeuvre: his poetry, novels, essays, and songs. Fascinated with the history of Bengal Renaissance, he was intrigued with the Tagore family in Joransanko. The inside stories and relationships in one of the most well-known families in Bengal, the magnetic narratives of the Tagore women had him enthralled. His plans to make a film on Thakurbari eventually remained incomplete. One of Ghosh’s earliest scripts that he tried pitching was an adaptation of Tagore’s novel Chokher Bali. His script departed from the original ending of the novel, which Tagore himself had expressed dissatisfaction with. Ghosh had discussed the lead role with various actors before the film was finally produced by Venkatesh Films in 2003 with Aishwarya Rai as Binodini. Chokher Bali marked a significant transition point for Ghosh with its ambitious canvas, enhanced production scale and the involvement of Bombay film stars (Chakravarti and Ganguly, 2007). Much critiqued by the home audience for such a glossy production, Ghosh was primarily interested in depicting the marginalisation and ambiguity of the sexualised widow. As with many of his earlier films, Ghosh 10

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explored the role of the outsider and the duplicity of an arranged marriage. Now, he also revelled in the potential of an opulent period setting. Armed with a talented production team, the period research was done in great detail. Both Rituparno and his brother Indranil had inherited visual aesthetics from their artist mother and film-maker father. Indranil, the set designer, researched North Calcutta houses to design a magnificent set in Technician Studio in Kolkata. Period costumes and accessories were painstakingly researched and designed. Props were ordered from London. Every detail was added with loving care, which finally contributed to such a rich and textured visual, making Chokher Bali a reference for film-makers over the last decade. The primary source of cinematic reference was the other artist that Ghosh had great admiration for – Satyajit Ray. The inspirations for period interiors were those classic Tagore adaptations by Ray, namely Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964), Devi (The Goddess, 1960) and Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961). Ghosh not only modelled his storytelling technique on Ray’s template, but also followed his diligent research and eye for detail. By this time, he was also recognised as the true inheritor of Ray’s legacy. In 2010, Bombay film-maker Subhash Ghai commissioned Ghosh to make a bilingual version of Tagore’s novel Noukadubi/Kashmakash (Boat Wreck, 2012). He agreed with the producer that this plot-driven Dickensian tale of mistaken identity would hold appeal for the masses, although he was not particularly fond of the novel. The project again offered the challenge of a period film, which Ghosh’s creative team would delight in handling. Shot between Kolkata and Benaras, the film captures the period in intricate detail and characters in fleshed out performances. Unfortunately, Ghosh fell out with his producer as he was not given editorial control over the film. Ghosh offered his own tribute to the Tagore on his 150th birth year in his interpretation of the well-known dance-drama Chitrangada, originally a tale from the Mahabharata. Tagore had dealt with the concept of identity within the framework of masculine and feminine constructs. Ghosh reworked this myth to extend fluid possibilities of gender and alternate sexual identity. His theatrical interpretation of Chitrangada’s transformation once again revitalised the stage presentation of this opera. As gay choreographer Rudra, Ghosh inserted himself into that performance/ transformation space, thus allowing the film to be defined as autobiographical. Ghosh reinstates the concept of androgyny, which has always been a part of his past, as Datta writes in ‘Several Roles Converging’: ‘This is the challenge the film offers- to confront and empathise with a third identity. In fact it asks us to tap into this hidden part of our psyche and our cultural 11

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history’ (Datta, 2011). Daisy Hasan (this volume), in her essay on Chitrangada, explores how Ghosh remakes Tagore’s vision of Indian identity by infusing it with elements of political, cultural and sexual liberalism. She argues that, in charting his response to Tagore’s original play, Ghosh is dramatising the need for oppressed groups to create subcultures capable of decoding cultural texts along subversive or oppositional lines. Ghosh has time and again showed Tagore in a new light, through his own reinterpretations, references to the poet’s works, in his writings, incorporation of his songs in almost all his films, and adaptation of his texts. Ghosh was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture to make a film on Rabindranath Tagore to mark his 150th birthday. Although this was a staggering honour, the offer also had its challenges. Ghosh had to make a documentary and how was it going to be different from Ray’s muchcelebrated biography Rabindranath (1964). Turning away from the institutionalised, public figure, Ghosh took up Tagore’s early autobiography Jeeban Smriti. These impressionist memories shape up the elusive poet and lonely artist lurking behind the canonised Rabindranath. This loving and subjective search for the artist by Rituparno becomes part of the narrative, thus shaping and moulding fresh insights into the human personality of Tagore (also see Dasgupta and Datta, forthcoming). As Sangeeta Datta writes in her paper, ‘Life, Death and an Elsewhere: Seeking the auteur vision in Rituparno Ghosh’s Abohoman’, the director’s preoccupation with the artistic process and a tortured artistic psyche can be marked from Abohoman through the later phase to culminate in Jeeban Smriti (Selective Memories, 2013). Deeply influenced by Vaishnav Padabali, Tagore’s early songs of Bhanusingher Padabali explored the subjective voice of Radha. At the age of 16, Tagore was also expressing his most feminine side. In his love songs, Tagore continued to explore female subjectivity or androgynous voice, many of which worked on the trope of the Radha figure stepping out in search of her lover. Ghosh assumes the abhisarika persona – embodying desire – and the Tagore song Gahana kusuma kunja majhey (In the dense, flowering bower, a soft, sweet flute plays/Forget fear and shame, come friend and step out in the woods) becomes a leitmotif in his films Abohoman and Jeeban Smriti. In the former, this marks the transposition of the young actress into a star, and in the latter, Ghosh himself is Radha, setting the film-maker and his subject in a quasi-erotic relationship. Tagore’s Vaishnav lyrics and other songs evoke passion and desire in key sequences in Chokher Bali, too. The imaginative use of Rabindrasangeet to forge subversive ties as in Utsab or in Dosar offer a fresh context for Tagore

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songs, which have otherwise been middle class staple fare for a very long time. And the final subversion comes in that wonderful dramatised reading of Tagore’s short story Streer Patra (The Wife’s Letter) for a radio production, in which Rituparno reads the female part of Mrinal in his voice. In his films, Ghosh often used oblique references to his sources of inspiration and influence. Having grown up on Ray’s films, his influences are obvious: references to the architectural design of Charulata in Chokher Bali, especially the binoculars he gives to Binodini immediately reminds an alert viewer of the lonely wife in Ray’s film. Devi is as an unmistakable intertext in the oppressive feudal narrative of Antarmahal; Shakha Proshakha (Branches of a Tree, 1990) quite clearly offers the template for the complex family drama of Utsab; Jeeban Smriti holds close the docu-drama treatment of Ray’s Rabindranath; and Abohoman with its unambiguous reference to Ray’s own life remains one of Ghosh’s best films. Ghosh’s Rabindrik or Tagorean sensibility went beyond the use of specific texts; it was a way of validating Tagore’s philosophy in contemporary times that shaped the vastly popular television series Gaaner Oparey (Beyond the Songs, 2011–2012) which he wrote for Star Jalsha, or sparked the cheeky song in Abohoman written in response to that fablesque Rabindrasangeet Krishnakali ami tarei boli. During Jeeban Smriti, Ghosh engaged in rigorous archival research and was inspired to make a film on the Tagore household in Jorasanko. This project remained unmade, although a limited edition of collaborator Shibaji Bandopadhyay’s script (entitled Ekti Barir Golpo or Story of a House) was published. Another lifelong ambition which he shared with Satyajit Ray was to make a film on the Mahabharata. He researched the epic seriously with Nrisinghaprasad Bhaduri, but this project always remained a dream. At the end, as performance artist, he was making boundaries fluid and starting to inhabit mythical texts in Chitrangada. He had also started rehearsing for a play on Krishna with director Kaushik Sen. As Datta argues in her paper in this volume, Ghosh traverses the Mahabharata, Tagore and Ray in his later films, pursuing the artistic consciousness and its painful contradictions: Ghosh leaves us with fleeting moments, compressed, layered, elegiac sequences which need not be shaped into narrative cohesion or closure. This abstraction makes Abohoman a significant transition point for Ghosh who then veers towards the creative process and the artistic predicament. The contradictions of this process are of immense beauty, pain and solitude, as we see in the interpretation of Chitrangada and Jeeban Smriti.

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Performing queerness A critical investigation into Ghosh’s work would be found wanting without reference to his sexuality and his uninhibited ‘performance’ of the same in public. As mentioned earlier, Ghosh’s films were remarkably informed by the social, cultural and economic changes wrought by the economic liberalisation in the lives of the Bengali middle class. Ghosh was at once a product and producer of the schizophrenic consumerist culture effectuated by the open market. Ghosh’s iconoclastic move, that is, his decision to ‘come out’ officially and thereafter associating himself with films on queer subjects, was also by default conditioned by neo-liberal discourses of a late capitalist society. His films, in which he acted and/or directed, were overdetermined by the neo-liberal sexual identity politics. That does not, however, eliminate the radicalism involved in making films on same-sex desires, for this is one topic which had never found expression in Bengali Cinema until Ghosh took the bold step. Ghosh’s queer films arrived at a significant moment in the cultural history of the LGBT movement in India. Arekti Premer Golpo, for instance, went on floors and was released subsequent to the reading down of Sec. 377 of the IPC in a momentous verdict given by the Delhi High Court in July 2009. Kaustav Bakshi and Parjanya Sen (2012) in their article ‘India’s queer expressions on screen: The aftermath of the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code’, while discussing how such a verdict transformed the cultural perspective on same-sex desires, write: The Delhi High Court Judgment extensively cites instances of contemporary psychiatric opinion on homosexuality thereby attempting to render the ‘homosexual’ subject as a ‘normalized’ subject . . . The attempt to thus normalize and recuperate the ‘homosexual’ subject is, however, accompanied by a simultaneous impetus of intervention, in the form of the HIV/AIDS interventionist framework. By appellating individuals as ‘gay community’ or ‘gay’ or ‘homosexuals’ the Judgment sanctions a new ‘class’ of normalized citizen-subjects, which is granted legal immunity. At the same time, by claiming them as ‘vulnerable’, the state makes the ‘life’ of a ‘community’ its targeted area of intervention. (174–175) Ghosh’s queer films began appearing in this particular moment, when the ‘homosexual’ men and women rejoiced the state recognition, yet stood on the precarious edges of being marked out as ‘different’, and therefore in need of disciplining. 14

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Ghosh made a positive contribution to this changing perspective and knowledge of the ‘homosexual’ by intervening sanitised spaces of the middle class home with narratives of parallel sexualities, thereby debunking false notions of compulsory heteronormativity. Arekti Premer Golpo, Memories in March (2011) and Chitrangada indeed worked towards arousing awareness of same-sex desires among the uninitiated middle class audience. By inserting narratives of same-sex desires and the emotional struggles of being different into already existing fables of normative middle class lives, Ghosh was successful in engendering a change in the perspective from which love and desire had been comprehended so far. It is indeterminable whether his attempt has indeed brought about any change and convert people to a sympathetic understanding of queer lives; but what Ghosh should be lauded for is his nerve to make visible which was so far barely represented in a populist medium of art. Interestingly, however, despite his radicalism, he was not unconditionally embraced by the LGBT community of Kolkata; they have been scathingly critical of his films on the grounds that they elided over local histories and cultures of remarkably non-conforming and rebellious queer subcultures and located queer desires within the snugness of affluent homes, cordoned off from grass-root politics. Kaustav Bakshi and Parjanya Sen and Aniruddha Dutta in their respective articles in this anthology address this critique. Bakshi and Sen argue how Ghosh’s queer aesthetics has remained ‘implicated within a largely homonormative and neo-liberal identitarian discourse’ and although iconoclastic in several ways, it never really manages to explore the radical and truly subversive potential of queer politics, while Dutta shows how Ghosh’s queer films ‘establish a double distanciation from lower class/caste narratives of gender variance, and construct a script of gender choice and fluidity premised on bourgeois trajectories of modernization’. But Ghosh had indeed taken an enormous risk in deciding to go public about his sexuality and making films on same-sex desires, as he told Kaustav Bakshi in an interview (this volume): I have indeed estranged a section of my audience . . . the middleclass audience, we were talking about . . . I am aware of the loss. A lot of them are wary of my cross-dressing in public! In fact, the respect I used to command has been seriously affected by my decision to proclaim my sexuality. Yet he could no longer be pretentious about his sexuality and deliberately took up this cultural activism. In retrospect, most of Ghosh’s earlier films seem to betray unambiguous signs of queerness. In a career spanning 15

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20 years, Ghosh indeed took a long time to ‘come out’ officially in public through his films, talk show (Ghosh & Company) and writings. But, as Richard Allen convincingly theorises in his article in this volume, the torment of being in the closet was much too conspicuous in his other nonqueer films such as Raincoat (2004) and Noukadubi. Both these films, he argues, invoke the metaphor of the ‘closet’ to characterize the mortifying ways in which desire is confined and denied within arranged marriages. By doing so they evoke, albeit in a manner that is itself closeted or disguised, an analogy between the closet created by compulsory heterosexuality for those who are incipiently homosexual, and the rejection of love based on desire created by conditions of what I shall call compulsory arrangement. Other films too, namely Asukh, Bariwali, Titli (The First Monsoon Day, 2002), and Chokher Bali, carry recognisable signature of a queer film-maker. In Asukh, the protagonist’s (Debashree Roy) mostly half-lit and overfurnished room, quarantined from the world outside, literally and metaphorically becomes a closet in all its claustrophobia and gloom. In Titli, a teenage girl’s (Konkona Sen Sharma) fascination with an ageing hero of Bombay Cinema ends in utter disillusionment when suggestions of incest become overt, as the girl discovers that her hero was actually her mother’s boyfriend in her college days. The film, told mostly from the perspective of this teenage girl, reveals the director’s identification with the girl’s self-anagnorisis that her desire to marry the star would never be fulfilled. In Chokher Bali, on the other hand, Ghosh effectively deploys the male body as spectacle, notably subverting the conventional male gaze of the camera. Kaustav Bakshi (2011), evoking Laura Mulvey (1975), observes in his article ‘Chokher Bali: Unleashing Forbidden Passions’: There are several shots in which the camera almost lovingly films the male body; in scenes of physical intimacy involving Mahendra and Ashalata or Binodini, it is Mahendra’s body that is exposed rather than those of the female characters. The gaze of the spectator and that of the camera are fused in all these shots thereby transforming the male body as spectacle. In this sense, the film makes an attempt ‘to reverse the relation between the female body and sexuality which is established and reestablished by the classical cinema’s localization of the woman’s spectacle’. (N.pag) 16

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In Bariwali, Ghosh’s queerness articulates itself more explicitly through the representation of Prasanna, the old servant of the house. Ghosh provokes a sense of discomfort with Prasanna (Surya Chattopadhyay) from the very beginning. Banalata’s loosening of her saree and baring her blouse in the presence of Prasanna unsettles the viewers. It becomes difficult to reconcile this particular act of Banalata with that of her parochial conservatism, which keeps her confined within the precincts of the house and does not even allow her to visit the ground floor of the house and meet strangers without a genuine cause. The piquing of the sense of discomfort among the viewers, for which the director definitely had a specific purpose, reaches its height when Prasanna appears in the dream, dressed in a saree and participating in stree achar (wedding rituals performed only by women). Prasanna does not merely accept his emasculation and infantilisation, but resists in his own way. Apart from that, in Banalata’s confinement in the decaying mansion, her detachment from life, her repressed sexual desires, and her eventual abandonment by the man she falls in love with, Ghosh’s anguish of being in the closet becomes indeed apparent. Prasanna is one of the first queer characters we encounter in modern Bengali cinema and the first visibly queer character created by Ghosh. In his later films, especially through his queer trilogy (Arekti Premer Golpo, Memories in March and Chitrangada), Ghosh made a positive contribution to the changing social perspective and knowledge of the ‘queer’. Bariwali, and Prasanna’s character in particular can be traced as the genesis of Ghosh’s lifelong interest in narrating and critiquing the neo-liberal sexual identity discourse. Before and after the release of Arekti Premer Golpo, Ghosh began appearing in feminine clothes and loud makeup in public. He raised a controversy in 2009 by publicly affronting a standup comic of Bengali television. Proclaiming himself the spokesperson of a community of men who had to live through public humiliation for being ‘effeminate’ day in and day out, Ghosh entered into a no-holds-barred critique of the standup comic in Ghosh & Company: When you are mimicking me, are you mimicking Rituparno Ghosh, the person or are you mimicking a generic effeminate man? .  .  . What message are you putting across? Have you ever thought that when you mimic me, you actually end up humiliating all effeminate men in Kolkata? . . . You should be sensitive to the fact that you are hurting the sentiments of a sexual minority. I am objecting to your act not because I am inconvenienced myself; rather I am objecting to it on the behalf of all those for whom I maybe a representative. 17

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In his editorial column in Robbar, Ghosh gradually became extremely eloquent about his sexuality, relationships and loneliness. On many occasions, he laughed at how people gossiped about his possible affairs and shared such incidents in his editorial column. He once wrote: As Gobindo [his driver] and I chaffered with the vendor for parsley, an interesting comment reached my ears. Two young girls, nicely decked up! One of them, indicating us, was telling the other – ‘Baba! He has seduced this guy, now! Only he is capable of such things . . .’ I understood they were speculating that Gobindo was my current boyfriend. Gobindo had heard the comment too, I noticed. I thought he would be embarrassed. But no! He was totally unperturbed. At least temporarily, he continued to perform the role of a gay boyfriend of a celebrity without demur. And we, like a couple, wrapped up our morning shopping and got into the car. (Robbar, 31 October 2010, p. 4) At other times, profoundly melancholic and lonely, he seemed to bleed through his pen. Recalling an incident with one of his erstwhile lovers, he wrote: ‘Am there for you’ – Actually, in love relationships, the mere utterance of these words brings contentment. Although we know, we do not want to accept that the promise implicit in these words are much too fragile. (Robbar, 24 April 2011, p. 4)2 Notably in Robbar, a self-consciously queer novel, Holdey Golaap (The Yellow Rose) by Swapnomoy Chakraborty began to be serialised under Ghosh’s editorial endorsement. Interestingly, the novel delineates the realities of those queer people who have never been represented in Ghosh’s films. An intricate mosaic of several queer narratives, the novel draws heavily upon anthropology, history, psychology, contemporary theories of gender and sexuality, and other juridico-medical discourses to establish same-sex desire as natural. Unlike Ghosh’s films, the novel addresses the grim realities of lower class kothis and hijras, both urban and non-urban. The novel, which ended on 14 July 2013, roughly six weeks after Ghosh’s demise, eventually turns out to be a bildungsroman of a kothi, albeit with a subverted ending. Holdey Golaap, which relentlessly ruptures bourgeoisie values and morality, to date remains one of the most potent queer novels in Bangla. Perhaps, 18

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what Ghosh could not do in his films was to a certain degree compensated by this novel written under his editorial supervision. Ghosh’s radicalism in its myriad forms indeed brought queerness out of the closet to dwell in the middle class living room. But conversely, he ended up generating a queer stereotype. In Kolkata, especially among the Bengali middle class, Rituparno Ghosh and ‘gayness’ have become unequivocally synonymous to many, whereby the indeterminable range of sexualities indicated by the term ‘queer’ has been eliminated from the popular imagination. In fact, ‘Rituparno Ghosh’ has become a brand epithet of abuse for men who cross-dress and/or ‘effeminate’. An LGBT activist of Kolkata writes: I feel like asking whether that name [Rituparno Ghosh] apart from becoming a cultural icon of the feminine man is also standing-in for something else for the Bengalis. Is this name (which among many other things is also a brand of sorts for gendered performativity), unwittingly, carving out a comfort zone for the middle/ upper class Bengalis? Is this name nothing but a sanitized version of such offensive terms as ‘ladies’, boudi, sakhi (and more recently and increasingly ‘homo’) . . . by which the Bengali bhadrolok has always abused his effeminate classmate mauling the latter’s selfconfidence . . .? (Hazra, 2011)3 While this is indeed unfortunate, it is also undeniable that Ghosh has indeed been instrumental in propagating the myth that all men who are ‘effeminate’ are ‘gay’ and all ‘gay’ men cross-dress or vice-versa (see Dasgupta, 2013). Yet what remains immutable and unsurpassed till date, is Ghosh’s extraordinary boldness to live life on his own terms, to make an alternative way of being, at least visible if not completely acceptable, and dispel, if not too successfully, the rock-solid mantle of impiety that hung over it. Despite the discomfort he generated, he also commanded an extraordinary respect – for his audiences were always in awe of him. The next section delves into the range and nature of Ghosh’s audiences and his stardom.

Audience The fact that audiences are essential for films has been understood for the last 100 years, ever since the first Indian cinema graced the screen. It is also true that within the corporatisation structure that dominates Indian 19

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cinema today (Ganti, 2013), the mythic viewer/audience is an even more important figure than they were earlier. But how can we define an ambiguous concept as ‘the audience’. In the case of Ghosh, it is even more difficult to conceive of who his audience really is. Christie (2012: 11) has argued that there are two concepts of audience that dominate the history of cinema. One is the imagined audience, which is based on the film-makers’ own assumptions and projections of who is most likely to watch their film, and second is the economic or statistical audience, which is recorded in terms of admissions or box office receipts. Christie, however, also notes that there is a third category of audience – the individual spectator which looks at how film impacts our own physiology and consciousness. When Ghosh began his career with Hirer Angti followed in quick succession with Unishey April, it was not hard to imagine that his audience was not the rural or suburban viewers who made a beeline to watch rather sloppily made, garish, folk-theatre-inspired Beder Meye Jyotsna (Jyotsna, the Snake Charmer’s Daughter, director Motiur Rahman Panu, 1991) turning it into a huge commercial success. Rural Bengal and the suburban belts had been a staple viewer base for popular Bengali cinema made through the 1980s and 1990s (Gooptu, 2010). But Ghosh’s films were invoking the urban audience of the late Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, perhaps that of Tarun Majumdar, Hiren Nag, Tapan Sinha, and Ajay Kar too, directors who ruled Tollygunje in the golden era of the 1960s and 1970s. There are more than a handful of news reports that have commended Ghosh’s role in bringing back the middle class audience to Bengali Cinema. As editors, we thus felt it was necessary whilst conceiving of this book to also include the viewers’ voice when talking about Ghosh. Based on ethnographic research conducted over three months, when we spoke to a representative sample of Ghosh’s viewers, we can draw some interesting perspectives about his audience. Ghosh has been a mentor for many young film-makers in the city. Newer directors, such as Srijit Mukherjee, Mainak Bhaumik and Kaushik Ganguly, all of whom shared a good personal rapport with Ghosh, have acknowledged time and again how he has been inspirational behind their ideas and concepts, how much they have learned from him. A very young film-maker Ranadeep Sarkar, an assistant to Goutam Ghose, has dedicated his debut film Unishey April to his mentor Ghosh: from the film name with a clear intertextual reference to Ghosh’s own film to even the storyline which draws striking parallels with his aesthetics. Sarkar told us: Rituparno Ghosh is the boldest director the Bengali film industry has ever had. I do not know whether anybody would ever have the 20

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courage to unpretentiously portray his personal life on celluloid as Ritu da has done with Chitrangada. My first film is a homage to him, our torch-bearer. Honestly, the story of Unishey April came to me while I was watching Arekti Premer Golpo! In fact, hadn’t Arekti Premer Golpo rung bells at the box-office, we would never have the courage to approach producers with a ‘queer’ subject! Sarkar is not the only one who testified to Ghosh’s boldness in topics. In fact, it would be quite a disservice to Ghosh if we were to characterise his queer film trilogy as the bold part of his career. Throughout his career, from depicting marital rape in Dahan to incestuous relationships in Utsab, Ghosh has always been several steps ahead of his contemporaries. Writing about this trajectory of Utsab, Srimati Mukherjee (2012: 408) contends that Ghosh has ‘made film after film, often to tell us something very simple: that those who are close to us . . . no matter how different from the majority because of inclination or circumstance, need not censure but words of love . . . it is up to us to do what we will with this message’. Mukherjee’s thoughts were echoed by Shakuntala Sinha (45), a homemaker we spoke to about Ghosh. She said: I love watching Rituparno’s films. I don’t think anybody understands the psyche of women as well as he did. It’s not just women actually, it is the entire human psyche over which he has a deep knowledge. My favourite films are Utsab and Dahan. I identified with them very closely. Things like incestuous relationships are taboo and not spoken about in joint families but incidents like those happen all the time. I was very very surprised when Utsab boldly portrayed that on screen. Several of the essays in this volume (Dutta, Bakshi, Sen, and Hasan) have explored his overtly queer films. Whilst not all of them have seen these films as utopic representations of queer life in India (Dasgupta, 2014; Dasgupta and Gokulsing, 2014), there have also been some criticism on the level of individuals towards the queer lives that he was portraying (often through himself as in Arekti Premer Golpo, Memories in March and Chitrangada). Sanjay Ghosal (37) a queer identified interior designer argues: I will remember Rituparno’s queer themed films just for a few brilliant moments and those moments had got nothing to do with queer sensitivity/approach. His being a celebrity and ‘out’, definitely helped the queer scene in a big way. He was someone the 21

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Figure I.3 A working still from Dahan with Suchitra Mitra and Indrani Haldar Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

Bengali middle class could not ignore, which brought the topic in whichever form, positive or negative, into the middle class domain. Also after watching Arekti Premer Golpo, middle class Bengalis started feeling ‘sympathetic’ towards gays, although, sadly enough, to most of them, ‘a gay’ came to mean a man who dressed like a woman or Rituparno Ghosh himself. Interaction and participation are central to the filmic experience in India. What Ghosal and Sinha demonstrate is how Ghosh’s cinema as well as his own persona allowed for a social interaction, where taboos and subjects that were oft neglected (rape, female agency, queerness, incest) were suddenly brought into the middle class domain for discussion and dissection. His audience also remember him for his innovative usage of Tagore, his writings and his talk shows, which were informal adda sessions with eminent people from the culture industry. Rita Sengupta (63, homemaker) based in a small town near Kolkata, for example, told us: I liked Rituparno because his films and writings, for instance his column in Robbar, were easily comprehensible. He could be 22

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profound without being preachy. I enjoyed his talk shows also. I loved him in Ebong Rituparno . . . he was so candid and colloquial. Ghosh’s fan following, therefore, was not determined by his films alone; he was appreciated for his overall contribution to the cultural sphere. This ‘star’ persona of Ghosh, indeed, extended well beyond his films. Moving slightly away from the production and the filmic text itself, Anugyan Nag (this volume) in his essay ‘Locating Rituparno Ghosh in Tollywood’ explores the industry politics along with the corporatisation that led Ghosh to become the director with the Midas touch and his cinema to cater to a wide section of the Bengali audience. This is an important intervention when thinking about Ghosh’s audiences, as Nag demonstrates that it was not the cinematic text alone that drew his audience but rather it was a combination with the growing corporate producers, multiplexes and his own star director persona that he had cultivated in the last few years. As we have mentioned earlier in the Introduction, his role as a cultural producer extended from films into television, music and print journalism. Sumit Dey (this volume) in his essay ‘Just Like a Film Star: The Style of Being Rituparno Ghosh’ has looked at how Ghosh’s identity had a dual response from his audience. Whilst his films were lauded as torchbearers of Satyajit Ray’s legacy by the bhadralok community, on the other hand he was censured for his non-normative sexual and gendered persona. In fact, many of the viewers responded that by making his personal life public through his semi-autobiographical queer films, he had actually distanced his core audience – the Bengali bhadralok middle class who were being forced to confront the issues around queerness and middle class hypocrisy which disrupted their own subjectivities. Segregated viewing (Srinivas, 2013: 399) experience was never Ghosh’s intention towards any of his films. In fact, he had earlier refused his films to be screened at a queer film festival in Kolkata, as he considered he was more than just a queer film-maker making films for a queer audience.

Conclusion In this volume, contributors were asked to respond to a set of key themes that run through Rituparno Ghosh’s films. In our attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, we opted to combine a thematic approach alongside their complex relationships to social, cultural, political, and institutional discourses. As Gokulsing and Dissanayake (2013: 2) have commented, regional cinema is often marginalised within Indian cinematic scholarship. Ghosh’s contribution to Indian cinema stretches beyond the cartographic 23

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limitations of Bengali-speaking regions (not to forget he has also made films in English and Hindi). The contributors were, therefore, asked to demonstrate the many facets within Ghosh’s work, such as evolving film language, auteur vision, gender and sexuality, and provide a comprehensive scholarly appraisal of his cinematic legacy. The essays are not grouped into sections, as we felt from the very start that neither would these sections be watertight nor would it help in the exchange of dialogue by imposing these boundaries. What we are seeking to do is situate Ghosh within the Indian filmmaking canon, which is notorious for being extremely restrictive in the kind of academic discourse it allows to emanate. To counter this, we need to look at Indian cinema and more importantly Ghosh’s work from more challenging angles. Ghosh’s work carries with it not just the marks of an aesthetic genius, but also has a social significance. The authors within this volume have, from their distinctive disciplinary expertise and through imaginative readings, underscored the importance and diversity that Ghosh’s work offers to cinema scholars and movie lovers. In addition to the essays that this volume has brought together, we also have a few conversations. These conversations set out to provide a multidimensional view of Rituparno Ghosh primarily as a film-maker and cultural producer. While this section does not try to cover every available perspective (something the essays in the previous section does in more detail), it does attempt to represent viewpoints from people Ghosh worked with in his career. In line with other publications which have juxtaposed the academic voice with the voice from the Indian film industry insiders (Dwyer and Pinto, 2011), we too believe that the conversations in this section have a critical relationship with the essays in the first section. While the essays represent an engaged and critical academic analysis of Ghosh’s work and life, the conversations (two of them with Ghosh himself and two with Ghosh’s cast and crew) present the insider perspective. We hope these interviews will provide another way of seeing Rituparno Ghosh engaged in film practice beyond the theoretical engagement offered in the first section. As editors, when conceiving of this project, we were aware of our own subjective position and limitation to Ghosh’s ouvre of work. A close friend from university days, Sangeeta Datta, has worked extensively as his direction associate, a connection that lasted all the way to his penultimate film Jeeban Smriti. Datta also introduced the young Ghosh and his work to British and European audiences at an early stage in his career. Kaustav Bakshi, who has closely followed and admired the works of Ghosh since his schooldays, on the other hand, became friends with the film-maker after 24

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the release of Arekti Premer Golpo, a friendship that began with a fierce telephonic debate on Bakshi’s review of the film on his blog and lasted till Ghosh’s last days. Rohit K. Dasgupta, already enamoured by his films, had a chance encounter with Ghosh at a conference in London, and follow-up conversations in Kolkata led to his academic interest on the sociopolitical significance of the film-maker and his films. This project, therefore, is both a personal as well as an academic endeavour to place Ghosh in perspective within his industrial and cultural context. It is hoped that Rituparno Ghosh: An Afterword will be the first of many studies that will engage with this remarkable auteur’s cultural production. However, there are certain gaps in this volume where we have been unable to do justice to all facets of this multifarious personality (his advertising years, his poems and songs, his illustrations, and his prose pieces) and we do not think that is possible within a single volume. By opening a number of small windows (some essays are more theoretical and some more informative) into Ghosh’s life and work, we sought to introduce the reader to a body of work that has received very scant academic attention and is deserving of much more. We hope that students, scholars, academics, and the lay reader, who might discover Ghosh after reading this book, find that the book in some small measure has extended the study of Indian cinema and a visionary film-maker.

Notes 1 We are using the term bhadrolok following Sumit Sarkar’s explication of the term. See, Sumit Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India, 2nd edition. Kolkata: Papyrus, 2000. 2 The two quotations from First Person are translated from the Bengali original by Kaustav Bakshi. 3 Translated from the Bengali original by Kaustav Bakshi.

References Bakshi, Kaustav. (2011). ‘Chokher Bali: Unleashing Forbidden Passions’. Silhouette: A Discourse on Cinema, 9:3. http://silhouette-mag.wikidot.com/vol9–3-kaustuv, accessed on 11 May 2014. Bakshi, Kaustav and Sen, Parjanya. (2012). ‘India’s Queer Expressions on Screen: The aftermath of the Reading Down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code’. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Films. 10 (2 & 3): 167–183. Chakravarti, Paramita and Ganguly, Swati. (2007). ‘Postcolonial Negotiations with the Nation: Rituparno Ghosh’s Chokher Bali’. Somdatta Mondal (ed.), The Indian ImagiNation: Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Culture. New Delhi: Creative Books, 242–259.

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Christie, I. (2012). ‘Introduction: In Search of Audiences’. I. Christie (ed.), Audiences: The Key Debates. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 11–20. Dasgupta, R. K. (2013). ‘Launda Dancers: The Dancing boys of India’. Asian Affairs. 44 (3): 442–448. Dasgupta, R. K. (2014). ‘The Visual Representation of Queer Bollywood: Mistaken Identities and Misreadings in Dostana’. JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing (Intellect Press/University of the Arts London). 1 (1). Dasgupta, R. K. and Gokulsing, K. M. (2014) (eds). Masculinity and Its Challenges in India. Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland. Dasgupta, S. and Datta, S. (forthcoming) (eds). Rabindranath Tagore in the World. Delhi: Macmillan. Datta, Sangeeta. (2002). Shyam Benegal: World Director Series, London: British Film Institute. Datta, Sangeeta. (2011). ‘Several Roles Converging’, The Telegraph, 13 January 2011. Datta, Sangeeta. (2013). ‘An Artistic Paradox’, The Telegraph, 28 June. Dwyer, R and Pinto, J. (2011) (eds). Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ganti, T. (2013). ‘Corporatisation and the Hindi Film Industry’. K. M. Gokulsing and W. Dissanayake (eds). Handbook of Indian Cinemas. London: Routledge, 337–350. Ghosh, Rituparno. (2010). ‘First Person’. Robbar (31 October 2010), 4. Ghosh, Rituparno. (2011). ‘First Person’. Robbar (24 April 2011), 4. Gokulsing, K. M and Dissanayake, W. (2013). ‘Conclusion’. K. M. Gokulsing and W. Dissanayake (eds). Handbook of Indian Cinemas. London: Routledge, 427–430. Gooptu, S. (2010). Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation. London: Routledge. Hazra, Anindya. (2011). ‘Amra Rituparnora’ (We, the Rituparnos). Prakashye: Prosongo Jounota, 4–6. Mukherjee, S. (2012). ‘The Impossibility of Incestuous Love: Woman’s Captivity and National Liberation in Rituparno Ghosh’s Utsab’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 29 (5): 401–408. Mulvey, L. (1975). ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen. 16 (3): 6–18. Sarkar, Sumit. (2000). A Critique of Colonial Bengal, 2nd edition. Kolkata: Papyrus. Sarkar, T. (2000). Hindu Wife Hindu Nation. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Srinivas, L. (2013). ‘Active Audiences and the Experience of Cinema’. K. M. Gokulsing and W. Dissanayake (eds). Handbook of Indian Cinemas. London: Routledge, 377–390.

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Part I READING RITUPARNO GHOSH AND HIS TEXTS

Figure PI.1 Rituparno at his monitor Photo Credit: Karna Basu

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1 INVOKING LOVE, DEATH AND AN ELSEWHERE Searching the auteur in Rituparno Ghosh’s Abohoman Sangeeta Datta

❦ Internal meanings In the opening sequence of Abohoman (The Eternal, 2010), ailing film director Aniket Mazumdar muses, ‘What is a film all about?’ Flanked by distant blue mountains on all sides, he tells his son Apratim about celluloid latitude implying range, scope and tolerance. His drifting mind considers how on digital mode he can erase and record, start anew at any point. Longevity of film and impermanence of the digitised image become metaphors of life, memory and meaning. A director’s film reflects the director’s personal creative vision – that of the primary author. The auteur expresses his thoughts and feelings about a subject matter and offers a worldview. From the time Truffaut advocated this theory, a director’s distinctive style or consistent themes are considered defined influences, unmistakable in a body of work. An auteur needs a considerable body of work, which can be analysed for themes and concerns and display a distinct style immediately recognisable. ‘Over a group of films a director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his signature’, Andrew Sarris wrote as he further developed the auteur theory.1 A film-maker must offer a group of films with a certain characteristic of style, a body of work that can be analysed, and most importantly offer

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subtextual or internal meaning in the works. The third premise is considered the ultimate glory of cinema as an art as Andrew Sarris expatiates:2 Internal meaning is the combination of contradictions: the director’s world view combined, meshed with the film’s subject matter and all other contributing factors of the film. A meaning and outcome ultimately derived from the director. It is the director’s attempt to create a whole from significantly disparate and opposing meanings and influences. Auteur theory has generated debate over the years, particularly with Pauline Kael or Peter Wollen maintaining an oppositional idea that filmmaking is a collective process. John Caughie, in turn, privileges the critical spectator who reads the ‘directorial subcode’.3 More recently, Janet Staiger reiterates the function of the auteur through ‘the authoring choice’.4 Moreover, Richard Dyer posits that the star actor is also auteur and David Kipen argues that the screenwriter is the true auteur of a film.5 In the light of theoretical arguments, Rituparno Ghosh’s filmography invites assessment as an auteur’s work. Almost all of Ghosh’s 20 films are

Figure 1.1 Rituparno Ghosh at a script discussion in his study Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

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Figure 1.2 Ghosh with the author Sangeeta Datta on the sets of Raincoat Photo Credit: Amal Kundu

written by him, occasionally co-written (Sob Charitro Kalponik and Arekti Premer Golpo); most of his films are either direct adaptations of or inspired by literary texts. He stars in his last two films (Chitrangada and Jeeban Smriti) as well as in two films by other film-makers (Arekti Premer Golpo and Memories in March). However, the vision informing the work is unmistakably 31

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Ghosh’s alone. It is this individual style and treatment he brought to his films that attracted both the stars and his audience. He had the persuasive power to bring back iconic female stars of Bengali cinema: Aparna Sen, Sharmila Tagore, Rakhi, and Madhabi Mukherjee. Popular Tollywood icon Prosenjit Chatterjee delivered impressive performances in his films. From the Hindi film industry, his scripts fetched Kirron Kher, Ajay Devgn, Aishwarya Rai, Jaya Bachchan, Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan, and Manisha Koirala to work in the poorer conditions of Tollygunge studios. In fact, the commercial Bollywood world held Ghosh in certain regard and this facilitated revolving doors into their mutual worlds. In other words, Ghosh’s films are always star driven. This chapter will explore Ghosh as an auteur whose work displays repeated themes, narrative patterns and evolving ideas that run through a number of otherwise disparate works. Co-ordinating all stages of production and well abreast of his audience, he possesses a personal style and an ‘interior voice’ or subtext. Ghosh, as writer–director–actor–star, defines the auteur who offers a well coded visual, literary and performance aesthetic. A leading voice in Bengali culture, straddling various media worlds as writer, magazine editor, television host, and fashion icon, Ghosh holds the position of director as star who later inserts himself as actor in his narratives. This chapter will attempt to search for the auteur vision in Rituparno Ghosh’s 15th feature film Abohoman. It will look at certain themes – the middle class family space, evocation of mythology and language, film within film, film as metaphor of life, and the director’s increasing obsession with death. Holding Abohoman as its core text and transition point, the chapter will allude to Ghosh’s filmography before and after this film: Unishey April, Utsab, Bariwali, Chokher Bali, Raincoat, The Last Lear, Arekti Premer Golpo, Chitrangada, and Jeeban Smriti. Abohoman marks a significant transition point, as the chapter would show, from Ghosh’s early linear narratives towards a more complex auteur vision exploring fluid time, space, artistic/performance identity, and the jagged contradictions of the artistic process. Abohoman demonstrates the convergence of early themes and points to nascent ideas that will evolve more fully in his later work.

The normative family and dinner table conversations Strongly influenced by Satyajit Ray’s films (particularly his last films Ganashatru/Enemy of the People, 1989; Shakha Proshakha/Branches of a Tree, 1990; and Agantuk/The Stranger, 1992), Ghosh’s early films are dialogue 32

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heavy and largely static. Depicting the reality of middle class lives and interiors and questioning the moral world of the family as an institution, Ghosh often exposed the duplicity implicit in apparent liberal homes of the Bengali bhadralok. Ghosh’s feminist concerns govern the early films with women-centric narratives and the discontent/despair of the normative family. Ghosh’s psychological realism sets characters firmly within the architectural space of the home. Ghosh’s early works reflect and are products of middle class liberalisation; urban mobility, aspirations and contradictions are reflected in domestic interiors which form the site of chamber dramas. Within these Bengali homes, a central space is the dining table around which characters gather and converse. But the space for warmth, nurture and conversation is often turned into a political space for unlikely confrontation between parents and children or between husband and wife. Often critiqued for his demonstration of middle class6 consumerist aspirations, Ghosh in fact offers the apparent potential comfort of family space only to disrupt/dislodge it with conflict, challenge or confession. The family home in Abohoman reveals subtle power imbalances. The discreet upper middle class home houses the film-maker Aniket (Dipankar De), his wife Dipti (Mamata Shankar), who has abandoned a potential acting career, and son Aniket (Jishu Sengupta), who is now a digital filmmaker. The dining space, in director Aniket’s home, features several times in Abohoman: at first, not as the centrifugal nurturing space but that occupied by the marginal and macabre. Aniket’s senile mother (Shobha Sen), tended by her nurse, has her meal at the table, unaware of her son’s demise. Srimati/Shikha Sarkar (Ananya Chatterjee), who has been instrumental in causing a rift in an otherwise happy family, arrives to pay homage to her departed mentor and is seated at the dining table. Later, a flashback sets out a perfectly normal dining scene. Aniket reads a book during his meal, wife Dipti and son Apratim converse about the concept of sophistication and the lack of it (Aniket’s wife and lover are polarised on this grid repeatedly). Dipti talks of her faith in the new actress Shikha, who is uneducated but has an arrogant spirit. She reminds Dipti of her younger self, as she proceeds to put her trust in the newcomer. The lighter mood in this sequence is soon replaced by a rather tense dining table scene when much has changed. Dipti is now aware of her husband’s relationship with Shikha and his regular excuses about coming home late. A phone call disrupts the scene and Aniket retreats to the bathroom to talk. An unnerved Dipti overreacts and lashes out at her motherin-law while Apratim tries to calm her down. Revelation of lies, deceit and unfaithfulness compel Dipti to confide in her teenage son. In the 33

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third scene, the bare dining table is no longer the sustaining family space. Aniket is absent; a lonely Dipti sits quietly at an empty table while her son approaches to comfort her. Troubled parent–child relationships are explored repeatedly by Ghosh in his films, starting from the Bergman-inspired Unishey April, in which a daughter (Debashree Roy) holds her ambitious mother Sarojini (Aparna Sen) guilty of her father’s death and has to resolve unstated issues. The night Aditi plans to stage her suicide, her mother returns home unexpectedly. Mutual issues are resolved while trying to stir up a meal and discussing recipes across the dining table. One of the key scenes in Asukh is set across father (Soumitra Chatterjee) and daughter Rohini (Debashree Roy) sharing a meal. As Rohini’s father talks about her mother’s recurrent illness, a normative scene is fractured by Rohini’s growing suspicion about her father’s sexual life. The four walls of the dining room become the site of deep-seated suspicion and inarticulate questions. Her dark, airless and claustrophobic room, on the other hand, mirrors her clouded mind and her eye infection prevents clear vision. In both these films, the possibility of young romantic love is threatened/negated/subsumed by more personal issues of family and identity, which need addressal. In Utsab, in an apparently happy family reunion during festive time invested with mythological overtures (that Goddess Durga leaves her heavenly abode with her family of four children to visit her father’s house on Earth), a dark secret of family incest is revealed. While others seem uncomfortable and unable to deal with Parul’s (Mamata Shankar) breakdown, her teenage son (Ratul Shankar) comes forward to offer sympathy and comfort. The son already demonstrates a forbidden affection for his cousin sister, an excess played out in furtive light and shadows, which the narrative finds difficult to contain. These women-centric interior dramas explore bonding, seclusion, hysteria, and recovery, evoking Pedro Almadovar’s feminine worlds in urban spaces (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988; All About My Mother, 1999). This everyday space of the dining table is rather volatile in Chitrangada. The first family dinner scene is set in a half-lit room with three characters at the dinner table. Choreographer Rudra (Rituparno Ghosh) invites his mother to his new stage production. He has long given up hope to see his father in the audience, knowing his reluctance to watch him dance. In the next scene, Rudra is more rebellious, openly talking about his intentions of leaving home for a sex reassignment surgery. Facing his mother’s stifled anger, he admits he has been a perennial embarrassment to his parents. While his father sits defeated, his mother struggles to understand Rudra and assures him he need not leave home. 34

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In a later scene, preoccupied parents eat hesitantly, confessing that they should have recognised the truth about their son a long time ago. These scenes of huge upheaval set over the everyday act of family meals, lit in half shadows, link the mythological to the familiar/real. They are archetypal middle class parents, who painfully reconcile to their son’s radical choice. Ghosh brings the political debate of gender and identity directly into a central familial space, first disrupting this site of nurture, then offering possible resolution for the most fraught exclusion. Ghosh’s physiological and psychological treatment follows Almadovar in exploring the contradictions of hospital/clinical spaces (Talk to Her, 2002; The Skin I Live in, 2011).

Performance and transposition Ghosh’s earlier films are about performance, in more ways than one. Narratives are peopled by dancers, film stars, ordinary characters layered with pretense or secrets. Ghosh’s feminist concerns privilege narratives of women characters finding a voice, forging resolutions and revitalising relationships. Whether in ordinary family stories, detective stories or adult marital stories, screen characters play fictitious roles; they seem or become someone else. For instance, in Asukh, the protagonist who is a film star dons makeup and costume to become someone else as her profession demands. On the other hand, her concern about her mother’s recurring illness and her collapsing relationship with her boyfriend create a psychological state of mistrust with a spiralling suspicion of her father’s moral integrity. Glamorous film star Padmini (Sharmila Tagore) in Shubho Muharat is a criminal who guards her secret well. Hiding behind the veneer of stardom is a vulnerable mother planning to avenge her child’s death. Corporate official Kaushik (Prosenjit Chatterjee) in Dosar spends his weekends in small town resorts with his mistress. The latter is killed in a road accident, which leaves him paralysed. The process of recuperation after his accident is the time of reckoning and eventual reconciliation with his wife Kaberi (Konkona Sen Sharma). This role playing extends in light-hearted fashion in Khela, where the kidnapped child Abhirup has his head forcibly shaven to play the role of Nalak in the obsessed director Raja’s film. The interchangeability of real/fictive characters and real/film texts reaches a far more sophisticated complexity in Ghosh’s last films. In Arekti Premer Golpo, Ghosh plays a transvestite director as well as the young crossdressing actor Chapal Bhaduri in the film within the film; in Chitrangada, Ghosh’s Rudra is a queer choreographer wishing/unwishing to become a woman. In the docu-drama on Tagore Jeeban Smriti, Ghosh inserts himself in the text, making the search/process as important as the subject Tagore. 35

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If Abohoman is considered the transition point to more layered complexity, the transposition works at symbolic and imaginary levels through real/ evoked spaces of public performance. The famed and respected director Aniket dies and his ex-lover journeys from the theatre to his home for the funeral. Aniket’s wife, son and pregnant daughter-in-law constitute the normative family, which is first disrupted by death, and then further by actress Srimati’s arrival in her garish stage makeup. As she waits at the dining table, visually out of place in this sombre funeral scene, her memories surface riddling the domestic space with suggestions of illicit desire and betrayal.7 In Abohoman, the Shikha-Aniket actor–mentor relationship is clearly inspired by one of the open secrets of the Bengal film industry – the Satyajit Ray–Madhabi Mukherjee relationship. Although discussed in furtive whispers even today, Ray’s supposed proximity to his protégé Madhabi Mukherjee caused problems in his family. He made Kapurush, Mahanagar and Charulata with the resplendent actress in the 1960s and sadly did not work with her after that. Many years later, Madhabi broke her silence in her autobiography Madhabikanan, admitting she had severed working relations with Ray out of consideration for his wife.8 Here again is the classic Pygmalion story of a young, uneducated girl from North Calcutta who was mentored by the upper class and highly anglicised Ray and his wife Bijoya. Madhabi’s grooming in the hands of Ray’s wife offered the template for Dipti’s moulding of the raw, unsophisticated but immensely talented Shikha in the film. In fact, the dining scene evokes the space in Ray’s real home as does the famous study set with the iconic armchair and bay windows. Facing accelerated media speculation, Rituparno Ghosh responded in self-defence in the following interview: I wanted to make a film on a filmmaker and his relationship with an actress a long time back . . . See, the relationship between a filmmaker and his subject is my abiding concern as a filmmaker. I have made so many films on this issue – Bariwali, Khela, Last Lear. In Shubho Mahurat and Titli, there were elements of the realities of the film world. This is a recurrent theme in many films. The subject is the proverbial Pygmalion concept of a mentor’s relationship with his muse. The kind of relationship Nati Binodini had with Girish Ghosh. That’s why we have the Nati Binodini-Girish Ghosh story as a film within the film. Abohoman is about a director played by Dipankar De, who has a relationship with a much younger actress, played by Ananya (Chatterjee). Mamata Shankar is his wife.9 36

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Dream, desire and song The idea of inhabiting multiple selves/lives/time zones is frequently revisited by Ghosh. As a cinematic trope, it collapses time and space into a multilayered, rich intertext. In fact, Ghosh consciously explores femininity and interiority in period and suburban dramas. In his dream sequence in Bariwali, the middle-aged spinster Banalata (Kirron Kher) dreams of her wedding. The wedding song (penned by Ghosh) is laid over an empty bed with pigeons: Holo madhumashey biya (We arrange pots of honey, sweet wedlock in the month of spring). The courtyard is decorated for rituals with floor drawings, flowers and glowing lamps and the women sing traditional wedding songs. Banalata looks down at the festivities from her window on the upper floor. Her effeminate servant Prasanna, dressed as one of the women, tells her that the groom has died of snakebite. The bride turns her face and the mirror reveals the old spinster. In Chokher Bali, the visual polarisation between the bride and the widow gradually brings the two together – first as friends, then in reversal as surrogate sexual selves. The beautiful widow Binodini (Aishwarya Rai) lies alone in an auto-erotic moment, while across the balcony, Mahendra (Prosenjit Chatterjee) and Ashalata (Raima Sen) share the conjugal bed in their room. When Asha dresses her friend with her gold jewellery, Binodini breaks into a song and dance singing a kirtan by Tagore, evoking the mythical union of Radha and Krishna in the woodlands. Binodini’s desire to become Asha, in fact the very interchangeability of the two, is often explored through her coveting Asha’s new clothes, jewels and finally her man. The widow, in her stark white garments, has earlier slipped into Asha’s red jacket in an iconic moment in the film. The folk song overlaying the sequence of desire again describes Radha waiting for her beloved, harnessing Ghosh’s obsessive feminine idiom of viraha or separation and desire. In Ghosh’s first Hindi film Raincoat, Niru (Aishwarya Rai), cloistered in her dark, musty and filthy house, spins a fictive yarn about her wealth to protect her abject marital condition. The artefacts cluttering the room, Niru fabricates, are remnants of the aristocratic family she is married into. When electricity fails, she announces it is a power cut. In reality, she lives in poverty-stricken conditions, has not paid the rent for months and the landlord has cut the electric supply. Clutching onto her self-pride, the only thing she can do is create this alternate story about her life to Manu (Ajay Devgn) when he lands at her doorstep. When she steps out to buy food, he enters the rear quarters of the house, and facing the filthy kitchen, bathroom and sleeping area, is hit by the truth and the pathos of his erstwhile lover trying to save her dignity. Over this sequence of

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discovery runs a beautiful love song of forsaken Radha yearning for the return of Krishna, King of Mathura. Piya tora kaisa abhimaan (Love, why have you turned your face?). Although both lie to each other, they secretly gift their most precious possessions as in O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, the inspiration for this story. The multiple roles of real life and film fantasy reach their most complex layering in Abohoman. Memories travel through subjectivities, space and time zones flitting through portals of film sets, projections and celluloid images. Film star Srimati (or Shikha) gets news of Aniket Mazumdar’s death at the theatre where she is performing a play. She leaves immediately for the director’s home, unmindful of her garish makeup and costume. Caught in traffic in front of the house, Shikha recalls her first meeting with the director when she arrives late. Dipti dresses her in her own saree and brings her into the dark room where Aniket is projecting stills of Binodini on the wall. In a wonderful reference to the mentor–mentee theme, Ghosh evokes the iconic audition scene from Guru Dutt’s Kagaz ke Phool/Paper Flowers (1959), in which the actress Shanti (Waheeda Rahman) called for a screen test is blinded by the light shining on her face.10 Reiterating the Pygmalion theme, Ghosh evokes the most tragic romance of Bombay cinema history that eventually led to Guru Dutt’s depression, alcoholism and suicide. In the house, Aniket’s son Apratim (Jishu Sengupta) seats her in the dining room, away from the other funeral guests. Shikha’s retreat to the washroom triggers the performance text. Memories of her first film, Amar Kotha (My Story: The Life of the Actress Binodini) start to flow in and block the present. Within the film frame, Shikha (in the role of 19th-century actress Binodini) talks to her mentor Girish Ghosh (Sumanta Mukherjee). Her long-term admirer and patron has got married. Her teacher tells her that the theatre world is her family and she should not think of quitting that world. The two talk across a doorway through which a group of young dancers can be seen rehearsing and music floats across as Binodini asks, ‘Why did my life become a stage, Master?’ Shikha’s thoughts are interrupted as the nurse knocks on the door. Shikha removes makeup from her face and looks at her image in the bathroom mirror. Her life too has become a stage, and her relation with her mentor is public knowledge. She steps back into the room to see her film running on the television screen – a melodramatic scene of sparring jealousy, in which Binodini’s enraged lover enters her chamber with a sword. He has married a rich girl but declares he cannot live without his mistress. The actressprostitute sentimentalises about her marginal status, her inaccessibility to the domestic space, as her lover pleads with her not to abandon him.

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Reminiscent of the period space and visual palette evoked in Chokher Bali, Binodini’s chamber is furnished with dark wooden furniture, heavy curtains and a decorative four-poster bed. Binodini in a red saree with bare shoulders invokes the desirable prostitute-actress. But the look is swiftly demolished with her declaration of autonomy; she can live without the man she loves but not without her work.11 In another scene, Binodini stays awake as midnight church bells usher in the New Year. The next night will be her curtain call and she tells her companion that she is tempted to tell her story – the truth – to her audience. Her intentions, however, are overshadowed by the public story that Binodini retired from the stage, heartbroken after the death of the saint Ramakrishna. The public story continued to privilege the prostituteactress’ spiritual reform.12 The sophisticated wife (housed in urban south Calcutta) and the unsophisticated actress (in her dingy tenement on the narrow street of North Calcutta) are physically polarised only after they are evoked as a merged persona when Dipti bestows her own screen name to the younger actress. In an orchestrated, celebratory sequence of great beauty, the transposition of wife and actress-lover takes place. Dipti gives her a new name – her own screen name Srimati, another name for the mythological heroine Radha. She is cast in the same role of Nati Binodini, which Dipti was originally cast as. She plays the 19th century actress Binodini, who is caught between loyalties to her mentor and her lover. In a key sequence, Dipti choreographs a dance, strains of music rise from a Tagore kirtan and Shikha enacts the role of Radha, the traditional nayika (heroine) who is in search of her beloved Krishna. The image of Radha setting out for a tryst in the dark woods evokes the twin moods of viraha (separation) and abhisaar (desire for union). There is fascinating fluidity of the role, as Dipti leads in the sunlit rehearsal scene, and then in one quick cut Shikha becomes the heroine. Radha is the epitome of desire, and as the sequence shifts from the rehearsal to the film set, Shikha’s transformation into Srimati the glamorous, mysterious other woman is complete. Aniket watches in fascination, Dipti approves her creation as the sequence unfolds and an uncharacteristic top shot transforms the studio set into a magic portal, framing the film within film, in which the performance entices and rouses emotions. It is an extraordinarily layered sequence in which the viewer travels from the present narrative to 19th century theatre history to Tagore’s world, hearkening back to medieval Vaishnav poetry and finally to glimpse the archetypal Radha, beautiful, lilting, in search of her lover. For the viewer,

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who connects to the intertextuality in Abohoman, this is delving through multilayers to discover a great piece of cinema. Ghosh’s first script that he ever pitched was called Radharani, and it is today part of industry lore that when he read out the script he would be in tears.13 Although full of beautiful images, the film was never made. Radha as the beautiful, tragic, forsaken woman manifests herself in Ghosh’s construct of the ‘other woman’ with hidden/transgressive desire – the sexualised widow Binodini in Chokher Bali, the mistress who dies in Dosar, even in the heartbroken Abhiroop after his partner Basu returns to his pregnant wife in Arekti Premer Golpo. The sequence in which Abhiroop shaves his head, replete with separation and impossible love, is overlaid by the poignant folk song, Bonomali tumi porojonomey hoyo Radha (O Gardener Divine! May you be reborn as Radha!). In a public interview with this author, Ghosh has remarked that ‘the audience accepted the film as a triangular love story. Abhiroop is seen as the other woman in a triangular love story’.14

Banshi Bajey: interior meanings of music The choreographed song in Abohoman is a Tagore composition (Rabindra Sangeet) from his earliest anthology called Bhanusingher Padavali: Gahana kusuma kunja majhey (In the dense, flowering bower, a soft, sweet flute plays/Forget fear and shame, come friend and step out in the woods). Ghosh was hugely inspired by Tagore’s poetry, songs and philosophy. As a neglected child, Tagore grew up mostly in the servants’ quarters and was exposed to the traditional kirtan performance every evening. He used this devotional form of music for his first body of compositions written under the pseudonym Bhanusingha . The kirtan is a performative and participatory form of music, sourced from Vaishnav poetry, about the love of Radha and Krishna. The songs are from a female/devotee’s point of view desiring the ever elusive union with the Lord. Hailing from a progressive Brahmo family, where the official religion was of monotheism, Tagore explored a lifelong influence of the subversive kirtan form and of padabali imagery on his poetry and songs. Ghosh reclaims the Brajbhasa lyrics (songs written in a near defunct, inbetween dialect with both Bengali and Hindi words) and uses its affective power in beautiful sequences of validatory love in Raincoat and Memories in March. Fascinated with the lyrical power of this marginalised dialect, Ghosh learnt the now obsolete Brajbhasha, writing his own love songs for films, which have found a generic currency through radio, television and caller tunes on mobile phones. Elsewhere, he uses Tagore music and folk most powerfully in the rich, orchestrated soundtrack of Chokher Bali. 40

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The film-maker layers the Gahana kusum kunja majhe song sequence like a master artist. The sequence evokes Tagore, 19th century stage history and in the dramatic turn of Shikha to a mischievous lover winking at the camera, Ghosh brings an obvious Hindi film reference. Ghosh had for long harboured plans to make Abohoman as a Hindi film. He had even had discussions with Bollywood talents and had a larger scale of production in mind. The act of winking at the camera (therefore, inviting a seductive gaze from the viewer) has been deployed in Bombay commercial films often. It has an obvious reference to Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa/Thirsty (1957) sequence where the prostitute lures her client from the ghats of the Ganga. Or even a more recent film like Mr. India with Sridevi’s performance, which was a great favourite for Ghosh.15 Shikha’s subversive act of winking is captured on the editor’s desk who alludes to her as ki ashobhyo meye (What a cheeky girl!) and the director smiles indulgently. Aniket hides the snipped piece of film negative in his desk and views it with fetishised compulsion. Late at night, as he sits at his desk and repeatedly looks at the film strip, his son Apratim (Jishu Sengupta) sings a song about a woman with beautiful eyes. The lyric written by Ghosh himself speaks back to another famous song by Tagore that describes a dark woman with beautiful doe eyes: Krishnakali ami tarey boli (I call her the black flower). Ghosh uses the song Gahana kusuma once again in his docudrama on Tagore, Jeeban Smriti. The film is about Ghosh’s search for his lifelong inspiration – Tagore. The making of the film becomes part of the fabric of the narrative in which Ghosh and his associates try to seek a new Tagore, or fresh perspectives on a well-documented life. As Ghosh walks into the ancestral home of Tagore in Jorasanko (North Calcutta) with his crew, inspecting the rooms and the artefacts, the song builds up and Ghosh’s feet fall in dance-like movements. Again, here the song of Radha invokes a passionate search and the lyrical trope of avisaar (tryst) layers the filmmaker’s subjective search for his beloved poet. The performance of being and becoming Radha links mythology and its several incarnations in the images from Tagore and Ghosh.

Khela Khela/all in sport: film within film Ghosh’s films exhibit an often flamboyant, often poignant self-reflexibility with stardom and the film-making process itself. Having made 20 films in 21 years, Ghosh was literally in production every year. Between research, script development, production and post-production, he evidently spent most of his time in his office and studios. Film-making was life for him; he 41

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was able to use the trope of cinema or performance in various narratives, immediately offering a second reality or a frame through which temporal and character transitions could be made. It also allowed Ghosh to plan narratives where the film unit itself could be deployed in the storytelling, which would also be a cost-effective measure for the producers. Starting from early projects like Asukh to Arekti Premer Golpo, Ghosh’s use of this film/reality interface gradually grew more fluid and complex.16 In Shubho Muharat, Padmini (Sharmila Tagore), a retired star, returns from abroad to produce a film. At the launch party, the lead actress is taken ill and dies soon after. Although the characters do not enter a studio set again, industry paraphernalia is visible all around. The printed invitation cards, bouquets lined up against the walls of Padmini’s room, the journalist arriving for an interview and so on allude to the glamorous world of films. Ghosh’s treatment and empathy for women characters is again displayed, as behind the glamour and the gloss of the film star, a heartbroken, lonely woman is revealed. After avenging the wrong done to her dead son, Padmini kills herself before the police can arrest her. In Bariwali, a lonely middle-aged spinster’s uneventful life is disrupted by a film unit which takes over her ancestral house for filming Tagore’s Chokher Bali. Ghosh evidently used extracts of his ready screenplay, which he had been pitching unsuccessfully at that time. Ghosh had laughingly observed, ‘If I am unable to make a certain film, I make my film heroes direct them’. So, the film-maker Dipankar (Chiranjit Chakravarty) enters the old house and starts demanding props and costumes which would authenticate the period film. He befriends Banalata, and she slowly succumbs to his charms. Banalata’s suppressed life surfaces in her dreams and erotic images. Unable to negotiate the gap between reality and the film world, she is gratified when the director gives her a walk-on part. Filming over, the unit disappears from her life. The man who had promised to return, never really does. The lonely Banalata retires to her secluded life, after a rude disruption during which she recognises the folly of desire. The Khela soundtrack album starts with the first person self-confessional voice of Ghosh. Tired of studio interiors he wants to escape and make an outdoor film. The light-hearted innocence of the film centres on a desperate film-maker who kidnaps a young child on the latter’s insistence to the North Bengal forests to make his film Nalak. Furnished with a thin narrative, Khela is very much a frolic outing for Ghosh and his unit and the act of film-making becomes central to that film shot in beautiful outdoor stretches of North Bengal. His unit, transport buses, camera equipment, assistants, and technicians all feature in the narrative with an easy fluidity. The film-maker Raja (Prosenjit Chatterjee) lost in his creative world, 42

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oblivious to the demands of his wife (Manisha Koirala), also displays the schism of real/fictive world which he inhabits and desires. Arekti Premer Golpo plays around in a more sophisticated language with reality and film narrative. Ghosh, officially the production designer and creative director, plays a transvestite film-maker making a documentary on a folk theatre actor who was well-known in Bengal for his female roles. Ghosh plays Abhiroop as well as the young Chapal Bhaduri in the film. Significantly, heralding the last trilogy, Ghosh again weaves in Vaishnav/ feminine culture, evokes Chaitanya the medieval radical, early Bengali jatra (folk theatre), and Tagore’s music to illustrate a historical trajectory of androgyny or fluid sexual identity.17 In Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish, Ghosh’s last autobiographical narrative, he pays tribute to Tagore on his 150th anniversary. The choreographer Rudra (Rituparno Ghosh) reinterprets the narrative of Chitrangada’s autonomy and her transformation to extend to sex reassignment rights and possibilities. Ghosh uses stage/film interface, with sharp choreographed sequences from Tagore’s dance drama as well as the theatrical trope of an alter ego in the counsellor. The transformation of Chitrangada from a masculine persona to a feminine self is presented theatrically as a highly ritualised process. As editor of a glossy Bengali film magazine, Ghosh enjoyed keen interest in the inside world of film personalities. In Abohoman, he uses film history/urban myths, which are part of popular consciousness. The fraught relationship between a famed director and his actress is evoked in several references, although shrouded in the intertext of Binodini and her mentor Girish Ghosh. The world of film-making, shooting, makeup, editing, popular magazines, and gossip all feature in the narrative as a personal family story is fractured with a betrayal, and thereafter becomes a public story through the son’s article entitled Aniket’s Broken Home (Aniket’r Nashtanirh, the Bengali title unambiguously alluding to the title of the Tagore short story on which Ray’s iconic film Charulata is based) and published in a popular magazine. Abohoman thus marks a significant transition from Ghosh’s earlier heterosexual family stories to the later queer narratives. It also displays a deep philosophical sensibility, which is explored further in the last trilogy. Playing around with past/present time zones, Ghosh creates compressed, layered and tentative moments, which bring together several recurring tropes and offers through invocation of film and cultural history, the possibilities of identity convergence, transmutation and even transposition. This act of rupture – of time, of space, of persona – suggests hidden charges, often sexual and regressive, which transform/distort a family story. The linear 43

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practice of the early films (with structurally inserted memory and dream sequences) is abandoned as Ghosh shatters linearity and juggles moments from several layers of past and present narratives.

Onyo Kothao: evoking an elsewhere In the last scene of Chokher Bali, Bihari reads out Binodini’s letter to a pregnant and bedridden Ashalata. Binodini writes of her prayer that someday they will meet in a land where they can once again believe in the innocence of friendship. Ashalata asks which country (desh) has her friend gone to. Bihari answers, ‘Not to any land but someplace else’. That someplace could be the outer world of nationalism or an inner utopia for Binodini to find an autonomous world. It could also evoke death or an after world, as the narrative shifts from the unsatisfactory closure of Tagore’s novel to an open-ended probability. Ghosh is constantly and increasingly interested in the performative aspect of characters, of life cycles and reveals a growing fascination with death. The rituals of marriage, death and performance are explored in Bariwali, Chokher Bali, Sob Charitro Kalponik, Abohoman, and later enacted by Ghosh himself as the young female impersonator Chapal in Arekti Premer Golpo and as a queer choreographer Rudra in Chitrangada. Death is treated as ritual and framed in dense compositions. Unishey April opens with a funeral scene, the dead father laid out in bed covered with wreaths, his feet towards the camera. Funeral guests sit around the room waiting for the dancer wife to return from Madras. In Sob Charitro Kalponik, the wife walks into her apartment to see her dead husband laid out, his face decorated with sandalwood paste. In Chokher Bali, one moonlit night, a despondent Binodini decides to drown herself. Later, in Benaras, after she has left Mahendra, standing at the ghat she sees an old woman’s imminent death. She is laid out by the river with a group of kirtan singers encircling her and the priest administering holy water. This performance of death makes Binodini recoil in horror and she fleetingly thinks this could be her future if left alone as a widow in the city. Later as she stands on the boathouse with Bihari and the funeral fires burn on Manikarnika Ghat, while contemplating death she finds hope when Bihari offers to marry her. The funeral chants magically transform into marriage vows and resonate across the ghats. Binodini, however, soon abandons this game of love and desire. In The Last Lear, comatose actor Harish Mehta (Amitabh Bachchan) battles for life as the film (on the sets of which he was injured) has its glittering premier. The Shakespearean stage actor has an artistic crisis when he is offered a role in the alien medium of cinema. The resolution occurs when the actress by his bedside reads out the last lines of King Lear and the dying 44

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Harry recalls the final lines of the tragic hero. There is also the grotesque suicide of the young bride in Antarmahal and the impressionist death rituals in flashback sepia in Arekti Premer Golpo. In Abohoman, Ghosh reverses time frame and starts at the end. Director Aniket Mazumdar’s death is announced on TV, the media wait outside his house and his drawing room is spilling over with guests and wreaths. The dead man remains absent to the viewer. The edit style of long black outs immediately rupture image-sound association and places the viewer in an in-between space. For Aniket, this is the space between consciousunconscious, life-death, this place, and an elsewhere. The fragmented images are moments, memories, disparate, scattered, which the film-maker is trying to string in a cohesive whole.18 At the end of the film, there is a retreat to an idyllic hill station, where the critically ill Aniket is nursed by his son. It is their chance to reconcile after bitterness and hostility of earlier years as film-making turns into a metaphor for life. Apratim has made a video film and they discuss the benefits of film and digital modes. The possibility of shooting and erasing belongs to Apratim’s world and Aniket would like to share that process. He asks his son if he can work with him. ‘You will make a bit, I will make a bit, your mother will make a bit, Shikha will make a bit.’ As in life, many stories will come together, many perspectives will shape the narrative, fluid and open.19 Back in Calcutta, Aniket is bedridden and delirious. He wants to shoot his imaginary film and calls for his heroine Srimati. In another fascinating convergence of identities, Dipti his wife comes to his bedside as Srimati, the heroine who she never was. Once again, identities collapse into one, Srimati evoking the primal other woman, the screen name given to Dipti, the name she bestowed Shikha. The legitimate figure of the wife assumes the identity of the other woman in this moving charade-like sequence, an almost reverse ordering of the transformation scene discussed earlier. He asks her how she has enjoyed working with him, and in a recall to an earlier scene, she says, ‘Beautiful, unique’, and when asked, he answers, ‘Apratim, incomparable’. She walks out of the room to call her son and on her return finds Aniket dead. The last flashback returns to the opening sequence, father and son talk of film in the misty expanse of a utopian nowhere land. Aniket muses, ‘What is a film – it is fleeting moments that we try and capture. Not fair, not fair’. As the black outs visually negate images, Aniket detects a change in colour of the misty sky. For a film-maker who was seeing life through film, life becomes film and thus the dying Aniket, flitting in and out of consciousness, stresses the process to his son, ‘Who says we have to complete the 45

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film?’ Ghosh leaves us with fleeting moments, compressed, layered, elegiac sequences, which need not be shaped into narrative cohesion or closure. This abstraction makes Abohoman a significant transition point for Ghosh, who now veers towards the creative process and the artistic predicament. The contradictions of this process are of immense beauty, pain and solitude, as we see in the interpretation of Chitrangada and Jeeban Smriti. The film-maker’s own ‘confrontation with death as abstract, actually a concrete truth of life, lured me towards a certain abstraction in my films’.20 As the screen black outs extend in time, the narrative slips through dislocated image and sound to a nebulous elsewhere. Aniket is still talking about shifting light, when darkness descends and memory returns. The dying man finally remembers the lines of the lost poem Ostey gela dinomoni (The sun has set beyond the horizon).

Notes 1 Andrew Sarris, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 650–665. 2 A Couple of Squared Circles, Sarris and Kael – Part 1. In the Motley View: Journal of Film, Art and Aesthetics by A. R. Duckworth on 11 February 2009. 3 John Caughie (ed.) (1981), Theories of Authorship, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. 4 Janet Staiger (2003), ‘Authorship Approaches’, in Gerstner and Staiger (eds), Authorship and Film, pp. 50–51. 5 See Richard Dyer (1979), Stars, British Film Institute; David Kipen (2006), The Schreiber Theory, Melville House. 6 Aveek Sen, ‘Yawning in the Darkness’, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1010415/ editoria.htm#head2, accessed on 10 August 2013. 7 Here, Ghosh makes direct use of the industry stories around Ray’s funeral. Madhabi Mukherjee actually interrupted the play she was performing and rushed to the funeral in her makeup. 8 Madhabi Mukherjee (2012), Madhabikanan, Charchapad, Kolkata. 9 Rituparno Ghosh, ‘Interview with Reshmi Sengupta’, The Telegraph, Friday 19 September 2008. 10 At 31 minutes 40 seconds in the film, there is a scene in which Shanti is called to the studio for an audition/screen test and is blinded by the lights as the producer, writer and cameraman shout instructions to her. At 32:57, Sinha asks her to do a test in Paro’s costume. At 33.37, Sinha says he has found the Paro of his imagination. I have referred to this scene and not to the preceding one at 28:00 where she enters the studio for the first time to return Sinha’s coat and gets filmed accidentally. 11 Binodini’s autobiography Amar Kotha has been performed on stage several times over the years, but the interpretation largely has been on the reform or chastising of the prostitute-actress and the actress as a sexual object. Binodini’s own narrative privileges her commitment to her work and Ghosh’s interpretation

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12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19

20

also traverses the cartography of hidden desire, but finally privileges the actress’ commitment to her work. This also renders poignant, the eventual betrayal by her colleagues about Star Theatre. See Binodini Dasi: My Story and My Life as an Actress, edited and translated by Rimli Bhattacharya (New Delhi, Kali for Women, 1998). See Aparna Sen’s memories of Ghosh in this volume. On-stage conversation with Rituparno Ghosh and Sangeeta Datta at the London Indian Film Festival 2011, Cineworld Haymarket, London. Pyaasa, produced and directed by Guru Dutt, 1957. Mr. India, directed by Shekhar Kapur, 1987. On-stage conversation with Rituparno Ghosh and Sangeeta Datta at London Indian Film Festival, June 2011, Cineworld Haymarket, London. In the last few years of his life, Ghosh performed the role of cross-dressing, gender-ambiguous persona. Sporting designer clothes, turbans and jewellery, Ghosh constructed a flamboyant persona, feeding to the media and resultantly more documented than the industry stars. He hosted a popular TV show, stepped onto the big screen playing versions of his real self. Before starting Chitrangada, his training in classical Odissi dance was well documented by the local dailies and magazines. In fact, Ghosh’s transformation from an overweight, curly haired, bespectacled individual to a slim, sharp featured, shaven headed, androgynous figure was documented and adequately ‘performed’ in public. Ghosh himself recounts that Abohoman had autobiographical strains, even as he struggled to come to terms with his mother’s death. His own filmmaker father was ill during the making of Abohoman and passed away soon after the film was made. The discussion about film and life between father and son also resonates closely with Ghosh’s close relationship with his father. Interview with Rituparno Ghosh at MAMI, Mumbai International Film Festival, India, 31 October 2010. Increasingly, Ghosh believed in the democratic process of filmmaking, as a collective effort and continuously recognised the roles of his close collaborators. In Abohoman, the filmmaker actually puts this into words, when the ailing director Aniket asks to work with his son and says, ‘You will make a bit, I will make a bit. Your mother will make a bit and Shikha will make another bit. We will all make the film together’. Ghosh’s last completed film, Jeeban Smriti, has no opening credits and ends with a credit list of all the cast and crew with no specific departments. Ghosh believed he was making this film together with every member of his crew, echoing those words at the end of Abohoman. Immediately after Ghosh’s death on 30 May 2013, Abohoman seemed a prequel to a sequence of events in real life. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, the filmmaker was laid out in his room upstairs, funeral guests spilling over and media and public crowding the streets. The wait for the chief minister before the funeral, the intrusion by political party workers, the public procession at Nandan, and the final gun salute at the crematorium all continuously unfurled over television channels from morning to late evening. Ghosh’s own death was discussed by many friends and colleagues as an almost carefully scripted and staged thereby in an extraordinary bizarre fashion, extending his star performativity beyond life.

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References Caughie, John (1981). Theories of Authorship, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Dasi, Binodini (1998). My Story and My Life as an Actress, edited and translated by Rimli Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Datta, Sangeeta (2011). ‘Just Another Love Story: Several Roles Converging’, The Telegraph, 13 January 2011, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110113/jsp/ opinion/story_13422577.jsp, accessed on 2 September 2014. Duckworth, A. R. (2009). Sarris and Kael: A Couple of Squared Circles. The Motley View: Journal of Film, Art and Aesthetics, http://ardfilmjournal.wordpress. com/2009/02/11/a-couple-of-squared-circles-sarris-and-kael-%E2%80%93-partone-notes-on-the-auteur-theory-in-1962-%E2%80%93-andrew-sarris/, accessed on 11 January 2014. Gerstner, David and Staiger, Janet, eds. (2003). Authorship and Film, London: Taylor and Francis. Ghosh, Rituparno (2011). On Stage Conversation with Sangeeta Datta. London Indian Film Festival, June 2011, London: Cineworld Haymarket. Ghosh, Rituparno (2013). First Person, Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing. Kael, Pauline (1973). Deeper Into the Movies: The Essential Kael Collection: from 69–72, New York: Little, Brown and Company. Mukherjee, Madhabi (2012). Madhabikanan, Kolkata: Charchapad. Sarris, Andrew (1979). ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, Aveek (Undated). ‘Yawning in the Darkness’, The Telegraph, http://www.tele graphindia.com/1010415/editoria.htm#head2, accessed on 10 August 2013. Vasudevan, Ravi (2012). The Mythological Public, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Wollen, Peter (1998). Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, revised edition, London: British Film Institute.

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2 RITUPARNO GHOSH AND THE PURSUIT OF FREEDOM Wimal Dissanayake

❦ For the very definition of the human condition should be in the mise-en-scene itself. Jean-Luc Godard

Rituparno Ghosh, one of the most talented and perceptive of Bengali film directors, is the author of a significant body of work. In this chapter, I would like to argue that a central theme that informed and guided his work is the quest for freedom. He was always concerned about the lack of freedom that characterised the lives of women in India and elsewhere and later began to explore issues of homosexual relations and transgender desires as articulations and effects of freedom. In this short chapter, I wish to explore Ghosh’s pursuit of freedom in relation to his film Chokher Bali: A Passion Play (2003). Despite the denunciations by such thinkers as Derrida and Deleuze that freedom is a bourgeois humanist illusion, I believe we have to adopt a more nuanced approach to decoding this concept, and Rituparno Ghosh underlined this need.

I Chokher Bali is based on a Tagore novel; Ghosh was deeply attached to the poet, as evidenced by his films, his writings and his constant reference to the poet in his interviews and talk shows.1 His films, such as Chokher Bali, Noukadubi and Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish, are based on Tagore’s writings; in addition, Ghosh made a documentary on the life and work of Tagore titled Jeeban Smriti. Moreover, in his films, at appropriate moments 49

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he has repeatedly employed popular songs and the distinctive music that Tagore fashioned. Ghosh believed that Tagore’s works need to be read, dissected, reinterpreted, and assimilated by each generation in the quest for its own social and artistic truths. He had a great empathy for Tagore; he said that Tagore’s life was ‘a journey of a lonely traveler’, and this can equally well be said of Ghosh’s relatively short life.2 What connects Tagore to Ghosh, more significantly, is the idea of humanism and its close association with the quest for freedom. The term humanism carries a multiplicity of meanings that aims to highlight the centrality of the action of human beings, their thoughts and actions, their freedom, and sense of agency. This term, however, has been disseminated throughout the world as a European concept that has been invested with a universal validity.3 The important point about Tagore’s humanism, and that of Ghosh, is that it focuses on the idea that humanism is not one thing but many, and that it is imperative that we seek to pluralise this concept. The work of Tagore and Ghosh enable us to move forward in this endeavour. In recent times, the term humanism has taken on the force of a smear word in academic polemics in the west; indeed, it has been reduced to a reactionary ideology largely due to the influence of newer modes of enquiry such as post-structuralism and postmodernism. It seems to be that the efforts of Tagore and Ghosh facilitate a reconsideration of some of the charges levied against humanism by contemporary commentators. There are, to my mind, three central charges brought against humanism by postmodern critics: First, humanism is regarded as a form of ideology that serves to decontextualise some of the ideas and values associated with the Renaissance in Europe and to freeze them into a kind of universality. Second, humanism is placed at the centre of interests and agendas of the sovereign and atomist individual, who is seen as self-present and originator of action and meaning, the privileged locus of values and civilisational achievements. However, the humanism articulated in Tagore and Ghosh presents a different picture. They were interested not in an isolated individual but the individual in relationality, the individual as a part of a collectivity, as an adjunct of a larger reality.4 Third, it has often been commented on by theorists like Michel Foucault that humanism should be mapped not as a free-floating and timeless entity, but as a human creation that bears the distinctive imprint of specific discursive formations.5 This line of thinking has a direct bearing on the way that ‘human’ was perceived and advanced by Tagore and Ghosh. It has to be asserted that far from promoting a free-floating and timeless concept, the humanism that guided Tagore and Ghosh was firmly tethered to the culture, traditions and values that nourished them. 50

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Tagore approached the idea of freedom in its manifold complexity. For him, as for the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, freedom was both positive and negative. Negative freedom was the escape from bondage while positive freedom was reaching out towards creativity and self-fulfilment. Both Tagore and Ghosh understood freedom in social, cultural, political, metaphysical, and artistic terms. For example, statements, such as the following made by Tagore, make clear the relationship between freedom and the wider social discourses: ‘Those people who have got their political freedom are not necessarily free, they are merely powerful. The passions which are unbridled in them are creating huge organizations of slavery in the guise of freedom’.6 Tagore, like Ghosh, was interested in the metaphysical dimensions of freedom. In his poetry, especially nature poetry, one observes how he is straining to reach a higher freedom, unconstrained by worldly bonds, and signifying a unity with the ultimate reality reminiscent of the Upanishads. Tagore’s poetry, I contend, bears the weight of this desire. Freedom was for him a creative force and humanism finds its fullest articulation in freedom. As Tagore once observed, ‘Our mind does not gain true freedom by acquiring materials for knowledge and possessing other people’s ideas but by forming its own standards of judgment and producing its own thoughts’.7 Hence, the independence of outlook is a significant strand in Tagore’s humanism. I have chosen to discuss Tagore’s idea of freedom and humanism for two reasons. First, Rituparno Ghosh, by his own admission, was a great admirer of Tagore. Second, the ideas of freedom and humanism espoused by Tagore quite expectedly find a ready echo in Ghosh’s work, and enable us to construct a productive frame of intelligibility to approach his cinematic output. Human freedom is vitally connected to full citizenship and this is an idea that finds repeated expression in Ghosh’s work. Chokher Bali is, as I stated earlier, based on Tagore’s novel of the same title. This novel has been translated into English under the title Binodini, which was indeed the first title Tagore gave to this novel before changing it to Chokher Bali. The protagonist Binodini is a young, beautiful, educated woman, widowed soon after her marriage. She returns to her village, where one day she encounters her mother’s closest childhood companion Rajlakshmi who, deeply touched by Binodini’s predicament, takes her home. Mahendra, Rajlakshmi’s only son, had earlier turned down a proposal to marry Binodini. Mahendra is now married to Ashalata, and apparently they are deeply attached to each other. However, after the arrival of Binodini in the house, things begin to change; Mahendra clearly is attracted to Binodini and loses interest in Ashalata. Meantime, Binodini is interested in Bihari, Mahendra’s friend. It is this emotional relationship among 51

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Figure 2.1 Aishwarya Rai and Raima Sen on the set of Chokher Bali Courtesy of Sangeeta Datta

Binodini, Mahendra, Bihari, and Ashalata that constitutes the essence of the story. Ghosh’s adaptation of Chokher Bali is marked by interesting departures from the original novel. Of these, I choose to discuss a few: Ghosh’s Binodini comes across as being far more aggressively independent minded and assertive, compared to Tagore’s. She makes use of her widowhood as a site for acquisition of agency and encourages other widows to ignore longstanding taboos such as abstaining from drinking tea. This is an intentional move on the part of Ghosh as a film-maker to underline the plight of women and the compelling need for acquisition of agency. Compared to the novel, there is a greater emphasis on physical intimacy and physical aggressiveness, underscoring the repressed sexual desire of widows and its unbearable agony. At times, unlike in the book, Binodini initiates the currents of eroticism. An aspect of Ghosh’s cinematic art is the construct of dense visual registers, in which simultaneously multiple layers of meaning are at play. Notably, the relationship between Binodini and Mahendra is inscribed with this density of meaning, with the result that while eroticism is reconfigured prominently, there are other countervailing forces at work 52

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such as the invocations of death. In other words, in many scenes, eroticism and death are amazingly juxtaposed. It is not the juxtaposition of eroticism (eros) and death (thanatos) that Sigmund Freud posited but something slightly different which has a bearing on Indian culture. The idea of self-articulation is central to the film’s narrative. In Tagore’s novel, the need for female agency is fully endorsed and indeed constitutes a vital facet of the theme. In Ghosh’s film, however, this is given greater weight and visibility. Passages in the novel, which are given over to authorial observation, are invested with a far greater measure of self-articulation in the film. This self-articulation is not merely a question of verbal expression; far more importantly, it relates to the way in which Ghosh has chosen to construct his visual registers. The juxtapositions, the framings, the camera angles and placements, and the diegetic soundtrack all contribute to this effect. Again, Ghosh’s use of space deserves careful consideration. Space is indeed a crucial aspect of Ghosh’s meaning. Short descriptive passages in the novel are converted by the film-maker into various spatial configurations pregnant with meaning. This spatiality is interestingly connected to the idea of human freedom. As we see in the film, space imposes certain limitations on the action of Binodini, and consequently in order to acquire a sense of agency, she has to battle the constrictions of space. Let us consider two representative passages from the novel: Though Binodini lived in the same house she had not yet appeared before Mahendra. But Bihari had seen her and knew that such a girl could not possibly be condemned to spend her days in a wilderness. He also knew that the same flame that lights a home can burn it down. Mahendra teased Bihari for his obvious concern for Binodini and though Bihari met this raillery with light-hearted repartees, he was worried in his mind, for he knew that Binodini was not a girl to be either trifled with or ignored.8 Binodini was constantly luring him on and yet would not let him come near her even for a moment. He had already lost one boast – that he was invulnerable. Must he now lose face altogether and confess that he was incapable of winning another heart, however much he tried to be conquered without making a conquest in return – this defeat on both the fronts was very galling to Mahendra’s self-esteem . . .9 The emotional content of these passages are converted into a series of wonderful images by Ghosh in the film. The idea of spatiality is central 53

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to this effort. For example, his cinematic space is not unitary but plural in that there are diversities of meaning. To give one example, he selects visual details carefully not only to attain verisimilitude, which clearly is one of his aims, but also to disrupt the unitary meaning. In the earlier part of the film, the frames are marked by the dictates of patriarchal culture. However, Ghosh deploys his visualities, his cinematic spaces not only to fortify patriarchal culture within which the narrative unfolds, but also to challenge it. Very often, in carefully constructed and modulated frames that affirm the power of the patriarchy, the director uses Binodini’s body language to puncture that patiently constructed world. As Binodini struggles to acquire a sense of agency by challenging patriarchal norms, the constrictive space which becomes a metonymy of patriarchy has to be depicted vividly in the film in the way that Ghosh has done. This perceptive use of space and the ensuing visualities that forward the narrative discourse and thematic interests grows out of a combination of rhetorical moves – the deft use of compositions, framing, camera positioning, play of light and shade, the information that the camera displays and withholds, and brilliant editing. Ghosh pays close attention to what are to be included in and excluded from his cinematic space and how are they situated in relation to diverse spatial axes of the frame, that is, the left-to-right and top-to-bottom axes that have a way of intersecting with the perimeters of the frame. Ghosh also quite thoughtfully conceives the contrasts forwarded between on-screen and off-screen spaces; indeed, they reflect an increasing control over his chosen medium of cinema. For instance, in the scene in which Mahendra and Binodini secretly meet outside the house, in the family carriage, there is a clear erotic mood shared by them. However, the off-screen space also becomes important as Binodini brings in the memories of her dead husband; this intrusion has a way of reinforcing the transgressive nature of their action. The most remarkable departure Ghosh makes from Tagore’s novel is in the ending (interestingly, later Tagore repented about the way the novel ended as Ghosh reminds us at the beginning of the film). This is how the relationship between Binodini and Bihari concludes in the novel: Bihari remained silent, looking grave. Binodini continued, her palms held together in entreaty, ‘Do not deceive yourself. You will never be happy if you marry me. You will lose your pride and self-respect and I shall lose mine. Live your life as you have always lived it, detached and serene – and let me remain at a distance, engaged in your work. May happiness and peace be ever yours’.10 54

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In other words, there is a kind of capitulation to the dictates of patriarchy; she wants to save him from the ignominy of marrying a widow. In the film, however, Binodini chooses her path in accordance with her desire to save others, to pursue her own goals of collective freedom. The way this desire is visually represented in the film adds to the emancipatory force that Ghosh seeks to unleash. This idea of freedom, as I stated earlier, is central to Ghosh’s work as a film-maker and his notion of freedom contains a number of important strands. Ghosh recognised the importance, as Tagore did, of the negative freedom; that is, the need to liberate oneself from constricting and selfdiminishing external forces that shackle human beings. The recognition of the tragic inadequacy of outmoded conventions to meet modern needs is an aspect of negative freedom. The film Chokher Bali deals ably with this aspect. Like Tagore, he was concerned with positive freedom; he paid great attention to the imperatives of self-realisation and self-fulfilment. An essential ingredient of freedom for him was the capacity for self-fulfilment. Ghosh valorised freedom as the capacity for self-reflection and consciousness raising. He saw ‘unfreedom’ as the inability and unwillingness to reflect fearlessly. In Chokher Bali, the director constantly underlines with great enthusiasm Binodini’s desire to think against fossilised customs and habitual ways of thinking. In this regard, it is interesting to recall what Jean Paul Sartre terms bad faith – the conscious refusal to reflect and to go with the flow in unreflective awareness of the world and to operate cozily within some other person’s assessment of oneself.11 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre argued that freedom needs to be construed as the reflective, imaginative capacity of the mind, its mobility and its clear negation of the given.12 Binodini’s behaviour in the film and the director’s reconfiguring of it conforms to this mode of thinking. Ghosh, in his film, is determined to emphasise freedom as reflective consciousness, for a reflective consciousness is a moral consciousness. Ghosh perceives freedom as the ability to exercise choice and this is related to responsibility. In Chokher Bali the film, the protagonist is unafraid to make choices despite severe forces arraigned against her, and the director seems to claim that this indeed is a mark of freedom. Thinkers as different as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Paul Sartre valorised freedom as choice. ‘Do I have a choice in the current circumstances?’ is a question that a person wedded to freedom would readily ask. Ghosh conceives of freedom as the capacity of consciousness to investigate into its own powers and potentialities. He adheres to the notion that freedom has to be understood as a reality that consciousness seeks to create for itself. This thought is important in understanding Ghosh’s cinematic art and his faith in the power of newer 55

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visualities. His cinematic style, therefore, becomes both an instrument and a product of the freedom that he prizes so highly. In that sense, Ghosh’s films are on-going processes; it is the cinematic productivity more than the cinematic product that interests him. One aspect of this effort that we see clearly in Chokher Bali is his penchant for granting freedom to cinematic images to tell newer stories, to unburden them of the cultural weights that had been placed on them. It has to be said that his ambition to create a free world unfettered by self-defeating conventions has been extended to his deployment of cinematic images. Ghosh was a film-maker who was concerned with finding a social voice for the unfree and he clearly made cinema a site for the undertaking of that effort. He wanted cinema to be a site of social and cultural cross-talk where diverse signs modulate one another.

II Ghosh’s endeavour in Chokher Bali to highlight the idea of freedom can be understood more productively if we bring into the discussion the work of the French cultural theorist Jacques Ranciere. Although he shared some affinities of interest with thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, he was also different from them. He believed in a form of humanism and the ability to act freely was a significant aspect of that humanism – a line of thought promoted by Ghosh, as well. And this was linked to his belief that viewers are intelligent and independent minded and the notion of passive spectators that has been commented upon by many theorists should be discarded. Ghosh, too, had great faith in the intelligence and powers of discernment of ordinary viewers. The emancipation of spectator that Ranciere talks about is a vital aspect of his or her freedom. And one of the aims of Ghosh as a film-maker was to promote this emancipation of the spectator by encouraging his or her critical participation. Therefore, Jacques Ranciere advanced the notion of the emancipated spectator which has a great relevance to the interests of Ghosh as a filmmaker. He believed that viewers are ‘active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs’.13 Ranciere makes a strong case for the reality of what he terms the emancipated spectator. He says: [E]mancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand the self-evident fact that structure the relations between saying, seeing and acting themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection. It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions. . . . she (spectator) 56

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observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of places. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her. She participates in the performance by refashioning it in her own way . . .14 Here, Ranciere is talking about the theatre, but his observations are equally relevant to cinema. And it is interesting to note that Ghosh (as evidenced by his films as well as the various interviews he has given) endorsed this line of thinking. However, it must be pointed out that there is a slight difference between the approaches of Ranciere and Ghosh to the idea of the emancipated spectator. Ranciere does not see emancipation as the teleological end point of a political activity or a form of social liberation; it is, rather, a polemical establishment of equality. In the case of Ghosh, the political project and social liberation are more pronounced. Consequently, the idea of freedom promoted by Rituparno Ghosh has a clear political edge. Jacques Ranciere went on to assert that the spectators possess a collective power and this collective power commonly owned by them does not emerge from the fact that they belong to a collective body; rather, it is the power each of them possesses to convert what he or she perceives in his or her own way. The manifestation of this power is a manifestation of the freedom of the spectator. As he aphoristically claimed, ‘Every spectator is already an actor in her own story; every actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same story’.15 Ranciere’s point is that the spectator is already emancipated and we need to recognise this fact. This mode of thinking offers us a fruitful way of approaching Ghosh’s films. For example, in Chokher Bali, the agony of Binodini is the director’s personal agony as well, and it is also our collective agony. We, in our own way, from our own distinctive vantage points and sites of interaction, can read the story to generate relevant sets of meanings and social truths. It seems to me then that Ranciere is very relevant to a deeper understanding of the cinema of Ghosh. I claim so primarily for three reasons: Ranciere, like Ghosh, places great emphasis on the idea of freedom. Both of them prize very highly the concept of humanism and to them the supreme mark of humanism is the ability of human beings to follow the dictates of freedom. Finally, both Ranciere and Ghosh recognised the importance of the idea of the emancipated spectator – the spectator who was not a passive voyeur as the generality of thinking holds, but an active participant and independent minded who is in search of meaning. In this quest for meaning, he or she is able to construct his/her own story on the basis of the 57

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presented experience. Again, the alteration of the sensorium, the field of sensory experience, was of utmost importance to both. Ranciere wished to rearrange the sensible fabric and so did Ghosh. What Ranciere signalled by this is the need to restructure the given order of relations between meaning and the visible and propose alternate networks of the sensible.16 The way in which, throughout the film, Binodini works within and against feminine images handed down by tradition attest to Ghosh’s interest in this endeavour. Besides, the idea of artistic practice held a great importance to Ranciere as it was with Ghosh. The work of Ranciere is important to a deeper understanding of Ghosh’s attitude to freedom; he is not only focusing on the freedom of characters, but also on the freedom of spectators. In the context of Indian cinema, this is extremely important. The way he widens the freedom of characters and spectators holds a valuable lesson for the generality of Indian film-makers.17

III Ghosh’s intention, as I understand it, was to construct a cinema of possibilities that was motivated by a transgressive impulse. He was interested in fashioning, through his cinematic style, a free world unfettered by self-annihilating conventions. Consequently, in his cinema, he wanted performance to outwit performative restrictions and fetters. He wished to establish a disconnection between the performing body and its contextualising and constraining frames of performativity. Aishwarya Rai’s acting throughout Chokher Bali can be understood from this optic. Indeed, his cinematic style is both an instrument and product of that quest for freedom. He was struggling, not always successfully, through his constellation of images to produce a new visual consciousness connected to social change. And that new visual consciousness has significant implications for the pursuit of freedom that the film-maker is interested in. Most of his frames are imbued with overlapping discourses and densities of meaning. These densities of meaning feed into the idea of freedom valorised by Rituparno Ghosh. Let me cite two examples. Throughout Chokher Bali, we see a careful and innovative interaction within the frames, where on the one hand Ghosh establishes clearly the hierarchies and conventions related to men, women, wives, widows, and so on, and on the other through his framing, bodily movements of characters destabilising these hierarchies. Another topos that he constantly deploys is that of living and dead bodies – very often intimate and romantic moments are disrupted by the memory of the dead body of Binodini’s husband. And later in the film, the husband’s dead body gives way to the dead body of the widow in 58

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Benares. A vivid example of this is the way in the scene in which Bihari proposes to Binodini we see in the background the flames of funeral pyres. For Ghosh, an important aspect of freedom is the way in which one works in through and against convention. This intent is deeply inscribed in his cinematic style. It is evident that Ghosh was a great admirer of Satyajit Ray. Indeed, he decided to become a film-maker, largely due to the influence of Ray.18 While recognising the importance of Ray and honouring him, Ghosh laboured to go beyond him in infusing his cinematic style with a clear critical and political edge. Like Ray, Ghosh adhered to realism, but this can be described as what I term interrogatory realism – he is keen to question what he sees and shows. Ghosh understands realism as the desire to capture appearances in all their pulsations, ambiguities and cross-talks. In Chokher Bali, there are certain scenes that immediately recall Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, based on another Tagore story Nashtanirh/The Broken Home. The first is Binodini swinging in the park while on a picnic (reminiscent of the garden scene in Charulata); and like Charulata, Ray’s protagonist, Ghosh too gives Binodini a pair of binoculars, which she uses quite often. What is different is that Ghosh has moved beyond Ray in emphatically underlining the erotic and psychological dispositions of his chosen characters. A mark of Ghosh’s cinematic freedom is to deploy intertextuality to expand its perimeter of meaning. Another area in which Ghosh displays his predilection for freedom is the way he has chosen to use aspects of Indian popular cinema for his purposes. In a number of interviews and private discussions, Ghosh has maintained the fact that cinema should reach a sufficiently large number of people; a cinema restricted to a handful of people, in his opinion, defeats the purpose of cinema.19 It is interesting to note that in Chokher Bali Ghosh has sought to draw on and make a connection with Indian popular cinema, more specifically Bollywood. By selecting Aishwarya Rai, one of the leading actors of Bombay, to play the role of Binodini, Ghosh made a deliberate choice to establish a link with Bollywood. This was indeed a calculated move on his part to appeal to a wider swathe of the audience. The important point to note is that while inviting Rai to play the lead role, he is also involved in an act of ‘de-Bollywoodising’ by getting her to act in accordance with the restrained cinema that Ghosh practices. Indeed, in his films, one observes a blending of the semiotics of the popular and art house cinemas of India. He does so in order to undermine the circulation of Bollywood sign values. This attempt to draw on and reframe popular cinema to suit his own distinctive intentions is, for Ghosh, an index of his freedom as a film director. Closely related to this is Ghosh’s deft manipulation of scopophilia. Scopophilia, in cinema, refers to the desire to see; more specifically, it directs 59

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attention to the unconscious processes in play in the act of viewing. The interaction between the viewer and the screen foregrounds two phenomena: how cinema produces the spectator as subject, the beholder of the gaze, and second, as the production of the pleasurable desire to look. In Chokher Bali, the very selection of Rai – one of the most beautiful actresses in the world – conformed to this scopophilia. At the same time, Ghosh being the transgressive film-maker that he is, turns the scopophilia against itself by making Aishwarya Rai, in her somatic movements and gaze, challenge those very assumptions and the discursive formations that buttress them. It should be noted that Rai’s performance in this film is one of the best in her career. Ghosh’s move is a way of liberating from objectification and investing her with agency. Here, we see how the performative traits feed into thematic imperatives. In other words, Aishwarya Rai’s acting in this film serves to highlight the notion of freedom that Ghosh is concerned with. The way Ghosh constructs his mise en scène in Choker Bali, and indeed in his other films, speaks to his unwavering commitment to freedom as a film-maker. Mise en scène in its broadest sense, in the way I use it here, indexes the setting, composition, movement, lighting, and costumes discernible in a frame. The eminent French director Jean-Luc Godard thought very highly of it as attested to by his quotation, which I have used as the epigraph to this chapter. Similarly, Ghosh placed great emphasis on the mise en scène; it was an integral part of the meaning of his films. Ambiguities, ambivalences and cross-currents mark his mise en scène generating interrogative meaning. His mise en scène put into play a plurality of transgressive impulses that bear witness to his quest for cinematic freedom. Ghosh, in his films, draws a distinction between visibility and visuality, seeing and looking. In visuality, the active participation of the spectator, his or her creative and critical engagement becomes extremely important. He fashions his mise en scène in a way that would activate these critical impulses of his spectators. Ghosh sought to effect a sensory and conceptual dislocation in the pursuit of cinematic freedom, and was deeply interested in cinematic communication as well as cinematic met communication, which is to say that he paid great attention to the content he was communicating as well as to the contexts and discursive formations from which the content assumed life. His desire was to entertain and educate in the broadest sense of these terms. John Dewey once said that a liberal education paved the way for the emergence of critical citizens and interactive communities and extended social justice to all fields – social, cultural, political, and economic. He

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felt that a liberal education afforded the people to behave with a sense of ethical responsibility needed for ‘reasoned participation in democratically organized publics’.20 It is this kind of public that Ghosh wished to create through his cinema; and the pursuit of freedom that I have been discussing in this chapter is both a means and an outcome of this effort. Ghosh was not imagining an alternate system or utopia. He was convinced of the validity of Foucault’s statement that ‘I think to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system’.21 That is why he chose to work in the shadows of Tagore, Ray and Indian popular cinema while seeking to go beyond them, perhaps.

Notes 1 For more details on this, see the introduction of this volume. 2 Personal communication with the film-maker. 3 Roger Ames and Wimal Dissanayake, Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry. Albany: SUNY, 1996; and Wimal Dissanayake, Narratives of Agency, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 4 Ames and Dissanayake, Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry. 5 Michel Foucault, Language Counter Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 84. 6 Rabindranath Tagore, My Life in my Words. New Delhi: Penguin, 2005, p. 59. 7 Tagore, My Life My Words, p. 61. 8 Rabindranath Tagore, Binodini, translated by Krishna Kripalani. Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1959, p. 42. 9 Tagore, Binodini, p. 129. 10 Tagore, Binodini, p. 244. 11 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992, p. 38. 12 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 54. 13 Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator. London :Verso, 2009, p. 4. 14 Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 13. 15 Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 17. 16 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2004, p. 13. 17 For a detailed study, see K Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, From Aan to Lagaan and Beyond. Staffordshire: Trentham Press/London: Institute of Education Press, 2012, and K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. 18 Kaustav Bakshi, ‘My city can neither handle me nor ignore me: Rituparno Ghosh in conversation with Kaustav Bakshi’. Silhouette: A Discourse of Cinema. Vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 1–12. 19 Personal communication with the film-maker. 20 John Dewey, cited in Frank Hearn, Reason and Freedom in Sociological Thought. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985, p. 85. 21 Michel Foucault, Language Counter Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 43.

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References Ames, Roger and Dissanayake, Wimal. Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry. Albany: SUNY, 1996. Bakshi, Kaustav. ‘My city can neither handle me nor ignore me: Rituparno Ghosh in conversation with Kaustav Bakshi’. Silhouette: A Discourse of Cinema. Vol. 10, no. 3, 2013, pp. 1–12. Dewey, J. Cited in Frank Hearn, Reason and Freedom in Sociological Thought. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985. Dissanayake, Wimal. Narratives of Agency. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Foucault, M. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. Foucault, M. Language Counter Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Gokulsing, K. M. and Dissanayake, W. From Aan to Lagaan and Beyond. Staffordshire: Trentham Press/London: Institute of Education Press, 2012. Gokulsing, K. M. and Dissanayake, W. Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Ranciere, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2004. Ranciere, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992. Tagore, Rabindranath. Binodini, translated by Krishna Kripalani. Honolulu: EastWest Center Press, 1959. Tagore, Rabindranath. My Life in My Words. New Delhi: Penguin, 2005.

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3 LOCATING RITUPARNO GHOSH IN TOLLYWOOD Anugyan Nag

❦ In a non-resident Bengali Durga Puja celebration in North America, the proprietor of the Kolkata-based jewellery house, Anjali Jewellers, Ananya Chowdhury exhibited the entire collection of jewellery worn by Binodini (Aishwarya Rai) and Ashalata (Raima Sen) in Chokher Bali (A Passion Play), Rituparno Ghosh’s 2003 film. Later, the Chokher Bali brand of jewellery, as it came to be known, created much fervour among Indian women not only in India, but also abroad. The designs became popular and a trendsetter, facilitating Anjali Jewellers to bag other film assignments from Bollywood, such as Parineeta (2005), Eklavya (2007) and others. If one looks back into the history of the Bengali film industry, such an event is unprecedented; a Bengali film’s jewellery becoming a trend worldwide is indeed a rare phenomenon, given that the industry had been and was still suffering from a tremendous setback, both economic and aesthetic, since the 1980s.1 Brand endorsements and corporate marketing strategies were unfamiliar concepts in the Tollygunge2 film business. What expedited this hitherto unheard of tie-up between a Bengali film and a local jewellery brand, with the latter subsequently finding an international visibility? It could have been enabled by several factors: the film’s corporate backup, its global distribution or its star cast; but most importantly, as I shall argue, Chokher Bali’s director Rituparno Ghosh. Rituparno Ghosh emerged in the early 1990s as a promising successor of the stalwarts of Bengali cinema (pioneered by Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen). Ghosh turned out to be one of the most powerful3 directors of the Bengali film industry by 2006. While perpetuating the tradition of art house cinema, Ghosh received tremendous critical acclaim along with modest

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commercial success consistently in the first one decade of his career. His films won national awards regularly and were appropriated by the urban upper middle class educated Bengalis or the bhadralok4 section. Films of his, such as Unishey April (1995), Dahan ((1997), Bariwali (2000), Utsab (2000), and Shubho Muharat (2002), were well received by the educated middle class, who praised them for their rich aesthetics and literaturecentric content. However, it is important to note that till 2003 Ghosh’s films were produced by small independent producers from the Tollygunge industry; and his films were given limited release with a maximum of 15–20 prints that got exhibited mostly in the urban localities of West Bengal. However, the films travelled to international film festivals quite often and non-resident Bengalis organised special screenings of his films. As the Bengali film industry gradually underwent an overhaul, steadily graduating into an organised and professional film producing centre, Ghosh began collaborating with corporate production houses, reintroduced the casting of Bollywood film stars and actors and began a nexus between the emerging media convergence and new exhibition spaces, thereby emerging as an important alternative and crossover film-maker both nationally and internationally in the next decade of his career Ghosh mentions in an interview: If my films help the Bengali film industry in any way, I’ll be extremely happy. I’m extremely flattered that I’m being compared with Satyajit Ray. But I feel I’m majorly overrated. I came into Bengali cinema at a time when intelligent urban films were going out of fashion. That’s why I found a place quickly. Rituparno Ghosh5 The year was 2003. Shree Venkatesh Films (SVF), the only fully corporate production house of Kolkata, came forward to produce Ghosh’s Chokher Bali. SVF was founded by Mahendra Soni and Shrikant Mohta who entered film production in 1996. They were also by then one of the leading distributors of Hindi, English and Bengali mainstream films in Eastern India. However, SVF still earned and continues to earn its revenues by producing highly formulaic commercial films. In an interview taken by me, Shrikant Mohta revealed how SVF came to be associated with Chokher Bali, which was to be produced by Tapan Biswas of Cinemawalla, a production house that had previously funded Ghosh’s Titli (2002) and Utsab. Chokher Bali’s lead female cast was announced in the press, and it was to be played by Nandita Das.6 However, due to Ghosh’s increasing popularity and far-fetched success in the international festival circuit, several Bollywood actors and technicians expressed their interest 64

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to work with him. Ghosh, utilising his liaisons with Bollywood, roped in Aishwarya Rai7 to play the lead role in Chokher Bali instead of Nandita Das. He also rewrote the film’s script and wanted to make it on a much larger canvas, giving it the treatment of a magnum opus. This is when Cinemawalla backed out due to the increasing budget; in any case, Tapan Biswas’s previous experiences of working with Ghosh had not been quite commercially profitable, although the films had earned critical acclaim. On the other hand, by 2003, SVF had emerged as the leading production house in Kolkata, having generated several commercial hits; but, none of its films could make significant positive impression on the educated urban middle class. SVF’s strategy was to associate with Rituparno Ghosh, in order to diversify their business dynamics towards a more ‘quality’ genre of cinema and tap into the growing national and international audiences for quality Bengali cinema.8 SVF came on board to produce Chokher Bali with an amount of more than Rs.10 million,9 an amount unheard of in Tollygunge at that time.10 Chokher Bali was the first Bengali film to be released in the recently constructed and the first ever multiplex of Kolkata, INOX Forum, located in the aristocratic Bhawanipur area of South Kolkata. The INOX multiplex not only changed the entire experience of film viewing, but also created a space for niche audience that was desperately in search of a legitimate space for a certain kind of cinema that had just begun to generate interest among the bhadrolok class.11 Chokher Bali received contradictory reviews but earned reasonably well at the box office. It was a film that managed to convince a large section of the Bengali audience that a mainstream Bollywood actor could be made to portray Binodini, one of Rabindranath Tagore’s most iconic and powerful heroines. A very mannered cinematography, stylised and aesthetically rich composition of frames, soft sepia-toned look, plausible performance by an ensemble cast, lyrical music, rich costume, and jewellery made the film a visual treat. However, conservative critics were harsh to the film, for they found it departing significantly from the original text, but more importantly for its explicit erotic content. Many found the casting of Aishwarya Rai as Binodini outrageous. Yet, perhaps because of Rai’s presence, the film was soon dubbed in Hindi and rereleased nationwide. Chokher Bali went on to win the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Bengali and was nominated for the Golden Leopard (Best Film) award at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2003. The film was screened at the 34th International Film Festival of India on 19 October 2003. Besides being the official selection at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2003, it was showcased in over 25 international festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival, London Film Festival, Karlovy 65

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Vary and so on. The film bagged the Apsara Film Producers’ Award for the Best Regional Film 2004, while Aishwarya Rai won the Best Actress trophy at the Anandalok Awards 2003. There was no looking back for both Rituparno Ghosh and SVF post the success of Chokher Bali. With the film, Ghosh crossed regional boundaries and SVF managed to earn a respectable position within and outside the Bengali film industry. The casting of Aishwarya Rai definitely widened the horizons of the film beyond Bengal. The industry reports and several articles in the press reported Chokher Bali’s commercial triumph, its gross profits crossing more than Rs.10 million12 within the state alone. In addition to this, the film did fairly well in Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. Ghosh’s earlier film Shubho Muharat, which was reported to have earned more than UK£12,000 after only two shows in the United Kingdom and around US$2,000 per show in the United States, got sold to Britain’s Channel Four for a substantial amount. It was reported that Ghosh was about to sell the international distribution rights of Chokher Bali13 to Miramax. Several developments followed the release of Chokher Bali. Ramoji Films, Hyderabad, Applause Entertainment (Aditya Birla Group), Mumbai

Figure 3.1 Aishwarya Rai rehearsing with associate director Sangeeta Datta Photo Credit: Karna Basu

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Mantra, and Planman Motion Pictures soon began to invest in the film production business in Bengal. Anshuman Swamy, CEO of Applause Entertainment, reckoned that ‘it was willing to back a film that’s somewhere between parallel and commercial cinema like Chokher Bali’.14 Tollygunge, almost overnight, became the new hub of creative expressions and Ghosh, at this point, censured the industry for its old-fashioned ways of looking at things. He averred, ‘Why do we look at the global market by default, why can’t we look global by design and approach it in a strategic way?’15 The press, public and critics saw the success of Chokher Bali as a starting point that triggered major developments in the corporatisation of Tollygunge and in initiating aesthetic changes in film production. Following the success of Chokher Bali, SVF produced Ghosh’s first Hindi film Raincoat (2004) starring Aishwarya Rai and Ajay Devgn. The film was shot entirely in the studios of Kolkata. An intense love story punctuated with soulful songs, Raincoat was also well received by multiplex audiences fairly well all over India. The film drew a net collection of Rs.45 million in the first week and Rs.30 million in the second week (on 33 prints), according to the film’s Mumbai distributor, Hemant Shah of Tilak Enterprises, reports Bollywood Trade.16 Around this time, actor–singer–film-maker Anjan Dutt made his first Bengali film The Bong Connection (2007), a film dealing with the presentday young urban Bengalis. It was a big success not only with the audience in Bengal and India, but also among the diaspora audience. The Bong Connection opened the floodgates for the industry to experiment with different genres, subjects and treatment. The film was crucial in changing screening regulations of Bengali films in multiplexes. Multiplexes earlier screened only select Bengali films, ones that targeted the niche urban audience. With the overwhelming success of The Bong Connection, the rules of exhibition changed. The Eastern India Motion Pictures Association made it mandatory for all multiplexes to devote at least 40 per cent of their screen time to Bengali cinema.17 Following these developments, the Bengali film industry went through diverse changes: newer groups of producers, directors and film technicians entered the industry that gradually led to the corporatisation of film production, distribution and exhibition. Relatively new entrants (ones who made films that were abiding to the ‘new wave’ or ‘art cinema’ traditions and ideologies), film-makers like Anjan Das, Subrata Sen and Abhijit Dasgupta managed to change the content and visual aesthetics to a considerable extent, though this genre of films, such as Saanj Batir Roopkathara/Fairy Tales of the Evening Lamp (2002), Iti Srikanto/Yours Srikanto (2004), Faltu/ Useless (2005), Dwitiya Basanta/The Second Spring (2004), Nil Nirjaney/ 67

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Vacation Blues (2003), and Bibar/Calcutta Unabashed (2006), fared poorly at the box office. Young film-makers, like Bratya Basu, Kaushik Ganguly and Suman Mukherjee, attempted serious and offbeat subjects for their films, but none recovered the invested money. Films that somewhat broke the jinx came from Prosenjit starrers, as Prosenjit was considered a oneman industry and fortune maker. The media dubbed his films as having too many commercial trappings and masala elements of the 1980s and 1990s Hindi cinema going by the label of ‘shaggy-dog-story’. Sandip Ray and Goutam Ghose managed to strike a balance in terms of revenue and critical appreciation with Bombaiyer Bombete/Buccaneers of Bombay (2003; produced by ETV, Hyderabad) and Abar Aranye/In the Forest Again (2003) by reaching out to the global business market, through festivals and overseas releases (‘Cliched images that shun realism’, 2006: The Financial Express). Simultaneously, following the liberalisation of the Indian economy, the television industry underwent a revolutionary change when several Bengali private cable television channels, such as ETV Bangla, Zee Bangla, Star Ananda, Tara Bangla, Akash Bangla, and so on, came into existence, each of which began airing a wide range of information and entertainmentbased programmes related to Tollygunge. This was followed by the proliferation of Bengali FM channels, like Amar FM, Friends FM, Big FM, Red FM, and others, which broke through the austerity of state-controlled radio stations, by regularly airing a new range of talk shows and musical programmes involving newer talent from the contemporary Bengali entertainment industry, besides playing songs from contemporary films. It is interesting to note here that Rituparno Ghosh himself hosted a very popular talk show Ebong Rituparno (And Rituparno) on ETV Bangla during the year 2001 and 2002, followed by FM Radio plays; and finally, in 2009, he started another talk show on the newly launched Bengali channel Star Jalsha, Ghosh and Company, produced by Blue Waters Pvt. Ltd. and run by actor Jisshu Sengupta, who starred in several films of Ghosh. Ghosh also collaborated with actor Prosenjit Chatterjee for his production house Ideas Unlimited’s first television mega serial Gaaner Opare (Beyond the Songs) as the creative head.18 The English and Bengali language press also underwent an unprecedented transformation as regards to its attitude to regional films. The newspaper stories on the Bengali film industry began to shift towards a more celebratory discourse, abandoning the ‘crisis narrative’ of an irredeemably decaying industry that dominated every discussion on Bengali cinema since the early 1980s. These stories began to circulate through newspaper supplements such as Calcutta Times (The Times of India), HT City (Hindustan Times), t2 (The Telegraph), Patrika (Anandabajar Patrika), and Bengali 68

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magazines like Anandalok, Unish Kuri and Sananda. All of these featured columns, articles and pages with a focus on Tollywood19 and related aspects of the Bengali film industry. New stars, new directors, corporatisation, film exhibition, film budgets, visual and techno-aesthetics, music, fashion, and so on were profusely covered. This was followed by reports of various business collaborations and ventures that Tollywood experienced.20 By this time, the word Tollywood had gained currency in the popular press and media discourses, leading to its acknowledgement in the public sphere. Following the liberalisation scenario of the Bengali films industry, Rituparno Ghosh acquired an unprecedented status by adapting a style or method both in film aesthetics and publicity, in a fashion in which he consistently and repeatedly engaged in the promotional strategy of his films to target the bhadralok audience who would be loyal to his films. In order to successfully establish an audience base unlike his predecessors Ghosh, focused with great emphasis (and developing a hold) on secondary and subsidiary media that would eventually influence his film’s reception in several ways, knowingly and unknowingly. Ghosh through his association with leading newspaper organisations, like Anandabazar Patrika, wrote film reviews or other feature stories regularly; he also became the editor of the film magazine Anandalok, followed by Sangbaad Pratidin, for which he was the editor of their Sunday supplement Robbar. Whether it was as a columnist or an editor, Ghosh contributed to establish a niche for his films and developed a star persona that was responsible to a great extent in establishing his stardom in public sphere discourses. After becoming the editor of the Bengali film magazine Anandalok, he managed to garner a closer reception and circulation of cinema that worked to his advantage in a manner in which he became a ‘regulator’ of public sphere discourses of filmi khabar (film news). (His films Titli and Shubho Muharat also use the name Anandalok to refer to film gossip, news and stories about star personas and celebrities.) Ghosh was also responsible for the face lift of Anandalok, and apart from ‘filmi’ news and interviews of film personalities, the magazine regularly began to include news sections and discussions from other public sphere concerns. Following his editorial position with Sangbaad Pratidin, he was able to effectively use press discourses even more innovatively to his benefit. Sob Charitro Kalponik’s pre-release Sunday editorial of Robbar supplement had a piece by Ghosh, mentioning how the poet Joy Goswami had agreed to give his poems exclusively for Ghosh’s film and promised not to publish them elsewhere. These poems, exclusively written for and used by Ghosh in the above film, were later published in Robbar.21 Bhattacharya further argues how Ghosh tactfully used his media associations and collaborations for the promotion of his films. As a media persona, 69

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he was always present in public sphere discussions across various medias. His strong television presence, at a time when the media ecology in Bengal was going through an overhaul, made him a household name and a cultural icon, subsequently. These associations helped him to establish his television persona as an ‘alternative’ film-maker within the new paradigm of Tollywood. He exploited his media associations as strategically as he could to promote his films that resulted in almost a genre called ‘Rituparno Ghosh films’, simultaneously leading him to stardom. Therefore, one can argue that no Bengali film-maker, either from the mainstream or from the art house tradition, except Aparna Sen to some extent, has functioned as a successful media persona as Ghosh has.22 There were changes both within and outside the Bengali film industry that ushered in a revamp, whereby a local Tollygunge graduated into a global Tollywood.23 But Tollywood’s contemporary financial condition for the longest time was generally dominated by a very high rate of interest for film financiers and production houses. This is tackled through the vertical revenue earning model − theatre release, satellite rights, home video rights, music rights, and overseas rights. This model has been most successfully adopted and is practiced by SVF. Actor and executive producer Arindam Sil is believed to have started the trend of crossover films in Tollywood as executive producer of Moxie Group with Bong Connection (budget Rs.10 million) that earned 10 times over the invested amount. Sil believes that this was possible because of the changing mindset in the youth and the narrowing gap between rural and urban psyches.24 While films such as Bong Connection and Chokher Bali were drawing the urban middle class, mainstream commercial films, such as Chirodini Tumi Je Amar/You Are Mine, Forever (Raj Chakraborty, 2007), were breaking box office records. In fact, SVF’s generous investment in commercial cinema brought to them a new glamorous look, comparable to big budget Bollywood productions. A new spate of actors was also introduced, relieving the audience of the monotony of the same old faces that had been reigning in the industry for the past two decades. The popular press discourse, then on, began foregrounding the industry as Tollywood, marking its uplift and smart developments. Ghosh’s subsequent ventures with leading production houses from Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata were Antarmahal (2005). In fact, Antarmahal too generated much hype in the media and the fashion world because of its heavy use of traditional Bengal jewellery, and there were several reports in the newspapers about the designs becoming a brand by themselves (Reporter, 2005). The film also managed to get distributorship worldwide through AB Corp. and Vasu Bhagnani, for whom this was the first regional venture. With a star cast including Abhishek Bachchan, Soha Ali Khan and 70

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Jackie Shroff, the film was premiered at another newly launched multiplex (fourth in the city) Fame Highland Park in the suburbs of south Kolkata (Gupta, 2005). Dosar (2006) produced by Planman Motion Pictures, The Last Lear (2007), it is perhaps important to mention here that with Ghosh garnering popularity as a Bengali director who could easily rope in the biggies from Bollywood, few of his later films again produced by non-Bengal-based corporate giants were being made bilingually. Arindam Chatterjee’s Planman Motion Pictures produced Ghosh’s Sunglass in Hindi and Bengali, while Subash Ghai’s Mukta Arts ventured for the first time into regional film production with Ghosh’s Noukadubi, again made in both Hindi and Bengali. Khela (2008) produced by RPG Enterprise, Sob Charitro Kalponik (2008) and Abohoman (2010) both produced by Reliance Big Pictures and Noukadubi (2010) produced by Subhash Ghai’s Mukta Arts Pvt. Ltd. Ghosh managed to get Amitabh Bachchan’s production house Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited to produce Antarmahal, in which Abhishek Bachchan played an important character. Ghosh’s association with Amitabh Bachchan was reinforced when the actor played the lead in The Last Lear, produced by Planman Motion Pictures and made with an unprecedented budget of Rs.110 million. The film failed at the box office and SVF’s Mahendra Soni argued that as the film was in English very few watched the film, apart from the urban elites in multiplexes.25 In 2008, Ghosh roped in Sa Re Ga Ma (RPG productions) to produce Khela, starring Prosenjit and Manisha Koirala. The film was promoted and publicised in a unique manner: Ghosh, for the first time, released an audio CD in his voice expressing his desire to move out of his style and form and take a break from the claustrophobic world of interiority and relationship dramas and make a light film with a child actor. The audio CD garnered much hype in the media, but the film did not generate much revenue. Ghosh’s subsequent releases were with Reliance Big Pictures − Sob Charitro Kalponik and Abohoman. Barring Dosar, all his other films since Shubho Muharat had a Bombay star in the lead, which, however, caused much consternation in Tollywood. But it is this casting strategy which, at least to a certain extent, facilitated Ghosh to find easy recognition nationally. At home, his repeated casting of stars rather than unknown faces (as was the custom with yesteryear art house film-makers), helped him find access to the popular domain quite effortlessly. Conversely, several mainstream actors who were never taken seriously by art house film-makers began to be cast by senior directors, such as Aparna Sen, Goutam Ghosh and Buddhadeb Dasgupta, after they had proved their mettle in Ghosh’s films. A fact that needs elaboration at this point is how Rituparno Ghosh and his films managed to break into the mainstream and attract commercial 71

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production houses. The answer to this possibly is that if films like Chirodini Tumi Je Amaar raked in the profits and inspired the new corporate production houses to dish out money for sleeker and trendier films along similar lines, these films were missing out on international visibility and critical acclaim. The production houses craved for the patronage of the elite Bengali audience – intellectual, educated, artistic, and affluent. It is Ghosh whose films, which repeatedly travelled to national and international festivals and won several awards effortlessly, attracted the educated middle class and assured steady business in the diaspora market. Plus, as mentioned earlier, all his films also had star power. The audience profile too began changing drastically: the divide between the masses and the classes, as it is commonly referred to in industry parlance, increased infinitely. Realising the potential lying latent in the audience of multiplex theatres that had grown by leaps and bounds within a few years, producers came forward to back middle-of-the-road Bengali cinema (the Rituparno Ghosh brand of cinema as they might be called) alongside the brazen commercial films. In 2010, SVF produced debutant director Sanjay Nag’s film Memories in March starring Rituparno Ghosh and Deepti Naval. The film was scripted by Ghosh, which was an intimate story of a mother coming to terms with her son’s sexuality post his death. Sangeeta Datta’s review in The Telegraph titled ‘An Ode to Grief’ on 4  April 2011 stated that ‘it is an enduring personal drama and it is heartening to see mainstream producers Shrikant Mohta and Mahendra Soni of SVF back an art house film such as this’.26 The film fared moderately at the box office, but gained positive critical responses from the press and public. It went on to bag the National Award for the Best English Film that year. Ghosh’s re-engagement with the issue of alternative sexuality, after the immensely successful Arekti Premer Golpo (2010), saw the emergence of a novel theme in Tollywood. Although the film catered mostly to the multiplex audience, most Bengali films thereafter began exhibiting a conscious tendency of capturing both the markets, represented by the ‘masses’ and the ‘classes’. Ghosh’s period drama Noukadubi, based on a Tagore novel and funded by one of Bollywood’s leading producers Subhash Ghai, is an example of such a tendency. Rituparno Ghosh, in other words, was a trendsetter in more ways than one, and was therefore instrumental in ushering the dawn of a new phase in Tollywood. Most media reports seem to unanimously agree that the Bengali film industry has been indeed rejuvenated and much of the credit for this revival goes to Ghosh and of course to SVF. In August 2007, The Telegraph published a detailed report entitled ‘Facelift’ on Tollywood’s changing look. The analysis listed seven ways in 72

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which Tollywood films, both commercial and offbeat, were changing for the better bit by bit. Some of the factors discussed were: (a) cinematography, (b) visual treatment and (c) experimentation that young technicians were making with improved and advanced technology. Areas such as special effects, exotic foreign location shoots, experimental and out-ofthe-box stories and thematic backdrops, music and dance, wardrobe and fashion, and most importantly, promotion and publicity were also identified as undergoing interesting changes. The data revealed that the films that had implemented these innovations were mostly produced by SVF. However, the studies added that a good number of films made by other small, independent producers also implemented these innovations with success.27 According to Ratnottama Sengupta, ‘Class cinema is drawing the masses, while mainstream is going classy. It’s time to toast Tollywood’ (e.g. Srijit Mukherjee’s Autograph, 2010, and Baishe Srabon/22 Srabon, 2011). Alongside big banner Bollywood film releases in Bengal, films like Moner Manush/The Quest (Goutam Ghose, 2010), Gorosthaney Sabdhan/Gorosthan on High Alert! (Sandip Ray, 2010), Arekti Premer Golpo, Autograph, and Baishe Srabon ran for record number of days, drawing a full house both in Kolkata and the suburbs.28 The confines of the middle class home had become an obsolete site for film exhibition. Contemporary Bengali cinema now captured the city with both its changing interiors and exteriors. The historical banner New Theatres revived itself and produced the National Award-winning Aami Aadu (I am Aadu, 2011). Television channels, like Tara Muzic, Mohua Bangla, Rupashi Bangla, and Rose Valley, entered into film production to earn higher gross revenue profit as they also owned the satellite rights of the film.29 It was as if a fine balance was struck by moving from contentoriented to form-oriented narratives. The techniques of digital technology promotions (Facebook promotion, Twitter, mobile ring tone downloads, website advertisements), the marketing of films abroad (through Databazaar Media), uploading films on YouTube, satellite sales, pre-release music launches, publicity press photo shoots added to the revival factor of Tollywood’s films and the industrial change. In an interview, Prosenjit Chatterjee said: This is the right time to come back to the way New Theatres operated. We must do local cinema, at the same time national appeal cannot be lost sight of. L V Prasad, Gemini, they are lost for good but New Theatres has revived! That speaks of the strength of the filmmakers of Bengal. Still, I wonder, why didn’t we make Saptapadi in Hindi? Why have we repeatedly missed the bus?30 73

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He suggested that Bengali films needed to be released in Bangladesh, Tripura, Assam, the United Kingdom and the United States, adding: I believe that mainstream is the bread and butter of any industry. And so I’ve always maintained that mainstream has to make stateof-the-art jhaan chak-chake (sleek) films. Even when Tollygunge was going through its poorest patch, I insisted in doing only colour films and going cinemascope (with Shasurbari Zindabad). Because I know that every technological change entails a change in the way we view films.31 In the last few years, Bengali films have found loyal audiences in countries such as China, Italy, Abu Dhabi, the United Kingdom and the United States, where the films are being treated as representing life on high-quality celluloid, only with the original language being Bengali. Incidentally, some of the more recent films – Memories in March, Autograph (2010) and Iti Mrinalini/Yours Mrinalini: An Unfinished Letter (2010) – which made it big in the international platform, came from Tollywood’s most powerful production house SVF. Director Srijit Mukherji, whose films made it to prestigious international film festivals, observed: ‘Definitely, Bengali cinema has carved quite a niche for itself globally’.32 Sanjoy Nag, the director of Memories in March, which was selected in the Pusan International Film Festival, Korea, and awarded the Best Screenplay Award at MIAAC, New York, in 2010, elaborated: There was a golden era in Bengali cinema quite some years ago when films used to be recognized and awarded on the international platform frequently; then there was a lull, but, now again the momentum is picking up. But this should in no way make film-makers complacent. Even though the portrayal of the socioeconomic state of the country remains relevant, I’d say the content in Bengali films has become a lot more contemporary with various genres being explored. When a film is selected in some international festival, a lot of backend support and coordination is required.33 While SVF’s role in bringing about this remarkable change in the Bengali film industry is indubitable, Ghosh’s contribution, as I have tried to show, was immense too. Ghosh collaborated with SVF again after a gap of few years for his semi-autobiographical film Chitrangada (2012), followed by Satyanweshi (2013). Ghosh, as a powerful director and cultural 74

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commentator, became the most talked about entity in the industry and played a crucial role in bringing about key changes in content and visual aesthetics and marketing strategies. His career reached its acme of success when the effects of the economic liberalisation had begun to be felt by the people. In other words, Ghosh was to a great extent supported by the changes wrought by the new economic order, manifested in the revolution in the media, among other things. At the same time, the fact cannot be denied that all local and regional media most certainly require a local culture industry parallel to the social-economic and political life, in order to produce content, views and critique. Thus, Tollywood reshaping and re-emerging as an entertainment and culture industry post-liberalisation is also possibly a result of the convergence in media and the paraphernalia that is generated in the public sphere. The mediums of print, television and radio have wholeheartedly allied with the Tollywood fraternity, and symbiotically formed a nexus and circuit that has overlapped and converged to become one, but have yet maintained their own distinct characteristics. The current industrial landscape of the Bengali Cinema is significantly affected by the omnipresent and omnipotent media convergence of television, radio and print. And Rituparno Ghosh occupied a very central position in this new collaboration, by literally straddling myriad roles of a film-maker, a talk show host, editor of leading magazines (first Anandolok, and then Robbar), and creative head of satellite channels. Media convergence altered the perception of the public and the press to a large extent, and what was earlier only an auteuristic expression was wholeheartedly picked up by the industry at large. With time, Ghosh’s films were time and again foregrounded as path-breaking within the discourse of the new phase in contemporary Bengali cinema, which rose like a phoenix, after a deathly hiatus during the 1980s and 1990s when Ghosh’s Unishey April hit the screens in the summer of 1995. The liberalisation of the Indian economy initiated a slow but somewhat steady process of evolution and modification within the industry, the imbrications of which Rituparno Ghosh skillfully capitalised on effecting major changes in cinematic aesthetics and in the overall production, distribution and exhibition systems. Thanks to Ghosh, newer film-makers with the mindset for experimentation have arrived in the industry, whereby films made for urban audiences have significantly swelled in number; also, the old-fashioned idea that experimental/thought-provoking films are ‘art’, and therefore, noncommercial is gradually fading away. Thus corporatisation in Tollywood and the simultaneous rise of filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh have made available a certain set of technology, human resource, capital, and basic infrastructure for filmmaking and a 75

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systematic organisation for the industry in general. A symbiotic relationship is evident between the industry and the film-maker Ghosh. However, it must be admitted that unless there was already an existing pattern of aesthetics and narrative tendencies, generation of a corporatised set-up based on a single director’s artistic inclinations could not have been possible. Although Chokher Bali explicitly exposed the possibility of capital profit through such a system (as discussed earlier), the foundations of such an infrastructure was already embedded in the industrial practice on a more auteuristic or personal level. This corporatisation simply democratised the process. Ghosh, having come from an advertising corporate background, was able to deliver creative content within limited time period, diverse and un-uniform capital flow and managed to work across different genres. The logic of ‘auteur film’ based on signatorial cinematographic styles, especially banking on tendencies of lighting, mise en scène, treatment of emotional conditions, art décor, and even choice of characters tends to get intercepted within the corporatised framework of a commercialised art cinema, if we may call it so. Rituparno Ghosh played a pivotal role in organising and systematising this process, and has left behind a legacy that would perhaps be carried forward by his contemporaries and the increasing number of urban film-makers entering the Tollywood industry.

Notes 1 One of the very first writings that appeared in Sattar Dashak (The Decade of Seventies) is an essay by Someshwar Bhoumik called Sattar Dashaker Bangla Chhabi/‘The Bengali Films of the Nineteen Seventies’, where he observes the deterioration of Bengali cinema in the late 1970s with films like Amanush, Ananda Ashram or Baba Taraknath, arguing that these films were devoid of the ‘clean entertainment value’ that was characteristic of Bengali films in the 1950s and the 1960s. See, Someshwar Bhowmik, ‘Sattar Dashaker Bangla Chhabi’, in Sattar Dashak, by Anil Acharya, pp. 28–43, Kolkata: Anustup Publication, 1981. Somen Ghosh in his book Bangla Cinemar Palabadal (The Changing Phase of Bengali Cinema), Ch. 7, has tried to analyse this ‘crisis’-ridden period of Bengali cinema when he observes that ‘when a totally unrealistic, lower standard film made its silver jubilee at the box office, it expressed our shameless nature in our cultural characterless-ness’. Ghosh writes about Chowdhury, ‘(I have heard that) he [Anjan Chowdhury] has broken the records of many of the earlier filmmakers. He has become so famous that even other directors are keen on having their film scripts written by him. But it is difficult to digest his films for any educated Bengali with proper taste. His films are not only unreal and bizarre, but full of a kind of tasteless vulgarity. It is really a matter of research, which class of audience makes these films hits’. Partha Raha, for instance, holds the underworld dons of the coal industry and non-Bengali producers (with surnames like Kejriwal, Agarwal or Khaitan), who took control of the industry,

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responsible for the deterioration of the quality of films. Most of these writings present a crisis story of Bengali cinema from the perspective of the ‘educated Bengali bhadralok class’, who feels distanced from the ‘crudity’ and ‘vulgarity’ of the contemporary mainstream model and the target audience of this model. See, Partha Raha, Bangla Chalachchitra Kathakatha O Anyanya Prabondho, Kolkata: Ratna Publication, 2004; Rajat Roy, Bangalir Chalachchitra O Sanskriti, Kolkata: Sristi Publication, 2001. South Kolkata area where majority of the Bengali film studios are located. Until 2006–07, the Bengali film industry would be referred to as the Tollygunge industry. Even Bengali and English dailies, including Screen, had a section on Bengali cinema and industry news under the heading ‘Around Tollygunge’. ‘How powerful is he?’ Powerful enough to get Aishwarya Rai at her peak to play a Bengali widow and spend weeks in Calcutta. Powerful enough to get Amitabh Bachchan to do his first English film and spend weeks in Calcutta. Powerful enough to get Abhishek Bachchan to play a poor potter and spend weeks in Calcutta. Throw in the Ajay Devgns and Bipasha Basus for good measure, and you marvel at what Rituparno has managed to pull off, sitting in south Calcutta. Described by veteran Basu Chatterjee as ‘the best story-teller in the country, Ritu(da) gets what he wants. That’s power’. The Telegraph, 21 July 2008. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080721/jsp/entertainment/story_9575991.jsp (accessed 10 December 2014). Sharmistha Gooptu explains:‘Bhadralok to indicate those social classes among the Bengalis who, since the nineteenth century, had been the recipients of some kind of English/western education, were mainly engaged in the professions and services, and found in the cinema a “modern” form which could encapsulate the movement of their lives . . . . This bhadralok middle class, a varied social group, was the Bengali Film industry’s mainstay for the greater part of the period . . .’ Sharmistha Gooptu, Bengali cinema: An other Nation, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2010. Somdutta Mandal, ‘Rituparno Ghosh: The Women’s Director of Bangla Cinema’, in Jasbir Jain and Sudha Rai (eds), Films and Feminism: Essays in Indian Cinema, Jaipur, New Delhi: Rawat Publication, 2002, p. 36. An actress known for her non-mainstream roles in Indian films. Bollywood star/actress, former Miss World and international celebrity. The idea of ‘good’ or ‘quality’ cinema comes from a tradition of writings and public discourses on Bengali cinema since the 1950s. For example, in their writings on 1950s and 1960s mainstream Bengali Cinema, authors like Rajat Roy, Kiranmoy Raha and film journalists Bipra Das, Ranjan Bandyopadhyay and so on point out a significant difference between Bengali Cinema and other regional cinemas of that period. According to them, unlike other mainstream cinemas, in Bengali mainstream cinematic practice (films featuring the hit pair Uttam-Suchitra) the mythological narrative and ‘vulgar’ song and dance took a backseat. This feature, according to them, made this cinema more mature and ‘distinct’ compared to the other cinemas of that period. 1,68,691.000 US Dollars. Author’s interview with Srikant Mohta at Kolkata, 18 October 2011. ‘Whilst the multiplex cinema has made an important intervention in urban leisure at a number of levels elsewhere in the world, the appearance of the multiplex format in India since 1997 has, if anything had an even more dramatic

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impact. In part, this stems from the primary role played by the cinema in Indian popular culture. Much more than this, however, the multiplex format has been adopted against the backdrop of massive social change taking place in an era of economic liberalisation. During the decade of its existence, the multiplex has thus been very much a sign of the times – both a symptom and a symbol of new social values. In particular, the multiplex has been indicative of a consistent, if not always coherent, push to create a “globalised” consuming middle class and a new urban environment. Multiplex theatres, like their single-screen predecessors, have thus become key sites in the long-running struggle over cultural legitimacy and the right to public space in Indian cities. India’s new chrome and glass multiplexes have been much appreciated by middleclass cinema-goers seeking a “better” standard, and wider choice, of entertainment than the older large-capacity halls provide. Due to smaller auditoriums, higher admission prices and its inherent rationale of providing an entertainment menu, the multiplex has served to elevate the box office value of the middle class public. With scores of multiplexes now in operational across India, the multiplex sector now far outweighs the returns made from the traditional cinema circuit. This naturally has major implications for how Indian film producers perceive their audience, and thus underscores the pre-eminence of the contemporary “aspirational” mode of middle-class melodrama and the values that it espouses’. Adrian Athique, ‘From Cinema Hall to Multiplex: A Public History’, South Asian Popular Culture (Routledge) 9, no. 2 (July 2011): p. 147 and p. 153. Also see, ‘Once in place, the multiplex developed a counter to the unitary propensity of the single screen hall, founded on exclusion, perpetuating homogeneity and cultivating committed audience segments. While single screen cinemas identify themselves with films of particular kinds, say the Hindi masala and blockbuster, the English, or the porn movie, the multiplex has capitalized on an inclusive tendency to motivate and assemble diverse audiences’. Aparna Sharma, ‘India’s Experience with the Multiplex’, India-Seminar, no. 525, May 2003. Sambit Saha, Rediff.com. 2004. http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/jan/10spec1. htm (accessed 14 August 2013). Shoma A. Chattreji, Times of India.com. 2003. http://articles.timesofindia. indiatimes.com/2003–07–06/news-interviews/27178157_1_aishwarya-rairabindranath-tagore-tagore-novel (accessed 14 August 2013). Ibid. Ibid. Manisha Deshpande, indiaglitz. 2005. http://www.indiaglitz.com/channels/hindi/ article/12533.html (accessed 1 September 2013). Pradipta Mukherjee, Business Standard. 2008. http://www.business-standard. com/article/sme/bengal-movie-industry-set-for-revival-108090101079_1.html (accessed 2 September 2013). ‘The result, the industry has progressed by leaps and bounds. Be it actors, directors, choreographers, scriptwriters or even producers, talent comes riding on mint fresh appeal. From Jeet and Dev to a new entrant in the Bangla family, Mahaakshay, from Koel Mallick to Srabanti and Subhashree, Raj Chakrabarty, Sujit Mondal, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, Srijit Mukherji to Gaurav Pandey and Raja Chanda, from NK Salil to Jeet Gannguli, Tollywood is all set to promote fresh talent . . . Carrying forward the idea, Shrikant Mohta, director, SVF,

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adds, “Those who are big, it’s our job to make them bigger. But the new ones need to be made big. So, we need more new people to carry the industry forward. Earlier, Tollywood churned out 40 to 60 films a year. Now it’s nearly a 100. The talent, however, hasn’t increased in that ratio. Tollywood has room for all. So, we need more new faces to take the industry to the next level” ’. See, Ruman Ganguly and Roshni Mukherjee, Tollywood Has Room for All, Calcutta: Calcutta Times, 2011. 19 Madhava Prasad says, ‘The origin of the term being obscure, there have been many claimants to the credit for coining it, and many theories as to its first usage. But now we may actually be in a position to settle this issue, at the risk of offending some claimants. In 1932, Wilford E. Deming, an American engineer who claims that “under my supervision was produced India’s first sound and talking picture”, writing in American Cinematographer (12.11, March 1932), mentions a telegram he received as he was leaving India after his assignment: Tollywood sends best wishes happy new year to Lubill film doing wonderfully records broken. In explanation, he adds, “In passing it might be explained that our Calcutta studio was located in the suburb of Tollygunge . . . Tolly being a proper name and Gunge meaning locality. After studying the advantages of Hollygunge we decided on Tollywood. There being two studios at present in that locality, and several more projected, the name seems appropriate” ’. Thus, it was Hollywood itself, in a manner of speaking that, with the confidence that comes from global supremacy, renamed a concentration of production facilities to make it look like its own baby. Deming is renaming the locality, but there is no suggestion here that the name will also serve as an adjective to describe Indian cinema in general (although Calcutta in those days was still a strong centre of production). This gels very well with what I seem to remember from occasionally glancing at a Kolkata-based youth magazine called JS (or Junior Statesman, a publication of The Statesman group which, long before satellite television and MTV, was addressed to what must have been a very small elite Indian youth segment), which referred to the Bengali film industry as Tollywood. See, Madhava Prasad, ‘This Thing Called Bollywood’, in Seminar 525: Unsettling Cinema, May 2003, p. 18. 20 Yash Chopra, in charge of the Entertainment Wing of cinema attached to the FICCI, led a delegation on its behalf to the Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya in 2002 for the revival of the Bengali Film Industry. The proposal included the construction of a chain of multiplexes, state-of-the-art entertainment plazas, shopping malls, and food rendezvous, which would assure ‘a sustainable revenue generation scheme’ for the overall entertainment industry in the state. Pradip Biswas, ‘Yash Chopra for Revival of the Bengali Film Industry’, Screen, 6 December 2002: pp. not available. Another report said: ‘After sponsoring city football giants a decade back, liquor baron Vijay Mallya is here to sponsor Tollywood. Inox Leisure Ltd, one of the leading multiplex chains, has already shown interest in distributing Bengali films. Mallya’s United Spirits Ltd, the biggest IMFL firm in the country, will promote commercial Bengali films by cobranding one of its highest selling whisky brands, Bagpiper, with Tollywood movies. Mallya is starting his Tollywood innings with Rituparna Sengupta’s maiden production venture Patadar Kirti’. Udit Prasanna Mukherji, The Times of India. 2009. http://articles.timesof india.indiatimes.com/2009–11–10/kolkata/28094472_1_tollywood-bengalifilms-priya-entertainment (accessed 10 September 2013).

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21 A Sunday supplement with the Bengali daily newspaper Pratidin. 22 Spandan Bhattachrya, The Post Liberalization Bengali ‘Parallel’ Cinema: Bhadralok Nostalgia, the Politics of Past-ness, and the Discourse of ‘Difference. Unpublished M.Phil dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2011, pp. 135–138. 23 See a detailed study of this phenomenon and transformation of the Bengali film industry post 1980s by Anugyan Nag, ‘The Contemporary Bengali Film Industry: From Tollygunge to Tollywood’, unpublished dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2012. 24 Abhijit Dasgupta, ‘Eastern Promise’, Indiatoday.com. 2010. http://indiatoday. intoday.in/story/Eastern+promise/1/80298.html (accessed on 11 September 2013). 25 Author’s interview with Srikant Mohta at Kolkata, 18 October 2011. 26 Sangeeta Datta, ‘An Ode to Grief’, The Telegraph. 2011. http://www.telegraph india.com/1110404/jsp/entertainment/story_13805636.jsp (accessed 8 September 2013). 27 Kushali Nag, ‘Copy-Paste with a Punch’, The Telegraph. 2009. http://www.tele graphindia.com/1090728/jsp/entertainment/story_11288039.jsp (accessed 2 September 2013). 28 Ratnottama Sengupta, ‘Bengali Cinema on a New High’, The Times of India. 2011. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011–01–02/kolkata/28380043_ 1_bengali-cinema-ekti-tarar-khonje-bangla-films/2 (accessed 11 September 2013). 29 Ashoke Nag, ‘The Revival of Bangla Film Industry’, The Economic Times. 2011. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011–04–30/news/29490800_1_ bengali-films-bengali-cinema-mukta-arts/2 (accessed 10 September 2013). 30 Ratnottama Sengupta, ‘Bengali Cinema on a New High’, The Times of India. 2011. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011–01–02/kolkata/28380043_1_ bengali-cinema-ekti-tarar-khonje-bangla-films/2 (accessed 11 September 2013) 31 Ibid. 32 Sreemita Bhattacharya, ‘Tollywood in a Festive Mood’, The Times of India. 2011. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011–05–27/news-interviews/ 29590487_1_film-festivals-bengali-cinema-bengali-films (accessed 11 September 2013). 33 Ibid.

References Athique, Adrian, ‘From Cinema Hall to Multiplex: A Public History’, South Asian Popular Culture (Routledge) 9, no. 2 (July 2011): 147, 153. Bhattachrya, Spandan, The Post Liberalization Bengali ‘Parallel’ Cinema: Bhadralok Nostalgia, the Politics of Past-ness, and the Discourse of ‘Difference. Unpublished M.Phil. dissertation, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2011, pp. 135–138. Bhattacharya, Sreemita, The Times of India. 2011. http://articles.timesofindia.india times.com/2011–05–27/news-interviews/29590487_1_film-festivals-bengalicinema-bengali-films (accessed 11 September 2013). Bhoumik, Someshwar, ‘Sattar Dashaker Bangla Chhabi’, in Sattar Dashak by Anil Acharya, pp. 28–43, Kolkata: Anustup Publication, 1981.

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Biswas, Pradip, ‘Yash Chopra for Revival of the Bengali Film Industry’, Screen, 6 December 2002: not available. Chatterjee, Shoma A., Times of India. 2003. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes. com/2003–07–06/news-interviews/27178157_1_aishwarya-rai-rabindranathtagore-tagore-novel (accessed 14 August 2013). Datta, Sangeeta, The Telegraph. 2011. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110404/jsp/ entertainment/story_13805636.jsp (accessed 8 September 2013). Deshpande, Manisha, indiaglitz. 2005. http://www.indiaglitz.com/channels/hindi/ article/12533.html (accessed 1 September 2013). Ghosh, Abhija, ‘Panel Discussion: The Audacious Bird of Dusk. Cinema and Rituparno Ghosh – A Film Festival’, New Delhi: The School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2013. Ghosh, Somen, Bagla Cinemar Palabadal/The Changing Phase of Bengali Cinema, Calcutta: Shyamali, 1990. Gooptu, Sharmistha, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2010. Gupta, Pratim D., The Telegraph. 31 October 2005. http://www.telegraphindia. com/1051031/asp/calcutta/story_5420837.asp (accessed 15 June 2014). Mohta, Shrikant, Personal Interview by Author (18 October 2011). Mukherjee, Pradipta, Business Standard. 2008. http://www.business-standard.com/ article/sme/bengal-movie-industry-set-for-revival-108090101079_1.html (accessed 2 September 2013). Mukherjee, Roshni and Ganguly, Ruman, Tollywood Has Room for All, Calcutta: Calcutta Times, 2011. ———, The Times of India. 3 July 2011. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ entertainment/bengali/movies/news-interviews/Tollywood-has-room-for-all/ articleshow/9085775.cms (accessed 10 June 2014). Mukherji, Udit Prasanna, The Times of India. 2009. http://articles.timesofindia.india times.com/2009–11–10/kolkata/28094472_1_tollywood-bengali-films-priyaentertainment (accessed 10 September 2013). Nag, Anugyan, The Contemporary Bengali Film Industry: From Tollygunje to Tollywood, New Delhi: The School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2012. Nag, Ashoke, The Economic Times. 2011. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes. com/2011–04–30/news/29490800_1_bengali-films-bengali-cinema-mukta-arts/2 (accessed 10 September 2013). Nag, Kushali, The Telegraph. 2009. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090728/jsp/ entertainment/story_11288039.jsp (accessed 2 September 2013). Nag, Kushali and Das, Mohua, The Telegraph. 2009. http://www.telegraphindia. com/1090807/jsp/entertainment/story_11329567.jsp (accessed 8 September 2013). Raha, Partha, Bangla Chalachchitra Kathakatha O Anyanya Prabondho, Kolkata: Ratna Publication, 2004. Reporter, Staff, The Telegraph. 2005. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1051025/asp/ calcutta/story_5393046.asp (accessed 15 June 2014).

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Roy, Rajat, Bangalir Chalachchitra O Sanskriti, Kolkata: Sristi Publication, 2001. Saha, Sambit, Rediff.com. 2004. http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/jan/10spec1.htm (accessed 14 August 2013). Sengupta, Ratnottama, The Times of India. 2011. http://articles.timesofindia.india times.com/2011–01–02/kolkata/28380043_1_bengali-cinema-ekti-tarar-khonjebangla-films/2 (accessed 11 September 2013). ———, The Times of India. 2011. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011– 01–02/kolkata/28380043_1_bengali-cinema-ekti-tarar-khonje-bangla-films (accessed 8 September 2013). Sharma, Aparna, ‘India’s Experience with the Multiplex’, India-Seminar, no. 525, May 2003. Sharma, Sanjukta, ‘The Heartbreakers’, article in a newspaper, New Delhi: The Times of India, 2014. Smith, Geofrey Nowel, ‘Weimer Industry’, in Oxford History of World Cinema, by Geofrey Nowel Smith, 546, London, New York, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. The Telegraph. 2008. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080721/jsp/entertainment/ story_9575991.jsp (accessed 30 November 2013). The Telegraph. 2008. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080721/jsp/entertainment/ story_9575991.jsp (accessed 10 December 2014).

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4 ‘JUST LIKE A FILM STAR!’ 1 The style of being Rituparno Ghosh Sumit Dey

❦ Introduction Rituparno Ghosh seemed to have an ambiguous position in popular media discourses and the Bengali bhadralok public sphere. On one hand, he was celebrated as an award winning film-maker and a legitimate torchbearer of the glorious tradition of Bengali ‘art’ cinema exemplified by Satyajit Ray and the like; on the other, he was censured for his non-normative modishness with transgressive impulses and his alternative sexual preference about which he was rather articulate. It appears from the popular media and public discourses that the bhadralok middle class sensibilities that Ghosh’s cinema aspired to address had a contrapuntal relationship with his unconventional sartorial statements, sexuality and the process of becoming and presenting himself as queer. His image as a sensible film-maker pursuing ‘good taste’ was to a great extent challenged by his unpretentious performance of queerness in public. He rued in an interview: ‘In fact, the respect I used to command has been seriously affected by my decision to proclaim my sexuality’.2 However, for Ghosh, performance was all about presenting oneself before the world; for instance, it included direction, acting, fashion, commenting on culture, reacting to political events, and so on. He indeed played several other roles that are not essentially tied to the director’s seat behind the camera. He reviewed films in newspapers; he became the editor of a leading Bengali film magazine Anandalok and later began to work as the editor of the Sunday supplement (Robbar) of a Bengali newspaper Sambad Pratidin. He engineered certain discernible changes in the content and look of these magazines. He invaded the drawing rooms of Bengali middle class 83

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households via his television chat shows Ebong Rituparno (And Rituparno) and later Ghosh and Company, in which he would indulge in a semiformal adda with the who’s who of different fields in the culture industry with his inimitable intellectual panache, idiosyncrasies and sartorial extravaganza. He appeared in protean avatars in the world of entertainment: as an elocutionist,3 as a judge on TV reality shows4 or as a special guest,5 as a proactive participant in heated political discussions on news channels; he even walked the ramp for a well-known designer and hosted coveted cultural programs. At a later stage of his career, he forayed into acting as well. Three films, two made by other directors and one by him, have seen him performing as an actor. Even prior to his embarkation upon the silver screen, he mentored his niche actors in his desired way in film after film. He also lent his voice to many of his protagonists. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to state that Ghosh had been playing cultural mischief by engaging in a ‘hide-and-seek’ game of sorts: he made his presence felt within the film text either through his actors who talked like him or sometimes even mimicked his mannerisms or through his voice, as I shall examine later. Ghosh has therefore, always performed in absence. Consequently, his status as a director was repeatedly being reconstituted by his role as a performer and celebrity.

Figure 4.1 Rituparno Ghosh, the style icon Courtesy of Abhishek Dutta

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It may perhaps be contended that as a celebrity Ghosh acquired stardom, in the sense that Christine Geraghty understands the term. Through his multiple role playing and different discourses around them, Ghosh quite unequivocally embodies all three aspects of stardom as explained by Geraghty: a celebrity, a professional and performer.6 (I will touch upon and expand on this point as I progress.) Again, on a different note, his status as an auteur too can be read from different aspects of new theoretical undersatnding of an ‘auteur’. I have in mind the proposition of Richard Dyer who sees an auteur in an actor. Ghosh’s rendezvous with the silver screen as an absent performer, perhaps urges one to review this aspect also. This chapter will investigate into the performance of Ghosh’s star text and the varied layers which enabled that construction. It will look into how his auteur status is constituted by such varied kinds of performances. The other important attempt of this chapter will be to enquire into his performance linked to his sartorial style and the expressive nature of his queer identity and how these contexts can be seen in terms of a certain tradition. The texts and contexts that contribute to the style of being Rituparno Ghosh, the star performer, who was much more than just a film-maker, can possibly be given an umbrella term – the ‘Rituparnoesque’. Here, I will take a brief moment to explain the term. I have coined this term7 to combine the manifold aspects of his cinematic and non-cinematic ventures which sees an ‘auteur’ meeting a ‘star’. I have premised this term on the theoretical hinterland of Richard Dyer’s notion of a ‘star’. He argues that stars represent a unique opportunity to study changing notions of the ‘self’. According to him, a ‘star’ discourse emerged as commentary extended to the off-screen life of film performers.8 Dyer argues that, in many cases, stars’ off-screen personalities were at least as important as their on-screen personas in shaping our perceptions of their meanings. Off-screen personalities must also be understood as constructed personalities, just as we understand the characters stars play in films to be constructed.9 In the present instance, I would like to appreciate the on-screen and off-screen personalities of stars as performed personalities. Hence, this chapter, while navigating through the map of Ghosh’s performative journey, will try to see whether a theoretical dialogue among new concepts of ‘auteurism’ and ‘stardom’ is possible.

The emergence of a media icon Rituparno Ghosh’s media presence was characterised by three overlapping phases. First, he came to the limelight in press discourses owing to his ardent loyalty to the tradition of Bengali ‘parallel cinema’, exemplified particularly by Satyajit Ray. Second, when he became the editor of the leading 85

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popular Bengali film magazine Anandalok, readers got a glimpse of the director’s creative and thoughtful mind. This period saw him writing about cinema and stardom, among other things. He later expanded his horizon through his cultural commentary in the editorial columns of Robbar (the Sunday supplement of Sambad Pratidin, a leading Bengali daily). Third, the moment that made him a household name in Bengal was the Bengali satellite television boom. In 2000, he appeared on ETV Bangla as the host of a popular Sunday evening chat show, Ebong Rituparno. While the programme seemed to contribute much to redefine the notion of masculinity on television, its content redefined televisual experience in the age of satellite TV. Ghosh was reincarnated again in the same role after seven years when he hosted Ghosh & Company on Star Jalsha. This time, Ghosh would project a more commanding voice and a more nonchalantly self-confident image, owing to his awareness of the tremendous power he wielded within the Bengali culture industry.10 This powerful image of Ghosh persisted in various other television programmes that invited him as a guest. The media constantly cast the spotlight on him and Ghosh barely disappointed them. He uninhibitedly talked and wrote about everything: his childhood, his school, relationship with his parents, outings with friends and teammates, on littérateurs and film stars, his choice of subjects and actors for his films, and his sartorial extravagance, apart from intriguing reflections on his androgyny and queerness. Ghosh continued to enjoy general media attention, since his second film Unishe April earned critical fame and success. The Bengali media immediately labelled him as a suitable heir to the glorious realist-modernist tradition of ‘parallel’ Bengali cinema, exemplified especially by Ray. For instance, a leading Bengali author in his review of Ghosh’s Dahan praised him as follows: The promise that Rituparno Ghosh created about himself with Unishe April has not only been fulfilled by Dahan but his position as the probable future of Bengali cinema and as a director of the highest order have also been secured by it.11 Such praise and patronage continued as Ghosh went on to make critically acclaimed films one after the other. Most of the press discourses highlighted his aesthetic sensibility that was perceived as the hallmark of ‘good’ cinema. Before and after the release of each of his films, the media conducted elaborate interviews with him and he spoke on the subject matter, the actors, the technicians, and the background to the film rather candidly. The major acknowledgement from the media perhaps came with the label 86

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that he is ‘the most powerful director of Tollywood’, with the ability to rope in Bollywood superstars like Aishwarya Rai and Amitabh Bachchan who agreed to work in his films, compromising with the sordid conditions of the Kolkata studios and low budget on which Bengali film-makers were compelled to work.12 While one section of the media was engaged with his art and work, the other observed the person, Rituparno, his sartorial style, his idiosyncrasies and speculated about his sexuality. As Tithi Sarkar writes: Rituparno Ghosh’s life is one unending celebration. National awards have come to be associated with every film of Ghosh . . . [His] sartorial statements raised eyebrows and there has been plenty of speculation about his sexuality.13 Most such news or feature articles talk in some detail about how Ghosh wore ‘ikkat dyed odhnis’ to add to his sartorial finesse,14 comment on his mellifluous voice and his ‘fashion glitterati’-like persona.15 The press also consistently published reports and articles on his androgyny, look, danglers, kohl-lined eyes,16 and sexuality17, especially in the context of his acting and public appearances. He indeed emerged as a distinct personality. In a blog post, Kaustav Bakshi described him as a ‘sensitive’ person, having an unconventional media presence. In his words: . . . my enthusiasm for Unishe April was triggered off by an interview of Rituparno Ghosh that was aired on HMV-FM. Listening to Ghosh, I discovered I had never heard a man speak so sensitively or even for that matter so informally in a public space. Ghosh’s mild voice, his effeminate accents, punctuated remarkably the thoughts he shared. I found myself meeting a very different man. He was not like the other filmmakers. I had heard Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen before, and was awed by their wisdom. But I never struck a chord with them. Rituparno’s emotionally charged talk . . . almost seduced me into admiring him.18 Such refined sensibilities in Ghosh are also evident in his editorial columns written for Anandalok and Robbar. They bring out the culturally sensitive mind of a person who always foregrounds the softer co-ordinates of life through his presence. His editorials are real treats for the Bengali literati. His editorials for Anandalok highlighted his cinephilia and penchant for the star-studded tinsel town. Occasionally, they turned out to be sneak previews of his films at different stages of their making. He was instrumental 87

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in changing the very look of the magazine – so much so that the advertisement for the magazine added a catch line Ulte dekhun, palte gechhe (‘Flip through and see it’s changed’). His editorial column ‘First Person’ in Robbar revealed his association with cinema, society and culture in general. His first editorial for Robbar came out in 2006, at a time when West Bengal was experiencing a deep political crisis with the issue of land acquisition in Singur. Ghosh articulated his disgust for the Leftist government’s policies, but his voice of dissent was very suave, soft yet argumentative, wise, and very strong. He wrote somewhat consciously that ‘ “Soft spoken” is the easily associable adjective to the personality of Rituparno Ghosh. Readers are probably taken aback in seeing such a soft spoken person as the argumentative editor of Robbar’.19 He, then, went on to say that his soft, mellifluous voice (literally and figuratively) has nothing to do with his argumentative and critical mind. Thus, he emerged as an ‘alternative’ voice in the Bengali cultural spectrum, a voice which always impressed by its uniqueness. Rituparno Ghosh’s visible entry into the Bengali public sphere happened with his appearance as the host of a television chat show called Ebong Rituparno. This programme came up at a time when West Bengal had just started to experience the satellite television boom. The first episode of the programme was telecast in April 2000 on the newly launched Bengali satellite channel ETV Bangla that aspired to match ‘the distinctiveness of rich Bangla culture with qualitative programming that echoes viewers sensibilities’.20 In keeping with the tune of the channel, the programme was conceived as a conversational show that would have the fervour of the Bengali adda. The show would see Ghosh holding casual conversation with his guests, mainly crème de la crème from different fields like film, and the entertainment and culture industries. The list of guests included actors such as Soumitra Chatterjee, Aparna Sen, Madhabi Mukherjee, Supriya Debi, directors like Mrinal Sen, Goutam Ghosh, Anjan Dutta, musicians like Debojyoti Mishra, Rezwana Chowdhury, novelists like Sunil Gangopadhyay, Suchitra Bhattacharya, poets like Joy Goswami, and so on. The choice of his guests reflected Ghosh’s inclination to locate himself within the haloed circle of Bengali culture catering to the intellect and emotions of the lettered Bengali middle class in pursuit of good taste. The setting complimented the theme of the show and his choice of guests. The set replicated the well-decorated drawing room of an upper middle class Bengali family with an uncanny resemblance with some of the interior spaces of his films. The set conceived by Ghosh himself consisted of different kinds of show pieces, table tops, photo frames, wall hangings, paintings, sun blinds, a portrait of Tagore’s, designer lamp shades, indoor plants, an antique centre table surrounded by wooden chairs, sofas with comforting cushions, and 88

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above all bookshelves full of a wide range of books from classical literature to cinema. Amidst all these, the host appeared in his clean shaven, curly haired, designer kurta clad, bespectacled look. To add to the look, he wore Earlier Indian words have not been italicized on his right shoulder – a perfect sartorial embodiment of bhadralok suaveness. He would indulge in extremely informal conversation with the guests, so much that he would often call them by their nicknames and address them in an informal way, too. Dipesh Chakraborty, in his thought-provoking analysis of Bengali adda, mentions how in the 20th century the adda became a site for exchanging thoughts by the informed and culturally inclined lettered Bengali middle class. He demonstrated how adda broke the mere gossip-oriented confines of pre-modern public spheres and metamorphosed into an elite practice of exchanging creative and constructive ideas, with drawing rooms of middle class houses being the major space for such discussions.21 Such homebound, vivacious conversations would vanguard and condition the urban, upper middle class bhadralok culture that was at its nascent stage at the beginning of the 20th century.22 Interestingly, at the dawn of the new millennium, this model of adda was being replicated televisually through this programme. That way, Ebong Rituparno had the fervour of popular interview-based programmes on satellite TV like Rendezvous with Simi Garewal or Koffee with Karan (these were contemporary chat shows) in terms of the informal ambience and presentation. While speaking of television chat shows at an international level, mention may be made of The Oprah Winfrey Show which, in its 25 years of popular existence, saw notable newsmakers and celebrities speak generously about their public as well as private lives with utmost ease, thanks to the cozy, casual ambience and Oprah’s powerful, charismatic yet casual presence. Ghosh seemed to have understood the varied layers of both the adda and the genre of TV chat show and used them quite well! Thus, on the one hand, the programme, that is, Ebong . . ., highlighted the aesthetic sensibilities of a true Bengali gentleman, well read and eloquent enough to exchange views with equally talented and celebrated personalities belonging to different fields of culture. But, on the other hand, it by design focused on the interviewer’s style, mellifluous voice and mannerisms. Ghosh himself was very hesitant about doing the programme in the beginning. He was afraid that he might invite abrasive criticism from the viewers for his ‘effeminacy’ and ‘fashion’.23 But the programme turned out to be a great success because of its rich content. In Ebong Rituparno’s sequel Ghosh & Company, aired on Star Jalsha, Ghosh reappeared as a host almost after eight years. This time, several changes had taken place. The title montage of the programme had Ghosh preparing 89

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himself for the show; he appeared in his much talked about androgynous look with bald head, eyes done up with kohl, earrings, jewellery, long dresses with frills, designer cloaks, Patiala pajamas, turban, and colourful dupattas, while confidently striding and performing certain quotidian chores on the set and talking to his guests with ease, in homely, semi-reclining posture. He appeared to be more comfortable with his experimental modishness and the performing body. He started appearing in other TV shows and cultural programmes flaunting this look. He saw this reappearance as the return of a confident Rituparno, sure about his image in the media. Ghosh thus challenged the normative notion of the masculine stereotype on television. As compared to actors in TV serials or male newsreaders, his self-defined sartorial style and softness had an element of rareness. His screen appearance possibly destabilised the television viewer’s preconceived notion of masculine stereotypes. Interestingly, this situation resembled Joshua Gameson’s take on tabloid talk shows on television. He observed: For people whose life experience is so heavily tilted toward invisibility . . . TV talk shows are a big shot of visibility and media accreditation. It looks, for a moment, like you own this place.24 That is, to say that prior to Rituparno Ghosh’s confident reappearance in Ghosh and Company, on Bengali television with his performed queerness there was no such queer presence. His visible markers of queerness called for a major amount of media accreditation. With this, he was able to curve a niche for himself in the media. However, the discomforting figure of Ghosh led to the production of several discourses – both friendly and adverse – especially in the media and virtual public sphere.

When the wardrobe spoke volumes The discomforting figure of Rituparno Ghosh that came in the media with Ghosh and Company gave rise to speculations that he was probably undergoing a sex reaffirmation surgery. Quite famously, Ghosh did not identify himself essentially as a woman, contrary to the commonsensical views about him. He rather saw himself as an androgynous man. He considered androgyny as a privilege for any artist. In this case, he drew inspiration from his cultural mentor, Rabindranath Tagore.25 He mentioned that Tagore’s androgyny was thematically played out in his novel Ghare Baire/Home and the World (1916), in which he cast the character of Nikhilesh in the mould of birahini who awaits her lover. Nikhilesh waits for his wife to come back from the path of infidelity. This, according to Ghosh, has a subversive 90

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potential as Tagore infused his hero with remarkable feminine sensibility.26 Ghosh pointed out how several Tagore songs seem to be narrated by an ambiguous, androgynous voice, and the gender of the loved one in these songs often remained elusive. Since ‘pronouns and verbs in the Bengali language are not gender sensitive . . . the mysterious and mystical ambiguity of androgyny is a treasure. . . .’, commented Ghosh.27 His own practiced androgyny, he believed, comes via this kind of influence. Hence, it can perhaps be said that he inherited the notion of androgyny from the Bengali literary and cultural traditions. Even otherwise, androgyny is not very unfamiliar in Bengali culture as at least two of the adored Bengali icons Sri Chaitanya and Sri Ramakrishna are considered androgynous. Thus, in the same way as his cinema is considered a continuation of a tradition, Ghosh’s androgyny too can be seen in the light of tradition. Kaustav Bakshi correctly observes: The clothes he has always sported are never strictly masculine; in fact, he had made fashionable the uttariya as a desirable accessory to be worn with long kurtas amongst Bengali men. The feminine edge he brought to men’s clothing was passed off as a mere fashion statement initially, but the political implication of this negligible transgression was felt by many. (Initially, however, Ghosh claimed that he was merely reviving an ancient tradition in which jewellery and the uttariya were integral to the male attire.)28 His sartorial style evolved over the years. His fashion, however, became conspicuous in recent years with a gradual queer shift in his wardrobe. He was described as a ‘creative person with a little unbridled look’29 after he had won the National Award for his film Unishey April. Press photographs would often carry images of him wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The recent images showed him flaunting his ostentatious garments accessorised with junk jewellery, kohl and makeup. Ghosh’s own explanation was that he did not want to abide by normative codes of dressing. Therefore, what he wore was gender defying and his fashion did not come from nowhere. It has precedence. He believed: The concept of unisex has been monopolized by women. Women can wear men’s clothes. The problem arises when men wear women’s clothes. Whatever I wear has always been worn by men. Wearing things like earrings and necklaces has always been a part of our sartorial history and tradition. These were tagged as feminine frills during colonial rule.30 91

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He was never apologetic for his transgressive attire, although he knew he was frowned upon by many. Rather, he was much too confident of what he was doing; in one of his editorial columns in Robbar, he said he hardly needed an excuse for makeup and dressing up, aamaar ichchhe tukui jothestho [my wish is enough].31 Interestingly, noted fashion designer Sharbari Dutta, who has been designing clothes for men for quite some time now (and has designed for personalities like Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Kapil Dev and M. F. Hussain), also has a similar kind of approach towards changing mindsets when it comes to dressing men. According to her, Indian men were very inhibited when it came to dressing up. Due to the British influence and our colonial hangover, we always considered grey, pale blue or navy blue as masculine colours that make for smart outfits.32 She once said: I wanted to prove that there’s no clash between masculinity and bright colours. Our Indian tradition in menswear is of bright colours and nakshas. So why have we ignored it completely? A three-piece suit is not the only fashion statement for an Indian man. He can also make a statement in traditional Indian clothes.33 Dutta is now busy popularising even sari as a unisex attire. So coincidentally, Ghosh as a practitioner of androgynous fashion and Dutta as a designer were trying to convey that fashion does not need to restrict itself to the socially sanctioned and culturally codified gender binaries. During my fieldwork, I came across one article which was published on the page opposite to the one that carried a review of Ghosh’s Dahan. The article was about how designer cotton jackets, dhotis and so on were gradually becoming a part of genderless and unisex fashion at that time.34 This article following the review of Dahan appeared to be very intriguing; it seemed as if the magazine layout predicted the parallel journey of fashion experiments that Ghosh would be involved with, besides catering to the intellect and emotions of the educated Bengali middle class. Fashion forms a major part of gender discourses, as it has a ‘queer’ dimension to itself and an ability to break conventions and set patterns. For instance, Richard Dyer points out: Feminization of male attire [does] not mean wearing women’s clothes but a readiness to wear bright or pastel colours, to put extra flounce or decoration to an outfit, to do things, in short, that only women were supposed to do.35 92

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Ghosh strongly declared that he would never wear something that is culturally very feminine like a sari unless he needs to wear it for the requirement of a particular character that he is portraying.36 This brings us to the question of defining what masculine fashion is after all. Recent scholarship on masculinity studies emphasises rethinking the masculine and feminine as constructed categories. R. W. Connell, for instance, argues that masculinity and femininity are fluid, culturally constructed categories. Connell writes: To define masculinity as what men empirically are, is to rule out the usage in which we call some women ‘masculine’, some men ‘feminine’, or some actions or attitudes ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ regardless of who displays them . . . the terms masculine and feminine point beyond categorical sex difference to the way men differ among themselves.37 This argument can be extended to fashion. Fashion like sex and gender is a cultural construction. Culturally, certain dresses are strictly associated with women and certain dresses with men. When someone breaks that rule, it immediately becomes problematic. Theoretically, such a deviation should not necessarily put the person concerned into the category of the other gender as the new theories propagate that ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ are broader categories, so much that they incorporate both norms and deviation. By this logic, deviant sartorial practices cannot always be called a case of gender bending. To apply this argument in the case of Rituparno Ghosh, his fashion statements can be seen as having the power of expanding the purview of the male wardrobe. His clothes do not necessarily make him a cross-dresser.38 Even if Ghosh’s attire is discerned as located on the borderline of cross-dressing or transvestism, they cause a ‘category crisis’.39 Transvestism generally problematises, exposes and challenges the very notion of ‘original’ and stable identities. It also ‘. . . calls[s] attention to cultural, social or aesthetic dissonances’.40 In the same manner, Ghosh’s wardrobe can be seen to demonstrate a failure of ‘definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits border crossing, from one (apparently distinct) category to the other’.41 Fashion bloggers have considered Ghosh as one of India’s uniquely fashionable ‘men’. Fashion connoisseur Parmesh Shahni writes: There is a new wave of androgynous dressing coming out of urban India, and I like it very much. In each case, it is a very unique form of individual expression. I’ve silently admired the award-winning 93

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film director Rituparno Ghosh’s several stunning public appearances in the past year. In February, at the Berlin premiere of the film Aareki Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story), in which he makes his acting debut, Rituparno made heads turn with his turban, choker, salwar-kameez, lipstick and eye-liner. Was he dressing in character (he plays two roles in the film, one of a gay director and another of a jatra performer) – or was he just reinventing himself in the public eye? Why does it matter? He was (is!) fabulous, full stop.42 The androgyny of Ghosh underlines queer visibility in media and the public sphere. As Ruth Holliday argues, ‘having been invisible (or pathologized) for so long in writing, the media, law and culture more generally’, now queer identities have been ‘increasingly visible through a number of mechanisms’.43 She believes: The politics of visibility as well as the many everyday cues and codes of dress, gesture or conduct are often used to communicate identity to others of the same or different groups. For example, the development of queer styles such as butch and camp (to name but two) have become signifiers of sexuality and are mapped onto the surface of bodies, not least through clothes.44 Ghosh’s androgyny and fashion thus contribute to the general queer visibility in the media. Theoretically speaking, the queer shift in the wardrobe of Ghosh can possibly be read as a sign of what Jean Baudrillard calls the ‘Transsexual’ era, which erases watertight compartmentalisation between male and female and tends to exchange the infinite convertibility of gender signifiers. According to him: The sexual body has now been assigned a kind of artificial fate. This fate is transsexuality – ‘transsexual’ not in any anatomical sense, but rather in the more general sense of transvestism, of playing with the commutability of the signs of sex.45 Keeping in mind this premise, perhaps, one needs to see how he carried forward this image from the small screen to celluloid, and how they differ or resemble in Kaushik Ganguly’s Arekti Premer Galpo, followed by Sanjoy Nag’s Memories in March and his own Chitrangada. It becomes important to see these performances in the context of Ghosh’s androgyny and sexual 94

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politics in real life. Reading these images together gives birth to a star text that brings together the cinematic and the extra cinematic.

Rituparno Ghosh: the absent performer While speaking of Ghosh’s on-screen performances, the androgynous politics and the extra cinematic, we should perhaps appreciate Ghosh as the absent performer in the films he directed. Being a meticulous person he kept an eye on every minute detail in the films, including the delivery of dialogues, acting and dubbing. More often than not, Ghosh himself enacted or emoted for his female actors to follow. For instance, Raima Sen admits in a commemorative piece that ‘Ritu da would cry behind the camera and I would follow that before the camera’.46 As far as dubbing is concerned, Ghosh would himself dub it first, and then the artiste concerned would imitate that. Ghosh revealed this in his interview with Kaustav Bakshi. He said, ‘I usually do the dubbing myself, and then the dubbing artistes imitate me’.47 What I am trying to emphasise by stating these is that Ghosh was already an actor even before he plunged into acting.48 A closer look at his actors’ gestural economy and emoting can possibly hint at how Ghosh’s own performative persona gets revealed.49 His desire to perform can also be discerned from the fact that in films like Noukadubi, Chokher Bali and Dosor, Ghosh lent his voice to important characters. It is interesting to note that Ghosh lent his voice only for female protagonists in these films.50 So, in this logic, one may perhaps claim that the artistic, performative style of Rituparno, as an actor, was already an absent presence in his work. The director’s celluloid presence stood on the hinterland of his absence performances through other actors.

The reconfigured stardom of Rituparno Ghosh Ghosh’s performer subjectivity, as discussed earlier, perhaps opens up possibilities to read his authorship in different ways. First, his presence as the absent performer in his films preceding the three enacted by him and of course, Arekti Premer Galpo (Director Kaushik Ganguly, 2010), Memories in March (Director Sanjoy Nag, 2011) and Chitrangada (2012) or the ‘Queer Trio’ as Shohini Ghosh fondly puts it,51 with him as an actor, makes me turn to the tricky question often asked within the discipline of Cinema Studies as to whether the actor can be called an auteur. Before getting into the discussion around an actor as an auteur, let me take a quick detour, so as to speak briefly about the ‘Queer Trio’. All the three films have two commonalities: one, all of them has Rituparno Ghosh 95

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as one of the central protagonists; second, they voice several queer concerns. In Arekti Premer Galpo, film-maker Abhiroop and his boyfriend Basu come to Calcutta to shoot a documentary on the colourful onstage and offstage life of Chapal Bhaduri, the well-known female impersonator of Bengali popular theatre. Apart from portraying Abhiroop and Chapal’s marginalised and ostracised positions in society due to their queerness, the film also brings out the issue of homosexuality and non-static sexualities. Abhiroop is different from Chapal. He is informed, sure of his sexuality, that is, he loves to be androgynous. This is almost his political statement. He refuses to be called ‘madam’, despite his flamboyant, androgynous attire, kohl-lined eyes and earrings. He does not identify with a woman, yet refuses to dress up ‘like a man’. His androgyny becomes even poignant when Abhiroop shaves his head. Chapal, on other the other hand, loves his long hair and feminine gait. Again, Abhiroop has an authoritative power that comes from his personality and self-confidence. Chapal’s power comes from his performance. Otherwise, he is a fatalistic person, docile to his companion. He forces androgyny on himself, under given circumstances. The film, through its camera work, foregrounds the bodily gestures and attire of Roop and Chapal to foreground their sartorial politics and sexuality. Memories in March was released soon after Arekti Premer Galpo; the film has been scripted by Ghosh. In this film, he plays the role of Arnab, an advertisement professional. The narrative of the film is about a mother’s coming to terms with her son’s sexuality after his death. Arti Mishra comes to Calcutta after learning that her son died in an accident. She is constantly supported by her son Siddharth’s colleagues Arnab and Sahana. Sahana later reveals that Arnab is Siddharth’s boyfriend. Arti takes time to come to terms with the fact that her son was gay, and after initial repulsion towards Arnab is able to accept him as a friend. Like Abhiroop in Arekti Premer Galpo, Rituparno Ghosh as Arnab occupies the centre of attention in this film. The camera captures him mostly in close-up and mid-close-up observing his gestures and persona. In terms of attire, the character Arnab is quite close to the general androgynous look of Rituparno. He portrays the vulnerability and marginalisation of a queer man through his performance. It seems that the film has a pedagogic tone as it aims at familiarising the audience with queer love and identity. Chitrangada is about gender, identity and performance. The film is about a clash of wishes – society’s wish to see a person in his normative gender and a person’s wish to choose his gender. Tagore’s dance drama Chitrangada here works as a metaphor. Rabindranath Tagore reconfigured the notions of gender and identity in this path-breaking dance drama. Manipur’s king raised his daughter Chitrangada like a boy, as he wanted her to become his 96

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suitable heir. Chitrangada meets Arjuna and gets besotted with him. She desires to become a woman and turns to the god of love, Madana, whose boons promise to make her a beautiful woman for a year. Arjuna, enamoured by her beauty, falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Chitrangada becomes tired of her new-found ‘femininity’ and Arjuna hearing about the masculine princess as she used to be, desires to see her in that form. Finally, Chitrangada reckons her true identity and gender. She returns the boons to Madana before time. Arjun accepts her the way she is. Ghosh adapts the story to a contemporary context. The film showcases a male dancer Rudra’s journey towards self-identification and his crowning wish to choose his gender. Rudra’s father wanted him to be like any other ‘normal’ man recognised by society. He does not like him to dance, as he thought dancing is not a very masculine form of self-expression. Rudra, however, refuses to conform to the norm and wants to be a woman so that he is able to adopt a child with his boyfriend. He further thinks that his gendered identity does not limit the art form of dance through which he expresses his self. Dance transcends his body which goes through a process of transformation. Rudra’s decision to undergo a gender reassignment surgery appears to be a necessity, directed towards a goal – to enable him to adopt a child. He also realises that the body, as a signifier of gender, is subject to medical change and mortality. Therefore, gender identity articulated through corporeality is essentially fluid. Body and performance are at the centre of the film. The film time and again captures Rudra’s body on the verge of a transformation, especially in close-up shots. The film goes to and fro between the corporeality associated with his art and the corporeality of his gender identity. So, one can possibly link the three films on the plane of creative unity, that is, the same actor plays four different queer male characters in them, each character with his uniqueness yet overlapping tendencies. In these films, Rituparno Ghosh plays characters who are performers in their own right. That way, all the three films can be read as a trilogy of sorts. However, Rituparno Ghosh was aware that he was becoming the face of ‘queer cinema of Bengal,’ preaching about different nuances of homosexual identity and relationships by default. He thinks this is not desirable as this repetition might result in a pedagogic monotony.52 He also felt that repetition of almost similar themes in Arekti Premer Galpo and Memories in March ran the risk of harping on the same string within a short time span. But he was happy at the impact these films were able to create in the public psyche.53 Now, in the light of this discussion, it becomes interesting to see how Rituparno Ghosh traverses the dual identity of auteur and actor. Richard Dyer proposes that a film text consists of multiple authorial voices, one of 97

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them being the actor.54 He points out that powerful actors often influence a film text more than the director or the writer. The actor’s presence has been considered an important semiotic signifier. When the actor becomes powerful enough to influence a film text, he can be seen as an auteur. He further seeks to articulate that when a star actor is considered as auteur, the network of the industry which produces the said star becomes important.55 Rituparno Ghosh might not be an acting star in the conventional sense of the term, but his status as a powerful director in Tollywood made him a star. When the actor Rituparno performed in a film, he brought out the star image of the director, Rituparno. He did influence the film texts of other directors in that right. This way, he became a star auteur, which is qualified by the other dimension of authorship that is the director auteur. Ghosh’s stardom, however, does not come only from his powerful image as director, and he also enjoyed the position of a star in the sense in which Christine Geraghty understands the term, as I have already mentioned earlier. According to her, film stardom needs to be rethought vis-à-vis other categories of stardom foregrounded by the media. She observes that while the stardom of a celebrity stems out of the gossip and press discourses regarding the public appearance, social life, style, and the self-sustaining prominence of that person, the stardom of a professional comes through his work and presence, especially on media like television in which his or her fame is highlighted by the acts he/she performs. Again, the performer becomes a star not through his private life so much but through his/her performance in films and other media. Here, the performance skills are drawn attention to, demonstrated vividly and highlighted.56 Through his performances of many roles in both reel and real life, Ghosh embodies the three aspects of stardom as explained by Geraghty. The stardom of Rituparno Ghosh constantly shifted between his performance as an actor and also as a director. In fact, to connect his stardom as a director and a performer, I must mention his obsession with stardom and the glamour world of divas, which gets revealed in his films too. This was unequivocally evident in his films much before he became a ‘Diva’ and star in popular imagination. For example, in Unishey April, Sarojini was a selfconfident star danseuse; in Asukh, Rohini was a melancholic, lonely star; Padmini essayed by Sharmila Tagore in Shubho Muharat, too, was a star of yesteryears; Sudeshna Mitra in Bariwali, too, was a star actor; and finally in Abohoman, budding film star Srimati alias Shikha Sarkar and star thespian Noti Binodini appear in grand ways. Interestingly enough, the role of film magazines, media and popular gossips play important roles in etching out the vivacious stardom of these protagonists. So this aspect can possibly be taken into account while deliberating upon his stardom. This also 98

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seems very complex if seen through a theoretical prism. It is multilayered in nature. In the words of Spandan Bhattacharya: The appeal of Ghosh’s stardom does not only lie in the simplistic acceptance of the ‘difference’ (that comes from his alternative media presence, androgyny, performance and the reception of these), but in the plurality of its meaning making.57 Thus, his stardom as celebrity, professional and performer constitutes the overall style of being Rituparno or the other half of the ‘Rituparnoesque’, which also comprises his auteurism. And this multilayered and multifaceted stardom impacts the reception of him in the industry and in the public psyche. The popularity that Ghosh still enjoys comes from his own auteur texts and his star texts, which are incessantly in dialogue with each other, making him the star director, a star barely ever produced by the Bengali film industry.

Notes 1 I have borrowed this phrase from one of Rituparno Ghosh’s editorials in Robbar, in which he elaborately described how a nurse, awestruck at his makeup regime, exclaimed saying, ‘How beautiful you look! Just like a film star!’ See Rituparno Ghosh, ‘First Person’, Robbar, Kolkata: Sambad Pratidin, 11 March2012, p. 4. 2 Kaustav Bakshi, Interview of Rituparno Ghosh by Kaustav Bakshi – ‘I know my city can neither handle me nor ignore me’. Silhouette, Vol. 3, No. 10, May 2013, p. 12. 3 For instance, Ghosh shared his voice reciting Tagore poems along with artiste Swagatalaxmi Dasgupta titled Jivan Devata. For details, see http://gaana.com/ album/jibon-devata-swagatalakshmi-dasgupta. 4 I have in my mind the example of Mirakkel: Akkel Challenger, telecast on Zee TV. For details, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfciY7Y9L_o 5 For example, ‘Ke Hobe Biggest Fan’. For details, see http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=T2DgdX2ucZQ. 6 Christine Geraghty, ‘Re-Examining Stardom: Questions Texts, Bodies and Performance’. In Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, London: Arnold Publishers, 2000, pp. 183–201. 7 I dealt with the term ‘Rituparnoesue’ in my M.Phil research work. See for details, Sumit Dey, ‘Unpublished M.Phil. Dissertation, Cinema Studies’. Defining the ‘Rituparnoesque’: Rituparno Ghosh and Auteurism, Sexuality and Stardom, New Delhi: School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 2012, p. 8. 8 Richard Dyer, Stars. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1979, 1998. 9 Ibid. 10 By that time, Rituparno was able to carve a niche among the Bengali intelligentsia as a sensible director whose films would fetch the National Award at

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

regular intervals. His editorial pieces were also being adorned by the literati and he became a common face to be seen in the media. Translation mine. See Dibyendu Palit, ‘Ekti Asohay Meyer Jibonto Kahini’, Patrika. Kolkata: Ananda Bazar Patrika, 1998. Kushali Nag, ‘Power List: The People Who Matter the Most in the Studios of Tollywood’. T2, The Telegraph, 21 July 2008. Tithi Sarkar, ‘Director’s cut’. Simply Celebrate. Kolkata: India Today Group, September 2011, p. 82. Chitralekha Basu, ‘Prized Possessions’. Sunday, 29 August–4 September 2001, p. 56. Mo Shah, EGO. 2005. http://www.egothemag.com/?p=86 (accessed 10 July 2012). Reshmi Sengupta, ‘I Don’t Want to Become a Woman – Rituparno Ghosh [interview]’. T2 The Telegraph, 22 December 2010, p. 2. Sudeshna Sarkar, Sulekha.com. 2011. http://newshopper.sulekha.com/rituparnoghosh-takes-the-plunge into-queer-film_news_1295464.htm (accessed 11 July 2012). Kaustav Bakshi, Kaustav’s Arden. 2008. kaustavsarden.blogspot.com/ . . . /humaneimages-of-human-emotions (accessed 8 July 2012). Translation mine. See, Rituparno Ghosh, ‘First Person’, Robbar. Kolkata: Sambad Pratidin, 2006, pp. 4–5. ETV Bangla official Website: http://www.etv.co.in/e-tv-5/index1.php?channel name=Bangla (accessed 5 July 2012). Dipesh Chakraborty, ‘adda: A History of Sociality’, Provincializing Europe: PostColonial Thought and Difference, by Dipesh Chakraborty, New Jersey and London: Princeton University Press, 2000, 2008, pp. 184–213. Ibid. Author’s interview with the director, Kolkata, 18 May 2011. Joshua Gameson, ‘Why I Love Trash’, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Non Conformity, Chicago, London: Chicago University Press, 1998, p. 5. Author’s conversation with Rituparno Ghosh, 30 July 2012, New Delhi. Tithi Sarakar, ‘Director’s cut’. p. 83. Ibid. Kaustav Bakshi, ‘Arekti Premer Galpo: The Yesteryear Female Impersonator, The Post-Liberalize Transvestite and a “Queer” Stereotype’. Paper presented at the national conference ‘Gay Subculture: The Indian Projections’ at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 3–4 April 2012. Shiladitya Sen, ‘Shreshtho Chhobir Porichalok Rituparnor Baktabya’, Anandalok, 1 July 1995, pp. 11–12. Reshmi Sengupta, ‘Man, Woman and Another Man’. T2. Kolkata: The Telegraph, ABP Pvt Ltd, 18 December 2010. Rituparno Ghosh, ‘Putul Khelar Itikatha’, Robbar. Kolkata: Sambad Pratidin, 19 December 2010, p. 8. Smita Roychowdhury, ‘Two Decades in Design’, Calcutta Times. Kolkata: Times of India, 20 January 2011. Ibid. Nibedita Dey, ‘Purush Ebar Notun saje’, Patrika. Kolkata: Ananda Bazar Patrika, 18 April 1998. Richard Dyer, ‘Dressing the Part’. In The Culture of the Queers, by Richard Dyer, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 63–64.

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36 Debshruti Roychowdhury, ‘Rituparno Preme Poren Naki Shudhu .  .  .’, Patrika. Kolkata: Ananda Bazar Patrika, 16 March 2011. 37 R. W. Connell, Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity, 1995, p. 69. 38 For instance, I have in my mind the image of Amjad Khan (who is generally remembered as one of the stereotypical villain characters of Bombay cinema) as the dandy ruler of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, in Ray’s Shatranj ke Khiladi, flaunting chowbandhis, chowrah pajamas, designer cloaks, jewellery, danglers, and kohllined eyes, or for that matter the ethnic costume of a male Kathak danseuse like Pandit Birju Maharaj. Such sartorial practices are familiar as androgynous and are not necessarily identified as exclusively female attire. Of course, one could accuse me of conflating attires related to performance and everyday life. But if the person concerned is Rituparno Ghosh, who considers himself to be a constant performer, then such accusations probably do not hold water. 39 Marjorie Garber, ‘Introduction’. In Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, by Marjorie Garber, New York and London: Routledge, 1992, p. 16. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Parmesh Shahni, VerveOnline, 2010. http://www.verveonline.com/90/spotlight/ parmesh.shtml (accessed 7 July 2012). 43 Ruth Holliday, ‘Fashioning the Queer Self’. In Body Dressing, by Joanne Entwhotle and Elizabeth Wilson, Oxford: Berg, 2001, pp. 215–232. 44 Ibid. 45 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecliptic of Sex’. In Jean Baudrillard: Revenge of the crystal, selected writings on the modern object and its destiny, 1968–1983, ed. and trans. Paul Fossand Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1979, p. 20. 46 Raima Sen, ‘Puropuri Nibharsheel Chhilam’, Prathama, 15 July 2013, p. 46. 47 Kaustav Bakshi, ‘Interview of Rituparno Ghosh by Kaustav Bakshi’, 2013. 48 Author’s telephonic interview with the director, 7 August 2011. 49 Actor Debashree Roy, for example, writes how she had to gesturally imitate Ghosh while emoting for a particular scene in Asukh (The Malaise, 1999). Debashree Roy, ‘Deep Nibhe Gechhe Momo’, Prathama, 15 July 2013, p. 44. 50 The very desire to lend his voice to female protagonists, in the above mentioned films, can perhaps be read as the director’s wish to remain present in a disembodied form, as if to put his signature onto the frame. Perhaps, he learned this art from his master Satyajit Ray himself. In his films, like Pratidwandi (The Adversary) and Agantuk (The Stranger), Ray lent his voice to certain characters. This act could have possibly inspired Ghosh to do the same while choosing to be the voice of female protagonists, unlike his master. Ghosh’s vocal performance perhaps touched its artistic height as he presented a dramatised version of Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Streer Patro (‘A Wife’s Letter’) in a popular Sunday show on Radio Mirchi. For details, see http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=mw4IRn5h9mw. This perhaps calls our attention to his desire to remain androgynous while performing. 51 Shohini Ghosh, ‘The Audacious Bird of Dusk: Cinema and Rituparno Ghosh’, The Audacious Bird of Dusk: Cinema and Rituparno Ghosh-A Film Festival, New Delhi, 13 September 2013. 52 Rituparno Ghosh, ‘Noro Narir Prothagoto Samparko Niye Ek Lokkho Chhobi Hoyechhe Somokam niye Koyekta Hole Khoti ki?’ Cinema Ebong. Kolkata: Rosevalley, 15 April 2011, pp. 25–26.

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53 54 55 56 57

Ibid. Richard Dyer, Star. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1979, 1998. Ibid. Geraghty, ‘Re-examining Stardom’, 2000. Spandan Bhattacharya, ‘Unpublished M.Phil. Dissertation, Cinema Studies’. The Post Liberalization Bengali ‘Parallel’ Cinema: Bhadralok Nostalgia, the Politics of Past-ness, and the Discourse of ‘Difference’. New Delhi: School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2011, p. 137.

References Basu, Chitralekha. ‘Prized Possessions’. Sunday, 29 August–4 September 2001, p. 56. Bakshi, Kaustav. Kaustav’s Arden. 7 June 2008. kaustavsarden.blogspot.com/ . . . / humane-images-of-human-emotions (accessed 8 July 2012). ———. ‘Arekti Premer Galpo: The Yesteryear Female Impersonator, the Post-Liberalize Transvestite and a “Queer” Stereotype’. Paper presented at the national conference ‘Gay Subculture: The Indian Projections’ at Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 3–4 April 2012. ———. Interview of Rituparno Ghosh by Kaustav Bakshi – ‘I know my city can neither handle me nor ignore me’. Silhouette: A Discourse on Cinema, Vol. 3, No. 10, May 2013, pp. 1–12. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘The ecliptic of sex’. In Jean Baudrillard: Revenge of the crystal, selected writings on the modern object and its destiny, 1968–1983, ed. and trans. Paul Fossand Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1979, p. 20. Bhattacharya, Spandan. ‘Unpublished M.Phil Dissertation, Cinema Studies’. The Post Liberalization Bengali ‘Parallel’ Cinema: Bhadralok Nostalgia, the Politics of Past-ness, and the Discourse of ‘Difference’, New Delhi: School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2011, p. 137. Chakraborty, Dipesh. ‘adda: A History of Sociality’. Provincializing Europe: PostColonial Thought and Difference, by Dipesh Chakraborty, New Jersey and London: Princeton University Press, 2000, 2008, pp. 184–213. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity, 1995, p. 69. Dey, Nibedita. ‘Purush Ebar Notun saje’. Patrika. Kolkata: Ananda Bazar Patrika, 18 April 1998. Dey, Sumit. ‘Unpublished M.Phil Dissertation, Cinema Studies’. Defining the ‘Rituparnoesque’: Rituparno Ghosh and Auteurism, Sexuality and Stardom, New Delhi: School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2012, p. 8. Dyer, Richard. Star. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1979, 1998. ———. ‘Dressing the Part’. In The Culture of the Queers, by Richard Dyer, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 63–64. ETV Bangla official Website: http://www.etv.co.in/e-tv-5/index1.php?channelname= Bangla (accessed 5 July 2012). Gameson, Joshua. ‘Why I Love Trash’, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Non Conformity, Chicago, London: Chicago University Press, 1998, p. 5.

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Garber, Marjorie. ‘Introduction’. In Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, by Marjorie Garber, New York and London: Routledge, 1992, p. 16. Geraghty, Christine. ‘Re-Examining Stardom : Questions Texts, Bodies and Performance’. In Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, London: Arnold Publishers, 2000, pp. 183–201. Ghosh, Rituparno. ‘First Person’, Robbar. Kolkata: Sambad Pratidin, 2006, pp. 4–5. ———. ‘Putul Khelar Itikatha’. Robbar Kolkata: Sambad Pratidin, 2010, p. 8. ———. ‘Noro Narir Prothagoto Samparko Niye Ek Lokkho Chhobi Hoyechhe Somokam niye Koyekta Hole Khoti ki?’ Cinema Ebong. Kolkata: Rosevalley, 2011, pp. 25–26. ———. ‘First Person’, Robbar. Kolkata: Sambad Partidin, 2012, p. 4. Ghosh, Shonini. ‘The Audacious Bird of Dusk: Cinema and Rituparno Ghosh,’ The Audacious Bird of Dusk: Cinema and Rituparno Ghosh – A Film Festival, New Delhi, 13 September 2013. Nag, Khushali. ‘Power List: The People Who Matter the Most in the Studios of Tollywood’. T2, The Telegraph, 21 July 2008. Palit, Dibyendu. ‘Ekti Asohay Meyer Jibonto Kahini’. Patrika. Kolkata: Ananda Bazar Patrika, 1998. Roy, Debashree. ‘Deep Nibhe Gechhe Momo’, Prathama. 2013, p. 44. Sarkar, Sudeshna. Sulekha.com. 2011. http://newshopper.sulekha.com/rituparno-ghoshtakes-the-plunge-into-queer-film_news_1295464.htm (accessed 11 July 2012). Sarkar, Tithi. ‘Director’s cut’. Simply Celebrate. Kolkata: India Today Group, 2011, p. 82. Sen, Shiladitya. ‘Shreshtho Chhobir Porichalok Rituparnor Baktabya’, Anandalok. 1995, pp. 11–12. Sengupta, Reshmi. ‘I Don’t Want to Become a Woman – Rituparno Ghosh [interview]’. T2 The Telegraph, 22 December 2010, p. 2. Shah, Mo. EGO. 2005. http://www.egothemag.com/?p=86 (accessed 10 July 2012).

Web links for videos cited http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw4IRn5h9mw (accessed on 5 February 2014). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2DgdX2ucZQ (accessed on 5 February 2014). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfciY7Y9L_o (accessed on 5 February 2014). http://gaana.com/album/jibon-devata-swagatalakshmi-dasgupta (accessed on 6 February 2014).

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5 THE ENDANGERED CITY IN RITUPARNO GHOSH’S EARLY CINEMA OF CONFINEMENT Sayandeb Chowdhury

❦ This chapter makes an attempt to look afresh at the cinema of Rituparno Ghosh from the vantage point of urban cultural studies. Ghosh was at the forefront of a new cinema in the mid-1990s that purportedly ‘brought the Bengali middle classes back to the theatre’. But this claim cannot be vindicated unless it stands up to a range of critiques, especially those enquiring into the nature and scope of this new middle class and how in the initial years of globalisation they located themselves in the imperatives of cultural and global capital. Since class categories are always problematic and part of a larger social and cultural formations, his work must be interrogated accordingly. And in doing so, this chapter hopes to locate Ghosh’s cinema as a major contributor to middle class’s conscious, cultural self-fashioning under globalisation and the construction of their spatial and locational aesthetic. That aesthetic, as this chapter hopes to show, was achieved by a conscious disenfranchisement of the idea of the City, which was part of the broader depoliticisation process that the middle class went through as liberalisation seeped in. In fact, the absence of the city was so total that it would not be an exaggeration to claim that the vanishing city reinforced Ghosh’s cultural authority and created the necessary capital for his kind of cinema to dominate middle class imagination for more than a decade. A detailed critique of Ghosh’s production and appropriation of space further leads us to reinterrogate Ghosh’s apparent critique of phallocentrism in his cinema, which concludes this chapter.

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I The cultural capital of sudden, unexpected and untimely death in a highly sentimentalised social and cultural formation often obfuscates the vigorous critical distance that ideally separates the artiste from his/her art and that art from those who consume it. Rituparno Ghosh’s death in the wee hours of 30 May 2013, in his home in Calcutta, belonged to this unfortunate category. It earned him a degree of immunity from sincere critical evaluation, especially in the popular press, which almost uniformly and without deliberation decorated him with maudlin hyperbole. Ghosh had in fact, in recent years before his death, walked the tightrope between the personal and the filmic with too much alacrity, probing sexual boundaries and limits, both as a person and as a storyteller. In fact, if anything, Ghosh’s films seemed to have somewhat faded to the background while he stood turbaned, behind dark glasses, in cross-dressed flourish, eloquent and intelligent, secure in his queer forthrightness. This fact remained fastened to his posthumous evaluation, making it all the more different to identify and mark out Ghosh the man from Ghosh the artiste. But the fact was that in recent years his cinema, with the exception of Arekti Premer Golpo (2010), a film which he co-wrote and acted in but did not direct, had fanned a coldness of both critical and commercial reception. Moreover, Rituparno, just 51 at the time of his death, was already a veteran in the Bengali cinema industry, which since at least the middle years of the last decade had seen a new crop of film-makers emerge. Ghosh, once the trailblazing new film-maker, the chronicler-in-chief of the new middle classes, was neither ignored nor silenced. But he floated in the discourse as one of the prominent film-makers in Bengal. His films were still awaited, but he had evidently lost the position of pre-eminence he had successfully cultivated for himself since his much-eulogised Unishey April arrived in the cultural life of Bengal in 1995. Ghosh was to complete two decades in film-making soon and increasingly seemed to be battling his own past achievements. His untimely death did cut short this embattled side of Ghosh, though it may have also brought to an end the serious efforts he seemed to have been making to reinvent himself artistically. It is with this understanding that it is necessary to rescue his name from both undiscerning aplomb and premature closure and to situate him within the broader cultural debates in cinema in the last two decades.

II Though the unreleased children flick Hirer Angti (1992) was his first film, it was the sleeper hit Unishey April that brought Ghosh recognition. He 105

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managed to follow Unishey April with a string of critically and commercially successful films in the decade that followed. One must not see commercial ‘success’ as an absolute, unqualified marker but only on a scale. The revenues that Ghosh’s films generated were no match for the box office friendly commercial fare that earned the Bengal film industry its bread.1 However, it was reasonable enough to earn him financiers. Also, Ghosh managed to give his backers the ‘safety’ of awards, his films having had an uncanny sense around accolades at various local and national film platforms. Soon, his films garnered enough attention and managed to marshal its own audience. This audience was not only a significant demography in Calcutta and Bengal, but was also significantly spread across borders in the metropolitan centres in India and in Europe and the United States. Across the borders, there was a sizeable presence of a professional, Bengali speaking, moneyed class with tendentious and variable links to Calcutta and Bengal – their intellectual but inevitably inhospitable homeland. With his films, Ghosh seemed to have sunk deep into their tenuous sense of belonging, their slippery subjectivity, their relentless self-fashioning, and their contentious identity. The liberalised media economy and the new-fangled worldwide web helped his case further. Soon, Ghosh was to find himself as not just a noted film-maker, but also as a cultural powerhouse. His name was to become part of a celebratory cinematic mythology, as the man who brought the middle classes back to the theatres. Ghosh was seen to have singlehandedly retrieved Bengali serious cinema at a time when it was choking under the weight of popular cinema,2 whose disregard for the middle class aesthetic, an aesthetic that was regarded as raison d’être in Bengali cinema’s historico-cultural aura, was becoming ever more assaultive.3 To understand better Ghosh’s centrality in the new cultural economy of Bengali cinema, one must look into the circumstances – social, political and cultural – in which Unishey April was released in 1994, circumstances that are not external to the film’s appeal and its consequent claim as a watershed film in recent Bengali cultural history.

III Any critical debate tracing the genealogy of new Bengali cinema must go back to the death, again shockingly untimely, of Uttam Kumar, the legendary Bengali matinee idol. From mid-1950s to his death in 1980, Uttam Kumar not only had carried the industry’s prospects on the shoulders of his phenomenal popularity, but also gave it a significant aesthetic and cultural modernity.4 Cinematic modernity in Bengal, thanks to Kumar’s overwhelming presence, never could secure for itself a safe ghetto, which 106

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proved to be its biggest windfall. The art-house behemoths – Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak – surely were no catch-all names in cultural hinterlands, but thanks to Kumar and a collective of talented behind-thescenes individuals, Bengali cinema never really relinquished its deeply organic and spacio-cultural links to metropolitan modernity.5 Though the rot started to set in while he was alive, Kumar’s sudden death finally left Bengali cinema bitterly divided into morbid art-house cinema and garish, insipid melodrama. I have written elsewhere6 how the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the ruling dispensation in Bengal since1977 had put its significant weight behind the former, pouring money into what it thought were serious, durable narratives which would cement its self-image as a custodian of high cultural tastes.7 With this favour to the cultural imperative of ‘good cinema’, the Communist Party-led government thought they could help build a repertoire that, in the years to come, would reinforce the party’s own founding mythology through cinematic memory. But in spite of their formidable patronage, through the 1980s and early 1990s, serious Bengali cinema was a washout.8 Popular cinema, on the other hand, having lost both public and institutional backing, sought out the lowest common denominator – by cutting costs and looking for desperate patronage in the farthest of places, distant from the tastes of the city and its dominant classes. The so-called ‘good’ cinema made with public money never really took off, while the fate of popular cinema, once the touchstone of Bengali cultural taste, was to languish in total abandonment. The urban middle class was complicit in both these ploys, buying into the cultural redemption the Communist Party was offering. The most visible impact of this decline of a public cinema culture was felt in two aspects. The physical space of the single theatres, suffering heavy losses, started to wind up. Second, the substantial patronage and energy of the middle class found new areas of concentration. Bengali cinema’s cherished space and spectatorship of the metropolitan centres in Bengal and most identifiably in Calcutta evaporated, changing the experience of going to cinema forever. Instead, the drawing room and the television became a somewhat lame substitute for the middle classes’ cultural engagement. Television, still a public broadcasting engine, largely dished out family entertainers and cinema of yore. Resultantly, a whole new generation grew up in the 1980s and 1990s on the staple of old Bengali movies on television and faced with the possibility of having seen not a single specimen of Bengali cinema in the theatres.9 The first ripple of change was felt with the arrival of liberalisation in the mid-1990s. Though Calcutta, owing to the posturing of its communist bosses, was slow to wake up to the possibilities of a new economy, sooner rather than later private financing began to tiptoe its way into serious 107

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cinema.10 One must remember what other alleged riches the early years of liberalisation were to bring. Among the significant developments was the broadening of the market and goods, easy loans and access to consumer articles, a heightened exposure to global issues through a new liberalised media economy, new possibilities thrown up by telecommunication technology, and so on. There were also factors like the swelling of the middle class in size and purchase power, the manifold reach and scope of televised entertainment, the arrival of a young crop of actors and technicians bred largely in the television format, and new money that could come to the entertainment industry without government gatekeeping. Ghosh’s debut in 1994 must be seen within the broader context of these developments.11 Having found the climate suitable for his kind of cinema, Ghosh managed to start a new dialogue with the urban middle class, a segment that was itself consistently on the increase throughout the first decade of liberalisation. Unchained from the burden of being government-approved tableaux, like in the years of CPM funded ‘art cinema’, Ghosh’s films had consciously set out to depoliticise its contents and environs to create a universe of its own, a universe of the class which chiefly patronised it: doggedly self-conscious, strenuously autotelic, unrepentantly isolationist, and deeply consumerist. Ghosh’s greatest joy was to throw a group of middle and upper middle class characters into a tightly controlled domestic ecosystem in which they were tested, tensions would mount, passions would play their turn, and the possibilities of subtle melodrama were to be fully realised. Ghosh’s chamber drama set pieces were sharpened with sartorial attention to make it fit into this tightly lit, closely observed, neatly packed environs of the posh house where the drama was usually set. Several films, from Unishey April, through Dahan (1998), Asukh (1999), Utsab (2000), Shubho Muharat12 (2003), and Dosar (2006), wooed the middle classes with their story. Having relished watching ‘themselves’ on screen, the middle class went back home from the theatre contended. After all, they must have thought, this was what sophisticated cinema must do to keep alive its cultural aura, its baggage of seriousness. Having denied a chance to partake in cinematic narratives for over a decade, the middle classes across towns and cities in Bengal and the Bengali demography outside India lapped up Ghosh’s films as their own. Ghosh found eager audience who also doubled as an expanding market. The new chamber cinema was born. Soon, this kind of self-same cinema became the staple of serious cinema in general, a benign formula. The conversion of his limited celluloid vision into an apparent asset for Bengali cinema as a whole was not entirely to his doing, but his vanguardism in creating a ‘new’ Bengali cinematic taste makes it impossible to hand Ghosh any exemption. 108

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To understand how Ghosh managed to create and sustain his much-feted middle class narratives, we must understand how his early cinema conspicuously becomes a ‘cinema of confinement’ and how it manages to create an operative distance from both the Cinema of the City13 and the City itself. To begin with, let us look at an excerpt from an interview of Rituparno Ghosh at the Asia Society in New York where he talks about Calcutta: Calcutta is not a very high-brow city. It is a very ordinary, plain city where you can mix with different kinds of people; it is not a bureaucratic city, it is not a clinical city. It is a very warm, pulsating, vibrating city, almost like New York, and certain areas of London remind me of Calcutta too. It is busy, there are people walking on the streets all the time, jostling against each other, there is constant energy and complete over-reaction to everything: when people in Calcutta are happy, they’re crazy, when they’re angry, they’re crazy as well! In Calcutta you see everything that a Bengali has in a slightly refined and filtered form, so it makes the city very interesting.14 Such exaltation usually borders on bombast, but Ghosh still manages to invoke the apparent exuberance of the city of his birth. Such a salutation to Calcutta is not new of course, but neither are the various discontents that challenge Calcutta’s unique, complex and hard to classify charm. But in his films is there a Calcutta that he exults about? Is there a teeming, cheek by jowl, crepuscular, cacophonic, empathetic, and ever-clammy city in Rituparno’s cinemascape? Evidently not!15 A critical look at some of his early films, starting with Unishey April, will hopefully bring us nearer to this claim. In an interview with Kaustav Bakshi, Ghosh had detailed the germination of his first prominent film. The story of Unishe April was largely inspired by Ray’s Jalsaghar. I was watching the film on Doordarshan, when the story idea of Unishe April came to me. You know, watching a film on television can change your response to it; for television facilitates a more intimate viewing, and a more intimate connection with the characters in the film. To a large extent, my experience of watching Jalsaghar on television made me read the film in a new light: I saw the film as a man’s muchcherished relationship with his mansion. Almost immediately, the idea of a story with a retired dancer as protagonist and her intimate relationship with her house came to my mind. The character 109

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of the daughter, which eventually superseded the mother, was conceived much later. (emphasis mine)16 The inevitable response to this excerpt would be to find similarities between Ray’s film and that of Unishey April, which to be honest are hard to locate. I will be more interested in the fact that Ghosh ‘found’ his film through an ‘intimate viewing’ experience on television. So it is not the film but the medium that attracts my attention. If what Ghosh claims is true, what indeed he borrowed from his watching Jalsaghar/The Music Room was not the plot of Unishey April (which anyway was borrowed from Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata) but the experience of intimacy he felt with television – a severely constricted, formulaic, middling, in other words, non-cinematic space. Hence, it will be a mistake to see Ghosh’s first major film as having aesthetic connections with Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece. Instead, what struck Ghosh was how he could locate his own sensibilities more profitably in the television format, a format whose intimacy, he must have thought, would outdo its severe limitations. So, when Ghosh arrived on the Bengali screen, he was in no way building upon a legacy of great cinema of the past but merely transferring the tried-and-tested intimacy of television into the format of celluloid.17 His audience, too, so long unused to the viewing experience of a large screen format and by now addicted to an uncritical reception of bedroom television, warmed up to his narrative space as much as they warmed up to his narrative content. Ghosh responded to this demand by returning again and again to the visual, chamber drama format: stagey in its management of space,18 confined in its narrative logic, private in scope, and deeply middle class in concern. It is entirely through this set of storytelling motifs – heightened interiority, protracted conversations, endless close-ups and fade-ins, and measured twists of narrative – that Ghosh achieved the intended dénouement. His films were hence the story of the middle classes told in their preferred scopic format. Either way, the new chamber cinema became de rigueur of the new middle class.19

IV Unishey April, a watered-down, unacknowledged adaptation of Autumn Sonata, concerns the day in the life of Sarojini, a famous danseuse whose daughter, the distant and lonely Aditi, arrives after finishing her medical school. It happens to be the day Sarojini’s husband died years ago leaving behind a young Aditi. The film opens with the arrival of news that Sarojini had won a prestigious award. In response to the excitement of 110

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the award and the consequent noise around her mother, Aditi pushes herself further and further into isolation thinking only of her father, whose absence becomes ever more conspicuous when compared to her mother’s self-absorption. The mother and daughter’s sentiments runs against each other till it reaches a peak, after which things start to settle down. Clearly, this film, in spite of Ghosh’s claims on the contrary, was not inspired by Ray at all but entirely by Bergman. However, any comparison with Bergman cinematically would be superfluous, which I have tried to enumerate later in the chapter. When one watches Unishey April closely one cannot help but be struck by how dramaturgical, non-cinematic the writing is. Ghosh’s camera pans simply between one room and the next, from one set of conversation to the next, from one sequence of close-ups to the next. Some films do demand rigorously confined spaces to make it imperative to its restive drama. But in Ghosh, as we will see, confinement became an unfortunate, self-referential trope. Because once this formula managed to hold forth with Unishey April, he repeated himself in film after film. It is hence imperative to establish the critical paradigm in the early cinema of Ghosh through its unrepentant internality – a parcelling out of larger conceptions of space and place into metonymic, drawing-room dramaturgy, a chambering of orchestrated relationships away from the politically volatile, lived, identifiable vestiges of the city of Calcutta, where the films were apparently based. Clearly, he was not interested in cinema in its broad, sweeping, spatial, throbbing, scopophilic largesse,20 but cinema that abjures its original scopic claims for a copious, sanctimonious, claustrophobic internality. One can surely demand this to be Ghosh’s signature style, all the more because having struck gold with his first major film, Ghosh found it logical to repeat himself. But, at the same time, it is important to locate his cinematic habitus in the wider cultural taxonomy of Calcutta/Bengal, for which one must critically analyse the limitations of his style. And moreover, as I have tried to show, his style is not foreign to the appeal of his films, their commercial viability with a class that Ghosh has unfailingly addressed and repeatedly mined. Consider Dosar, an otherwise luminous film in monochrome, made in 2006. The premise of the film is promiscuity, as are in most of his films. On his return from a rendezvous outside the city with his girlfriend, Kaushik’s car meets with an accident that injures him brutally and kills his companion Mita. The accident forces Kaberi, Kaushik’s wife, into a split between her duty to nurse her husband and the emotional detachment his infidelity provokes. Needless to say, this is as chambered a dramatic material as it could be and Ghosh makes no effort to exercise any other option. The result is that, after a full decade after Unishey April, one sees the same film all 111

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over again – two characters drifting apart in intimate space, confrontation, near-breakdown, and then sudden reconciliation, every fault line evoked in aching domestic detail. Ghosh’s fourth film Asukh had pushed this tendency of detailing to its extreme. In this film, a successful actress, while slowly coming to terms with the supposed infidelity of her lover, starts to suspect her own father when her ageing mother’s protracted illness hints momentarily at the possibility of immunity deficiency. Her fears are not only proved erroneous, but also she comes across as no more matured than an irritating and fidgety adolescent, throwing accusations as easily as owning up to her mistakes. But the film’s real failure was in its inability to salvage the thinness of the story which Ghosh had forcefully stretched into a two-hour chamber drama. Devoid of any real sense of tension and any real empathy for the grim-reaping protagonist, the film seemed like a silly, tiresome medley of dimly lit scenes with a meticulous, obsessive attention to the banalities of everyday life. Such tender attention to pointless detailing as seen in Asukh and Dosar may remind one of French avant-gardist Chantal Akerman. However, like Bergman, the association is fortuitous, because Ghosh is incapable of either intellectualising loneliness or forging an experiment of layered time, both actual and cinematic. Even when his camera does manage to tread outside the four walls of designer bedrooms, the city is usually empty, devoid of its humungous humanity, almost deserted. In Dosar, for example, the city emerges only as passing scenery from a taxi, and that too only around the total emptiness of the green space in the heart of the city. Another scene set in the city is when characters from a subplot hotly debate the state of paralysis in their adulterous relationship (again) on an empty stretch on the bank of the river Hooghly. In another scene, Kaberi, while waiting for her husband to emerge into consciousness, waits in the hospital corridor while outside a solitary corporation waste van glides down an abandoned road. So conspicuous is the effort to depopulate the outdoor that it raises serious curiosity and concern about what kind of city Ghosh’s narratives endanger. Dahan, a film about sexual assault, marital rape and the luridness of legal scrutiny has a similar visual distance from the city. In this film, the camera sets out to capture a small stretch of the city, empty and barren again, only when Romita, the assaulted woman, writes confessional letters to her sister in Canada. 9, Golf Club Road, the address of her in-laws and the site of most of the drama in the film, remains just an address, unqualified by any specific detailing, any neighbourhood and any real, physical habitation. Except for some minor scenes, the film largely moves between the home of Jhinuk, a conscientious school teacher, and Romita, the housewife and 112

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battered woman of the assault. Their embattled lives as the saviour and the saved become the crux of the drama. Here too, like Dosar, the drawing room, the bedroom, the lighted premises of the elite clubs and restaurants, the chatty school classroom, and the daunting confines of the courtroom become metonymic of the city itself. Even the pivotal scene of the assault of Romita and her husband remains clumsy, to say the least, with Ghosh preferring to narrate the sequence of events mostly through apathetic passers-by sitting inside vehicles till Jhinuk comes to the rescue. Unlike his other films of the time, Dahan’s dramatic potential, because it was based on a true incident and a popular novel based on that event, had saved the film from becoming another innocuous pontification on promiscuity.21 But that did not mean that the film could evolve into a realistic commentary on the city’s hidden but festering sleaze and its overwhelming parochial and patriarchal authority. Like its peers, Dahan too triumphs in its obsessive love of the interior space to create the necessary dramatic tension, thanks to which the arrogance of sexual crime and the legal impunities offered to the well-heeled remain foreign to a frame confined to sequestered, isolated moments. The tension never manages to spill out into the city, contributing to its larger meaning-making process.

Figure 5.1 A postcard with a still from Utsab Courtesy of Sangeeta Datta

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In Shubho Muharat, a film inspired, this time officially, by Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple whodunit The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side, Ghosh continues with his usual concerns. This time, the narrative ‘justifies’ his logic of conceited space because the Indianised version of Miss Marple, like her original, never leaves her home. In the original story, Marple does visit the scene of crime, the Gossington Hall. But in keeping with Ghosh’s dogged logic of internality, Rangapishi (Marple) is denied even that. She spends all her time at home, picks up her cues from television, film magazines and newspapers, and uses the information gathered by her journalist niece to crack the case. In fact, Rangapishi’s homebred intelligence is a special highlight of the film’s drama, which tries to juxtapose her eye for detail from within the confines of her home with the cavalier enquiry of the police, who keep missing out on clues. In this film too, all possibilities of contact between the characters and the city are severed. The city is banished into a vast unknown, kept behind the closed doors in carefully arranged confinement of the rooms – be they the house (or houses), the film studio or other, inevitably refined interiors. One scene in the film becomes symptomatic of this tendency. While on a date with a police officer who is investigating the case, Rangapishi’s niece Mallika parks their car on an open space in the city only to recoil in horror when poor children accost them for alms. They readily pull up the windows of the car and move out. Clearly, even if Ghosh’s comfortable, bourgeoisie space unlocks itself for a moment, it takes no time to recoil back to its sequestered interiority and locks out the dirt of the city’s nether apparitions. In Utsab, Ghosh apparently manages to create a site that is more intrinsic to its plot than others.22 Utsab is located outside the city in an old mansion that has seen better days. Here, during the four days of the Durga Puja, a family gathers every year. Their mother is the sole inhabitant of the mansion. The film opens with the hint that the house, the last residual connect between the members of family scattered in various parts around Calcutta, could be sold to a cousin. Ghosh repeats the close-fitting scenario again (not for a single frame does the camera leave the house) but this time with a mythological design: the matriarch and her two daughters and two sons are like the Durga who visits the earth with her four children. The earth goddess’s home for four days of festivity stands in for the house, the ancestral bhite23 of Bhagabati,24 the mother. We learn that a cousin, who on allegation of incestuous affair with the elder daughter was banished from the house years ago, now wants to buy the house. The situation is further complicated by the current crises that each sibling is facing – the odds and ends usual to the aspirational middle classes: insecurity at the workplace, vacuous mid-life meddles, unhappy marriages, funding children’s education, 114

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and so on. A hint of incest between cousins now growing up hovers again around the house while the one in the past that was erased comes back to irritate. The tensions, however, are resolved rapidly as festivities come to an end. The house is saved for the time being and fractured relations are, even if temporarily, restored.

V The total absence of the city in Utsab and the endless references to the power it exerts over the family is symptomatic of Ghosh’s larger world view. We have tried to see how in film after film, Ghosh’s characters seek to freeze the contours of their confines, declare external agency unwarranted and deny any associative reference to the world at large. And yet in his films, the city repeatedly seduces, weans away, provokes and petrifies, and ushers in fractured aspirations. However, the city is also conspicuous by its absence, severely banished, circumscribed, and almost always stopped at the gates.25 But why is Ghosh so obdurate in making any allowance to anything that is external to his confined environs and to the middle classes’ selfish needs? The answer perhaps lies in Utsab. In this film, by substituting the mythical earth for the confines of the home, Ghosh’s reversal of the home and the world is total. And this home is marked by its non-denominational physicality, like a play, where the space is determined by the square-foot of the stage, where characters converse on a seemingly endless loop, where props stand in as signifiers of external objects, where painted walls and pasted papers signify the absent weight of the city. But what does one mean by mining of the needs of the middle classes? One way of connecting selfishly to the city is to have the utilities taken care of. In Ghosh’s films, the needs of the professional middle class are fulfilled by a retinue of service people: chauffeurs, maids, babysitters, nurses, sweepers, watchmen. They are always in the shadows of Ghosh’s dimly lit chic interiors, always an unquestioning, servile presence behind the burgeoning consumer needs of the middle class which foreground his narrative and aesthetic space, a space which is itself a catalogue of merchandise and riches made available to the newly moneyed middle classes. This is the height of the consumerist ethic that was unleashed by neo-liberalism, an ethic in which there is both an unquestioning enforcement and a selfcongratulatory jouissance about the efficacy of capital to monetise not just goods but also relationship and services. The other motif of the city’s metonymic presence in Ghosh’s films is the telephone. In every early film of his, the telephone is the link to the 115

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external world. Its presence is not just constant but almost imperative, like a narrator that creates and resolves tension in the film, disrupts and heals. The dependence on the telephone sometimes becomes so obsessive and ostentatious that one wonders if his films are located in a mythic space, a sort of cinematic outback where the telephone brings in the news from a world afar. Hence, Ghosh’s city, if any, is not Calcutta, contrary to his many claims. His films, non-denominational as they are, can be based anywhere as long as there is a telephone. This is the Calcutta of the post-1990s, fuelled by real estate boom, luxury condominiums and protected habitations. To extend Gyan Prakash’s argument about the ‘urban turn’26 in the Indian context, this was a moment when the middle class finally and fully uncoupled itself from seeing the city as part of any nationalist imagination. The new bourgeois city, as Partha Chatterjee argues,27 grew outside the sphere of ‘the governed’ and sought to provide a new urbanism that is in service of neo-liberalism through a utilitarian exchange of monetised functions and services available for purchase. As Chatterjee writes, The idea of what a city should be and look like has now been deeply influenced by this post-industrial global image everywhere among the urban middle classes in India. The atmosphere produced by economic liberalisation has had something to do with it. Far more influential has been the intensified circulation of images of global cities through cinema, television and the internet as well as through the Indian middle class’s far greater access to international travel. Government policy, at the level of the states and even the municipalities, has been directly affected by the urgent pressure to connect with the global economy and attract foreign investment.28 If the Bengali cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s turned away from the metropolitan consciousness to invoke a fractious provinciality, Ghosh’s cinema turned unctuously inward. The reverse image of the desired city replaced the actual. The global network of services and functions that the middle class increasingly aspired for was levied as something that the lower classes and the poor were supposed to provide. In the new world order of the 1990s, the desirous subjectivity that the middle class nurtured was entirely dependent on its instrumentality of the needs and riches that the market economy had ushered. In Ghosh’s cinema, the dividends of becoming the newly globalised middle class were clearly laid out in the production of their interior space, which can be controlled by them by carefully orchestrating the entry of the undesirable. Hence, by interchanging the home with the world, Ghosh is merely repeating the biggest fantasy of the neo-liberalised, apoliticised middle classes:29 to reduce the physical, 116

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actualised space of the city into an entourage of metonymic devices and payable services. All other links to the city are consciously minimised if not obliterated, even the need for movement or mobility. This is the middle class of the gated housing estates in which a lifetime worth investment is in keeping the vagaries of the city out of sight and its grime out of bounds. The sizeable attraction of his films for the middle class is precisely because it successfully feeds into this fantasy. It is precisely again in this sense that the absent homeland of part of his audience – those who have lived a substantial part of their lives outside Calcutta and other metropolitan centres of Bengal – becomes realisable. The posh rooms and other privileged settings of familiar emotional traction appear more recognisably anywhere territory to this demography which would otherwise shudder to drop their feet on the onerous dirge that is Calcutta. They do want to connect to their so-called homeland but only in their own way, only through signifiers that feed into their collective ennui about the real, embodied, city. In this sense, the home in Ghosh is not a parallel form of habitus in the world but its other. Home is the new middle class accumulation – not just a private but a privatised property. This repeated investment in privatised non-space, the aesthetic truisms and the unproblematic alliance with middle class fantasy is what forbids Ghosh’s films from finding acquaintance with either Bergmanesque minimalism or the economy of objects as in Ackerman or in the several superlative movie experiences that the idea of confinement has produced.30 The notion of confinement as serialised in Ghosh’s cinema provokes a far more damaging indictment of his oeuvre than can be easily understood. The home and the world has much bigger implications in Bengali cultural history and memory, the name obviously referring to Tagore’s classic work about the arrival of modernity in colonial Bengal and its conflict with vulgar nationalism. The same theme resonates in Ray’s Charulata (or Tagore’s Nostoneer/The Broken Home) and Mahanagar (The Big City), where the idea of the city as a liberating space is set against the doctrinaire orthodoxy of the home. Undeniably, in both Tagore and Ray, the home and the world are not equipoise but necessarily indicators of spatial progress, of movement from former to the latter.31This idea has hence garnered a deeply embedded cultural logic in Bengali and even Indian cinema. A serious film-maker should have been, ideally, aware of what he might risk by making his films politicise domestic confinement and displace the city. By reversing the idea of home and the world, Ghosh, who has always made claims of strong cultural kinship to both Ray and Tagore, is actually reversing the legacy of liberty as engendered in space. If his films are essentially ‘feminine’ narratives, as has been repeatedly argued, does not his kind of feminism forfeit any 117

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claim for the public space, the space in which its demands are most regularly violated? What kind of modernity does this femininity propound in a confined, sequestered, privatised space? By forcing the public space to be confronted within the liminality of the private, Ghosh’s early cinema ends up deeply problematising the foundational idea of women’s politics itself. In trying to critique dominant modes of phallocentrism, are not Ghosh’s films threatening to become its impenitent apogee? If nothing else, this in itself should provoke us to rethink Ghosh’s legacy as a protrusive artiste.

Notes 1 There is little scope to discuss this in detail here, but the economy of popular cinema is a complex study in itself. Refer to Anugyan Nag’s paper in this volume. 2 For a detailed, if somewhat simplistic, exposition on the trappings of Indian popular cinema, especially in its proclivity to narrativise an imagined Indian national space, see K. M. Gokulsing and W. Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change, Staffordshire, UK: Trentham Books, 2004. A more sophisticated theoretical discourse on Indian cinema’s gifts and fissures is Ravi S. Vasudevan (ed), Meaning Making in Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. 3 The popular art cinema divide is always fraught with conflicting ideas, because though it was somewhat an applicable duality till the 1990s, the division over the next decade or so became doubtful, thanks to money that came the way of ‘art’ cinema and the talent that came the way of popular cinema, the two things that were said to be lacking in their past incarnations. In Bengali cinema, critically speaking, this division is even more unreliable, thanks to celluloid figures like actor Uttam Kumar and film-maker Tapan Sinha, who have effortlessly juggled and achieved considerable success with both. 4 For a detailed analysis of Kumar’s early career and the conflicted modernity of the melodrama form that dominated his early films, see Dulali Nag, ‘Love in the Time of Nationalism: Bengali Popular Films from 1950s’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, no. 14, pp. 779–787, 1998. 5 For more on Kumar’s cinema and his continuing cultural deification, see my essay, Sayandeb Chowdhury, ‘The Heroic Laughter of Modernity: The Life, Cinema and Afterlife of Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar’, Film International, Vol 10, no. 04 & 05, pp. 82–91, 2012. 6 See my essay, Sayandeb Chowdhury, ‘Power to the Bourgeoisie’, Caravan Magazine, December 2011. 7 There is no quantifiable reference for this claim. However, if one looks at the history of production of ‘arts film’ in Bengal since the mid-1970s, it becomes clear the Bengal government backed a significant amount of serious cinema in the next decade or so. The national equivalent of this norm were the films produced by National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) and the fact that Bengali ‘serious’ cinema was not patronised by NFDC; but the Bengal government is evident in the fact that none of the NFDC-produced films were in Bengali (but had most other prominent languages in its repertoire).

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8 Exceptions like Gautam Ghose, Aparna Sen and Buddhadeb Dasgupta were not significant to cause any ripple in the radar. 9 For a nuanced discussion about the televisation of broadcasting space and the emerging discourse around a denationalised scopic regime, see Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘National Pasts and Futures: Indian Cinema’, Screen, Vol. 41, no. 1, pp.  119–125, 2000. Vasudevan writes: ‘A complex historical account of the changing patterns of film production and its constituencies would bring into focus the ever more complicated map of diversity and overlap in India’s contemporary audiovisual sphere. It is here, in the efflorescence of new systems of delivery, especially satellite relays and cheap cable networks, that a picture of the future seems most radically presaged. In a context in which cheap cable access is still beyond the reach of a substantial part of the population, India’s state television, Doordarshan, still dominates the field through its extensive network of terrestrial broadcast. But satellite channels relayed through cable command very substantial viewerships in India’s populous cities and small towns and amongst the well-to-do in the countryside’. 10 The so-called art cinema movement in the 1970s was largely public funded, but not every serious film before or after was made with public money. So, private financing was there. Liberalisation extended the scope of attracting private capital further. 11 For a critical understanding of the various turns in the history of Bengali cinema from its early years, see Sharmistha Gooptu, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation, London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Apart from being the first serious academic study of the whole history of cinema in Bengal, Gooptu is also keenly attentive to its attendant dualities and disjuncture. 12 The appropriate English title of this film remains elusive. The title refers to a practice in Indian cinema of launching a film on an auspicious day. The film plays on the semantic possibilities of auspicious, but English titles in circulation, like ‘The Beginning’ or ‘The First Day of Shoot’, cannot hope to highlight that irony. 13 For a detailed theoretical exposure of Bombay/Mumbai in cinema, see Ranjani Majumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, University of Minnesota Press, 2007, and her detailed treatment of the ‘unintended city’ and the ‘unreal city’ in Indian contexts as against studies of the archetypal cinematic metropolis in the West. 14 Nermeen Shaikh, ‘Rituparno Ghosh and the “Intellectual Film” in India’, 2005. Full interview available at http://asiasociety.org/arts/film/rituparno-ghosh-andintellectual-film-india (accessed 5 September 2013). 15 This claim follows Ghosh’s trajectory from 1994 to 2006, however Bariwali (1999), Titli (2002), Chokher Bali (2003), Raincoat (2004), and Antarmahal (2005) are kept out of the discussion for the fact that they are either period pieces or set mostly outside Calcutta. However, it is worth noting that the dividing line between his early cinema and his so-called late cinema (post2006) is not necessarily clinical and there are, as is mostly the case, obvious overlaps. However, the concerns of his cinema did change over the years, and perhaps the change was unfolding rapidly at the time of his untimely death. 16 Kaustav Bakshi, ‘My city can neither handle me nor ignore me: Rituparno Ghosh in conversation with Kaustav Bakshi’, Silhouette: A Discourse on Cinema, Vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 1–12, 2013.

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17 For a detailed thesis on how the television and its audience construct each other, see Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz, Television Studies (Short Introduction Series), Polity Press, 2011. Gray and Lotz writes: ‘As much as television programmes matter much of their importance is only felt in as much as there is an audience in the first place. To say a programme ‘does’ or ‘means’ something is to assume it does so to an audience. We might often convince ourselves that commercial television is the business of creating and selling shows but in truth it is the business of creating and selling audiences (p. 58). 18 By cinematic space, I mean a space whose scopic range is unlimited and open ended as against theatrical space whose range is limited by its proscenium practice. For more detailed understanding of use of city space as cinematic space, see Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. For more pertinent discussions on Calcutta, see essays by Moinak Biswas, Supriya Chaudhuri and Sudipto Kaviraj in ‘Preben Kaarsholm’ (ed), City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004. 19 I use new to denote a series of films that consciously belonged to this particular cultural and ideological formation of the middle class. There are, of course, older specimens of chamber drama in Bengali and Indian cinema, but Ghosh’s films are different and form part of a broader, neo-liberal construction of identity of the new middle class post the arrival of liberalisation and globalisation. 20 There is no denying that cinema’s relationship with modernity is highly contingent upon its purchase as a medium of extraordinary visual scope, a purchase which has given a normative understanding of cinema. 21 See a detailed discussion of this film in Srimati Mukherjee, ‘Feminism in a Calcutta Context: Assault, Appeasement, and Assertion in Rituparno Ghosh’s Dahan’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 22, pp. 203–210, 2005. Also, see Alison Macdonald, ‘Real and Imagined Women: A Feminist Reading of Rituparno Ghosh’s Films’, Working Papers, March 2009, Department of Anthropology, University College London, 2009. 22 Unlike the other films discussed where each house could be any house, the old, airy, decaying, colonnaded mansion, with its long corridor and neatly separated spaces for living, relaxing, cooking, eating, and receiving guests assume a character of its own. 23 Ancestral homes in Bengal, mostly in the suburbs or mofussil, usually built in mixed architectural styles in the colonial period, but are since long in a state of permanent disrepair. 24 It literally means one with vagina, a potent symbol of both fertility and its decay that come with both ageing and having to preside over a bickering family. 25 In fact, among other things, the city makes itself present through a series of sounds and noises – the cry of peddlers, songs played at local Puja festivals, horns of cars and cycles. This device is used across the films I have tried to look at closely. The city’s atmospheric sounds make itself through the ‘closed’ windows of the home. 26 Gyan Prakash, The Urban Turn, in Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram et al. (eds), Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, Sarai, CSDS+ The Society for Old and New Media, 2002, pp. 2–7. 27 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 143–144.

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28 Ibid. 29 Moinak Biswas’s Bengali essay, Neo-Bhadrolok Darpan, 2011 (Mirror of neobhadrolok) in Baromash, a Bengali journal published annually, critically discusses this idea in detail. A concise form of his argument has recently appeared in his essay Rich Tradition, 2013. Frontline, Special Issue on Indian Cinema’s Century, October 4: The following quote is from the online edition: ‘The new middle-class cinema of the post-economic reform period, on the other hand, has developed a thoroughly apolitical character. Realism continues to be a yardstick for the latter, but curiously, it is now a realism committed to the details of the new urban interior and spaces of consumption opening up for gated communities. The signs are clear: it is the television screen that now stands as the spectral mediator for self-reflections of a class. It seems not only to be using those chamber reflections for closing off larger dimensions of reality, it also betrays a happy ignorance of things happening in the cinema outside’. (Accessed 3 October 2013). I have tried to further his argument in trying to define the said cinema, its ideological, spatial and aesthetic concerns in terms of confinement and interiority. 30 The cinema of confinement has also produced some of the finest specimens of world cinema: 12 Angry Men, The Fireman’s Ball, Taste of Cherry, Last Year at Marienbad, Russian Ark, Dillinger is Dead, Persona, JeaneDielman, Wait Until Dark, and so on. But it is impossible to trace any of the effects generated by these films in Ghosh’s cinema, both as a narrative and as an aesthetic practice. His is safe and in its way stunted cinema. 31 Satyajit Ray’s cinema is too heterogeneous and multi-referential to make allowances for any singular claim about his narrative patterns. It is beyond the scope of this essay to deal in great detail about the same. However, it would be sufficient to claim that Ray’s cinema manages to avoid any kind of straitjacketing as a far as his female protagonists are concerned. Ray excelled in crowding the visual and locational motives of his protagonists, ennobling them with a heightened sense of humanity and cultural referentiality. His Mahanagar is a case in point. His Home and the World is perhaps the only film in which, adapting Tagore’s locational imperative, he heightens the effect of space as an engendered identity. Otherwise, interiority was not a given locale of his female protagonists but a site of serious intellectual enquiry itself, a space that one like Ghosh, perhaps unwittingly, manages to politicise as essentially female.

References Bakshi, Kaustav, ‘My city can neither handle me nor ignore me: Rituparno Ghosh in conversation with Kaustav Bakshi’, Silhouette: A Discourse on Cinema, Vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 1–12, 2013. Biswas, Moinak, Neo-Bhadrolok Darpan, Baromash, Annual Journal, 2011. Biswas, Moinak, ‘Rich Tradition’, Frontline Online Edition, accessed on 4 October 2013. Chatterjee, Partha, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Chowdhury, Sayandeb, ‘The Heroic Laughter of Modernity: The Life, Cinema and Afterlife of Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar’, Film International, Fall Issue, Vol. 10, no. 04/05, pp. 82–91, 2012.

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Chowdhury, Sayandeb, ‘Power to the Bourgeoisie’, Caravan Magazine, December 2011. Gokulsing, K. M. and Dissanayake, W., Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change, London: Trentham Books, 2004. Gooptu, Sharmistha, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation, London: Routledge, 2010. Gray, Jonathan and Lotz, Amanda, Television Studies (Short Introduction Series), Bristol, London: Polity Press, 2011. Kaarsholm, Preben (ed), City Flicks, Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004. Macdonald, Alison, ‘Real and Imagined Women: A Feminist Reading of Rituparno Ghosh’s Films’, Working Papers, March 2009, Department of Anthropology, University College London, 2009. Majumdar, Ranjani, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Mukherjee, Srimati, ‘Feminism in a Calcutta Context: Assault, Appeasement, and Assertion in Rituparno Ghosh’s Dahan’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 203–210, 2005. Nag, Dulali, ‘Love in the Time of Nationalism: Bengali Popular Films from 1950s’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, no. 14, pp. 779–787, 1998. Prakash, Gyan, The Urban Turn, in Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram et al. (eds), Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, Sarai, CSDS+ The Society for Old and New Media, 2002. Shaikh, Nermeen, ‘Rituparno Ghosh “Intellectual Film” in India’, 2005. Full interview available at http://asiasociety.org/arts/film/rituparno-ghosh-and-intellectualfilm-india. Accessed 5 September 2013. Shiel, Mark and Fitzmaurice, Tony (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. Vasudevan, Ravi S. (ed), Meaning Making in Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Vasudevan, Ravi S., ‘National Pasts and Futures: Indian Cinema’, Screen, Vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 119–125, 2000.

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6 BORROWING, BECOMING AND THE QUESTION OF THE SELF IN  SOB CHARITRO KALPONIK 1 Srimati Mukherjee

❦ Contemporary Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh’s2 Sob Charitro Kalponik (Afterword, 2009) introduces from the outset questions of plagiarism and simulation not only to suggest in the Nietzschean sense that ‘[the artist] enters into any skin, into any affect: he constantly transforms himself’, but also to mobilise the notion of ‘poetic deceit’ for broader purposes.3 In this chapter, I argue that Ghosh structures key sequences around the idea of ‘stealing’ or ‘lifting’ in a poet’s life to show how such ‘piracy’ is also a way of deconstructing class lines, opening up to alternate kinds of desire and breaking boundaries between the normative and the ‘deviant’. In Simulations, Jean Baudrillard notes that simulation, as opposed to dissimulation, ‘implies a presence’, because ‘[t]o simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t’. Indeed, one must take on the symptoms of that which one simulates (Baudrillard).4 In Ghosh’s Sob Charitro, Radhika, a wife and budding poet, is troubled by such simulation in the work of her husband, Indraneel, a professional poet. He appropriates the ‘symptoms’ of a fever she once had; he borrows and ‘falsifies’ the refugee’s narrative of flight during the Partition of India from their maid, all to create acclaimed poetry. Yet, after Indraneel’s death, once Radhika opens up to such ‘falseness’ and what she calls theft in his writing, she is also able to imagine her husband, engaged in intimate and erotic interaction with her, as a woman. Further, as she reads his last poem to a friend in a voice now directorially modulated as neither quite male nor female, a poem she claims he ‘stole’ from her, Ghosh’s wide shot presents her ‘crazy’ husband of the poem in the frenzied body of a homeless madman who once provoked fear in her. 123

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Figure 6.1 Ghosh briefing Bipasha Basu on the sets of Shob Choritro Kalponik Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

I use segments of Sob Charitro to argue that Ghosh deploys notions of ‘falseness’, theft and borrowing all through this film to progressively prepare his audience for the kinds of crossings he situates at the end, crossings that dissolve borders between the normative and the unexpected. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche says of the unusually talented person, ‘All innovators of the spirit’ must for a time take on the mark of the Chandala on their foreheads, as they feel deeply the gap which separates them from all that is ‘conventional and honourable’ (219–20). Earlier in Twilight, Nietzsche discusses ‘Indian morality’, ‘the law of Manu’ and its prohibitions against the Chandala or ‘untouchables’. Among other things, Nietzsche notes for example that the Avadana-Sastra forbids the Chandala from getting water from any place other than ‘entrances to swamps or from pits formed by animal footprints’ (184). In speaking of how the innovator must adopt, even if temporarily, the ‘symptoms’ of the Chandala, the ‘mongrel man’ or outcast in Indian society, Nietzsche underscores the significance of borrowings that facilitate crossovers, such as the ones addressed earlier. Broadly, Nietzsche is thinking of the artist’s ability to identify with those that are ‘excluded’ and considered ‘unworthy, polluted’ in society (219).5 The shock value of some of Ghosh’s last sequences in Sob Charitro certainly 124

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helps us move beyond that which ‘already is’ and ‘has stopped becoming’ (Nietzsche, 220),6 but as one of the leading innovators of contemporary Indian cinema and one whose canon consistently reveals an empathy for the marginalised, he also uses concepts of borrowing, simulation and becoming in a responsibly sustained way through this film to lead us to unexpected crossovers at the end.

Preparatory notions of dispersal Ghosh prepares his audience for such crossings and merging by introducing the notion of the dispersal of the name or self. What is important for him to establish here is not, obviously, a sense of an autonomous self with individual contours intact, but a self dispersed by uncontrollable forces in the topography of memory. Deindividualisation in Sob Charitro is also associated with some form of trauma, whether personal or political, since such breaking and scattering can hardly be an easy or felicitous process.7 Thus, the name that is no longer equated with selfhood and dispersed in a landscape of memory is also left behind in a memory-scape of disruption and flight. In order to accentuate deindividualisation further, Ghosh introduces a third factor: this dispersal marks not one, but many in the nation’s history of fragmentation and trauma. It is part of a collective loss in which not one but many had to come to terms with such a dispersal of the proper name, such a leaving behind of parts of the self in a memory-scape of trauma. The vehicle through which Ghosh presents these three concepts – dispersal of the name and self; a memory-scape of disruption; and a collective fragmentation – is a poem composed by Indraneel. Read by an admirer at a memorial service for him after his death, the poem already is no more just his but belongs to a public enamoured of his work. The image of the single reader, delivering the poem to the audience in the packed auditorium with a massive photograph of the poet looming behind him (quite obviously to be equated with the Romantic ego), fades out to a sequence which recreates the political context of the poem. The lines of the poem on the soundtrack match the images on the screen as we hear of the name left behind in the ‘fields of flight’, ‘in the water’, ‘caught and tangled in barbed wire’, and abandoned in ‘notebooks of immigration checkpoints and formalities’.8 This psychological landscape, marked by the fracture of the self and the dispersal of the name is embodied on screen as Indraneel’s poem, continues to tell us how ‘the serenity of sleeping houses’, ‘the peace of sleeping gourd plants on roofs’ were shattered by ‘spreading fires’ as many fled from home to confront refugee status. In this sequence about the flight of (then) East Bengal residents to West Bengal during the Partition of India 125

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in 1947, the images of flight are presented to the audience in black and white. The sudden contrast offered by the black and white in a colour film, as also the effect of figures moving single file across the screen, underline that Ghosh wants this sequence to convey not only an empirical and historical reality, but also one charged with deep psychological implications for those who faced it. The strategic shift to black and white etches this reality in the mind of the viewer, suggesting also how it must be etched in the memory of those who fled home while the quick-paced movement of many drives home the fact of an exodus. No doubt, Ghosh’s message is that recognition and psycho-emotional negotiation of such realities of uprooting are complex, long-term processes for any individual. However, his focus in this sequence is also very much on a collective understanding of loss of home and the loss of contours of self. Perhaps it is no accident then that what precedes this sequence is the mega-photograph of the individual poet which Ghosh cuts from to move us to a sequence on collective loss. What follows the black-and-white section of the exodus sequence is a series of shots in which we are back to colour – shots with sharp-angled furniture organised meticulously in an urban living space. Within the stillness of this space moves the single (or individual) figure of the maid, who shared her story of rupture and flight with Indraneel, the narrative which forms the basis of his poem. What I can argue here, then, is that, this figure of the maid, who moves between sharp-angled furniture in these shots, is less herself than Ghosh’s comment on the poet with individual contours intact. She is less herself because we already know that, as a child, she has gone through that traumatic collective experience of the scattering of name and self; that this experience remains as much a part of her as her sister who is irretrievable; who was flung away from the family in the turmoil of flight and the chaos of political upheaval.9 The spectator’s already existing knowledge of her past fragmentation and border crossing, in the sequence immediately preceding, renders her present ‘wholeness’ in these scenes questionable, especially because Ghosh frames her figure with furniture that is separated from each other by sharp outlines and depicts her performing tasks one after another in a mechanical way. It is as if he uses her body here to comment on the falsity and undesirability of such wholeness. These shots are followed by one of the poet, Indraneel, reclining alone also in a still room attempting to compose. The proximity of these shots suggests that the director wants to conceptually link the figures of the maid and the poet, but they remain individual separated bodies until the poetic imagination breaks open to face and absorb the fragmenting experience of the maid.

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This figure then, with the body of the maid, is really Ghosh’s representation of the ego of the poet, the self-sufficient poetic ‘I’ which must shatter and crossover to confront the maid’s past experience. The mega-photo of the dead poet and the figure of the maid performing one household chore after another that preface and follow respectively the black-and-white section of the sequence of ‘name dispersal’ are not so different from each other after all. They are directorial representations of the self with contours intact, and embedded between them is the poem on ‘dispersal’, the poet’s lesson learnt from the maid.

Stages of inhabiting the body of an other Yet why, we may ask, does Ghosh represent this unbroken poetic self as the body of the maid? It is not only a beginning of the breaking of class lines in Sob Charitro, but also an early example of using the body of an other to suggest that an imaginative inhabiting of the other is possible. In this particular case, the body of the maid is not only Ghosh’s visualisation and cinematic representation of the intact poetic ego, but it is also used to suggest that there is not much difference between the less literate workingclass woman who calls a poem a chhora10 and the gifted upwardly mobile poet who enthralls his audiences with his talent and creativity. At this early point in the film, the body performs duties mechanically, because, as I argue, this body is less the maid with her experience of fragmentation and dispersal and more the condition of any poetic ego that is not imaginatively expansive. In this poetic self, there is little sign of a Coleridgean ‘plasticity’ or what Nietzsche calls Dionysian ‘intoxication’, a condition essential for creating art. In the much-discussed Chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge defines ‘secondary’ imagination as one which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead’ (304).11 And although Coleridge refers to the imagination as esemplastic power at the opening of Chapter 13, he explains [e]semplastic at the beginning of Chapter 10 as meaning ‘to shape into one’ (168).12 While I show how such Coleridgean notions of dissolving and dissipating in the process of poetic creation work through sections of Ghosh’s film, there is no representation of an impulse to ‘unify’ with the poetic sensibility or to mold ‘into one’, at least in Ghosh’s representation of the male poet. Rather, what is shown is a desire to inhabit and become an other.

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The following discussion of a dream sequence in Sob Charitro helps clarify this. Ghosh intersperses fragments of a dream sequence with shots of reality following Indraneel’s death. In the dream, the grieving Radhika hears her husband call her name as she moves through a field, but as one male figure after another turns to face her, she realises none is him – Ghosh building the motif of inadequacy. The dark and beautiful figure of a woman appears, ‘dissolves’ in an image of fire and appears again to beckon her. Ghosh signifies that this is the husband ‘transformed’ into a woman through the image of fire, fire being one of the key elements used in a Hindu wedding ceremony.13 In a second fragment of the dream sequence, Radhika, married to her new lover Shekhar, enters a room, but is aggrieved to find her dead husband, Indraneel, on the floor. It is in a third fragment of the dream sequence that Ghosh heavily underscores the husband’s crossover from male to female. Radhika stares at a photograph of her husband, on a compact disk, but the image that appears to us on one half of the cover is that of a dark woman. Radhika frames this female face with her thumb and forefinger, and the camera focuses in on the bottom part of the face and lips, easily generating an eroticised mood. Ghosh continues with the fragmented dream sequence, but cuts to a room which Radhika enters. On the wall facing her hangs the megaphotograph of the poet, which by now is all too familiar to the spectator of this film. On the bottom left of this photograph is superimposed the dark female face, and Radhika and she stare at each other in a shot reverse shot sequence. The face becomes the full body of the woman and emerges out of the photo moving towards Radhika. A cut to the next scene, first brings us the field again, and then close-ups of the two women, but clearly suggesting now that the dark woman is a fragment of Indraneel, the husband, a ‘creation’ whose body he inhabits as his ego or ‘mega-self’ contained within the frame of a photograph shatters. The woman caresses and massages Radhika in the scene, but in the following scenes also actively performs with her tasks normatively associated with a woman in the Bengali household, such as preparing the bed for the night or folding a saree.14 While foregrounding the suggestively erotic images of one woman touching another’s body, Ghosh introduces in this sequence a poem in the ‘dead’ husband’s voice, a poem which asks how it is possible for him and his wife to ascend to the terrace with one couple after another lying together or making love on floors above them. In this sequence, of course, Ghosh brings us representations of both homoerotic desire, between Radhika and the woman, and transsexual desire as Indraneel, the male poet, transforms into a woman and continues to feel desire for Radhika. Breaking through the bound of a physical body 128

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(or the photograph of a physical body) and crossing over into one different from the self are concepts which help Ghosh situate non-normative forms of sexualised desire in this sequence, specifically transsexual desire. However, his message is also deliberately gendered. As opposed to the more mechanical nature of the tasks performed by the body of the maid, as discussed earlier, there is pliancy, an animated quality, urgency in the bodies in action in this sequence. In my reading, this in itself is metaphoric of the progression in the poetic imagination. That Ghosh uses this progression to help represent homosexual passion or desire in a transsexual in this sequence is one part of his message; another part is his depiction of transgendered love. The subtextual directorial wish is clear. The male poet’s transformation into a woman makes him not just an impassioned participant in the (homo) erotic, but a companion and participant in quotidian tasks, as well. Whereas there is no abatement in Indraneel’s desire for Radhika because of his sexual transformation, there is a beginning of a gendered understanding, as a woman, of partnership in small, daily tasks and a clearly delineated empathy for her sadness because of her husband’s many lapses before. Thus, as the two women’s bodies continue to be swiftly mobile and perform shared actions in the sequence, the male voice reciting the poem concludes, ‘Let us go to the sky and touch a star to make a pledge that all hurts inflicted on you by your past husband will disappear like fireflies in forests’.15 Although the disembodied poetic voice expresses this wish, it is only in the bodily form of a woman that the ‘husband’ can actively perform tasks to help his wife.

Non-normative desire and sexuality in art and reality This binary of the aestheticised world of art and lived material reality, as it affects the playing out of non-normative forms of desire, takes on much darker overtones in a Ghosh film released three years after Sob Charitro. In the 2012 Chitrangada, Ghosh’s message is far more pessimistic as he brings us the story of the dancer Rudra (played by himself) who undergoes a series of ‘gender reassignment’16 surgeries to change to a woman. A number of scenes depicting the early stages of homosexual attraction between Rudra and the heroin-addicted percussionist Partho are framed as or mingled with beautifully choreographed dance movements, Ghosh associating this phase of passion with the world of art in which Rudra, as director of his troupe, relentlessly strives towards perfection. In some such scenes of early attraction, Ghosh also introduces on the soundtrack Rabindranath Tagore’s song from his dance drama Chitrangada, Bˉodhu kˉon alˉo laglˉo chˉokhe.17 Ghosh uses 129

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the following lines of this song, Chhilˉo mˉonˉo tˉomari prˉotikkha kˉori/jugey jugey dinˉo ratri dhˉori (The heart waited for you/through every age, through the days and nights), and another song from Tagore as the attraction between Rudra and Partho intensifies: Amar onge onge ke/bajay bashi (Who plays the flute/ in every part of my body?).18 Such evidently idealised representations of early passion linking it to the stylised rhythms and perfectibility of a dance performance or to a distinctly romantic evocation of love in a canonical dance drama by Tagore disappear completely in the second half of Chitrangada, as Ghosh contextualises queer desire and transsexuality in a day-to-day lived reality. Although Ghosh continues to use choreographed movements and lines from Tagore’s Chitrangada, as for instance in the hospital sequences when Rudra is undergoing the series of sex change surgeries, the connotations are distinctly dark.19 Very much in contrast to what I address in my discussion of homoerotic desire and transsexuality, as represented in Sob Charitro, Chitrangada drives home the notion of a tragic hiatus between the artistic/idealised and the quotidian/lived reality. Whereas in Sob Charitro, the male poet’s imaginative inhabiting of a female body moves him beyond an empathetic wish, to actively helping his/her wife in daily tasks, in Chitrangada, Ghosh progressively intensifies his representations of feelings of alienation, humiliation, rejection, and even self-doubt as the protagonist Rudra proceeds with his sex change in the real world. One other obvious point of difference is the reception of the sex change by the partner. In Sob Charitro, Radhika, the wife, is a willing participant both in erotic interactions and daily chores performed with the husband transformed into the woman. However, spectators do not forget that such receptivity and voluntary partnership are situated within a dream sequence. This situating together with the fact that Radhika’s lens is also the lens of a poet/writer, a fact revisited later in this chapter, explains the relative easiness of the acceptance of non-normative desire and sexuality as opposed to Ghosh’s representation of how these are ultimately and violently rejected by Rudra’s partner, Partho, in Chitrangada.20 If we are to read Sob Charitro and Chitrangada intertextually, I personally find it valuable to consider how in two films just three years apart in his canon, Ghosh frames queer desire and transsexuality both similarly and differently. In this process, he offers commentary on how forms of ‘becoming’ and changes of ‘self’ are received or rejected in an aestheticised art world or ‘dream’ world and in a day-to-day lived reality. He may very well be commenting also on the reception of his own representation of such issues in his art and the challenges of the sociocultural context in which he lived, where he often fearlessly crossed the lines of gender demarcation. 130

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What becomes evident from even a brief comparative analysis of the two films is that while breaking through boundaries of the self and inhabiting the body of an other may be acceptable in a dream scenario or a world of representation, the chances of such acceptance drop significantly in the real world. In an intertextual reading of Sob Charitro and Chitrangada, the major issue for consideration in this regard is, of course, transsexuality. In these two films, Ghosh uses notions of moving beyond assigned biological bodies to inhabiting or constructing (through surgery) bodies of the opposite sex. In a special issue of the magazine Rˉobbar (Sunday) published in Kolkata 10 days after Ghosh’s death and dedicated to him, we find a series of editorials written previously by Ghosh. In more than one, he muses on sexual identity, gayness and transsexuality. What becomes quite apparent is his difficulty in existing as a transsexual in a generally prescriptive social environment. In editorial number five, he writes: There is no place in our society for that life that would perhaps free me from this captive condition of loneliness. I have lived this captive life of loneliness with my characteristic ‘unnaturalness’ – and before me lay an immense prison of society. Any new method/ custom has historically had to enter that space like a punished rebel, paying the price through much violence and bloodshed. (Ghosh 13)21 In the same editorial, he goes on to say that this ‘inevitable tragedy’ of living outside accepted custom has ‘broken’, ‘torn’, ‘fragmented’ him many times – has ‘bloodied’ him in such a way that he has thought death far more desirable (Ghosh 13).22 In these writings, Ghosh captures most poignantly the tremendous difficulties of being sexually non-normative in a culture that continues to be largely essentialist. The success of a film, such as Sob Charitro Kalponik, illustrates to some extent that a male poet inhabiting the body of a woman is acceptable for mainstream spectators. In other words, when such ‘sex change’ is represented in and limited to the domain of imagination and art, it is not rejected. Besides, the poet is already dead when such transformation is conceptualised in Sob Charitro. Chitrangada, however, tells the story not of imaginative habitation but the artist actively choosing surgery in real life to replace his biologically assigned male body with that of a female. In relation to that section of my argument in which I address ‘becoming’ and questions of self-identity, Chitrangada offers a counter-thrust to Sob Charitro. Although it traces the deteriorating relationship between two lovers as one undergoes a series of sex change surgeries, Partho’s rejection of Rudra can also be read as metaphoric of the 131

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social rejection Ghosh faced in many instances in real life. In this way, this later film dramatises that certain forms of ‘habitation’ or ‘becoming’, as these relate to sexual identity, are still denounced and unacceptable in lived, dayto-day reality. While the story of ‘becoming’ may be one of success in the world of art, in real life, the ‘self’ is often ravaged following such attempts. In editorial number 10 of the same issue of Rˉobbar, Ghosh brings together the news of Michael Jackson’s death with the amendment of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which ‘freed homosexuality from the humiliation of being a punishable act’ (17).23 He addresses Jackson’s progressive transformation of appearance from masculine to more feminine, and points out that although this generated intense curiosity in viewers or media, there was no resentment or rejection. He continues that Jackson was once married and a father. Ghosh suggests that perhaps we could use these facts from Jackson’s life to think with curiosity that sexual gestures or manifestations of sexuality cannot be socially determined. He speculates that, perhaps without knowing it, Jackson helped us understand that colour or sexuality, things we know as God given from birth, are largely changeable if one so wishes (Ghosh 17).24 Ghosh contrasts such thoughts with those on gay ‘pride processions’ that appeared in several Indian cities following the amendment of Section 377 of the Penal Code. While watching television, he noticed that the cameras were naturally inclined towards men dressed in ‘feminine clothes’. Yet, walking silently beside them were many who were ‘ordinarily dressed’. The media did not focus on them. Thus, according to Ghosh, for the media homosexuality equates ‘unsocial dressing’ and consequently is ‘unnatural’ (17).25 These editorials bring us Ghosh’s reflections not just on his own predicament as a transsexual, but also on media representations of homosexuals in India in the 21st century. Obviously, celebrities, such as Jackson, in the West negotiate ‘transformations’, whether sexual or otherwise, with relative ease as regards spectators and media. Ghosh’s theoretical writings and films, produced in the final phase of his life and career, alert us to the enormous difficulties surrounding non-normative sexuality and sexual transformation in his culture. Thus, in the real world, ‘becoming’ and the ‘self’ could be severely compromised.

The normative and the ‘insane’: Crossing lines to cinematise the unexpected If in the sequences on transsexual desire and transgendered love in Sob Charitro, Ghosh focuses more on ‘esemplastic’ dissolution and then becoming, he returns forcefully to the concept of intellectual piracy, which he 132

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presents to us in the early sequences of ‘borrowing’ the maid’s narrative, at the end of this film. The breaking of class distinctions is again underscored through cinematic representations of inhabiting the body of an other, but these sequences immediately preceding the conclusion of Sob Charitro move to a crescendo as it were, deconstructing also boundaries between genders; the normative and the insane; and the materially or intellectually privileged and destitute. Bodily habitation is the conceptual lever Ghosh uses to mobilise these possibilities in the minds of his audience. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche, in aligning the unusually talented person with the Chandala, speaks also of a ‘Catalinarian existence’, a stage in the development of a genius charged with feelings of insurrection against everything which ‘already is’ and ‘has stopped becoming’ (220). Further, he notes that Dionysian ‘intoxication’ is imperative for the artist, a condition by virtue of which he can become anyone and anything. ‘One physiological precondition is indispensable for there to be art or any sort of aesthetic action or vision: intoxication’ (Nietzsche 195).26 Other translators of Nietzsche’s Twilight have called this condition ‘frenzy’. As Ghosh returns to the deconstruction of class lines at the end of the film, he uses the figure of the maid one more time, in this instance the maid inadvertently helping Radhika discover that her husband has ‘stolen’ her poem, written in English, and ‘rewritten’ it in Bengali. Not only is the maid instrumental in this discovery, but she also consoles Radhika during her frenzied outburst as she screams (at the imaginary absent presence of her husband) that he is guilty of theft in composing. Ghosh precedes this outburst with a sequence in which the husband as woman returns. The first shot of the sequence situates the photograph of the male poet on the right corner of the screen, but what is immediately noticeable is that this is a different photo, much smaller in size, a clear indication of the diminution of the poetic ego or ‘I’ after some crossovers and inhabiting. The camera then tracks from Radhika to the photograph of the poet to the other woman who recites Indraneel’s poem, ‘plagiarised’ from his wife’s, in her own female voice, thus indicating there is no longer a split between male poetic voice and the inhabited female body, as in a previous sequence discussed earlier. I have argued that this inhabiting of the female body is an effect of the shattering of contours of the (male) poetic self; a result of a diminution of the poetic ego. However, it is also possible to read Indraneel’s transsexuality in the film as a projection of the poet Radhika’s wish or ability to see herself in a homoerotic relationship. After all, Indraneel’s transformation to a woman is situated within Radhika’s dream sequence. It is very likely that Ghosh mobilises Radhika’s projection here to preface what occurs in some of the final sequences of the film. In fact, the juxtaposition of Indraneel’s 133

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Bengali poem, recited in the woman’s voice, and in a sequence shortly following, Radhika’s English poem, recited by Radhika, yet in a voice modulated to be not quite male or female, foregrounds not just the concept of borrowing, but the possibilities of many kinds of crossovers. Both poems bring us the idea of a husband inhabiting the body of a madman, and alternately the madman inhabiting the body of the husband – returning to the wife asking her for food, pleasure and solace – and the wife’s misgiving that her intense liking of this ‘wild man’, ‘this other,’ might cast out her husband, her ‘most intimate’27 to wander alone on train platforms, under banyan trees, before shuttered shops, or break down in front of the hut of some unfortunate woman.28 Radhika’s reciting of her version of the poem in English to her ex-lover, Shekhar, as she addresses Indraneel’s ‘lifting’ and yet calls this ‘his last poem’,29 is cinematised brilliantly by Ghosh to bring us the possibilities of crossovers from Radhika’s perspective. As the androgynous voice begins the recitation, ‘What if one night/one crosses the boundary’, Ghosh has a homeless madman, familiar to the spectator as inducing fear in Radhika in a previous scene, approach rapidly in a long shot. Ghosh cuts to a repeat of the earlier scene in which Radhika sits with the glass up in a cab because of her fear. He returns quickly, however, to the shot of the madman searching for food on the road, but in the rhythmic movements of a dance, just as the voice-over has recited his demands to the wife in the poem and is addressing his passion for her. What is most suggestive about this sequence is the visual collapsing of distinctions between the husband and the destitute madman as Radhika’s poem, after detailing what could happen to her husband, her ‘most intimate’ if he is cast out, closes with the line ‘my moon-struck man/unknowingly betrayed’. What we see in the long shot on screen is the figure of the madman, with his back to us, receding. This impactful sequence towards the close of Ghosh’s Sob Charitro breaks down lines of class – distinctions between the economically privileged and the destitute homeless; boundaries between the normative and the mad; and more implicitly, gender divisions as well, through the medium of poetry and of course film. In its early and middle sequences, the film dramatises possibilities of the breaking up of the poetic ‘I’, crossovers and inhabiting an other via the character of Indraneel. Yet, as Sob Charitro moves through its middle sections and queer desire and transsexuality are represented, Ghosh also destabilises certainties in his audience by having us question whether the perspective is Indraneel’s or Radhika’s. This blurring of distinctions between the two perspectives is accentuated by the juxtaposition of their two poems at the end of the film, Ghosh coming full circle to the concept of poetic borrowing and poetic license. 134

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Yet, if I began this chapter by claiming that once Radhika opens up to ‘theft’ in her husband’s poetry, she is able to engage in erotic interactions with him as a woman and imagine him in the body of a madman, I have to end by saying that her role, as represented by Ghosh, is by no means only that of a passive recipient. Ghosh implies an unbreakable intimacy and mutuality between Indraneel and Radhika at the end of the film not only because they are husband and wife, but also because they are both poets. Indraneel ‘borrows’ his last poem from his wife, the female poet whose initial version of the poem had already crossed boundaries in many ways. Although through most of Sob Charitro Radhika is depicted as the more conformist one of the couple, holding down a job and berating her husband for his lack of financial responsibility, her art, brought to us at the end of the film, aligns her with what Nietzsche sees as the revolutionary phase when the artist turns against everything that ‘has stopped becoming’. It is Radhika’s self that we have known through the film that is deconstructed at its end as she crosses the boundaries of class, privilege and conventionality to inhabit the body of the homeless madman. Yet, this is not the only way in which Ghosh breaks down gender distinctions between her and the madman. He also links them through the idea of frenzy or ‘intoxication’. Radhika’s frenzy at her husband’s ‘theft’ of her poem is captured by Ghosh in quick close-up shots of her face, a few sequences prior to the one in which he cinematises the actions of the madman, as she recites her poem. This first instance of frenzy depicted in Radhika prepares us for another kind of frenzy in her in the recitation sequence – that Dionysian ‘frenzy’ or ‘intoxication’ which Nietzsche thinks is ‘indispensable’ for the artist. As he addresses this intoxication, Nietzsche says, ‘This feeling makes us release ourselves onto things, we force them to accept us, we violate them, – this process is called idealizing’ (196). He continues that a person in this condition of intoxication can ‘enrich’ and strengthen everything he sees. ‘Someone in this state transforms things until they reflect his own power, – until they are the reflexes of his perfection. This need to make perfect is – art. He even finds inherent pleasure in things that he himself is not . . .’ (Nietzsche 196).30 Even as Coleridge’s definition of ‘secondary’ imagination includes idealising and unifying, there is a clear focus on dissolution and dissipation. In contrast, Nietzsche’s understanding of idealising, as it comes to us via his concept of ‘intoxication’, evokes the sense of the artist leaving his/her powerful imprint on objects. In Sob Charitro, Ghosh aligns the male poet more with a Coleridgean sense of dissolution and the female poet more with a Nietzschean notion of powerful enrichment and perfecting. While both impulses are directorial representations of the force of the imagination, a woman’s image is superimposed more than 135

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once on Indraneel’s photograph, preparing the way for his ‘dissolution’, and the diminution of his poetic ego is also later implied. The madman is not shown to overtake Radhika in this way. Rather, her ‘intoxication’ powerfully transforms his hunger into the rhythmic movements of a dance; he is transfigured by the invasive force of her poetic imagination. The frenzy that Ghosh represents almost as a rhythm in the body of the madman is Radhika, the poet’s frenzy as she crosses over and inhabits his body and consciousness.

Notes 1 I would like to thank my niece Sukanya Banerjee for giving me a disk of Sob Charitro Kalponik as a holiday gift, and thus motivating me to see and begin work on the film. I would like to thank my mother, Debjani Mukherjee, for eagerly saving issues of Rˉobbar for me. These certainly helped me to expand my argument. 2 Ghosh passed away on 30 May 2013. 3 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, Eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. See page 197. 4 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. Foreign Agents Series. New York: Semiotext (e), 1983. http://www. ee.sun.ac.za/~hgibson/docs/html/simulacra-and-simulation.html. 5 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. 6 Ibid. 7 While it is clear that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, any ‘self’ can be fragmented for different reasons, the major point of difference here is that in this film, Ghosh wants to emphasise a movement towards deindividualisation as opposed to, say, something we often hear in the United States at parties or meetings when people say, ‘Hi, I am so and so. . . .’ 8 Translation mine. Although I have tried to be faithful to Ghosh’s original text, this is not a word-for-word translation. 9 The audience of the film gets almost all of this narrative through Indraneel’s poetic lens. The film later reveals that the fact about the loss of the sister was ‘invented’ by Indraneel and introduced into the poem, although the maid’s story of leaving home during the Partition is of course true. However, as the maid says (without rancour) to the wife, Radhika, after Indraneel’s death, ‘bannaiya, bannaiya likse’ (‘he has made many things up’). 10 In Bengali, a chhora is generally a rhyme-heavy poem that is rendered orally. 11 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, Vol. I, Eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 12 Ibid. 13 The Hindu wedding ceremony performed with a fire burning, in fact, renders the flames an important ‘witness’ of the event, hence the term oˉ gnishakkhi or ‘fire witness’, which adds to the authenticity and sanctity of the event.

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14 This reminds the viewer of an early sequence in the film in which Indraneel, then alive, lay in bed while his wife folded a saree, just gazed at her and enquired what kind of saree it was. 15 Translation mine. On 28 September 2009, I interviewed Ghosh at length in Kolkata. Sob Charitro had just been released in the city, and I mentioned the public reaction to the film was positive. Ghosh responded that he did not know if the film was ‘good’ or not, but he had managed to do in it what he ‘wanted to do’. Although I had not seen the film at the time, subsequent analysis leads me to reflect that one of the things Ghosh wanted to do was represent transsexual desire and love. In the face of our loss with Ghosh’s untimely demise, I can only hope I am right. His films following Sob Charitro, such as Chitrangada (The Crowning Wish, 2012), do continue to address these themes. 16 I take these words, as spoken by Rudra, from the film itself. The uncanny parallels between certain sections of this film and Ghosh’s own life and death remain the potential subjects of a separate essay. 17 ‘Beloved, what light strikes the eye?’ Translation mine. Obviously, this is Tagore capturing the radiance of early love as Chitrangada, the female lead, becomes enamoured of the traveling hero Arjun. Chitrangada, born as a girl to the king of Manipur, is raised as a male and trained in the art of warfare, as per her father’s wishes, in order to be an appropriate heir to the throne. When she falls in love with Arjun and he is unimpressed by her, because of her ‘masculine’ appearance and because he has taken a vow of celibacy, she pleads with Madan, the God of Love, to endow her with the beauty of a woman for one year. In his film Chitrangada, Ghosh takes his point of departure from Tagore’s dance drama of the same name, moving beyond the androgyny depicted in Tagore to exploring unreservedly queer desire and transsexuality. 18 Translations mine. 19 Two examples will substantiate this point here. Rudra takes hold of the apparatus from which hangs his intravenous syringe and uses it as a balance in his post-surgery pain to perform measured dance steps. In another sequence, the soundtrack brings us a line from Tagore’s dance drama, Kˉon moha rakkhˉoshire diyechˉo badhiya/ongˉo shohˉochˉori kˉori? (What mighty [female] demon have you tied to me/making her the mate of my body?), as dancers dance behind an agitated Rudra now transferred in imagination to the foreground of a stage. Translation mine. 20 Even though one of Partho’s last declarations to Rudra is that he loves him and he continues to send him text messages, what reverberates for the viewer are his pronouncements to Rudra as he is going through sex change surgeries that he would rather be with a ‘real woman’ than this ‘half thing’ or ‘synthetic one’ and have his own biological child than adopt one with Rudra. It is interesting to note that Partho, as drummer, could also be categorised as an artist. 21 Translation mine. See Rituparno Ghosh, ‘First Person’, Rˉobbar, 9 June 2013, pp. 6–17. Ghosh was the editor of this magazine prior to his death. 22 Ibid. Translations mine. 23 Ibid. Translation mine. This section (377) of the Penal Code dates back to 1861 (British Rule) and criminalises sexual activities ‘against the order of nature’. On 2 July 2009, the High Court of Delhi ruled the section unconstitutional as regards sex between consenting adults. However, this decision was overturned by India’s Supreme Court on 12 December 2013 (over six months after Ghosh’s

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30

death). The Supreme Court maintained that the amendment should be a subject for the Parliament to consider. Ibid. Translation mine. Ibid. Translation mine. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. I am giving words used in both versions of the poem in this paragraph. ‘Wild man’ appears in Indraneel’s Bengali version and the other quoted phrases in Radhika’s. These locations are listed in Indraneel’s version. Radhika’s version speaks of ‘cold and crowded streets’ and ‘crouching under a wayside stall’. Italics mine. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.

References Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. Foreign Agents Series. New York: Semiotext (e), 1983. http://www.ee.sun. ac.za/~hgibson/docs/html/simulacra-and-simulation.html. Accessed on 9 February 2010. Chitrangada (The Crowning Wish). Director Rituparno Ghosh. Kolkata: Shree Venkatesh, 2012. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, Vol. I, Eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Ghosh, Rituparno, ‘First Person’, Rˉobbar, 9 June 2013, pp. 6–17. ______, Personal interview. 28 September 2009. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, Eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Sob Charitro Kalponik (Afterword). Director Rituparno Ghosh. Kolkata: Mahesh Ramanathan and Rajesh Sawhney, 2009.

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7 EN-GENDERING THE DETECTIVE Of love, longing and feminine follies Madhuja Mukherjee

❦ Introduction It may be interesting to begin with a discussion of Satyajit Ray’s Manihara/ The Lost Jewels (1961). The film was a part of Teen Kanya (Three Daughters), comprising three films adapted from Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories (produced to commemorate his centenary). In this film, the female protagonist Mani (Malika) is obsessively attached to her jewellery, and therefore, she returns to get the same even after her death. The film takes off from a ghostly mansion, revealing the intense loneliness of Mani and her affective longings for her jewels. Haunted by an unresolved past and troubled by an uneasy present, the uncanny in her life represents the reality of the home and its dark chambers. In time, lonesome Mani is seduced by her ex-lover and she eventually elopes with him in order to protect her belongings from her husband, who apparently is broke. Later, it is revealed that during their sojourn Mani has been killed by her lover, whose sole intention was to clench the jewellery. Nevertheless, towards the end of the film, Mani, now dead, is driven by an undying yearning for things, and thus returns to reclaim her jewels. The close-up of the bejeweled skeletal arm is a shocking revelation of how Mani’s intense love for life was displaced onto beautiful inanimate objects to produce a narrative of desire and hopelessness. The purpose of alluding to the story of Manihara at the onset is to highlight the import of objects (or properties) in narratives of desire. The valueloaded and iconic presence of ‘things’ and the preoccupation with them

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uncover deeper complications. For instance, Supriya Chaudhuri (2010: 189) shows how: In an early novel, Chokher Bali (Grit in the Eye, 1901–02), Tagore spends little time on the description of furniture, but there is a particularly telling scene, late in the novel, when Mahendra comes home to find his room elaborately tidied and re-arranged by Binodini. [. . .] A notable film version of the novel, directed by Rituparno Ghosh (2003), presents a highly charged cinematic treatment of domestic interiors, the camera’s gaze focusing especially on floors, staircases, and furniture. The film’s use of colour to impart a rich, warm glow to surfaces and skin is instrumental in creating the effect of bourgeois prosperity [italics added], if not opulence, in Mahendra’s house. Clearly, Ghosh is interested in a feature of the ‘period’ film that fascinated his great predecessor Satyajit Ray: ‘the visual aspect of opulence’, as Ray described it in Shyam Benegal’s definitive documentary, referring to his own treatment of domestic interiors in films like ‘Monihara’ (in Teen Kanya, 1961), Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964) and Jalsaghar. (The Music Room, 1958) This chapter, however, develops the question of ‘props’ (or what Chaudhuri describes as ‘furniture’) and the above point further, in order to engage in a close reading of the objects of desire and its signification, as well, to connect it to themes of ‘obsession’ and ‘want’. The chapter reflects on Rituparno Ghosh’s attachment to mise en scène, particularly the staging of lighting, camera movements, settings, colour scheme, a range of specific objects, and performance styles. Additionally, it links his elaborate mise en scène and the affect produced by it with the popular genre of detective films, and engages in an analysis of the film texts in order to illustrate the ways in which through the creation of particular types of interiors Ghosh dismantles the equilibrium of male structures. Briefly, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which Ghosh’s keen observations and his personal fascination with objects create unique domains for musings. Mise en scène and metteur en scène Narratives of fervour and lack, which may be recounted through objects and its implications (as in the story of Manihara), provide a meaningful backdrop to reflect upon the underpinnings of the mise en scène in Ghosh’s films. This chapter explores some of Ghosh’s films by examining the recurring themes 140

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and elements, in order recognise the production and function of mise en scène. Furthermore, the chapter tackles the field of mise en scène as a point of departure to examine films, like Shubho Muharat (2003) and Satyanweshi (2013), which operate within and transform masculine genres like detective films. The ‘feminisation’ of masculine orders through the feminine everyday makes these films crucial despite the fact they primarily deal with middle class concerns. Frequently described as chamber dramas, Ghosh’s films nevertheless negotiate the dilemmas of the bhadralok and more importantly, present it from a predominantly women’s point of view. The duality of gender and longing thus becomes an effective device through which Ghosh produces a rich tapestry of contemporary narratives and addresses the fervent homoerotic attachments between women. Indeed, Ghosh’s films remain noteworthy due to the affective presence of lusting women, and dark interior spaces. In fact, one may elaborate on this subject of mise en scène with a discussion of one of his most recognised films, Chokher Bali (A Passion Play, 2003). Chokher Bali becomes an important reference in this context, largely for two reasons. First, the film is truly a self-conscious elaboration of the play of mise en scène and Ghosh’s emergent style; second, and more importantly, the film maybe described as the threshold or an intimate interface beyond and through which Ghosh introduces his self-reflexive mode; moreover, it sets off his explorations into fierce sexual longings. Indeed, while Chokher Bali received the National Award for art direction (and Chaudhuri’s comment on the richness of colour is crucial here), the film does not effectually deal with the intricate plotting, political framework and the nationalist context in the complicated ways in which Tagore’s novel published in 1903 does.1 Contrarily, Ghosh transforms Tagore’s themes – complexity of the characters, as well as the conflicts of late 19th century along with the accounts of evolving urbanity – into an overtly dense mise en scène. The soft silken light, the unmoving camera, portraiture shots of Binodini (played by Aishwarya Rai), the chiaroscuro lighting reframing her bare torso (or what Chaudhuri describes as the ‘warm glow on skin’) as well as a rich setting produced through careful placement of ‘props’ (or properties) fashioned a new sensibility for Bengali cinema. Briefly, the intensity of Tagore’s novel was transported onto the visual plane, and the unique mise en scène of Ghosh’s films rapidly developed into an influential as well as a productive archetype. For instance, in Chokher Bali, following their very first meeting on the terrace, Ashalata (Raima Sen), wearing an identical costume as Binodini’s, is clearly captivated by the latter’s beauty, intensity and wit. On one hand, this scene is connected to a later one, in which Ashalata recognises Binodini’s sexual exploits (with her husband), on the other, it underlines a strong homoerotic connection between the two, played out within personal and markedly feminine spaces 141

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like the iconic terrace and through the obvious display of their splendid ‘skin’ glowing under soft artificial lights.2 This yen is advanced further as Binodini enters Ashalata’s interior spaces, both literally and figuratively. In addition, it is difficult to overlook how in such scenes of passionate and private encounters certain objects like mirrors, framed photographs, figurines, vases, lamps, drapes (velvet and net) as well as copies of Renaissance paintings and colours like red and gold play a meaningful role and become an integral part of the narrative. For instance, in the scene in which Ashalata lends her jewellery to Binodini, she in effect offers her husband to her friend/confidant or soi. This scene comes at the point when both Mahendra (Prosenjit Chatterjee), Ashalata’s husband, and Bihari (Tota Roy Chowdhury), Mahendra’s friend, are vying for Binodini’s attention. Ashalata’s innocence and her admiration for her friend are telling. As a bejewelled and exultant Binodini sings and dances, the two men enter the room. At that time, the neckpiece that Bihari had gifted to Ashalata, and of which Mahendra is relentlessly jealous, slings on her chest. Distraught, Mahendra expresses his resentment regarding Binodini’s new attire, but Bihari genuinely appreciates it. The manifold meaning of the scene evolves not merely at the level of plotting but through the allusions produced by the jewellery worn by Binodini, who is a widow. First, she not only adorns herself with Ashalata’s jewels, but she also seemingly bears Mahendra’s sexual interest. Likewise, this is further complicated by the fact that at one time Mahendra was supposed to marry Binodini. Besides, Mahendra is envious of Bihari’s obvious admiration of Ashalata and her liveliness; moreover, it indeed is the same necklace, which was Bihari’s gift to Ashalata. Eventually, as tête-à-tête follows, Binodini leaves the scene deeply hurt; Ashalata is embarrassed at Mahendra’s scathing criticism of Binodini, and finally to make up for the humiliation Binodini suffers, she sends her husband to her with a box of jewels. The following scene rapidly turns into a scene of intense longing, which is preceded by Mahendra taking off Binodini’s tulsi beads and his own silken shawl. Furthermore, the case in which Mahendra carries the jewels eventually becomes a box that would hoard their love letters and would emerge as a crucial component in this plot of desire and deceit. Clearly, the function of props and the manner in which each (e.g. mirrors with gilded frames, boxes and the colour red) is repeatedly brought back in scene after scene, lay bare the obsession with which Ghosh fabricated and explored the mise en scène in his films. Sangita Gopal (2011: 159) comments on how, [t]he film reinflects Tagore’s themes of gender, desire, and the colonial modernity to project a vision of Kolkata’s past [Calcutta’s 142

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19th Century] that is entirely congruent with the consumerist fantasies of a newly resurgent, rapidly globalizing present. Gopal also mentions how the film’s technological forte and the casting of the international star Aishwarya Rai as a Bengali widow highlighted the ‘new Bollywood’ ambitions of Bengali cinema and the Bengali public. As a matter of fact, as narrated by Ghosh’s long-time collaborator and cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay (during a personal conversation in 2013): With Chokher Bali the scope became bigger. As well, the set design was done carefully. We used copies of Rembrandt’s paintings in the set. I referred to the Dutch painter [Rembrandt] and recreated his dark palette and the uses of sharp source lights. By deploying the bleach by-pass technique, as well, by retaining the silver on the celluloid prints, we produced an intensity that commented on the darkness of the plot. Distinctly, Ghosh established a narrative style that was accomplished through somewhat fussy detailing of the mise en scène, inclusive of the lighting, camera movement, setting, colour palette, and so on, which was supported by a wandering editing style and the deployment of classical music and Rabindrasangeet (Rabindranath’s songs). Moreover, as analysed by Gopal, the scene in which Binodini wears the red velvet blouse is actually reframed through Ashalata’s look, and it thereby appears like a critical shift within Bengali cinema. In a self-conscious and skillful way, the film problematised the ‘gaze of the camera’ and allowed the woman to become the bearer of the look. I would, nevertheless, point out that in my understanding Ghosh is not an explicitly feminist film-maker especially in the ways in which he represents women; however, through the characterisation, plotting and the execution of the scenes, his films become a testimony of the feminine every day, and an expanded frame which includes subjects of gender, sexuality and affection.

Cartography of properties It is in this context of the decisive function of mise en scène that one analyses Ghosh’s Shubho Muharat (2003) – a film released in the same year as Chokher Bali and Satyanweshi (2013), his last (and incomplete) film. Both Shubho Muharat and Satyanweshi operate within, and have markedly intervened with the defined and popular masculine genres like the Bengali detective films.3 As mentioned earlier, I propose to examine the function 143

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of mise en scène as a point of departure, in an attempt to study the manner in which Ghosh problematises Bengali detective narratives (especially films). I wish to look at the fashion in which Ghosh, introduces desiring female protagonists, and also transforms the accounts of explorations into exotic places (like the hills, forests or desert) to an exploration of the interiors (like bedrooms, kitchen and dining spaces), transfiguring interior spaces into narrative landscapes. In such films, interior spaces become an affected topography, while props have an individual quality. In effect, Ghosh’s so-called chamber dramas address the dilemmas within what has been described as the conditions of the ‘neo-bhadralok’, and more importantly, present it from women’s viewpoint.4 The discords between gender and longing thus produce a new liminal condition that interlaces a thick fabric of contemporary stories. Such yarns include subjects like homoerotic bonding between women, which dent the spaces isolated by male fantasies. The ‘Bengali detective’, however, is a typically gendered figure who represents the bhadralok, and according to Gautam Chakrabarti (2012), he is a generically sanctioned, perceptive intellectual, who works as a ‘private’ agent and thereafter solves the complications. However, beyond the immediate function of resolving the case, he advocates a particular moral order. One may specially speculate about this point with reference to the cult figure Felu-da, aka Prodosh Chandra Mitter, created by Satyajit Ray. Felu-da’s accounts are set in picturesque locations, as opposed to the stories of Byomkesh Bakshi, penned by the exceptionally imaginative author Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, which are mostly set in the realm of the dark city (Calcutta). Thus, Felu-da, in films such as Sonar Kella (Director Satyajit Ray, 1974) or Joy Baba Felunath subsists in an asexual world. In Sonar Kella, for instance, he journeys unto Rajasthan in order to rescue little Mukul from the clutches of the kidnappers; he castigates the ex-convicts, brings back the missing doctor Hajra and explains Mukul’s condition (memory of a past life) in logical terms. Indeed, Felu-da is a prescient figure, whose keen observation never misses even minute details, and thereby he successfully analyses and makes meaning of a mystery he undertakes to resolve. Consequently, in the scene, in which Felu-da and his cousin/assistant Topse consider what and where is sonar kella or ‘the golden fortress’, Feluda explains that gold (sona) is not an object, instead it is a value-defining term, like the golden era or sonar Bangla (Bengal) or sonar chhele (boy). In a later sequence, Felu-da chances upon yellow limestone saucers made in Jaisalmer. Thus, in the next sequence, as they chase the kidnappers, Felu-da instinctively heads towards Jaisalmer instead of Barmer (which is suggested by one of the suspects, Mandar Bose). Such intuitive connection between yellow limestone and Mukul’s sonar kella, which may be located in 144

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Jaisalmer, is in effect framed by a larger reasoning capability of this infallible figure. Briefly, his purpose is not merely to protect Mukul from severe consequences, his aim is to produce a rationale for the range of events. Simply, it is not a question of ‘whodunit’, but ‘why’. In contrast, Ghosh clearly domesticates the genre of detective film by locating the action within lived spaces of middle/upper middle class homes. His first film, Hirer Angti (1992), belonging to the category of children’s detective/adventure genre, marks this by setting the action in a large familial space, and particularly through the little nothings the members of the joint family share with each other, the ways in which the sisters-in-law share their unaccounted afternoons inside the house and so on. The film highlights how Ghosh’s ‘detective’ films delve into interior spaces and into the interiority of the characters. In short, Ghosh deals with mindscapes and a range of trivial everyday events in place of the crafty play of mind games. Ghosh’s last film Satyanweshi is an adaptation of Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s detective story about the suave sleuth Byomkesh Bakshi and his assistant Ajit Bandyopadhyay. While Byomkesh Bakshi stories have been adapted successfully by Ray (as Chiriakhana/Zoo, 1967) and others, Ghosh chose one of the early stories namely Chorabali (Quicksand), which is about betrayal and fateful coincidences. On one hand, Bakshi’s love for Tagore and Maharbharat is well known to its readers and may have inspired Ghosh; on the other, the filmic connections woven into his text may be read in the light of Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s own association with screenplay writing.5 Indeed, Bandyopadhyay is known for his ambiguous endings and for an even more dubious protagonist and narrator (Ajit). On the contrary, in the film Chiriakhana, as pointed out by Gautam Basu Thakur, in his intricate reading of the text through Lacanian model (2013: 68): Ray’s figuration of the detective as an infallible omniscient Other relies on the significant changes that the director makes in the process of adapting the literary text for his film. This particular figuration, I will contend, is symptomatic of Ray’s oeuvre (films as well as his literary writings), in many of which we witness a persistent attempt to represent, overwrite, and, at times, substitute intransigent, flawed father figures . . . with representations of omniscient father figures. In connection to such propositions, one may argue that Ghosh’s detective seemingly disturbs the powerful symbolic order (of the father) through affective presence of desirous women caught in the dark patches of the interiors. For instance, in Satyanweshi, Ghosh thickens the mystery of a 145

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missing person with issues of love, longing, jealously, vengeance, and suffering. And thus, in many ways, Satyanweshi mirrors the twisted tale of Chokher Bali and a range of other Ghosh’s films involving similar themes (inclusive of Dosar [2006], Sob Charitro Kalponik [2009], Abohoman [2010], Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012), etc.). Therefore, at the point when Byomkesh (Sujay Ghosh) and Ajit (Anindya Chattopadhyay) reach the Balabantpur mansion, the location reveals other crises, which include the economic deterioration of the princely estates as well as problems within such patriarchal structures exemplified by the strained relationship between the childless Prince Himangshu (Indraneil Sengupta) and his wife Alaka (Arpita Chatterjee). Thus, in their attempt to solve the riddle, Byomkesh and Ajit encounter the mistress of the house with an enigmatic voice.6 She is sexually stifled (aptly represented through the delicate face of the actor) or ‘frigid’ according to Himangshu’s description, yet she is deeply lovelorn due to the sudden demise of the librarian, Harinath. The plot also involves Kaligati (Sibaji Bandyopadhyay), the doctor cum manager of the princely estate, who plots and hopes to use his widowed daughter as bait in an attempt to seize the family wealth. Furthermore, Alaka’s unhappiness and her yearning for Harinath are juxtaposed with her unconsummated marriage. As well, Ajit is seemingly attracted to Alaka, while Harinath is enticed by Kaligati’s young and attractive daughter Leela (Anandi Ghose). Such layering of lust and hopelessness was not an integral part of the original plot; then again, such elements produce a complicated structure of things in Satyanweshi. In effect, the ‘feminisation’ of the masculine orders through the feminine pining and envy emerges as a crucial intervention.7 As a matter of fact, in Satyanweshi, though beginning with Bariwali (The Lady of the House, 2000) as well, through Chokher Bali, Raincoat (2004), Antarmahal (Views of an Inner Chamber, 2005), and so on, Ghosh produces the figure of the agonised woman who is trapped in the interiors of house; furthermore, in the above mentioned films, he also connects it with the subject of strong homoerotic attachment between the women. The scene, which introduces Harinath, the victim, also presents the crux of the story. While Himangshu sits in the dimly lit interior, Alaka sits on the verandah with Harinath as he sings delightfully for her. Leela, Kaligati’s daughter, enters with (presumably) a glass of sorbet. Despite being deeply engrossed in the song, Alaka intently follows Himangshu’s gaze from the point he begins drinking from the glass to the point he puts it back on the tray. First, such placement of characters echoes the ways in which characters were connected to each other in earlier films (as in the scene in which Bonodini wears Ashalata’s jewels); second, and more significantly for the chapter, this scene produces a complex web of desire and despair through a heavily 146

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loaded mise en scène executed through the setting (drapes, decorative window panes, photo frames, lamps, greenish interiors), tracking, lighting, and the movement of the characters. In a way, this scene presents a Ghosh ‘cliché’, which has acquired a certain currency through its repeated deployment over the years. Even so, such recognisable patterns produce what I describe as a powerful grid that allows us to perceive the significance of mise en scène, and the fashion in which it may communicate the intricacies of the plot. Consequently, in a willful manner, the honest librarian is killed as a result of his attachment to books or objects; this is beside the fact that Kaligati kills because of his aspirations to own the entire property. The meaning of this ‘property’ (or props) is aptly discovered at the point when Ajit drifts through the house and Himangshu narrates to him the history of the place. Indeed, Ghosh’s personal admiration for décor and household artifacts were apparently transferred onto the film’s sets.8 Thus, from what used to be commonplace set design in mainstream Bengali films (for instance, a trendy sofa set for a drawing room), settings in Ghosh’s film expanded as something far more definite and represented both the world of characters as well as directorial imagination. According to Avik Mukhopadhyay (personal conversation, 2013), for Satyanweshi they extended the environment of the forest into the interior space. Mukhopadhyay says: We used a range of objects, which were greenish in colour, or within the same colour scheme. Moreover, while we lit certain areas, specific zones were left in the dark, as in the forest. We used a lot of wall paintings and prints of animals, birds and insects. As opposed to Chokher Bali in which the props were meticulously placed for the viewer’s attention, or for instance, in Shubho Muharat and Raincoat where spaces were crowded with objects, in Satyanweshi we tactfully drew attention towards specific props while a variety of objects were left in dark. The overall impression was like that of an animal – the tiger in this case – hiding behind the shrubs. We wanted to hint at the fact that, the danger is within the house, not out there in the jungle. Effectively, through fastidious detailing of the ordinary, Ghosh’s films underscored the complications of familial and familiar spaces.

Inner spaces, women and detectives In Shubho Muharat (2003), Ghosh borrows and transforms Agatha Christie’s story about the unassuming Miss Marple and explores his own gender 147

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concerns through a peering story about a ‘private’ detective. The plot deals with a senior and successful star Padmini (Sharmila Tagore) who returns to Calcutta to produce a film, which in reality is a tactic to redress the loss of her child, born with a certain condition. On the other side, Ghosh presents Ranga Pishi (Rakhee Gulzar), the widowed and aging aunt of the female lead. Ranga Pishi is confined to the interiors of the house, and between cooking and prying over the personal life of her niece Mallika (Nandita Das), she watches television, attends to her cats and eventually solves the mystery by her intelligence, curiosity and an uncanny feminine intuitiveness.9 The dynamism of the characters – the actor from whom Padmini gets the infection and who is also her first victim; Padmini herself as the unforgiving mother and actor; the exploited hairdresser who blackmails Padmini for her daughter’s medicines (and becomes her second victim); the young and vivacious journalist Mallika (who has two lovers and another marriage proposal), and the forlorn Ranga Pishi with her cats – produce a world that is crowded with elements, which is meticulously produced and is deeply telling. For instance, in the scene in which the case gets complicated after the second murder, Mallika sits before her computer and smokes, as she ponders over the possible solutions. Prior to this, Ranga Pishi has already seen the news on TV and suspects that the second murder is indeed a logical follow up of the first one. Later, Ranga Pishi watches Padmini’s film (Praner Pradeep/The Light of Life) on TV, and raises questions regarding the ways in which the first victim appears in the film. Mallika, however, keeps working and seemingly ignores her observations, while Ranga Pishi continues her banter and then quickly shifts her discussion from crime, possible victims and motives to domestic issues like the need for a vet (for her cat Haridasi). Mallika retorts to this by saying that she is working, just as Ranga Pishi reminds her that household chores are work too. Thereafter, she continues to be critical about Mallika’s ways, and then bursts out in desperation. Such rapid shift from the murder case to her expecting cat and the food she had prepared for Mallika, illustrate very typical, supposedly ‘non-critical’ and ‘sentimental’ feminine behaviour. Yet, besides the fact that Ranga Pishi will eventually and tactfully solve the case (and will know ‘whodunit’), her outburst and choice of colloquial words to describe her life draw attention to the manner in which the film deals with the tensions between the home and the world. In many of his films (as in Asukh [1999], The Last Lear [2007], Khela [2008], Abohoman, etc.), Ghosh has dealt with characters involved in the field of media, especially cinema. The industrial (hi)story about work and its people is further developed in Shubho Muharat, which obliquely refers to the production conditions and ways in which many (women) ‘junior 148

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artists’ as well as star actors are constantly exposed to (sexual) violence. Shubho Muharat also shows the vulnerability of the (aging) stars. In fact, in the last scene of the film, Padmini’s most ardent fan, Ranga Pishi, forces her to pay a visit. In this scene, Padmini, after noticing a rather devious personal letter (published in Mallika’s magazine), which resonates with her own life, arrives at Mallika’s house with a motive to kill. At this point, Ranga Pishi, whose real name remains unknown to us, urges Mallika to go inside her room with Jojo (one of her admirers) lest they are seen by Padmini. This room becomes the space for the expansion of the romantic subplot that brews along with the main plot centering on murder and detection. The room is awkwardly swarmed with props and becomes the setting within which Mallika can actually explore her wants. This spatial demarcation between the plot and the subplot turns out to be a crucial aspect of the film. Thus, in the sitting area, while a distressed Padmini enquires about Mallika, Ranga Pishi explains that it is she who has spotted the crime and not Mallika. Moreover, she has been following Padmini, writing letters to her, since Padmini’s heydays. It is such fannish curiosity that has encouraged her to notice the discrepancies in the murderous plot conceived by Padmini. However, as Padmini gets progressively unsettled, she notices a room in which someone is supposedly hiding. Within the Bengali detective genre, in such climactic moments the (male) detective normally narrates the intricacies of the plot to a gathering and explains the chain events in logical terms. In this film, conversely, first, the encounter is personal; second, the scene includes a series of shots through which Padmini discovers Haridasi and her kittens and is overtaken by emotion. After this, she confesses to the crime. In an environment in which all important characters – the detective and her primary associate, the murderer and her victims, as well as the cats – are female, Ghosh includes several elements, which may appear inconsequential. And yet, Padmini eventually breaks down, narrates the chain of events and confesses to her crimes, which nevertheless remain with Ranga Pishi until the end. Such intimacies and the reconstruction of a masculine genre within the feminine daily life make the film engaging, despite the fact that Ghosh worked within an inflexible narrative style marked by character prototypes (especially media personnel), ordinary situations (dining room conversations, scenes in the toilet, sleepless nights, etc.), performance styles (including gestures, words and mannerisms), musical tropes, lighting styles, and editing patterns. Curiously, while Ray’s films were unremitting point of reference for Ghosh, when it came to the detective genre, with which he had begun his career, Ghosh presented remarkable alternatives by creating characters of familiar 149

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women, mundane situations, just as he zealously created and considered inner terrains and domestic spaces. In conclusion, it is imperative to note that precisely because of his preoccupation with the mise en scène and themes of affection, envy, infidelity as well as suffering and death, Ghosh shapes a recognisable pattern and manufactured intimate and liminal zones onto which the ever evolving topics of bodily matters, gender, sexuality, and non-normative desires could be projected. Thus, as a final point, Mallika admits to her attachment towards Jojo while she is in the confined space; as well, Jojo confronts his past and his associations with his aunt Padmini within this room. As in the case of Satyanweshi, the staging of such delicate exchanges is connected to the controlled setting that becomes the means through which the narrative unfolds. It, however, is not entirely a question of the realistic props per se; contrarily, Ghosh repeatedly uses specific and personal objects, which splendidly recount the densities of the plot. Perhaps, Ghosh was one of few Indian directors who – somewhat like Mani (of Manihara) – was consumed by ‘things’, and thus he exploited those to build thoughtful mise en scène. Therefore, within the designed and chessboard-like plot (signifying fabula/ploy/space), each figure (meaning person/number/object) had certain assigned movement and import in relation to each other. It is this harmony within the ordinary things and stories of our tedious everyday which make these films discreetly memorable.10

Figure 7.1 With crew members and cast on the set of Shubho Muhurat Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

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Notes 1 For an elaborate discussion of Tagore and Ghosh, see Mandakranta Bose (2007). 2 In my work on ‘Early Melodramatic Forms and the Subject of Bhakti: Gender, Sexuality, and Modes of Subversion’, I discuss how ghats are generically loaded spaces, which are half public-half private, and the manner in which these may be examined as women’s domain. Films which refer to Vaishnavite tradition of love often explore such spaces. For instance, the exceptional song Aaj sajaan mohe ang lagalo in the film Pyaasa, director Guru Dutt (1957) uses the terrace as a location to work on the complexities of the content. 3 On detective narratives also see Stephen Cooper (1989). 4 See Brinda Bose and Prasanta Chakravarty (2012) for a thorough discussion on contemporary Bengali cinema and the emergence of what is being described as the neo-Bhadralok in the context of post-globalisation and growing consumer cultures. Also see Sharmistha Gooptu (2010). 5 He wrote screenplays of successful Bombay Talkies films like Durga (1939), Kangan (1939), Navjeevan (1939), and so on. 6 The film referred here (i.e. Krishnakanter Will), in which Alaka was supposed to perform, is one of early ‘talkies’ produced in 1933. Therefore, the use of the voice of the actor Arpita Chatterjee, and presenting it as an unheard voice of the 1930s, are decisive and intriguing explorations. 7 Therefore, when Alaka sends off Leela with her husband, Harinath enquires, ‘Whom are you punishing?’ Indeed, to quote Basu Thakur (2013: 75), in the opening scene, Byomkesh tells Ajit his friend and chronicler that there is ‘no such thing as pure love. Pure love when probed and analyzed is full of impurities’. Love, Byomkesh contends, is not free from ‘jealousy, lies and deception. There is no love in today’s world without any of these’. He then goes on to convince Ajit that even the greatest works of literature, those of Shakespeare and Tagore, are in truth stories about death and deceit. ‘Consider Tagore’, notes the self-proclaimed ‘seeker of truth’ [satyanneshi], ‘beginning with Chokher Bali . . . there are not a single novel that does speak of illegitimate love’. 8 As mentioned by cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay (personal conversation 2013). 9 For an interesting study of TV, local news and role of the viewing public, also see Franklin D. Gilliam Jr, and Shanto Iyengar (2000). 10 Here, I am making a connection between the ‘commonplace’ and the ‘extraordinary’ in order to underline specific ritualistic behaviours, which mark our ‘everyday’. Also see De Certeau.

References Bose, Brinda, and Prasanta Chakravarty, ‘Kolkata Turning Contemporary Urban Bengali Cinema, Popular Cultures and the Politics of Change’, Thesis Eleven, Vol. 113, no. 1, 2012, pp. 129–140. Bose, Mandakranta, ‘Political Aesthetics of Nation and Gender in Rituparno Ghosh’s Chokherbali’. In Heidi R. M. Pauwels (ed.), Indian Literature and Popular Cinema: Recasting Classics. London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 191–202.

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Basu Thakur, Gautam, ‘Configuring the Other: The Detective and the Real in Satyajit Ray’s Chiriakhana’. In Meheli Sen, and Anustup Basu (eds), Figurations in Indian Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 67–88. Chakrabarti, Gautam, ‘The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker: Towards a Social History of the Bengali Detective’, Cracow Indological Studies, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2012, pp. 255–268. Chaudhuri, Supriya, ‘Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture, Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction’, Journal of Victorian Culture, Vol. 15, no. 2, 2010, pp. 173–193. Cooper, Stephen, ‘Sex/Knowledge/Power in the Detective Genre’, Film Quarterly Vol. 42, no. 3, 1989, pp. 23–31. de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Dwyer, Rachel, ‘Bombay Gothic: 60 Years of Mahal/The mansion, dir. Kamal Amrohi, 1949’. In Rachel Dwyer and Jerry Pinto (eds), Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 130–155. Gilliam, Franklin D., Jr., and Shanto Iyengar, ‘Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public’, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 44, no. 3, 2000, pp. 560–573. Gooptu, Sharmistha, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation. New Delhi: Roli Books, 2010. Gopal, Sangita, Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Mukherjee, Madhuja, ‘Early Melodramatic Forms and the Subject of Bhakti: Gender, Sexuality, and Modes of Subversion’. In Gopa Gupta, Seema Kundu and Shuchismita Mitra (eds), Religion and Popular Culture in the Indian Subcontinent. Kolkata: Bethune College, 2012, pp. 35–64. Mukherjee, Srimati, ‘Feminism in a Calcutta Context: Assault, Appeasement, and Assertion in Rituparno Ghosh’s Dahan’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 22, no. 3, 2005, pp. 203–210. Mukherjee, Srimati, ‘The Impossibility of Incestuous Love: Woman’s Captivity and National Liberation in Rituparno Ghosh’s Utsab’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 29, no. 5, 2012, pp. 401–408.

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8 CLOSETED DESIRES AND OPEN SECRETS Raincoat and Noukadubi Richard Allen

❦ What does our knowledge of Riturparno Ghosh as a queer film director contribute to our understanding of his films that are not explicitly gay- or queer-themed works? Raincoat and Noukadubi are both films that intricately anatomise a condition of unrealised desire that is created by the social expectations and constraints of arranged marriage, yet a desire that still exists at a level of ‘open secrecy’, at once acknowledged and disavowed. I argue that both films, Raincoat especially, invoke the metaphor of the ‘closet’ to characterise the mortifying ways in which desire is confined and denied within arranged marriages. By doing so, they evoke, albeit in a manner that is itself closeted or disguised, an analogy between the closet created by compulsory heterosexuality for those who are incipiently homosexual and the rejection of love based on desire created by conditions of, what I shall call, compulsory arrangement. The idea of the homosexual closet as the container of a barely acknowledged and disavowed desire that engenders the epistemology of the open secret, really only emerges in 19th century Europe when, in a society of compulsory heterosexuality, homosexuality began to be discriminated and rendered conceivable as a form of identity, while at the same time, this identity was phobically conceived as abject, degenerate and so on.1 It is only in the recent past that this concept has gained purchase in the Indian context as the idea of homosexual identity, in contradistinction to heterosexual identity, has been self-consciously asserted.2 In this sense, it might be claimed that given that the idea of the ‘closet’ arrives ‘late’ and from

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the outside, it has little to do with portraying the emotional costs of Indian marital arrangement. Raincoat and Noukadubi suggest otherwise. Ghosh applies the sensibility and sensitivity of a contemporary, queer-identified film-maker to understanding the social costs of the compulsory organisation of desire. However, my purpose here is less to tease out a queer subtext to these works, which would be a reductive exercise, than to explore the multifaceted ways that Ghosh anatomises arranged marriages in terms of closeted desires and open secrets. For by doing so, I argue, Ghosh serves to articulate the particular saliency and cultural specificity of the closet in a society traditionally governed by rigorous social restraint upon the expression of desire. His work offers a kind of genealogy of the closet in which closeted desires and the open secrets they engender emerge with their own distinctive history within the Indian context. In Raincoat, Manoj (Ajay Devgn), who has lost his job in a jute mill, arrives in Calcutta in order to scrape together enough money from old college friends to start up his own business to support himself and his mother. There, he visits his erstwhile sweetheart, Neeru (Aishwarya Rai), who succumbed to an arranged marriage and moved to Calcutta six years earlier. Her protestations of wealth and happiness seem suspect, thinly disguising her abject destitution, but he too pretends to possess a wealth and status that he does not have. Neeru’s abjection is configured in terms of the metaphor of the closet, a filthy, cluttered space that expresses all her selfloathing. Both of them keep the other’s secret even when they find out the truth, and in a twist that is inspired by O’Henry’s short story, The Gift of the Magi, they each leave with the other, as a parting gift, their most prized possession. The concealed nature of the gifts becomes a charged expression of their unrealised love and the nature of its existence between them as an open secret. Raincoat is a contemporary film, though its characters are imprisoned in the past. Noukadubi, on the other hand, is an historical film, a self-conscious adaptation of a novel by Rabindranath Tagore (translated into English as The Wreck), a writer whose importance to the Bengali tradition, and to Ghosh in particular, can scarcely be understated. Noukadubi deploys the shipwreck conceit from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors to engender a narrative of mistaken identity when the bride from one of two travelling couples, a young, partially educated, girl from the country, Kamala (Riya Sen), is cast ashore with the wrong man, an intellectually sophisticated but socially reticent babu from Calcutta, Ramesh (Jisshu Sengupta), whom she mistakenly believes to be her husband. Early on, Ramesh comes to realise the mistake, but for reasons both of indecision and propriety does not tell 154

Figure 8.1 Poster of Raincoat Courtesy of Shree Venkatesh Films

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her, even as he loves another who is his equal, Hemnalini (Raima Sen). While Ramesh incurs great personal cost by staying in the relationship with Kamala, he fears ‘coming out’ to someone who is so vulnerable and dependent. Ghosh’s adaptation makes explicit the fact that, for Kamala, the condition of ‘fake’ marriage is as real as any ‘actual’ marriage. While remaining within the closet of deception causes pain, emerging from that closet is potentially life threatening to loved ones. Raincoat and Noukadubi provide contrasting perspectives upon the prison house of arranged marriage that highlights not only the differences, but also commonalities of gender. In Raincoat, Neeru, as a woman of humble origins, is imprisoned by the expectations of wealth and happiness that colonise her desire as she ‘marries up’ with her arranged husband, such that she becomes a hollowed-out self, empty of feeling. Ramesh, on the other hand, is burdened by the expectations of responsibility and support that accrue to the older man who marries a woman of humble origins for whom he is a lord and master. Each illuminates one half of the double bind of the closet; the excruciating emotional pain that issues from denying one’s true desires in conformity to the expectations and norms of a culture, on the one hand, and the social costs of ‘coming out’ and declaring once true allegiance, on the other. In a society where the idea of the lifetime ‘arrangement’ of desire is so deeply embedded and embraced by the parties to it, the internalisation of these social norms may have a deadening effect upon the self, but the social costs of transgressing them are also potentially catastrophic. The style of Ghosh’s work, especially that of the intimate kammerspiel or chamber drama, is perfectly suited to dramatising the estranged intimacy yielded by the closet. Raincoat is shot largely in a single interior, and in Noukadubi, too, claustrophobic interiors predominate save for open air shots at Benares fort. It is far more spatially restricted than Tagore’s novel. Post-sync sound also adds to the feeling of intimate drama as voices are heard in ‘close-up’. Ghosh is a conventional and quite a conservative stylist; his stylistic palette is a narrow one. Although the tempo of his stories is slow, he works mainly within the standard shot/counter-shot in medium close-up or two-shot character set-up style with a static camera. The pace of Raincoat is reflected in the relatively small number of shots and high average shot length: 524 shots at an average of 13.4 seconds. This average is explained by the fact that Ghosh consistently deploys extended two-shot long takes in the film. There are many more shots in Noukadubi in proportion to its length – approximately 1,200 at an average length of 7 seconds – in part because of the long opening montage and other song montages in the film. The exception to the norm of cross-cutting that 156

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achieves observable salience in Noukadubi is the use of a two-shot, where the speaker is held in focus in the foreground while his or her interlocutor is held out of focus in the background. However, rather than sustaining the long take, Ghosh will cut for emphasis to the background figure, but then return to the two-shot with the figure occluded in focus. This device, while occasionally used in Raincoat, is regularly deployed in Noukadubi to orchestrate relationships of emotional proximity and distance between the characters, and it is particularly effective in expressing the concealment of feelings between the two parties involved.

The metaphor of the closet in Raincoat The metaphor of the closet in Raincoat as a hidden or concealed place of abjection emerges in the film through the figuration of the bathroom that is initially associated with Manoj’s sense of shame. When Manoj arrives at Calcutta, we see his friend Alok reading to him a letter of introduction that he has composed about Manoj’s desperate financial circumstances while Manoj stands on the threshold of the bathroom. Manoj’s sense of shameful self-exposure is palpable, and when his friend leaves he cries, half naked and alone, in the bathroom. He is further shamed when Alok observes as he sits down at the breakfast table that Manoj has not shaved properly. Manoj’s sense of shame is caused by the fact that he fails to meet the burden of social expectation, yet it comes to be experienced by Manoj as a sense of who he is, that is, less than a man. Before Manoj leaves to meet Neeru, Sheela (Mouli Ganguly), Alok’s wife, approaches the bathroom while he shaves again. ‘Why do girls cry so much when they leave home after marriage?’ he suddenly asks her. ‘Is it just because they are leaving their parents?’ She thinks that he is talking about Neeru, but he says that he was not at her leave taking. He is talking about Sheela herself: ‘I still remember you wept all the way to the car.’ Sheela replies: ‘Next time you cry in the bathroom please turn the shower on. You need to learn a few things from us girls, too.’ The bathroom here is explicitly articulated as the spatial container for concealed emotion. Unlike her husband, in front of whom Manoj feels deficient, inadequate and liable to exposure, Sheela is someone with whom it is safe for him to be vulnerable. He does not have to put on the façade of ‘being a man’ with her, while at the same time she knows all too well the need to hide one’s emotions from public view. Later in the film, when Manoj and Neeru converse, and Neeru spins a fantasy of her traveling businessman husband, she says to Manoj that she could not possibly travel with him because she is afraid of flying – she does 157

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not want to have to use the bathroom on the plane. When Manoj points out that the bathrooms are clean, she responds that her worry is not that they are dirty but that she might get locked inside the toilet and stuck there. Towards the end of their meeting, Neeru again returns to the idea of travel. She wishes she could be far away: ‘So what if I got stuck in the bathroom. The plane has to stop somewhere and move on.’ When Manoj questions her idea that she would be locked up all the way on her travels she blurts out: ‘I am locked up in here Mannu. Do you think this luxury is everything?’ She had commented earlier on her fears that if her husband discovered that Mannu had visited he would lock her up in a bathroom, but now she acknowledges that she is already incarcerated. Manoj responds that no one can stay locked up forever for someone is bound to come and open the door. Neeru confesses that she has lost all hope for that. In relationship to Neeru, the bathroom is explicitly figured as a closet, an enclosed place in which she fears being trapped. Her later remark makes evident the sense in which her entrapment is writ large, that is, she is trapped in the closet of her marriage. But the closet she is trapped in is not in fact that of luxury. She is trapped by having to imagine that she lives in luxury, by her expectations of luxury. Her ‘confession’ of her secret that she is imprisoned in luxury, even though it acknowledges her unhappiness, is at the same time a wishful fantasy, the fantasy of being able to bemoan luxury, which serves to conceal her degradation and impoverishment even as it reveals her unhappiness. In this respect, in her answer to Manoj about the bathroom closet on the plane, she undoubtedly dissembles. Neeru’s own ‘bathroom’, which actually encompasses the entire ‘private’ area of her house, turns out to be a very dirty place indeed, which she prevents Manoj entering at all costs. When Manoj lets the man he discovers to be her landlord into the apartment, the landlord asks him whether he has used the bathroom that is situated behind a translucent glass screen that bisects the room. He opens the door for Manoj who looks through, but we do not initially see what he sees. This withheld view conveys the sense of a secret beyond the door in the manner of a gothic mystery. Furthermore, there is something unseemly and shameful for us to share this view with the disreputable landlord under whose unsympathetic gaze the nature of the bathroom’s condition would cast Neeru in the worst possible light. The landlord is like the figure of the blackmailer – he is someone who uses the knowledge of another person’s secret, his capacity to see through the closet, as a source of power and subjugation. In that sense, the domain of the ‘bathroom’ is actually his domain and he is the figure who wallows in the abjection.

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So, it is only when the landlord has left that we return with Manoj to the room behind the screen, after Neeru has warned him in a flashback recollection that if they ever meet again she undoubtedly will not convey to him the truth about her situation. Initially, we see the chaotic mess of a kitchen. Dirty pots and pans cover the filthy countertops and food lies uneaten. Cockroaches stalk the drawers. The bathroom is actually in the farthest reaches of the room, behind the screen in the far corner, the inner room. Visible from the outer room it stands as its most representative part. It is disgustingly dirty and strewn with empty bottles, presumably discarded by Neeru’s husband whom the landlord reveals has become an alcoholic who is enabled by Neeru in her continued attachment to him. But if the bathroom is a filthy closet within the cluttered abject space of the kitchen, this kitchen space is, in turn, divided off from a larger room that itself is essentially a storage closet or a cupboard. The room Neeru lives in is cluttered with furniture and pieces of art. While she pretends all this stuff is part of the burden of being married into an aristocratic family, in fact, it does not belong to her at all but is the property of a furniture retailer who is renting the room off her as a storage space. The closet-like nature of the room is further reinforced in the way that Neeru shuts the windows and keeps out the light. This is ostensibly to keep out the rain, but in fact it is to stop her landlord, to whom she owes rent, demanding money from her. The rain gets in anyway from leaks in the roof. Furthermore, the lights are not working and so the room is dark. She claims it is because of the storm, but actually it is because she has not paid the rent. Also, she is completely alone. She claims the servants have the afternoon off but she has no servants; and she tells Manoj that her husband is away on a business trip to Japan and Germany, while actually he is a business failure, a fraud and probably out on a drunken binge. Like Neeru, as we have seen, Manoj has his own closet of shame, though his secret is more open. One feels though that he might truthfully share his actual circumstances to Neeru were she not so tightly enmeshed in the veil of illusion. Indeed, when he spins his own elaborate middle class success story that mirrors her own imagined state of happiness, it is as if he does it for her as a gesture of love. To be sure, like Neeru, Manoj is partly motivated by pride. However, he is more conscious of his motivation; after all, he speaks frankly of his sense of shame to Alok, early in the film. Therefore, he is able to discern the nature of Neeru’s stubborn pride and the way it engenders the suffering that she seeks to protect herself from. Thus, his own dissembling is a way of acknowledging Neeru’s mental prison; it is a way of redeeming her from the web of illusion, without exposing her

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shame. In contrast to the landlord, Manoj’s knowledge of Neeru’s secret is one that, out of love, preserves it. Manoj tells her that he gave up the jute factory a long time ago, and like someone spinning a fantasy or dream out of the residues of a day’s events, he borrows the identity of his successful friend. He is the proud owner of a ‘private limited company’ (in English) that makes TV serials. She enquires of him what programs he has done. He deflects the question by saying that they are just local programs but they are soon going national. He is now here to sell a slot for national syndication. Furthermore, his mother no longer lives in the tiny ground floor house she used to inhabit. Now, his mother has two whole floors in a six-storey building. She has the two top stories with marble floors, attached bathroom and air conditioners. And she has a dish antenna and watches TV all day (just like Neeru claims that she does). He pretends the call from Sheela is from his secretary who he flirts with, just as he imagines, and Neeru confirms that she flirts with her personal fitness coach. Neeru’s closet is fundamentally created from anxieties about social status and social role. She fears regression to a socially fallen, penniless condition of life on the street that is close to where she finds herself. Indeed, when Manoj meets the landlord, he expresses the thought that Neeru is prostituting herself and that he, Manoj, is one of her clients. The regression she fears has aspects of both class and caste anxiety. She cannot afford servants and so her house is filthy. Furthermore, she has no one to cook food, no one to buy it for her and no money to buy it with in any case. As a result, she is pale and malnourished. Indeed, so central are her anxieties about status that abjection is cast in Raincoat in terms of metaphors of pollution. The idea of contamination or pollution is explicitly raised at the beginning of the film through the narrative device of the raincoat. The raincoat belongs to Alok, and his wife lent it to their servant Govind, a figure whom we see only briefly in the background cleaning some furniture. Sheela assures Manoj that Govind is clean, yet she has put a little scent on the coat just to make sure it does not smell. It is odd that this item of protection is cast as a potential cause of pollution, and while Ghosh might seem to endorse fastidious caste anxieties, his point I think is actually to denaturalise them. The raincoat levels identity and masks apparent differences: it passes from Alok to Govind, and via Sheela to Manoj, then to Neeru, back to Manoj, and finally back to Sheela. It is also, obviously, a device of protection from the ever-present rain. Although rain is often associated with romance and social renewal in Indian Cinema, in Raincoat, a film about depression, rain takes on connotations of pollution and corrosion 160

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and becomes an expressive correlative to the emotional storm that resides within and the salty tears that manifest it. The idea of polluting rain is linked to the figuration of the ‘bathroom’ closet as a vale of tears through the Krishna-inspired poem and song that accompanies Manoj’s exploration of the kitchen and bathroom space. Expressing Manoj’s thoughts, the song begins ‘O my beloved why are you so proud’. Then, we hear the voice of the film’s lyricist, Gulzar, narrating a poem about the corrosive effects of the monsoon rain that are likened to tears. In the context of the Krishna story, the tears are those of Radha who proudly waits for Krishna to return: ‘In the last monsoon the walls were not that damp. Who knows why there is dampness in the wall and the walls are filled with cracks, and, on the damp floors as on the wan cheeks, wet tears flow’. In this way, the closet of the ‘bathroom’ itself is conceived here as a place where the boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ dissolves, objectifying Neeru’s inner abjection. Gulzar continues: ‘The rain on the glass of the windows of the house writes a message with is fingers, as she sits sobbing behind closed windows’. The dampness that seeps through the walls or is made visible on the window serves to objectify her inner despair. The singer then narrates how her tears flow endlessly like a force of nature. ‘From her eyes she rains tears that make the Jamuna flow’, and yet her desire to bathe, that is, to renew her spirit, remains unfilled: her hair is dry, her clothes are morbid and her heart is lifeless. Manoj’s depression, like Neeru’s, resides in his sense of failure to live up to social expectations, but in Manoj’s case his core of abjection seems to have an explicitly sexual component. In an early memory scene, Manoj remembers a time when he and Neeru were going out to a movie. We peer through a black veil as Neeru tries to button up her top. She needs help and asks Manoj. He steps behind the veil but he cannot do it because he is constrained in his action by the intimacy of the situation. She looks up at him longingly in anticipation of a kiss but he withdraws. ‘What are you afraid of,’ she asks. ‘Sitting and watching an adult movie with me, neighbors, or yourself?’ He says nothing. Later, in an excruciating scene that takes place during Diwali, as Manoj lies on a bed with fever, Neeru declares to him that she is getting married and he grips her wrists tightly so as not to let her go. He insists that he will buy her a diamond ring and a car and that he too, like her intended, is six foot tall, as he struggles to get off his bed. It has taken eight years for him to declare his love for her, and then only when he is threatened by a rival. Perhaps Manoj’s inaction simply expresses the natural diffidence of a shy and sensitive man who has been raised in a sheltered rural environment. He is still, we surmise, a virgin when he visits Neeru in Calcutta 161

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years later, even though he is probably a man in his early thirties. Yet, is the character actually heterosexual? The actions of Manoj, his reticence with Neeru, who is after all the gorgeous Aishwarya Rai, and his belated selfassertion in imitation of a rival are entirely consistent with a man who may not be heterosexual; so too, indeed, is his subsequent later diffidence when he meets Neeru again. Yet the film does not invite us to ask this question. His actions would be the same if he were heterosexual. The closet here is a capacious one that denotes a core of reticence and shame in his self-identity and in the expression of desire. But it is a core of shame that is intimately entwined with his sense of deficiency as a public actor. Here, Manoj stands in marked contrast to his buff, brash, confident, urban friend who works in the media. Alok tells Sheela who suggests that he should try and find Manoj work that Manoj is too ‘cool and composed’ (the words are spoken in English) to work in the media. He lacks the requisite self-assertiveness. Thus, we have, enacted in Raincoat, a relationship between two characters whose identities are forged around an inner core of abjection, which is itself formed out of the unbearable pressure to meet the social expectation of worthiness with respect to normative familial social arrangements. The flashbacks in Raincoat, whose bright saturated primary colours contrast with the dark and washed-out drabness of Neeru’s rooms, sketch the classic situation of the Devdas story where a boy and girl grow up together and are inseparable. The boy it seems loves the girl, but he is constitutionally reticent and his family lacks the resources to support her; he thus internalises a corrosive sense of self-deficiency – he is emasculated. Lacking a social structure that might support and legitimate his desire, he cannot bring himself to articulate it or he is like the hero of male melodrama always too late. Meanwhile, the girl’s expectations are framed by the same social structure that enjoins arrangement to ensure prosperity. Even as she too might love the boy, she internalises those norms around a core of self-denial, a vacuum of emotional isolation and emptiness that comes to completely define her life when her expectations are unrealised. Ghosh brilliantly succeeds here in laying bare the emotional devastation yielded by compulsory arrangement – the manner in which it is structured to yield a core of self-division and self-denial.

The ‘fiction’ of arranged marriage in Noukadubi The appeal of Rabindranath Tagore’s Noukadubi to Ghosh is quite evident. The narrative conceit of the shipwreck that, unbeknownst to the parties involved, engenders an accidental exchange of marriage partners, denatures the institution of marital arrangement in a manner that is comparable to Raincoat. In both stories, the arranged marriage is a fiction that 162

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is nonetheless experienced as real, and thus made strange. However, in Raincoat, the arranged marriage appears fictional yet real, because it is an illusory ideal sustained in the mind of the central character; Neeru cannot let go of the fiction of marital plenitude lest she lose her sense of self completely. Noukadubi, in contrast, lends the fiction of arranged marriage an objective form: the protagonists, Ramesh and Kamala, appear married to the outside world and initially believe themselves to be married, but they are not, they are victims of a mistaken identity. While the arbitrary character of this coupling seems to expose the stifling nature of an intimate relationship that fails to be based on desire, and certainly the character of Ramesh suffers, perhaps the most telling aspect of the novel and the film is the sympathetic treatment of their relationship, which even though it is fictive, carries for Kamala, and to some extent, for Ramesh too, the weight and meaning of real marriage. In both cases, the result of exposing the fiction of arranged marriage is potentially catastrophic. For Neeru, the loss of her paranoid self-identity might issue in self-destruction were she to confront her abject core, which is why Manoj protects her secret; for Ramesh’s partner, Kamala, the exposure of her arranged marriage as a fiction leads directly to her attempted suicide, which is why he is so reticent to expose the fiction of their ‘marriage’ to her. The imaginary marriage in Noukadubi engenders three interlocking secrets. First, Ramesh conceals his actions to Hem and her family. After he agrees to an arranged marriage to please his father, in the novel, and mother, in the film, he writes to tell Hem what has taken place. However, he destroys the letter before he posts it, and once he has found out that Kamala is not really his wife, the very fact that he holds out tangible hope of uniting once again with his beloved Hem prevents him narrating to her his tangled story. He isolates himself from the world with Kamala in their darkened apartment with its barred windows. Although Kamala reaches to the light outside in the courtyard and the girls of her own age who play there, we perceive Ramesh to be confined and diminished. As his secret is preserved, it becomes more entrenched. Kamala is finally ‘outed’ as his ‘wife’ when Akshay, Ramesh’s rival, and Jogendra, Hem’s brother, retrieve her from the school where Ramesh has sent her away, in a scene that is deeply humiliating to them both. This ‘outing’ is at once true and false. It is true, for it reveals that Ramesh and Kamala are cohabiting as if man and wife, yet it misrepresents the actual state of their intimacy. Both Ramesh and Kamala are shamed, but for different reasons. Ramesh has been exposed as apparently duplicitous, and Ramesh’s willingness to leave Kamala at school during the holidays has exposed his lack of interest in establishing full conjugal relations, which is shameful for her. 163

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Second, Ramesh conceals his love for Hem from Kamala. However much he might wish it, Ramesh cannot isolate or suppress his love for Hem. Indeed, he harbours and nurtures that love in secrecy from Kamala. The physical proximity of Kamala, within the confinement of shared space they inhabit, serves to dramatise and express Ramesh’s emotional confinement, which can be transcended only in imagination or spirit that is expressed by Ghosh in song. In a self-reflexive gesture, the songs Hem sings are the songs of Tagore that serve, as so often in Indian cinema, to miraculously connect through the spirit, lovers who have been separated. Furthermore, Ramesh’s confinement is contrasted with the joy that Hem can find in being ensconced together with him in an attic room. As in Raincoat, the prison the character inhabits is a mental one created by frustrated or unrealised desire and the pressure to dissemble its existence. After the shipwreck, when Ramesh and Kamala set up house, Ramesh sits down in the foreground of a darkened interior while Kamala sets up her shrine, out of focus, in the background. We cut to Kamala’s activities behind him but Ramesh, though he inhabits the same space, is detached from her. When Kamala intrudes into his space to fan him, in tight twoshot, Ramesh abruptly gets up and leaves, switching on the mechanical fan instead. This cues a reaction shot of Hem remembered by Ramesh that mimes the reaction of Kamala. Ramesh then, secretively, opens a drawer that conceals Hem’s photograph, an action which, as Hem sings a love song, cues him to a memory that overwhelms the present: Hem and Ramesh, like lovers, enter his tiny attic apartment together and switch on the fan. The idea of the ‘closet’, as a hidden or concealed space of intimate emotion, is registered through the shrine that Ramesh constructs for Hem within the confines of the house, which is compared by Ghosh to the shrine that Kamala creates to the mother goddess. Ramesh’s shrine takes the form of a secret closet in which Ramesh encloses Hem’s photograph, previously hidden in the drawer, behind an array of books (we might imagine them to be those of Tagore), as we hear Hem’s voice sing from Tagore: ‘For my new playmate, my very own, I keep reserved this special throne. He will mend what is broken by some magic spell’. It is as if, here, there is established an inverse ratio between the contraction of space and the reaching out of the spirit, where this tiny closet houses and sustains the infinite expanse of love. After he has created his secret shrine, he is left alone in tears, bereft of Hem’s company, as we hear her echoing voice: ‘Spending nights wakefully, making a playhouse for you and me’. Ramesh harbours a third secret, the most important of all. In addition to hiding Kamala from Hem and Hem from Kamala, he leaves Kamala in the dark about the fact that she is not actually married to him. His motives for 164

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this are entirely honourable; he wants to preserve Kamala from dishonour and shame and in the meantime search for her missing husband. Yet the logic of the secret here works only to confirm their de facto status as a married couple. Kamala undergoes excruciating suffering as Ramesh renders her into a companion who is untouchable, withdrawing from her proximity when they are confined at home, and then sending her away to school. At the same time, he shows her a level of companionship and solicitude, especially in his support of her schooling. Furthermore, Kamala herself proves more than capable of building a home in the film, and Tagore spends a number of chapters drawing a portrait of her as a capable homemaker. In fact, she is portrayed as both a wife and a mother, since she ‘adopts’ a little boy. In the context of my prior discussion of Raincoat, it is tempting to ‘read’ this relationship as analogous to that of a ‘closeted’ gay man and his wife, characterised by intimacy and detachment, at once ‘fictive’ and real. Here, there is a marked difference in treatment between novel and film. In Tagore’s novel, having been thrown into conjugal intimacy with Kamala in the belief that she is his wife, Ramesh finds reasons to be attracted to Kamala, even if the attraction is not a deep one: ‘He felt strangely drawn towards the little maid and even his erudite mind could not resist her charm’.3 Once he finds out the truth, he withdraws from her on moral grounds and his desire for Hem is reawakened. However, he does not quite reckon on the nature of Kamala’s growing attachment to him for whom the marriage is real and he feels duty bound to respond to her: ‘Not his happiness alone but Kamala’s love for him must be the guiding factor’.4 He writes a letter proposing that they assume conjugal relations. Ramesh’s recognition of the fictive nature of the marriage is less important than the fact that the marriage has been experienced by Kamala as real, although it turns out to be too late, for Kamala has, meanwhile, discovered the shocking truth. For Tagore, it is less that Ramesh’s desire is known, but nonetheless hidden, than that he is somehow unsure of his desire in relationship to the obligations and duties he is supposed to have to others. It is as if the nature of his desire is not fully formed or known to him, and is thus profoundly shaped first by social expectations about how he ought to behave, and then by his experience of intimacy itself. In that sense, too, Ramesh in the novel is more like Kamala herself in his sensibility, in spite of the class difference, because for her, under the conditions of arrangement, obligation and love are fused. In contrast, Ghosh simplifies Ramesh’s motivation by making his desire something about which he is certain. This is a more modern conception of desire, one in desire pre-exists both obligations and intimacy. In Ghosh’s film, Ramesh does not touch Kamala. Initially, this is because of his allegiance to Hem, and then it is because of his discovery of the fact 165

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that they are not man and wife. Ramesh remains chaste because he loves another and this love is an authentic expression of his desire. His desire, while closeted, is fully known to him. Different viewers will have different responses to this. I find it to be a simplification of Tagore’s more subtle intent. When Kamala finds out by accident that she is married to the wrong man, ironically, by using her developing education to read an advertisement that Ramesh has placed in the newspaper, the shame that is caused to her by this discovery prompts her to contemplate taking her own life in a manner that justifies Ramesh’s reticence to reveal the truth, even as his concealment has arguably made matters worse. In the novel, she contemplates suicide, but then, driven by a resolve she has shown throughout, she makes her way along the banks of the Ganges towards Kashi. In the film, she actually enters into the waters of the Ganges to die, or die again, for she had, in the shipwreck, already once been reborn. However, miraculously, she is reborn once again, rescued by a holy man on the ghats of Kashi. There, circumstances bring her to the house of Nalinaksha (Prosenjit Chatterjee), whom she discovers to be her lost husband. At the conclusion of the film, having fallen ill after Nalinaksha discovers her identity, Ramesh comes to visit her. He tells her that he had given her a fake home before, so he wanted to find her a real one. But now he has come to visit her and found that she already has one. But, in contrast to the novel, where she finds secure comfort in Nalinaksha’s home, here she remains attached to Ramesh in a manner that underscores the emotional reality of their fictional marriage. She asks Ramesh: ‘Do you know the difference between what is fake and what is real?’ He defers answering the question, but then she asks him, with tears streaming down her face, who cooks for him? He may know lots of people in Calcutta, but in Gorakhpur, why not ask Mrs. Mukherjee? He tells her not to worry, and that fake and real are two different homes, and she cannot look after them both. But here, unlike the novel, though we have come to know and trust Nalinaksha as Hem is drawn to him, Nalinaksha is still unknown to Kamala. She has been forced to leave the man she loves, because she is not married to him, for someone she knows not. As I have already intimated, the figure of Tagore himself is central to Noukadubi, and his presence is woven into the portrayal of the relationship between Ramesh and Hem and the articulation of unrealised desire. At the beginning of the film, Ramesh recognises that he has a rival for Hem’s love, which is none other than the handsome Rabindranath Tagore himself whose picture adorns her room, and Hem tells her sympathetic father that she would marry Tagore were it not for the fact that he is already married. 166

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Hem’s love for Ramesh is kindled in the film through Tagore’s songs that at once serve to comment upon Ramesh’s state of mind and evoke Hem’s presence to his consciousness, even as he is confined in the house with Kamala. Here, Tagore is celebrated by Ghosh as the ‘father’ of the Indian film song as well as being self-consciously acknowledged as the source of the romance that the director seeks to portray. If Hem imagines herself to be a lover of Tagore, her songs, living in the mind of Ramesh, casts Ramesh himself in the role of Tagore. This suggestion is made explicit in the film. Returning to the home of Ramesh and Kamala, Kamala mistakenly thinks that Ramesh is a doctor when he is actually a lawyer. Her confusion functions as a cue for Ramesh’s mind to wander back to his relationship to Hem, as Hem vocalises the song of Tagore: ‘For my new playmate, my very own, I keep reserved this special throne’. Her song transitions to Ramesh’s memory of a conversation between them in which she tells Ramesh that she always felt that he was not cut out to be a lawyer. His lawyer’s conjecture that she would feel suffocated in his attic room, she declares to him, was actually a weak supposition, pure imagination. She then goes on to say that such a supposition is better suited to a poet and that Tagore started off life living in an attic room in his ancestral mansion with his child bride. Tagore was subjected to a marriage arranged by his father with a child bride of 10 years old, Bhabatarini, whose name was changed to Mrinalini upon marriage and who bore him several children, beginning at age 13. Hem’s comparison of Ramesh to Rabindranath, one that strikes any reader of the novel, might initially invite us to think of Hem as like Tagore’s ‘child bride’ living happily in Ramesh’s attic room. Yet, Hem does not resemble a child bride at all, the resemblance is provided by Kamala. The subtext here is that Rabindranath’s marriage to his child bride was suffocating and we are invited to think of Ramesh’s marriage to Kamala in the same terms. At the time of his marriage to his child bride, Rabindranath had engaged in an intimate emotional relationship with his sister-in-law Kadambari, who subsequently committed suicide at the age of 25.5 This relationship was the subject matter of Tagore’s novel The Broken Nest (1901) and Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964). Hem effectively casts herself as Kadambari in her remark to her father that she might have married Rabindranath were it not for the fact that he was married already. Thus, the comparison is complete: Hem, Ramesh and Kamala stand for Kadambari, Rabindranath and Mrinalini. Rituparno is inviting us to think that in the novel, Noukadubi, Tagore imagined a scenario where his marriage, the marriage between the learned older man and the naïve semi-educated child, turned out to be a fiction 167

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and where Kadambari was available for him to marry and realise his true desire. At the same time, he also imagines the arranged marriage being happily consummated with the right man, Nalinaksha. Actually, it seems, Tagore remained in a state of emotional isolation throughout his life that he wrote about poignantly. According to his biographers, Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, his relationship to his wife was distant. He did not remarry after her death, nor, it seems, did he enter into any other intimate relationships during the course of his long life. In remaking Noukabubi as a work that is about Rabindranath and the love of Radindranath, it is as if Rituparno, the auteur, declares his own emotional and spiritual connection to the author, at once identifying with him in his isolation, but also affirming his allegiance to the power of art itself to transcend that isolation. In this chapter, I have sought to understand Raincoat and Noukadubi through a comparison between the closeted desire created by compulsory arranged marriage and the closeted desire created by compulsory heterosexuality. I am not suggesting that these two forms of closeted desire are the same. Of course, they are not. But these films do invite us to discern affinities; perhaps, most of all, in the way that compulsory arranged marriage, like compulsory heterosexuality, involves matters of life and death. Furthermore, the affinities suggest the extent to which, within India, the closet created by compulsory heterosexuality and the choices it affords and precludes is historically framed by the internalised norms, customs and protocols of arranged marriage within which the freedom to discover and act upon one’s heart’s desire is a hard won freedom.

Acknowledgement Special thanks to Dalpat Rajpurohit for help with Hindi translation.

Notes 1 The anatomy of the closet and its emergence in the Anglo American context is conceptualised in the now classic literary study by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 2 Akshay Khanna, ‘US “Sexuality Types”: A Critical Engagement with the Postcoloniality of Sexuality’, in Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya (eds), The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007, pp. 159–200. 3 Rabindranath Tagore, The Wreck. New York: Macmillan, 1921, p. 12. 4 Tagore, The Wreck, p. 172. 5 For details, see Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. London: Bloomsbury, 1995, pp. 78–91.

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References Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Khanna, Akshay, ‘US “Sexuality Types”: A Critical Engagement with the Postcoloniality of Sexuality’, in Brinda Rose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya (eds), The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Tagore, Rabindranath, The Wreck. London: Macmillan, 1921.

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9 BEYOND THE BINARY (Trans)gender narratives and class distinction in Rituparno Ghosh’s later films Aniruddha Dutta

❦ Towards the end of Arekti Premer Golpo, a 2010 film featuring Rituparno Ghosh and directed by Kaushik Ganguly, there is a significant scene where the two chief protagonists of the film, Abhiroop Sen and Chapal Bhaduri, compare their respective senses of gender. In the film, Abhiroop, played by Rituparno, is a fictional Delhi-based film-maker who is directing a documentary on Chapal Bhaduri, a real-life actor in Bengali open-air theatre (jatra) now past hir prime, played by hirself.1 The film establishes a parallel narrative between reconstructions of Chapal’s past life, in which the younger Chapal is again played by Rituparno, and the present-day drama that unfolds in Abhiroop’s life during the shooting of the documentary. Near the end of the filming process in rural Bengal, the shooting is interrupted by the police acting on behalf of the local villagers, who heard that Chapal is supposed to enact Ma Shitala (the Goddess of plague) for the documentary, and who fear that an untimely performance of the pala (mythical play featuring Shitala) may precipitate an outbreak of plague. Abhiroop fumes at the ‘absolutely ridiculous’ behaviour of the villagers, who are apparently unable to comprehend that this is merely a ‘performance’, and contemplates going to the police station to protest. Since Abhiroop’s cinematographer boyfriend Basu is already in negotiation with the police, Chapal advises Abhiroop to stay behind – byatachheleder kaaj byatachhelerai koruk (let men do men’s work). At this, Abhiroop smiles at Chapal indulgently, and the following conversation ensues:

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BEYOND THE BINARY A B H I R O O P : Do you really think of yourself as a woman, Chapal-da?2 C H A PA L : O ma, if I thought of myself as a man, then all the trouble would

have ended! Why, you don’t think . . .? No. C H A PA L : You don’t think that God, while almost making you a woman, has made you a man [meye gorte gorte chhele gore phelechhe]? A B H I R O O P : No, I don’t think so. I think that women are separate, men are separate, and we are separate ABHIROOP:

(During hir statement, Abhiroop gestures with hir hand to the left, then to the right, and then to the middle.) While Abhiroop’s statement in Bengali and the accompanying hand gestures place both of them in the ‘middle’, the English subtitles translates Abhiroop’s statement into the common ‘third gender’/‘third sex’ framework: ‘I think women are one category, men are another, and we’re a third category’. Whether understood as ‘middle’ or ‘third’, Abhiroop confidently claims hir position outside the gender binary, and gently derides Chapal for seeming a naïve, binary-gendered belief of being a woman in a (wrongly) male body. Moreover, Abhiroop’s gender bending persona is contrasted with Chapal’s apparent espousal of old-fashioned gender roles (‘men’s work’). This follows from a broader schematic contrast in the film between Abhiroop as the English-speaking middle class director from the metropolis and Chapal as the representative of the ‘traditional’ folk theatre of Bengal (the scenes featuring Chapal are mostly in Bangla, the scenes with Abhiroop mostly in English; moreover, the reconstructions of Chapal’s past life are shot in sepia-tinted tones). The film positions their respective narratives of gender variance and identity in terms of the archetypical contrast between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, which is further aligned with a dichotomy between the elite and the vernacular. The aforementioned scene, and the film more broadly, thus illustrates some of the stakes of framing (trans)gendered selves and identities vis-à-vis narratives of class, modernity and progress. In this chapter, I will be examining how the later films featuring or directed by Ghosh, particularly Arekti Premer Golpo and Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012), attempt to legitimise gender variance within a binary-gendered, sexist social context through claims to progress, modernity and enlightenment, but in the process also distinguish transgender identities, selves and narratives in terms of class and caste in ways that elide the agency, narratives and histories of working class or lower caste gender variant persons and communities, in effect positioning them as the subaltern others to the relatively liberated

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(trans)gendered subjects portrayed by Rituparno.3 However, while the films constant attempt to establish such class/caste distinctions through teleologies of modernity and progress, these distinctions remain fragile, troubled and insecure, and are subject to fracture or challenge. While on one hand, Abhiroop supersedes Chapal through a class/caste-restricted narrative of bourgeois modernity and enlightenment, on the other, hir putative modernity and liberation is also undercut through reminders of their commonality, particularly evidenced in their similarly frustrated attempts to achieve successful personal relationships. I locate these tensions as symptomatic of broader tendencies in the emergence of transgender identities, narratives and selves in Bengal and India. Emergent transgender narratives articulated by a rising generation of trans activists often tend to assert and legitimise themselves through trajectories of modernisation and enlightenment, which may position lower class gender variant persons and communities as putatively oppressed, backward subalterns, even as such figures may challenge narratives of transgender distinction.

Rituparno and emerging narratives of trans identity The later films directed by or featuring Rituparno can be located within the context of both Rituparno’s own increasingly public and visible outing of hir sexuality and gender variance later in hir life, and emerging narratives of sexual and gender identity in Bengal and India. Since the economic liberalisation of the 1990s and through the 2000s, there has been a proliferation of media coverage on ‘alternate’ sexuality and gender in the Indian media and public sphere,4 as well as the growth of many non-governmental and community-based organisations working with queer and trans communities.5 In this context, there have been the emergence of new discourses of transgender and transsexual identity, distinct from older working class/lower caste community formations that predated liberalisation, such as the hijras and kothis.6 In Bengal, this is particularly evident through the much-publicised transition narratives of two transwomen, Manabi Bandopadhyay and Tista Das, who were among the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery/gender affirmation surgery in the region, as distinct from the cruder procedures of castration and penectomy undergone by hijras. Both of them have publicly articulated their identity as a woman in a (wrongly) male body who wishes to undertake an external transition from a ‘male’ (or more precisely, medically and socially male-assigned) body to a ‘female’ one. This model aligns the defiance of one’s socially assigned gender identity and identification with the ‘opposite’ gender with the biomedical discourse and apparatus of transsexuality, 172

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involving the surgical transition from ‘male’ to ‘female’, which has gradually gained global circulation since the 1950s following the example of pioneering transsexual women and men such as Christine Jorgensen.7 When speaking about her history and surgical transition in a recent interview, Tista said: I always felt like a girl. All my childhood playmates were girls. I used to behave and dress like them. I felt discomfort among the boys, and I was always forced to use the boy’s toilet . . . I was desperately searching for a way out of this anatomical cage. I wanted to align my body with my psyche.8 The expression of one’s ontological and social identity as a woman, accompanied by sartorial and/or medical transition, marks a shift from older narratives of gender variance and liminality as evidenced within hijra and kothi communities. As Reddy notes in her detailed ethnography of hijras and kothis in Hyderabad, while hijras usually dress in women’s clothes, often undergo voluntary castration-penectomy and hormone treatments for feminisation and describe themselves as being ‘like women’, they simultaneously assert that they are ‘not women’ per se.9 Indeed, their livelihood depends on their status as a separate group distinct from both genders, which has led some anthropologists to designate them as a ‘third gender’.10 Further, participants of hijra and kothi communities may also utilise terms that indicate the simultaneity of both genders or mixture between genders, such as the common phrase meyeli chhele or maigga pola used in Bengal (effeminate boy/male). The binary transsexual model is asserted by Tista in terms of a hierarchised distinction from hijra and kothi narratives of gender variance, thirdness or gender admixture. In a notable article published in the community magazine Swikriti Patrika, Tista laments the lack of respectable terms or identities for transgender (lingantarkami) persons in Indian history and culture, eliding working class and lower caste community formations and associated epistemologies of gender variance. Chhakka, moga, dhurani are neither decent/aesthetic (shobhan) nor scientific words (. . .) such indecent words . . . it is not respectable (shommanio) to any self-conscious (atma-sachetan) person. (.  .  .) Even in the age of the Internet, there is no usage of the word lingantarkami (transsexual) anywhere in Indian society or history. Everywhere, it is the bijatiyo (bastard, wrongly derived) words like chhakka, moga or hijra that are used.11 173

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Tista here conflates pejorative terms used against hijras and kothis (chhakka, moga – roughly analogous to fag, sissy or tranny) with terms that they use to describe themselves, deriding them all as disreputable and not acceptable for any self-respecting person. In contrast to such ‘indecent’ idioms of gender liminality, Tista has said in the aforementioned interview that she only wanted to be ‘a beautiful, decent girl’ and undertook surgery to feel ‘complete’. Thus, one’s self-recognition as a complete, decent woman marks a more ‘scientific’, self-respecting and self-conscious mode of identification relative to ‘indecent’ labels like hijra, chhakka or moga, which fall outside the gender binary (whether that ‘thirdness’ or ‘in-between’ status is seen pejoratively or reclaimed as identity). Tista’s identity as a transwoman is asserted in terms of simultaneously gendered and classed distinctions from hijra/kothi discourses. After Rituparno began ‘outing’ hirself and visibilising hir sexuality and gender variance, rumours began circulating in the media about hir supposed breast implants and hormone therapy – thus, even as Rituparno was labeled as a gay film-maker, zie was also interpellated into the aforementioned narrative of male-to-female transsexuality, at least by implication.12 However, Rituparno, in turn, distanced hirself from the binary male-tofemale transition narrative and claimed a more ‘gender fluid’ position outside the binary  – without, however, any acknowledgement of hijra-kothi idioms of gender variance. This is evident in this interview given to the Kolkata-based daily, The Telegraph: There’s always been a lot of speculation about me on approaching femininity . . . whether I am going in for a sex change or a breast augmentation . . . But I was never embarrassed. If I want to change my identity by changing my sex, I would be the first person to let the world know about my new identity. I consider myself privileged because of my gender fluidity, the fact that I am in between. I don’t consider myself a woman and I don’t want to become a woman . . . . . I find it pointless for anybody to run after gender reassignment procedure only to conform to a conventional heterosexual society.13 Though Rituparno’s refusal of the binary creates a powerful rupture in dominant narratives of gender/sexuality in the media, hir celebration of ‘in-betweenness’ as opposed to trans womanhood is asserted through a greater degree of sophistication relative to the apparently restrictive and heteronormative conformist model of male-to-female transsexuality, even as the transsexual model is asserted by proponents like Tista in terms of its 174

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greater sophistication and decency relative to hijra/kothi discourses (for a critique of the easy dismissal of transsexuality as conformist, which ignores how non-transsexual people perpetuate the gender binary in many ways, see Valentine, 2012). Thus, both these models of transgender or gender fluid identity are foundationally constituted through a class and casterestricted access to modernity and enlightenment. Both Arekti Premer Golpo and Chitrangada negotiate between the aforementioned narratives of (trans)gender identification, one based on a binary model of gender and the other on a non-binary or ternary (three-gendered) model. As Rituparno has on occasion explicitly acknowledged the parallels between the protagonists of these films and hir own life,14 it is not surprising that both films critique the male-to-female transitional model in different ways and seek to reclaim and even celebrate the thirdness and gender liminality of their protagonists. In so doing, the films both extend and subvert common stereotypes of gay effeminacy into statements of gender defiance, which marks a radical departure from attempts by Indian middle class gay men to counter the stereotype of gay male effeminacy by masculinising gay identity, claiming ‘gay’ as both more masculine and more respectable relative to gender variant persons and particularly lower class/caste kothi/ hijra communities.15 However, while Rituparno’s reclamation of ‘third’ or ‘in-between’ gender/sexual positions may seem to imply solidarity with hijras and kothis – communities that can encompass a spectrum between effeminate males who dress as ‘men’ to castrated hijras who dress as ‘women’ – the films largely do not reference these communities, and further, distinguish their middle class gender-fluid protagonists from their working class/lower caste counterparts like Chapal Bhaduri. In the films, as in the aforementioned interview, the non-binary or ternary model becomes distinguished from the binary-gendered transsexual model in terms of a further claim to its greater sophistication and class distinction – which is why the distancing from hijras is essential and not merely an incidental slip. As I will argue, the films thus establish a double distanciation from lower class/caste narratives of gender variance, and construct a script of gender choice and fluidity premised on bourgeois trajectories of modernisation.

The Chapal-Abhiroop dichotomy in Arekti Premer Golpo In Arekti Premer Golpo (2010), the distinction between the two aforementioned models or narratives of gender variance is elaborated in terms of both class and gender through the analogical comparisons and contrasts between the two chief protagonists, Abhiroop and Chapal. As mentioned 175

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earlier, the film constructs a parallel narrative between enactments of Chapal’s past, as recounted by the aged actor, and the dramas unfolding in the director Abhiroop’s own life while directing hir documentary on Chapal. Rituparno plays both the younger Chapal in the reconstructions of hir past life (the aged Chapal is played by hirself) and Abhiroop, thus establishing clear analogical links between the real-life actor Chapal, the fictionalised character Abhiroop and Rituparno hirself, and blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, documentary and feature film. For both Chapal and Abhiroop, the narratives centre on their respective romantic relationships with relatively masculine men (recalling the parik or panthi, the masculine partners of hijras/kothis or the butch-femme model in lesbian/gay relationships). The film particularly dwells on the relational asymmetries and power dynamics between the relatively masculinised and feminised partners, owing to the social stigma faced by feminine/gendervariant males, and the unwillingness of relatively privileged masculine men to entirely commit to such relationships. Both Chapal’s chief love interest, Kumar Babu, and Abhiroop’s boyfriend, Basu (again played by the same actor, Indraneil Sengupta) have wives and families that they ultimately prioritise over their relationships with Chapal or Abhiroop, who are both left alone in the end. However, they are positioned differently vis-à-vis this common narrative of unfulfilled love. Abhiroop is presented as a confident, independent artist who, despite moments of great vulnerability, is able to distance hirself from Basu after the latter’s wife, Rani, becomes pregnant, and continues with life on hir own terms. In contrast, Chapal is largely victimised and exploited at the hands of Kumar Babu, who uses Chapal as a domestic help for over a decade before sending hir away abruptly. This is paralleled by the overall decline in hir career – initially a successful essayer of female roles in jatra who is much in demand in the 1950s, Chapal is dismissed from the troupe due to the scandal resulting from hir numerous flings with men, and is rendered replaceable by an increasing number of women who join jatra. Eventually, after various odd jobs and a stint as a help in Kumar Babu’s house, Chapal takes to performing as Goddesses in palas (plays on mythic themes) for a far lower rate than what zie had commanded in jatra, which is when Abhiroop rescues hir from penury and obscurity through the documentary. This contrast between Chapal’s victimhood and Abhiroop’s agency visà-vis their respective personal and socioeconomic circumstances implies broader dichotomies of location, class and gender. Abhiroop is positioned in the film as a metropolitan figure from Delhi, the national capital, who is often at a loss in Kolkata and rural Bengal, portrayed as conservative and backward, relative to Delhi. Early in the film, the shooting of the 176

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Figure 9.1 Working still from Arekti Premer Golpo. Ghosh with Indraneil Sengupta Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

documentary is disrupted by men from Chapal’s neighbourhood in north Kolkata (the older part of the city), who say that they will not permit such nongramo (indecency) in their neighbourhood – much to the chagrin of the urbane, Anglophone director, who retires to hir hotel room in disgust while Basu deals with the men. The film-makers are accused of smearing Chapal’s name, who had till then apparently led a closeted and respectable existence in the neighbourhood, and for spreading bikrito ruchi (perverted tastes/ preferences) in society by supporting homosexuality and the ‘third sex’ – as they say, ‘Kolkata is not a foreign country!’ Subsequently, Abhiroop meets Uday, a young wildlife photographer, who shows a way out of the impasse by offering his ancestral house at the village of Hetampur for the shooting. However, while this allows the filming to continue, subsequently the backdrop of the village is also revealed as ignorant, backward and unthinkingly steeped in tradition when the villagers protest the untimely performance of the Shitala pala. These episodes establish a rather unsubtle dichotomy between the class position, metropolitan location and bourgeois acculturation of Abhiroop, and the seemingly uniform homo- and transphobia of lower middle class and rural Bengal. This renders Bengal as a stereotyped, static backdrop against which the film is constantly marked as a progressive 177

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and radical departure, and Abhiroop is positioned as an exceptional figure. This elides how north Kolkata neighbourhoods, similar to where Chapal lives, have been the site of several documentary films on kothi/hijra people and communities,16 and discounts the broader history of non-elite queer/ trans organising across several districts of West Bengal, including rural areas, since the 1990s.17 Within this larger dichotomy, Chapal is mostly positioned as a victim who is unable to be as ‘out’ as Abhiroop is. This is particularly evident in a scene where Abhiroop takes off Chapal’s eye makeup (kajal) prior to shooting a scene: C H A PA L : But you have worn kajal yourself! A B H I R O O P : I wear it everyday . . . do you?

Abhiroop implies that Chapal is relatively restricted in hir everyday expression, and accordingly seeks to make the filmic representation faithful to Chapal’s reality. However, the scene suggests a certain fixed trajectory of being ‘out’, modelled on Abhiroop’s display of overt markers of gender variance, which discounts the decades of Chapal’s performance in female roles in jatra and pala – indeed, as Chapal’s narration of hir history makes clear, apart from hir cross-dressing, hir sexual preference for men was also known within the jatra troupe. The complexity of Chapal’s position and negotiations within hir social context thus defies any simple dichotomy between being closeted/repressed and being out/liberated. However, the film, and Rituparno’s own commentary on it, further underscores the contrast between Chapal and Abhiroop in terms of gender identity. In an interview with The Telegraph, Rituparno explicitly acknowledges the parallel between Abhiroop as a character and Rituparno hirself: ‘Roop goes through the journey that I have gone through once. That’s why I told you earlier that Roop is 10 years younger than me.’18 Chapal, meanwhile, stands in for a restrictive male-to-female transgender identity, which Rituparno castigates as a ‘pointless’ attempt to conform to heterosexuality and gender binary: I find it pointless for anybody to run after gender reassignment procedure only to conform to a conventional heterosexual society. Then why will Roop run after an illusory thing and change himself into a woman? This is the basic difference between Chapal and Roop (. . .) Chapal feels he is trapped in a man’s body, while Roop feels he is different from either ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’.19

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Rituparno conceptually conflates male-to-female transgender identities with heteronormativity (disregarding, for instance, transwomen who are lesbians), and reduces the desire to transition to nothing more than the desire to ‘conform to a conventional heterosexual society’. Moreover, this casting of Chapal as chasing a restrictive, heteronormative womanhood completely elides hir own accounts of hir gender both inside and outside the film. Chapal hirself presents a far more nuanced accounting of hir subject position vis-à-vis both binary and non-binary transgender narratives in a candid rendition of his life story: Rupantar (transition) is happening all the time with me! Everyday I am changing my roop (form, appearance) on stage! As for changing sex (lingo poriborton), it once did cross my mind when I was twenty-four or twenty-five. But I haven’t really thought of that since then.20 Thus, contrary to Rituparno and Abhiroop’s interpretation of Chapal, Chapal’s own characterisation of hirself juxtaposes the fluidity of hir performance on stage to hir erstwhile desire for a ‘sex change’, without the rigid contradiction between the two models as expressed by Rituparno. It thus indicates a certain freedom of negotiation, which Chapal as a character in the film does not have. Within the film, Chapal does not get much space for elucidating hir gender variance, except for the scene cited in the introduction where Abhiroop casts hir as naively desiring womanhood (‘you really think of yourself as a woman?’), even as Chapal’s own response signals an accidental, but not necessarily tragic, androgyny (‘You don’t think that God, while almost making you a woman, has made you a man?’). The two questions circle past each other without convergence; Rituparno/Abhiroop’s a priori dismissal of the complexity of Chapal’s subject position, and of transsexuality more broadly, precludes an equal exchange and translation between their respective narratives. This dismissal also implies a broader elision of epistemologies of gender sexuality associated with lower class/caste communities, as evidenced in the metaphor of the ‘line’ used by Chapal in the scene where zie is introduced to Uday: ABHIROOP:

Chapal-da let me introduce you . . . he is Uday! We are shooting in his house . . . he does wildlife photography. C H A PA L : He is not of our line, is he? (O bujhi line-er noy?) A B H I R O O P : I don’t know . . . hush!

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The ‘line’ is an old usage referencing the range of persons who may participate in same-sex cruising and gender/sexually variant persons, particularly used within kothi-hijra cruising networks and subcultures. In Chapal’s usage, the ‘line’ is also a site of gender fluidity – Chapal interpellates Uday, a conventionally attired man, as potentially of ‘our line’ (the ‘we’ being overtly gender variant people like Abhiroop and hirself), only to be hastily quelled by Abhiroop. This failure of the film to explore such epistemologies distinguishes Rituparno/Abhiroop’s gender fluidity from both binary transsexuality and lower class/caste idioms of gender variance, even as transwomen like Tista position binary transsexuality above ‘indecent’ kothi/hijra terminologies. This effects a double distanciation between enlightened figures like Rituparno/Abhiroop and working class/lower caste communities; to rephrase Spivak, the subaltern is doubly silenced. Significantly, Chapal is not the only figure to whom Abhiroop is contrasted in terms of gendered liberation – the other figure is Rani, Basu’s wife, who confesses to feeling ‘ordinary’ in comparison to Abhiroop, and in Rituparno’s words, symbolises a ‘routine-bound existence’.21 After she becomes pregnant, she wants the security of her husband – ‘I cannot afford to let him go’. Abhiroop, on the other hand, is not interested in the restrictive domesticity that Rani is made to stand for. When Basu wants Roop to remain involved as friend to his family, Abhiroop asks that he be allowed to stay away – ‘baby nappies, diapers . . . it’s not my scene, Basu’. In this case, Abhiroop, for all hir gender fluidity, replicates an old hierarchy between feminised domesticity and the transcendent position of the independent male – one that is, as we shall see, further underscored in the later film, Chitrangada. However, Abhiroop’s liberated, independent position is also undercut at certain moments of Arekti Premer Golpo – particularly in one scene late in the film, when Momo, the research assistant for Abhiroop’s documentary, points out to Basu that Abhiroop is using Chapal’s story to articulate hir own: M O M O : Abhi-da puts on this air of being liberated . . . B A S U : That he is! M O M O : Basu! Putting on kajal doesn’t . . . um . . . is not

what liberation is all about, you know! I think Abhi-da is as closeted as Chapal-da, deep inside. (. . .) I just think he’s using his life as a peg to hang his own story on. While Momo questions the relative liberation of Abhiroop over Chapal, she maintains the same opposition of the ‘closet’ and ‘liberation’, allied to 180

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related binaries, like tradition-modernity and metropolitan-rural, underlying the Chapal-Abhiroop dichotomy. However, in one crucial and poignant scene near the end of the film, Chapal hirself articulates a deeper critique of the class differences that structure the film and the unselfconsciousness of Abhiroop to hir privilege, enabling a reflexivity that is otherwise rare within the film. To Abhiroop’s chagrin, Chapal is unwilling to share some of the more intimate details of hir life for the documentary, and is subsequently offered extra money by the producer to speak up. Meanwhile, Abhiroop gets the news of Rani’s pregnancy, is emotionally affected and talks it over on the phone with hir mother. Chapal enters the scene, and shares hir sense of hurt at the attempt to get hir to produce ‘truth’ in return for money, when Abhiroop hirself would be uncomfortable in publicly sharing details like those zie just shared with hir mom. C H A PA L :

Did you have to insult me like this, brother [bhaiti]? (. . .) More money means more truth . . . is that how it works? (. . .) What you just told your mom on the phone . . . what if you were asked to share those words in a public marketplace [haanter majhkhane danriye]? A poor artist, once rich, now pauper – there is no denying this truth. But your actual truth [ashol shotyi], my actual truth . . . that has no value to the world, brother!22 A B H I R O O P [quietly]: Thanks, Chapal-da! Chapal here poignantly exposes the exploitative logic of representation that seeks to commoditise hir life story, even as it downgrades hir narrative of gender variance as the less liberated counterpart of Abhiroop and Rituparno. Further, Chapal also exposes how fragile and troubled the distinction between hir putative closet and Abhiroop’s liberation is, pointing out their shared vulnerability and ‘truth’ as gender variant people, which does not have much value to the world at large. Hir attempt at solidarity between their vastly different socioeconomic positions thus undercuts the attempt to hierarchise (trans)gender identities and narratives along normative scales of progress and liberation, but this remains an underemphasised (if subversive) thread in the overall weave of the filmic narrative.

The bildungsroman of Chitrangada While in Arekti Premer Golpo the negotiation between the binary and nonbinary model is externalised in terms of the negotiation between the two chief protagonists, in Chitrangada the negotiation is more internalised. The protagonist, Rudra, played by Rituparno, personally feels the lure of 181

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heterosexual womanhood and elects to undergo the two-gendered (maleto-female) model of transition. The male-to-female transgender person is, therefore, not an external other to be derided, but an internal possibility that must be lived through and overcome, in the manner of a bildungsroman in which the character eventually finds peace with hir gendered selfhood, by going through and then relinquishing ‘sex change’ procedures. Rudra is an established dancer who is directing Rabindranath Tagore’s dance drama Chitrangada as a narrative of gender choice. Tagore’s Chitrangada is about a mythical princess whose story is drawn from the Mahabharata; Chitrangada is raised as a man by her father the king, who wants a male heir, but wants to change herself into an attractive woman (surupa) after she falls in love with the prince Arjuna. In Rudra’s interpretation, this change is interpreted as a surgical transition effected by a cosmetic surgeon; accordingly, the beginning of the film carries the following caption: Tagore’s Chitrangada is an Amazon warrior on a quest to discover her gender identity. From this work of Tagore comes a very personal interpretation. Chitrangada’s narrative is made to parallel Rudra’s own. During the process of rehearsing and staging Chitrangada, Rudra falls in love with Partho, a percussionist who is also a recovering drug addict, whom zie gives a role in the production, initially out of pity as Rudra has also faced ‘ostracism’ due to hir effeminacy. As their relationship develops, Rudra starts contemplating a ‘sex change’. As in Arekti Premer Golpo, the choice of ‘sex reassignment surgery’ is seen as a consequence of the pressure of heteronormativity and not as an expression of a deep-seated prior identity, in contradistinction from transwomen like Tista. The process is initiated through Rudra’s encounter with Mala, a former member of hir dance troupe. Rudra asks Manish, hir manager, what Mala has been doing lately. Manish derisively remarks: ‘What will she do? . . . managing kids!’ This dismissal of feminised domestic labour renders Mala as symbolic of heteronormative womanhood, limited by her family obligations. Subsequently, Mala visits Rudra: RUDRA:

You can’t come without me calling you? (. . .) What work do you have? Lazing at home! (Mala laughs) M A L A : (. . .) Believe me, I don’t get time (. . .) you can do without me, but my family can’t do without me at all, believe me! Like Rani in Arekti Premer Golpo, Mala symbolises an ‘ordinary’ and ‘routine-bound existence’, and represents a feminised domesticity in contrast 182

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to the male yet genderqueer artist who ostensibly transcends this restrictive role through hir creativity. Yet, Mala is also the one who pulls back Rudra from hir privileged position as the transcendent artist into the longing for stable domesticity. As their conversation continues, she expresses her concern regarding Rudra and Partho’s relationship. Not only is he young, he is also a recovering drug addict. Mala doubts that he will be able to give Rudra hir due regard or respect. At this, Rudra smiles and replies, ‘So many people regard me highly, how many have the guts (shahosh) to love me?’ Mala’s probing thus exposes that beyond the regard or admiration that Rudra already receives as an artist, zie also desires a more intimate, personalised love, which is harder to get, presumably because most men do not have the courage (shahosh) to be in a socially recognised relationship with a gender variant person. This desire results in an ironic reversal of position between Mala and Rudra – it translates into a vulnerability that pulls hir back from the privileged transcendental position of the male/genderqueer artist into the feminised familial domesticity that was derided with respect to Mala: R U D R A : You can get caught up/snagged with family, and M A L A (incredulously): He will give you family? He will

I cannot, no? stay your whole

life with you? I am ready to be his slave, if so! It is unclear whether Mala intends this more as a particular comment on the unsuitability of Partho (too young, drug addict) for a sustainable relationship, or the general unfeasibility of long-term relations between people like Rudra and their masculine partners. Rudra seems to take it in the latter sense, particularly when zie realises that Partho enjoys playing with Mala’s children and loves kids in general. For Rudra, this prompts a sense of hir inadequacy because of hir inability to provide children and a family to Partho, eventually leading to the decision to undertake a ‘sex change’ procedure. Later that night, this train of thought is elaborated in a prolonged, tense scene located at Rudra’s apartment, where the protagonists talk, fight and make up among themselves, with the shehnai (the instrument customarily played during marriage ceremonies) from a wedding in the neighbourhood playing in the backdrop. Rudra begins the conversation by commenting on Partho’s evident love for children, and then declares, ‘Let me move away, Partho . . . you clean yourself up, get married, have children. I have no role to play in your life’. The sense of inadequacy thus shifts from Mala to Rudra, who as a non-woman cannot provide the heteronormative family life (shongshar) that Partho is supposed to desire. Partho protests, downplaying the importance of having children, but then 183

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suggests that if needed, they can adopt a child. Rudra points out that adoption would not be legally feasible in India and suggests that he go in for a ‘sex change’ instead, so that they can adopt as a heterosexual couple, to Partho’s initial incredulity. Partho laughs away the idea till he realises that Rudra is serious. Partho then turns to common tropes of transsexuality as an ‘unnatural’ and pathological desire that contravenes what one ‘naturally’ is, and gender affirmation surgery as a risky, foolhardy procedure: PA RT H O : Then admit it. R U D R A : What? PA RT H O : That you are not

happy with what you are naturally. You just want to become a woman! With any excuse! R U D R A : A lot of us are not happy with what we are naturally, Partho. Else boys (chhelera) wouldn’t go everyday to the gym to build a six-pack . . . to become a man! Girls (meyera) wouldn’t go to have their eyebrows threaded, or to get waxed . . . to become a woman! PA RT H O : The two aren’t the same Rudy! This has many side effects, many complications! Rudra’s response, pointing out that ‘men’ and ‘women’ are also constantly constructing their manhood or womanhood, effectively critiques the selective naturalisation of gender, wherein the social construction of gender and cisgender people’s construction of their gender identity are invisibilised, but constructions of selfhood and identity that cross prescribed gender boundaries are scrutinised and deemed unnatural. This critique may be interpreted beyond its filmic context as a response to the scrutiny around Rituparno’s supposed hormonal treatments and surgeries. While Rituparno dismissed such rumours in hir lifetime,23 hir death prompted a fresh round of speculation, and some people from the Bengali film industry, such as the actor Prosenjit, alleged that hormone therapy had putatively hastened the end: ‘Lately, Prosenjit and Ritu had grown distant because of the latter’s insistence on undergoing potentially lifethreatening hormonal operations. Prosenjit warned Ritu not to mess around with his body. But the director, adamant on changing his gender, wouldn’t listen’.24 At this moment, at least, the film thus indicts the pathologisation of transgender lives and bodies and the association of ‘sex change’ with illness and death. However, this defense does not translate into a unilateral acceptance of the male-to-female transitional model, and even after defending hir decision to undergo ‘sex change’, Rudra distances hirself 184

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from the common transsexual narrative of affirming a pre-existing inner womanhood through surgery, and rather positions hirself as transcending womanhood: PA RT H O :

What about your dance? (. . .) Where your whole body is the main instrument, should you tamper with it? R U D R A : Shut up! I don’t dance with my body, Partho. It comes from within. And fortunately I work with such an art form that is not gender-bound. My dance is not limited by my gender, Partho, and neither is my identity. Here, Rudra claims to transcend gender in a way that Mala, Rani or Chapal cannot, all of whom are putatively restricted by their femininity. This is further underscored when Rudra meets the doctor to discuss the transitional process, but refuses counselling: DR. SHOM:

We have to understand whether you’re prepared from the inside to change your phenotype. R U D R A : Meaning? D R . S H O M : Meaning your gender! We’ll have to assess that! R U D R A (sighs): Dr. Shom, can I tell you something very plain and simple? To me it’s a technical necessity. All I need from you is a certificate that I’m a woman. I will not change anything. I will not wear either a saree or a salwar kameez (Indian feminine garments). So . . . to me it’s more of a cosmetic surgery. On one hand, this exchange conflates ‘sex’ (‘phenotype’) with ‘gender’ by equating surgical transition with gender change, belying the experiences of many transwomen who identify as women prior to or irrespective of surgery.25 On the other, in keeping with Rudra’s prior claim to transcendence, gender itself is rendered as a superficial rather than essential or internal; anatomical change need not imply the adoption of social gender constructs like wearing sarees. While this permits a certain freedom of negotiation with gender constructs, it also potentially devalues the experiences of people for whom gender affirmation surgery is not merely a ‘cosmetic surgery’ or a ‘technical necessity’. Moreover, in the end, the surgery is relinquished. After Rudra gets breast implants, Partho rejects hir as ‘fake’ and goes off with another woman from the troupe, which underlines the fragility of transition as a legitimising procedure. During a series of dream-like, surreal episodes on the day before hir ‘main operation’ (sic; the phrase again conflates gender change with genital surgery), Rudra 185

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eventually decides to cancel the operation and have hir breast implants reversed. Rudra’s putative transcendence of gender, and hir free negotiation with transitional procedures, is based on two tropes of distinction: high art and economic status. The position of the (male) artist enables an identity that is seemingly above gender, unlike say the homemaker who is putatively trapped by gender. To this is added the immense privilege of being able to freely negotiate ‘sex change’ procedures, which completely elides the realities of such surgeries. Sex reassignment/gender affirmation surgery is often inaccessible and expensive for many transpeople; moreover, to access health insurance for such procedures, transgender people have to be officially diagnosed with gender dysphoria, avow a fixed gender identity and prove that they can ‘live’ in the target gender.26 Rudra’s ability to both choose and later reverse the procedure is reflective of hir financial ability to bypass such requirements – a privilege about which the film is largely not self-reflexive. *** While making space for subjectivities and practices beyond the gender binary, both films establish an elitist narrative of gender variance where an enlightened form of non-binary trans or genderqueer identity is accessible only to upper middle class metropolitan figures like Abhiroop, Rudra or Rituparno, who assert their subject position over both the male-to-female transgender narrative exemplified by transwomen like Tista and lower class/ caste articulations of gender and sexuality. Within the films, particularly Arekti Premer Golpo, these boundaries are still somewhat permeable through figures like Chapal, who challenges Abhiroop’s pretensions. However, the ‘real-life’ scenario becomes particularly ironic and poignant in light of the immense distance between Rituparno’s appropriation and celebration by the middle class and the state, and the situation of lower class/caste gender variant communities. Rituparno’s posthumous gun salute and celebration accompanies the continuing criminalisation, surveillance and pathologisation of these communities, who do not have speaking parts in the films.

Notes 1 Throughout the article, I use zie and hir as gender-neutral pronouns for people with non-normative gender identities or for people whose gendered positions are ambiguous. 2 ‘Da’ is a Bengali diminutive for dada or elder brother, used in affection or respect.

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3 Rituparno hirself did not explicitly identify using the word ‘transgender’ itself, but referred to hirself as ‘gender fluid’. See, Anon., ‘I Don’t Want to Become a Woman’, The Telegraph, 22 December 2010, and also see, Kaustav Bakshi, ‘I know my city can neither handle me nor ignore me: Rituparno Ghosh in conversation with Kaustav Bakshi’. Silhouette: A Discourse on Cinema, February 2013. I use ‘transgender’ in its increasingly common academic and activist sense of an umbrella term, which may include various distinct forms of gender variance, including transsexual women or men (male-to-female or female-to-male transsexual persons), transmen or women who do not undergo ‘sex reassignment surgery’, and gender variant gay and lesbian people. See, D. Valentine, Imagining Transgender: Ethnography of a Category. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 4 A. Dutta, ‘Narratives of Excess and Exclusion: Nationhood, Class and Queerness in the Indian English-Language Press’. In Kuntsman, A. and Miyake, E. (eds), Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality. York: Raw Nerve Books, 2008. 5 L Cohen, ‘The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification’. In Adams, V. and Piggs, S. L. (eds), Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 269–303. Also see, Bhan, G. Bhan and A. Narrain (eds), Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005. 6 Briefly, the term hijra designates persons assigned male at birth who dress as women, often live in separate clans and may undergo voluntary castration and penectomy; kothi is one of several regionally variegated terms for a spectrum of effeminate males or male-assigned transgender persons scattered within society who may join hijra clans. 7 See Valentine, Imagining Transgender. 8 Anon., ‘My Trans Reality: An Interview with Tista Das, Founder, SRS Solutions’, India HIV-AIDS Alliance Blog, 2013. http://indiahivaidsalliance.word press.com/2013/09/17/my-trans-reality-an-interview-with-tista-das-foundersrs-solutions/, accessed 22 September 2013. 9 See G. Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 10 See Hall, K. Hall, ‘Intertextual Sexuality: Parodies of Class, Identity, and Desire in Liminal Delhi’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1), 2005, pp. 125–144. Also see, S. Nanda, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 1990. 11 T. Das, ‘Bibhatsa-Bibar’, Swikriti Patrika 6, 2009, pp. 9–15. 12 See S. Jha, ‘Prosenjit to Make a Film on Rituparno Ghosh’, Daily News and Analysis, 3 June 2013. 13 Anon., ‘I Don’t Want to Become a Woman’, 2010. 14 See Bakshi, ‘I know my city can neither handle me nor ignore me’. 15 See A. Gupta, ‘Englishpur ki kothi: Class Dynamics in the Queer Movement in India’. In Bhan, G. and Narrain, A. (eds), Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005. 16 For instance, films such as Manash, directed by Enrico Pizzolato and Riin Kranna, India/Estonia: NGO Support and Praajak, 2005, and Monologues, directed by Debalina Majumdar, India: Sappho for Equality, 2008.

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17 See A. Dutta, ‘Kon Ruper Ontor? “Transgender” o “Lingantorkami” Porichoy Borgo o Kichhu Lingo-Prantik Manusher Atmoprokasher Bhasha’, Swikriti Patrika, 2012 Boimela Sankhya. 18 Anon., ‘I Don’t Want to Become a Woman’. 19 Ibid. 20 C. Bhaduri, ‘Chobbish-Pochish Bochhor Boyoshe Amar Ekbar Lingo Poribortoner Kotha Mone Eshechhilo’, Swikriti Patrika 10, 2013, p. 9. 21 Anon., ‘I Don’t Want to Become a Woman’. 22 Bhaiti is more gender neutral than the English ‘brother’. 23 Anon., ‘I Don’t Want to Become a Woman’. 24 Jha, ‘Prosenjit to make a film on Rituparno Ghosh’. 25 Valentine, Imagining Transgender. 26 See D. Valentine, ‘Sue E. Generous: Towards a Theory of Non-Transexuality’, Feminist Studies 38(1), 2012, pp. 1–19.

References Anon., ‘I Don’t Want to Become a Woman’, The Telegraph, 22 December 2010. Anon., ‘My Trans Reality: An Interview with Tista Das, Founder, SRS Solutions’, India HIV-AIDS Alliance Blog, 2013, http://indiahivaidsalliance.wordpress.com/2013/ 09/17/my-trans-reality-an-interview-with-tista-das-founder-srs-solutions/, accessed 22 September 2013. Bakshi, Kaustav, ‘I know my city can neither handle me nor ignore me: Rituparno Ghosh in conversation with Kaustav Bakshi’, Silhouette: A Discourse on Cinema, February 2013. Bhaduri, C., ‘Chobbish-Pochish Bochhor Boyoshe Amar Ekbar Lingo Poribortoner Kotha Mone Eshechhilo’, Swikriti Patrika 10, 2013, pp. 7–9. Bhan, G. and Narrain, A. (eds), Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005. Cohen, L., ‘The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification’. In Adams, V. and Piggs, S. L., (eds), Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 269–303. Das, T., ‘Bibhatsa-Bibar’, Swikriti Patrika 6, 2009, pp. 9–15. Dutta, A., ‘Narratives of Excess and Exclusion: Nationhood, Class and Queerness in the Indian English-Language Press’. In Kuntsman, A. and Miyake, E. (eds), Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality. York: Raw Nerve Books, 2008. Dutta, A., ‘Kon Ruper Ontor? “Transgender” o “Lingantorkami” Porichoy Borgo o Kichhu Lingo-Prantik Manusher Atmoprokasher Bhasha’, Swikriti Patrika, Boimela Sankhya, 2012. Gupta, A., ‘Englishpur ki kothi: Class Dynamics in the Queer Movement in India’. In Bhan, G. and Narrain, A. (eds), Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005. Hall, K., ‘Intertextual Sexuality: Parodies of Class, Identity, and Desire in Liminal Delhi’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1), 2005, pp. 125–144.

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Jha, S., ‘Prosenjit to make a film on Rituparno Ghosh’, Daily News and Analysis, 3 June 2013. Nanda, S., Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 1990. Reddy, G., With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Valentine, D., Imagining Transgender: Ethnography of a Category. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Valentine, D., ‘Sue E. Generous: Toward a Theory of Non-Transexuality’, Feminist Studies 38(1), 2012, pp. 1–19.

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10 ‘KISSED ON ONE CHEEK AND SLAPPED ON THE OTHER’ Rituparno Ghosh’s Chitrangada as an allegory of oppositional readings1 Daisy Hasan

❦ As India’s leading queer film-maker, Rituparno Ghosh always felt deeply ambivalent about the traditionalist element in Indian culture. Aware that the sort of pre-modern vision of Indian identity embodied in texts like the Mahabharata had played a central role in shaping contemporary India, he also knew that its deep conservatism posed a massive threat to his own more liberal, sexually nonconformist view of the world. Ghosh’s ambivalence towards Indian traditionalism was thrown into especially vivid relief in his film Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012). On the one hand, Chitrangada includes a respectful tribute to Rabindranath Tagore’s modern drama of the same name. On the other, Ghosh seeks to extend Tagore’s vision of Indian identity and individual autonomy by infusing it with elements of political, cultural and sexual liberalism. This chapter argues that in charting his response to Tagore, Ghosh, while engaging in a highly idiosyncratic rereading, is simultaneously dramatising the need for oppressed groups to create subcultures capable of decoding cultural texts along subversive or oppositional lines.

Chitrangada, then and now In a master class at the ‘What’s New? The Changing Face of Indian Cinema: Contemporary and Historical Contexts’ conference held at the University of Westminster in London (8–9 July 2011), Rituparno Ghosh spoke, somewhat 190

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reluctantly, of the film which would become one of his last – Chitrangada. The film was, at that point, a work in progress, a film that Ghosh had written, directed and also acted in as the protagonist Rudra. Though somewhat reticent, Ghosh made it quite clear that the film was very important to him, not least because of the fact that this was a story which took inspiration from Tagore’s dance drama also titled Chitrangada (1936). Ghosh was an unusually self-aware and articulate film-maker and his comments, which I occasionally refer to in this chapter, illustrate, I believe, some of the most important thematic and formal aspects of the film. While I recognise that a possible criticism of my approach is that it is too closely rooted in the director’s own take on the film, my chapter does not simply reproduce Ghosh’s views but rather attempts to elucidate them. The fact that I take his remarks seriously does not mean that a work of art can be reduced to the conscious intentions of the artist. There are indeed a number of factors to be taken into account if we want a comprehensive account of the film. Rituparno Ghosh’s work has had a long-standing cinematic relationship with Tagore, and it is significant that one of his last films is also inspired by a Tagore text.2 Commenting on the significance of Tagore in his life and work, Ghosh spoke of the special empathy he felt with him, given that both men had been revered on the one hand but judged and misunderstood on the other.3 In Tagore’s 150th anniversary year in 2011, Ghosh chose not only to celebrate and interpret Bengal’s iconic writer, but also to push the boundaries of his take on gender in Chitrangada.4 Ghosh has never been interested in simply periodising Tagore. In films like Chokher Bali (2003), he arguably gives greater autonomy and sexual agency to Tagore’s women characters.5 Yet, Chitrangada is a departure from Ghosh’s earlier tributes to Tagore, as the film releases the political and erotic energies of the drama through a charged queer imagining. Chitrangada (1936) is one of Tagore’s best-known plays.6 Tagore reworks the story of Chitrangada, a mythological warrior princess in the Mahabharata, in the land historically referred to as ‘Manipur’.7 A daughter is born to the King of Manipur, in spite of his prayers to Lord Shiva for a male heir. She is raised as a prince and in this masculine form, she meets the brave warrior, Arjuna. Arjuna is not impressed by her masculine appearance, but Chitrangada falls in love with him. She prays to the God of Love, Madana, to turn her into a beautiful woman – Surupa – who seduces Arjuna for a while. Arjuna, however, is entranced by the stories of Chitrangada, the warrior princess raised to be a man. When Surupa learns of his desire, she goes back to Madana and asks to be transformed back into Chitrangada, in which form she then confronts Arjuna on equal terms. The pair is united, 191

Figure 10.1 Poster for Chitrangada Courtesy of Shree Venkatesh Films

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but Chitrangada does not follow Arjuna out of Manipur when his exile is over. Instead, she chooses to look after the kingdom and groom its future male heirs. The performative aspects of Tagore’s text about gender roles and the transformative power of desire become rich textual material for Ghosh, whose films have been preoccupied with issues of gender, sexuality and autonomy: . . . gender equality and playing with gender . . . . that was something that was done by Tagore himself . . . that gender is imposed upon us . . . sometimes by our parents, irrespective of our biological sex . . . we have to play up a gender to the society . . . which may not be what we want to do . . . to him [Tagore] it’s a story of wish, her father’s wish versus Chitrangada’s wish. So my film is a deconstruction of the Tagore text . . .8 The dance drama becomes a leitmotif in the film. It forms an aesthetic backdrop and also foils the contemporary love story between Rudrajit Chatterjee (Rudra, played by Rituparno Ghosh), a Kolkata-based choreographer and dance teacher who lives with his parents, and Partho Majumdar (Jishu Sengupta), a percussionist, working on the original Chitrangada drama which Rudra is directing on the occasion of Tagore’s 150th anniversary. Scenes from the play recur in the interstices of the film as a dramatised expression of Rudra’s inner turmoil over questions of identity, love, duty, and autonomy. Rudra has broken the shackles of middle class Bengali career and gender role expectations. He is forced to study engineering but rebels and becomes a choreographer. He falls in love with Partho, who has an intermittent heroin addiction. Rudra identifies with Partho’s social marginalisation as he is himself ostracised for being effeminate. Yet Partho is indecisive, weak and tempestuous. Rudra or ‘Rudie’ as Partho calls him, is, on the other hand, the feminine and relatively stabilising force in a tumultuous relationship made all the more rocky by Partho’s regular lapses into drug addiction. Ghosh effectively uses the disparities in class and social status to depict their mutual attraction. At the same time, the social, cultural and personal divides between the lovers and Partho’s younger ‘macho’ appeal is constructed as hugely appealing, even ‘sexy’ – a representation which highlights the uneasy relationship between desire and social hierarchies (Sinfield, 2004). Rudra’s narrative unfolds in a non-linear fashion as a retelling of his life story to his counsellor Shubho, assigned to him in the hospital, to prepare him for a series of transformative operations which will turn him into a biological woman. The reason why Rudra undertakes these operations becomes clearer later in the film. At every stage, Shubho records and interrogates 193

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Rudra’s motivations and aspirations as he witnesses the critical crossroads in Rudra’s life. The film unfolds as a series of flashbacks and Shubho appears as an onlooker in these scenes. There is a suggestion of romantic intimacy between the two until the final scene of the film, when we discover that Shubho does not in fact exist. We realise then that Shubho has all along been a personification of Rudra’s split psyche. There are suggestions here of narcissism – has Rudra been falling in love with himself? The trope of the drama within the film provides the space for the exploration of Rudra’s inner life and the nature of desire. Rudra plays the character of Madana – the God of Love – depicted, in the filmic version of the drama, as a modern-day cosmetic surgeon who transforms Chitrangada into a woman in an operation theatre. Some film critics have argued that the inclusion of the play in the film is forced. The derivations from [Tagore’s] Chitrangada do not work. A director known for his beautiful sense of imagery, characterisation and music does not need to fall back on Tagore. He could have told the story without referring to Tagore’s work because his individual argument is stronger than the Tagorean allusions.9 It may, however, be argued that Tagore’s text is central to the film, which inflects the drama’s liberal impulse to uncover greater queer possibilities. Tagore’s drama unfolds in a particular sociocultural and political context in the early 20th century and has been understood as contributing to the inauguration of a tradition of modern dance. Tagore’s portrayal of Chitrangada is in line with his representation of the modern or ‘new’ woman (naba nari) in his other important works.10 It is also important to read the play in the light of his innovations with dance in Shantiniketan.11 Thematically, though often delving into Hindu mythological stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, Tagore’s protagonists were often women ‘who could not be located within a specifically Hindu world’ and whose internal conflicts were the focus of the dance dramas.12 Thus, Tagore’s dramas rescue marginal women characters from a Hindu patriarchal and pious framework, bringing them into a modernist limelight. Purkayastha draws our attention to the empowering way in which Tagore centralises Chitrangada and not Arjuna, ‘the greatest Hindu warrior in Indian mythology’.13 In her reading, it is Chitrangada’s will and personality that direct the outcome of the narrative, and thus Tagore eschews the practice of celebrating male heroes which is long established in the classical tradition. However, when viewed from the perspective of Ghosh’s more radical interpretation, Tagore’s text appears restricted. This is not, 194

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however, to undermine Ghosh’s respect for Tagore’s wide-ranging oeuvre. In Tagore’s play, the narrative still unfolds within a framework of patriarchy and of ‘either- or- choices’ for Chitrangada who, while she might be liberated from the beauty myth, is still required to prove herself of equal capability to Arjuna. She is also obliged to do her duty by her people, her father and her son. While she expresses some autonomy in desiring a feminine body, she is content to revert to her male persona when this is desired by Arjuna. The film subtly rebukes this sort of subordination of individual autonomy to patriarchal and heteronormative demands. Like Satyajit Ray before him, to whom Ghosh is up to a point regarded as a spiritual heir, Ghosh’s films both interpret as well as interrogate Tagore’s work.14 Saumitra Chakravorty uses the notion of ‘confrontation’ to discuss the manner in which Ray and Tagore’s works speak to each other.15 Given, as Chakravorty points out, the incomparable cultural regard in which Tagore is held, the reinterpretation, not to mention the ‘deconstruction’ of his work, can be risky and controversial.16 Further, issues of sexuality continue to be a sensitive issue in Bengali culture. Operating in such a fraught context, the film nevertheless accomplishes an ingenious interpretation allegorising the very act of reading queerly.

Recovery, recuperation and retrospection In an essay on Chokher Bali, which is also an adaptation of a Tagore novel of the same title, Srimati Mukherjee invokes Benjamin’s notion of the ‘shattering of tradition’ that the film form is able to achieve.17 Mukherjee points out that Benjamin commends this ‘destructive, cathartic’ function of film which facilitates ‘the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage’.18 Mukherjee develops Benjamin’s idea of the reactivation of a mass-produced text in individual contexts to argue that in bringing a 21stcentury interpretation to Tagore’s 19th-century story, Ghosh ‘reactivates’ the character of the widow, Binodini, in the story giving her more agency through her expression of physical desire. ‘As artist and film director he challenges the moribund aspects of Bengali (or Indian) cultural tradition, drawing us into the “fixed” space of the widow as defined by this tradition and showing how mobilisation in and out of this space is possible’.19 Chitrangada accomplishes a similar unsettling of tradition, using Tagore’s suggestive text to push the boundaries of individual liberty and desire. Rudra constantly returns to the story of Chitrangada, even after the play has been staged, asking questions about Chitrangada’s transformation and the reactions of shock and censure this must have evoked from her father, the King of Manipur, and his court. Perhaps, Rudra says to Shubho, the King 195

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derided Chitrangada, asking her if she was one of his courtesans, asking her to name her price. He expresses a desire to revisit the drama – ‘the staged drama was just a “glossy spectacle, it had no soul, I don’t know Chitrangada well enough” ’. The film teases out the subliminal shades of the play. The use and interrogation of this text indicates Ghosh’s search for clues from the past that could help him in his present challenges to heteronormative society. While, on the one hand, the drama holds out the possibility for a fulfilment of Rudra’s utopian longings and wishes, on the other hand it also represents the societal limits to self-experimentation and transformation. Given that the roots of the story lie in the Hindu epics, the film can also be read as an attempt to critique the Hindu Right’s appropriation of mythological texts. This is in line with other Indian queer films that have critiqued and reclaimed Hindu myths and traditions such as Deepa Mehta’s film Fire.20 Rudra’s story parallels Chitrangada’s, but is expressed in contemporary queer and erotic registers. This ensures that the story of Chitrangada will never be read again as a straightforward and unambiguous tale. Shohini Ghosh has discussed, in the context of Fire, the concept of ‘retro-spectatorship’, which facilitates the reclamation of older texts through newer ways of reading, where reading back is inevitably reading into.21 Rituparno Ghosh provides us a self-reflexive reading back at two levels – not only is he as a film-maker revisiting and reactivating a preexisting subject, but his screen persona Rudra also raises unsettling questions of the text. While discussing the relationship between contemporary lesbian writing and the invention of history, Doan and Waters speak of both the ‘lure’ and ‘limits’ of history in the creation of cultural texts for queer consumption.22 Their discussion offers a useful way of looking at Ghosh’s relationship to Tagore’s Chitrangada. Concerned with repossessing the myth of Chitrangada to create a queer narrative in the present, the film uncovers and elucidates her subversive history suppressed by patriarchal and non-queer readings of the text.

Autobiography and authorship Ghosh’s films, both those he directed and those he starred in, had towards the end of his life become increasingly autobiographical.23 In Chitrangada, he achieves a postmodern retelling of the tale by inserting autobiography and ambiguity into the narrative. By doing so, he also subjects the original story to stylistic and semantic shifts to create a new queer consciousness. His use of the tale is therapeutic, in a Jungian sense, whereby the drama illuminates the past, holds a mirror to the present and presents a vision for the future. If all fables are ultimately a psychic attempt to understand the 196

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self, then the story of Chitrangada provides Ghosh (and us) an opportunity to both perform and understand identity, infusing the drama with his (and our) own psychological needs, utopian dreams and sexual preferences. Moinak Biswas has drawn our attention to the way in which Ghosh deploys autobiography in his recent work.24 While documenting his changing persona, the films have also mapped the director’s interiority and become the site for the staging of the self. In sharp contrast to his earlier work, which made clear political statements championing women’s autonomy, foregrounding desire and taking a clear stand on issues of gender and sexuality, Chitrangada chronicles an indeterminate state of being that transcends fixed categories, a state in which desires are fluid and shifting. What then is the politics of Chitrangada, given this ambiguous exploration of the self and of gender via Tagore’s modernist dance drama? In the film, Rudra, by and by, discovers Partho’s love for children and since samesex couples cannot legally adopt a child in India, he decides to undergo a series of sex reassignment surgeries to ‘become a woman’. Partho is ambivalent about his decision, but goes along some way until we discover he has started seeing Kasturi (a female actor in Rudra’s dance group who plays the role of Chitrangada and first introduces Partho to Rudra).25 Jilted and humiliated, Rudra undertakes a torturous journey of social and metaphysical self-questioning, eventually reversing his decision to change his biological sex. His parents, though initially resistant to his choices, rally around him as he negotiates his filial duties and his own desires, eventually managing to strike some kind of balance between the two. As we struggle to understand the conflicting representations of queer desire, individual autonomy and familial nostalgia in Chitrangada, it is worth reminding ourselves, as Shohini Ghosh does, that ‘. . . the narrative logic of visibilizing the queer may, on occasion, run counter to the logic of sexual politics on the ground. Very different rules and conventions govern the worlds of representation’.26 To his critics, Ghosh’s work has often come across as self-indulgent. His provocations and pushing of boundaries are seen to be done from the safe confines of the middle class Bengali home. While they acknowledge that Ghosh is bringing up issues considered taboo, his critics argue that his notions of feminity and masculinity are stereotypical – women are seen as coy, nyaka, and masculine roles are imagined in limited ways even as his work is stiflingly aestheticised. Writing about Ghosh’s rendition of Chokher Bali (2003) in the Indian daily, The Telegraph, the writer Amit Chadhuri argues that the director’s style is operatic, in the sense that it combines the ‘kitsch and the mythic’ in a ‘spectacle that is larger than life’, and which therefore leaves little room for nuance. Ghosh’s aesthetic in Chadhuri’s considered opinion – an aesthetic which he contrasts with the more subtle 197

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international and humanising perspectives of Ray and Tagore – is a materialistic one adapted to a globalised India. It is worth comparing Chadhuri’s rather dismissive perspective with Biswas’s more useful sociohistorical context of economic liberalisation, fluid class categories and the rise of an informal and confessional audiovisual media culture in which Ghosh operates.27 He argues that where Ghosh’s work once represented the milieu of the Bengali urban middle class, in Chitrangada he has moved from addressing and representing that collectivity to speaking about his individual self. Perhaps, this is where Ghosh has been at his most provocative. His critics have doubtlessly regarded this as another instance of self-indulgence. Yet new scholarship on the subject of authorship has reinstated the auteur, despite earlier post-structuralist and other accounts that marginalised the figure. The presence of the film-maker in his/her own films is seen today as an assertion of authorship, an assertion that is part of the process of the creation of the author.28 By walking the fine line between art and reality, Ghosh has laid bare not only the creative process, but also the conflicted and ongoing discourse through which his own personal and professional identity is constantly made and remade.29

New ways of seeing At the aforementioned conference, Rituparno Ghosh spoke of his endeavour to make films which provided audiences with a unique experience of viewing, an experience that would be impossible to narrate after the film had been viewed. In Chitrangada, which seamlessly merges the depiction of everyday reality with a dream-like state – where past, present and future are inextricably linked so that characters move fluidly across time and states of mind are personified – we see something of what he may have intended. In one of the final scenes of the film, just before Rudra’s final transformative operation which will irreversibly turn him into a woman, he has a poignant and intense discussion with his parents about his father’s will which refers to an ‘only son and heir’. The deeply realistic scene is built up through tightly framed shots of the three characters in the hospital room. The family finally breaks down when Rudra’s father pleads with him to return home – ‘Ma has decorated your room with new curtains,’ he says, making, as Kaustav Bakshi (2012) has argued ‘a major Freudian slip’ suggesting that ‘the father still wants to keep him under wraps . . . he still thinks of his son as a social embarrassment, notwithstanding his compassion for him’.30 The lachrymose moment gives way to the expanse of the beach, as the camera shows Rudra walking out of his hospital room with Shubho. Dawn is breaking and the two are framed in silhouette. In the ‘magic hour’, Shubho 198

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asks Rudra what he would choose to become were Madana to grant him a boon. He leads him back to the house by the sea that Partho had wanted to buy during their holiday in Odisha.31 Accompanied by a haunting and operatic soundtrack, Rudra enters the house and meets his ex-lover, a photographer who has set up his dark room in this place. He invites Rudra to live with him but Rudra refuses. Walking back with Shubho along the beach, Rudra tells Shubho how he would wish to be remembered – ‘as the vivacious, energetic, eccentric, creative dancer . . . .’ ‘Or perhaps,’ Shubho suggests, ‘as Surupa – the transformed Chitrangada?’ ‘But that too is not permanent,’ Rudra replies. A nurse appears on the beach urging Rudra to return to the hospital, before she too recedes along the water. The magnifying and multiplying effect of waves and mirrors suggests fluidity and dissolution as the end of the film draws to a close and Rudra reverses his decision to become a woman. The enclosed, claustrophobic and tightly framed spaces of home and hospital, which reflect Rudra’s entrapment within fixed and assigned identities, also contrast with the sumptuousness of the stage which he enters intermittently in surrealist sequences. Desire, place and body become intertwined as desire overpowers the habitual body (Grosz 1995), reorienting it to new experiences of painful pleasure.32 In Chitrangada, Rudra’s preoccupation with painful pleasures pushes his body towards oblivion. In the hospital, he is in desperate need of sleeping pills. Biswas points out that the story of Chitrangada eventually becomes a story about the dissolution of the body – a story that uncannily mirrors the trajectory of Ghosh’s own life.33 ‘Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die’, reads a cryptic message sent to Rudra’s phone. Perhaps, as Biswas (ibid.) remarks, in order to be reborn (or in this case to be queerly reinvented) one’s older identities and habits have to be completely effaced. At the same time, the film marks a desire to return ‘home’ seen in Rudra’s intention to go back to his parents, despite his earlier suggestions that he would leave home after his operation so as not to embarrass them. By focussing on the family as the site where the personal and the political become intertwined, the film maps the amorphous and shifting processes through which heteronormativity is accomplished and tries to imagine new strategies of individual freedom while maintaining the nurturing aspects of family and society.

Queer ways of reading It is clear that Chitrangada will invariably be read retrospectively in the light of Ghosh’s untimely and tragic death. Retrospection is, in fact, critical given that Ghosh himself has chosen to make a contemporary and 199

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undeniably autobiographical film in dialogue with Tagore’s early 20thcentury text. Thus, while the film is engaged in telling us Ghosh’s own story, it is also mediating our relationship to Tagore’s work, drawing our attention to the fact that our understanding of the past is invariably affected by the needs of the present. In depicting his own response to Tagore, Ghosh symbolises for his audience how the oppositional potential of texts can be extracted from them in the present. It is in this sense that the film allegorises the act of reading subversively. Ghosh becomes the queer and active reader, contributing to, in Sinfield’s terms, the creation of a subculture of active readers who are consciously engaged in decoding cultural texts.34 By identifying himself with Tagore’s character, Ghosh also draws our attention to aspects of the drama that undermine stable oppositions between heterosexual and same-sex desire pointing to the unstable aspects of sexual identity. In forging a flamboyantly queer version of Tagore’s play, Ghosh has shown how homophobic discourses can be repositioned in such a way as to contaminate mainstream discourse with elements of queer identity. By referring back to Tagore and moving forward through his own self-inscription in Chitrangada, Ghosh also plots a history of desire, all the while negotiating forces of conservatism and censorship that seek to tame its queer and multifarious manifestations.

Notes 1 My title quotes Rituparno Ghosh’s statement made at the ‘What’s New? The Changing Face of Indian Cinema: Contemporary and Historical Contexts’ conference, University of Westminster, London (8 and 9 July 2011). Speaking about being revered and reviled in equal measure, he said that, quoting Arundhati Roy, it felt like being constantly ‘kissed on one cheek and slapped on the other’. I am indebted to Philip Bounds for illuminating some of the key critical ideas in this chapter. Deep gratitude to Rosie Thomas for helping me refine and develop my ideas and to Lalitha Gopalan for her suggestions on structure. I am also extremely grateful to Moinak Biswas, Moushumi Bhowmik, Ranita Chatterjee, Noorul Hasan, and Anjum Hasan. Sincere gratitude to Shohini Ghosh for inspiration and to Rohit K. Dasgupta, Sangeeta Datta and Kaustav Bakshi for the opportunity to write about the inimitable Rituparno Ghosh. This chapter is dedicated to the warm and whimsical memory of our brief meeting. 2 Ghosh has an enduring relationship with Tagore and has made consistent use of his poems, songs and stories in his work. Among the films which have either adapted Tagore’s stories or incorporated his poetry are Asukh (1999), Chokher Bali (2003), Naukadubi (2011), and Chitrangada (2012). Jeevan Smriti (2013), his last film, is a deeply personal docudrama on Tagore. 3 While adulation for Ghosh’s work has not been in short supply, yet he has often been the victim of homophobia.

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4 Rituparno Ghosh was commissioned to make a documentary – Jeevan Smriti: Selected Memories – marking Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. The film is in English and was produced by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. 5 Srimati Mukherjee, ‘Chokher Bali: A Historic-Cultural Translation of Tagore’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 54, Fall 2012. Retrieved from http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/MukherjeeChokerBali/text.html (accessed on 15 October 2012). 6 Originally written as a poetic drama Chitra (1891), he later rewrote it as a dance drama Chitrangada, which was first directed by Protima Devi and staged on 11 March 1936 (Prarthana Purkayastha, ‘Warrior, Untouchable, Courtesan: Fringe Women in Tagore’s Dance Dramas’, South Asia Research, Vol. 29, no. 3, 2002, pp. 255–273). 7 Manipur, at that point, encompassed modern-day Odisha. The original story is, in Ghosh’s words, a ‘straightforward narrative about the beautiful princess whom Arjuna wants to marry. Her father makes Arjuna pledge that he can’t take her away to Hastina because she has to give birth to a son who will ensure the continuity of the lineage of male heirs – a boon granted by Lord Shiva.’ 8 Master Class with Professor Shohini Ghosh, ‘What’s New? The Changing Face of Indian Cinema: Contemporary and Historical Contexts’ conference held at the University of Westminster, 8 and 9 July 2011. Ghosh is not using the term ‘deconstruction’ in the Derridean sense. What he is engaging in, rather, is a creative interpretation of Tagore’s text. 9 Shoma, A. Chatterji, ‘Chitrangada – The Crowning Wish I, Me and Myself’. Retrieved from http://bengalimovies.org/article/review/chitrangada-crowningwish-i-me-and-myself-10975 (accessed on 12 November 2013). 10 These include short stories such as Nastaneer (The Broken Nest, 1901), novels such as Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1916) and dance dramas such as Chitrangada (1936) and Chandalika (The Untouchable Girl, 1938). The Bengal Renaissance (late 1700s–mid-1800s), a period of intellectual and creative ferment in the arts and sciences in Bengal, had inaugurated these empowering representations of women examples of which are especially seen in the work of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (Purkayastha, Warrior, Untouchable, Courtesan, p. 262). 11 Shantiniketan, an educational institution, set up by Tagore in 1901, became Visva Bharati University in 1918 and continues to attract scholars and visitors the world over. Purkaystha (ibid., p. 263) argues that, in Shantiniketan, dance was a reflection of altering conceptions of the role of women in society and played an important cultural role in forging Bengali national identity during India’s struggle for independence (see Purkayastha, ‘Warrior, Untouchable, Courtesan: Fringe Women in Tagore’s Dance Dramas’, p. 262). 12 See Purkayastha, ‘Warrior, Untouchable, Courtesan: Fringe Women in Tagore’s Dance Dramas’, p. 262. 13 Ibid., p. 265. 14 For an argument about Satyajit Ray as Tagore’s ‘critical and creative interlocutor’, see Chandak Sengupta, ‘The Contours of Affinity: Satyajit Ray and the Tagorean Legacy’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 35, no. 1, 2012, pp. 144–161. 15 Saumitra Chakravorty, ‘Female Sexuality: An Intertextual Analysis of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray’, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific Issue, Issue 25, 2011.

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

Ibid. Mukherjee, ‘Chokher Bali: A Historic-Cultural Translation of Tagore’, 2012. Walter Benjamin, 2008: 22 in Mukherjee, ibid. Ibid. Shohini Ghosh, Fire: A Queer Film Classic, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010. White, 1999, 197 in Ghosh, ibid. Laura Doan and Sarah Waters, ‘Making Up Lost Time: Contemporary Lesbian Writing and the Invention of History’, in David Alderson and Linda Anderson (eds), Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, pp. 12–28. These include Arektir Premer Golpo (Kaushik Ganguly, 2010) and Memories in March (Sanjay Nag, 2011) as well as Chitrangada (Rituparno Ghosh, 2012). I am grateful to Dr. Ranita Chatterjee for her painstaking and sophisticated translation into English of Moinak Biswas’ article, originally written in Bengali – ‘Autobiographical Revelations on Screen’, Ei Samay (Rabibarowari, Special Sunday Supplement), 9 June 2013. Partho rejects Rudra’s female body saying that if he wanted a woman, he would find a real one rather than a ‘synthetic’ one. Ghosh, Fire, p. 20, 157. Biswas, ‘Autobiographical Revelations on Screen’. See Cecilia Sayad, Performing Authorship: Self-Inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema, London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Ghosh had undertaken a series of sartorial and physical changes to his appearance over the years reflecting his negotiation and queering of a personal identity. Kaustav Bakshi, ‘Why Chitrangada?’ Kaustav’s Arden. Blog retrieved from http://kaustavsarden.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/chitrangada-crowning-wish.html (accessed on 12 October 2013). In connection with a dance festival, Rudra and Partho visit the beach in Odisha – the only time they leave Kolkata. This is a period of relaxed intimacy and exploration interrupted only by the appearance of Rudra’s ex-lover and Partho’s brief relapse. See Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, UK: Routledge, 1995. Asked by Rudra why he shoots up, Partho tries to explain to Rudra the way in which ‘pain becomes pleasure’. Biswas, ‘Autobiographical Revelations on Screen’. Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

References Alderson, David and Linda Anderson (eds), Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Bakshi, Kaustav, ‘Why Chitrangada?’ Kaustav’s Arden. Blog retrieved from http:// kaustavsarden.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/chitrangada-crowning-wish.html (accessed on 12 October 2013). Biswas, Moinak, ‘Autobiographical Revelations on Screen’, Ei Samay (Rabibarowari, Special Sunday Supplement), trans. from Bangla by Ranita Chatterjee, 9 June 2013.

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Chakravarty, Saumitra, ‘Female Sexuality: An Intertextual Analysis of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray’, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific Issue, Issue 25, 2011. Chatterji, Shoma, A. ‘Chitrangada – The Crowning Wish I, Me and Myself’. Retrieved from http://bengalimovies.org/article/review/chitrangada-crowning-wish-i-me-andmyself-10975 (accessed on 12 November 2013). Chaudhuri, Amit, ‘Madmen, Lovers, Artists; Chokher Bali is to Bengali film what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to Europe’, The Telegraph, 14 December 2003. Retrieved from http://www.telegraphindia.com/1031214/asp/opinion/story_2676546.asp (accessed on 3 March 2014). Doan, Laura and Sarah Waters, ‘Making Up Lost Time: Contemporary Lesbian Writing and the Invention of History’, in David Alderson and Linda Anderson (eds), Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, pp. 12–28. Ghosh, Shohini, ‘The Wonderful World of Queer Cinephilia’, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 17–20. Ghosh, Shohini, Fire: A Queer Film Classic, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010. Grosz, Elizabeth, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, UK: Routledge, 1995. Gupta, Trisha, ‘Home and the World: Rituparno Ghosh’s Intimate Cinematic Canvas’, The Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture, July 2013. Retrieved from http:// www.caravanmagazine.in/arts/home-and-world (accessed on 20 August 2013). Mukherjee, Srimati, ‘Chokher Bali: A Historic-Cultural Translation of Tagore’, Jump Cut: A Review of contemporary Media, no. 54, Fall 2012. Retrieved from http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/MukherjeeChokerBali/text.html (accessed 15 October 2012). Purkayastha, Prarthana, ‘Warrior, Untouchable, Courtesan: Fringe Women in Tagore’s Dance Dramas’, South Asia Research, Vol. 29, no. 3, 2002, pp. 255–273. Sayad, Cecilia, Performing Authorship: Self-inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema, London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Sengupta, Chandak, ‘The Contours of Affinity: Satyajit Ray and the Tagorean Legacy’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 35, no. 1, 2012, pp. 144–161. Sinfield, Alan, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Sinfield, Alan, On Sexuality and Power, New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2004.

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11 A ROOM OF HIR 1 OWN The queer aesthetics of Rituparno Ghosh Kaustav Bakshi and Parjanya Sen

❦ Introduction Queer aesthetics, as it is understood in critical parlance, should not necessarily be predicated upon the sexual identity of the artist; rather, being queer in art connotes the artist’s rebuttal of the apparently inviolable dominant power structures, notwithstanding the artist’s sexuality. It is worthwhile quoting one of Colin Self’s2 tweets which aphoristically articulate the basic idea of being queer: ‘If you are not queer, you are not paying attention’.3 In other words, one needs to be queer in order to cultivate a sensibility to see through what appears natural and even sacrosanct. To put differently, queerness should not be narrowly interpreted as subversion of received codes of gender performativity alone; queerness is also implicit in the disruption of status quo and negation of normativity which is often confused with the natural. Therefore, equating queer aesthetics to the sexuality of the artist is rather essentialist, to say the least. In that sense, an assessment of Rituparno Ghosh’s queer aesthetics should not be limited to the three overtly queer films, in which zie essayed lead characters. Rather, these films should be analysed in the light of hir earliest films, in which zie vociferously challenged the incontrovertibility of heteropatriarchal structures by attributing to hir female protagonists an agency and a voice of protest, while simultaneously evoking the agony of being in the closet, metaphorically.4 At the same time, in a very interesting way, Ghosh used hir earlier films to play out hir sexual queerness, from behind the scene. Long before zie appeared on the screen as an actor portraying unambiguous queer characters, Ghosh was present in many of hir films as an ‘absent’ performer, by lending hir voice to several female actors; 204

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but zie barely ever claimed credits for that. Therefore, for Ghosh, hir films have always been a medium of liberating hirself, both at the narrative and at the performative level, years before zie actually ‘came out’. Because Rituparno Ghosh was a cultural icon and not just a film-maker, hir style and aesthetics as projected by hir films are to be understood as coextensive with hir public appearances and hir overwhelming presence in the media – as a talk show host, as a commentator on politics, as anchor of cultural programmes, as a writer, as a film reviewer, and as the editor of a popular Bengali film magazine Anandolok and later Robbar, a weekly cultural supplement to a Bengali news daily. In fact, Ghosh’s status as a cultural icon and hir stardom were contingent upon the protean roles zie played in the world of entertainment. No other Bengali film-maker, barring Aparna Sen perhaps, has been as visible as Ghosh in the public domain. Later, when zie officially ‘came out’, began talking about hir sexuality in the media and underwent a visible transformation in hir physical appearance by undergoing cosmetic surgery and cross-dressing in public, Ghosh emerged as a queer icon, subverting accepted notions of gender and sexuality, which barely has any precedents in Bengal. Therefore, Ghosh’s queer aesthetics needs to be appreciated not only in terms of the three overtly queer films in hir career – Arekti Premer Golpo (Director: Kaushik Ganguly, 2010), Memories in March (Director: Sanjoy Nag, 2011) and Chitrangada: the Crowning Wish (2012), but by locating these films in a larger discourse of queerness which Ghosh, as a star auteur, enunciated through hir other films, hir myriad roles in the media and hir contribution to the cultural sphere in general.5 Such contextualisation also enables a probable reading of the three films as a trilogy, the presence of Ghosh in the capacity of auteur actor in all three of them facilitating such a reading. While locating these films in a discourse of queer aesthetics already generated by Ghosh’s oeuvre of work, this chapter will also make an attempt to address the film-maker’s endeavour to discover an alternative rhetoric, confronting patriarchal language and its hegemonic power. Julia Kristeva’s6 and Helen Cixous’s call for an écriture féminine, challenging patriarchal discourses, can be transposed to queer cultural expressions, which should also seek to be ‘volcanic’; it should have the potential ‘to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the “truth” with laughter’.7 Although Ghosh did not quite successfully bring forth such a remarkably radical language in hir films, we shall show zie at least made an attempt to do so, while being cautious of not offending hir decent neo-bhadrolok8 audience. At the same time, we shall locate the three films in history, in the context of the changing scenario of LGBTQ movement in India. All three 205

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films released after the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code9 at the Delhi High Court in July 2009, seem to be informed by a new discursive category of the sexually deviant subject which did not have a precedent in Bengali Cinema at that time. Products of a neo-liberal sexual identity politics, these films draw their legitimacy, as we shall show, by tracing a genealogy from myths and literary works, particularly Tagore’s, while completely effacing existing local histories of queer subcultures. This effacement is again coextensive with Ghosh’s firm rooting in a metropolitan bourgeois paradigm, as underscored by hir other films. In other words, this conspicuous absence also becomes an important marker of Ghosh’s queer aesthetics which aimed at assimilating and normalising the queer individual in the consciousness of the Bengali neo-bhadrolok class, the class Ghosh hirself belonged to, understood the best and always had as hir target audience. In so doing, Ghosh, as we shall contend, risks a certain degree of depoliticisation of the LGBTQ movement, which has been gathering momentum in Bengal in the past two decades.

Ghosh’s self as subject and a neo-bhadrolok queer aesthetics Ghosh scripted, directed and acted in Chitrangada, and also co-scripted and played the role of the protagonist in both Arekti Premer Golpo and Memories in March. All the three films in discussion, therefore, unwittingly conflate the queer protagonist with Ghosh, the person. Given that Ghosh was already a household name within the neo-bhadrolok bracket, popular understanding of homoeroticism and queer men was, to a great extent, shaped by this discursive self-construction of Ghosh as a queer figure. Both Arekti Premer Golpo and Chitrangada deploy the popular trope of the heterosexual love triangle, with the exception that in these two films there were a ‘bisexual’ man, a woman and another man who seems to be performing the role of the quintessential ‘other woman’. At a performative level, this femaleness is mapped on to a biologically identified male body. In Arekti Premer Golpo, Ghosh wears loud makeup, wears female garments and is often mistaken for a woman; zie reappears as Ornab in a comparatively toneddown avatar in Memories in March, though no less sartorial in hir choice of clothes. Chitrangada has hir as a cross-dressing choreographer Rudra, who contemplates and almost undergoes a sex reassignment surgery in order to be able to adopt a child (for in India, there is no legal provision allowing two men to adopt). But none of these three characters, that is, Abhiroop, Ornab and Rudra, could gain a life of their own; rather, all three have become mere extensions of Ghosh’s real-life personality in the popular imagination, 206

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for by the time these films appeared, Ghosh had already become a queer icon. Besides, an audience, aware of Ghosh’s personal life, owing to hir overwhelming presence in the media gossip columns and hir editorials in Robbar (which were more often than not revelatory of hir personal life), could not but conflate Ghosh’s subjectivity with the reel life of these characters. In Memories in March, the terms in which Siddharth, hir boyfriend, describes Ornab to his mother – ‘loving, sensitive, caring, a fine sense of aesthetics, well-read, and has an impeccable taste for sarees . . . nagging, jittery, impatient, can’t live without air-conditioning, no nonsense sorts . . . a total drama queen’ – seem to apply to the real-life Rituparno Ghosh as well; following Ghosh’s demise, many of hir friends and colleagues described hir in the media using more or less similar epithets.10 In Chitrangada, the connection is even more explicit: Shubho, Rudra’s alter ego, comments about a new project zie discusses with him: ‘Isn’t it becoming much too autobiographical?’ Rudra replies: ‘You think so because you already know my story.’ In Rudra’s rejoinder, one might read an auto-reflexive irony directed at the audience of Chitrangada who has entered the theatre with extradiegetic knowledge of Ghosh’s personal life and is expecting a confessional narrative. At the same time, this comment also legitimises, as it were, the audience’s speculation. Such legitimisation is further corroborated by repetitive use of mirrors and reflections within the film that insinuates that Rudra may be a self-image of Ghosh.

Figure 11.1 Ghosh with Deepti Naval on the set of Memories in March Courtesy of Shri Venkatesh Films

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The conflation of the subjectivity of Ghosh with the reel life of all the three queer characters is made possible by the reiteration of the same kind of aesthetics characteristic of the earlier Rituparno Ghosh films. Although concerned with non-normative sexual desires, these films, apart from repeating tropes of bourgeois ‘heterosexual’ romance central to Ghosh’s earlier cinema, are all set in softly lit, aesthetically done up interiors of upper middle class homes (hotel/guest house rooms in Arekti Premer Golpo), apparently detached from the world outside. What these films seek to do is to insert discourses of sexual non-conformity into the consciousness of the neo-bhadrolok class, willing participants in the late capitalist consumerist culture. The aesthetics, as regards to set, costume and dialogue, which had become characteristic of Ghosh’s cinema, is consciously repeated, or so it seems, to reinforce the message that the queer individual is not an aberration but a natural (or even normal) member of the neo-bhadrolok family home, which has been the site of action in so many of hir earlier films. Revolving around an English-educated metropolitan bourgeois individual with enough disposable income to indulge in a consumerist culture, all three films parade a highly affluent lifestyle. The consumerist power zie wields is manifest in the designer clothes zie wears, the cars zie rides and the luxuries zie can afford. In Arekti Premer Golpo, zie is a film-maker who is very particular about hir makeup, hir dresses and even the kind of mug in which hir coffee is served. In Memories in March, zie, always sartorially dressed, is at the helm of an advertising firm and indulges hir boyfriend with expensive gifts regularly. In Chitrangada, zie is remarkably well-heeled to even contemplate a sex reassignment surgery. Apart from that, each frame of the films exhibits an iconography of plenitude as underlined by pricey interior décor, crockery sets, designer clothes, jewellery, and high-end gadgets, and in Chitrangada, even the hospital cabin is designed like a duplex apartment. In other words, the queer protagonist in each of these films is remarkably empowered in terms of class position, having access to a highclass queer lifestyle often seen as a ‘mass-mediated commodity, a culture of beautiful objects (bodies, fashions, food, and furniture) to be consumed’.11 The repertoire of material objects can be read as a signifier of a consumerist, neo-bhadrolok queer identity, locating the queer character within an identifiable familiar zone of middle class desire. What Aveek Sen, in a rasping critique of contemporary metropolitan Bengali cinema, observes is applicable to these films too: [T]hese films use a form of easy realism that could give to their audience the addictive pleasure of recognizing their familiar selves in the films’ polished surfaces. Rooms, clothes, makeup, speech, 208

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food, local references reflect back an everyday world that falls in exactly with the images designed for and distributed to a particular ‘niche market’. This phrase has been used recently by Rituparno Ghosh, who understands ‘the sentiment of the metropolitan and educated Bengali who has purchasing power’.12 However, it is also important to point out here that while playing to the gallery, Ghosh has also repeatedly shocked the Bengali middle class out of their complacency in hir previous films. In Unishey April, zie completely defamiliarised the image of a Bengali middle-aged widow; zie went to the extent of suggesting a sexual relationship she might have with her impresario-cum-friend. In Dahan, Ghosh showed the violence of marital rape; Chokher Bali unleashed the tabooed passions of a widow who seduced men, but remained remarkably impenitent even when faced with the moral police; Antramahal invited abrasive criticism from the audience which endlessly moralised about the explicit representation of the crudity of sex and the violence associated with it. Therefore, Ghosh’s position as a film-maker may be best described as one that was critical of the bourgeois moral paradigm while wallowing in its material markers. Such a position conflates as well as marks out two categories of the bourgeois – the ‘moral-modern’ bourgeois that emerged during the Bengal Renaissance and the ‘consumer-emancipated’ one that came into existence only recently, owing to rapid economic and cultural globalisation. To put it in other words, Ghosh’s films demonstrate a firm rooting in the aesthetics of an older Bengali bhadrolok class,13 while undermining its worldview with the current neo-liberal ideas informed by the cultural changes wrought by the economic liberalisation. In fact, Ghosh’s films are a product as well as a producer of neo-bhadrolok aesthetics, which is symptomatic of a troubled modernity. Ghosh’s films, while speaking back to bhadrolok sensibilities, also underline the emergence of this new middle class, which is still in the making. Moinak Biswas, in an article on contemporary Bengali cinema, while confirming Ghosh’s disposition, explains why this new middle class needs to be distinguished from the older bhadrolok class: But why neo-bhadrolok? The debate begins here. Not new, but, am calling this class neo. For it carries a sense of incompleteness, of something being still in process, of obscurity. And, it also underlines the propensity toward self-emulation which is historically associated with the prefix neo. Consumerist capitalism which is on the rise for the last two decades has significantly changed 209

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the character and ambit of the middleclass. A new class identity, which is rather transient and itinerant, is being formed based on the degree of accessibility to consumable commodities . . . As a result the bhadrolok class is being compelled to look for new distinctive makers of self-recognition . . . [And] what I mean by neobhadrolok cinema is best exemplified by such films as Antoheen (Limitless) Autograph and Abohoman released during the last two years. The filmmaker who is leading this class of cinema is Rituparno Ghosh.14 This is apparent in Ghosh’s queer films, too, in which zie conspicuously glosses over local subcultures pre-existing the advent of the global LGBTQ15 movement and locates hir narratives within the neobhadrolok class. Despite their radicalism, these films significantly work towards consolidating the cultural hegemony of the neo-bhadrolok ‘gay man’. In other words, they end up reinforcing the hierarchy between the English-educated, metropolitan ‘gay man’, who is largely the product of a neo-liberal bourgeois discourse of sexual identity politics and the kothi belonging to the lower socioeconomic strata of society.16 That the films did not even target the latter is evidenced by the language they use: both Arekti Premer Golpo and Memories in March are mostly in English, while in Chitrangada several important dialogues are in English, although all three are made in Kolkata. At the representational level, this hierarchy, albeit perhaps inadvertently, is foregrounded in Arekti Premer Golpo. A Delhi-based film-maker (Abhiroop Sen) arrives in Kolkata to shoot a documentary on a yesteryear female impersonator (Chapal Bhaduri) of Bengali folk theatre. Always in command and extremely articulate, Abhiroop confidently cross-dresses in public and has sufficient access to the mass-mediated queer consumerist culture; on the other hand, Chapal can barely sign his name, shares a small scruffy flat with hir brother-in-law in a dilapidated North Kolkata building, is dressed poorly, and does not share Abhiroop’s knowledge of current LGBTQ politics. Inevitably, a repressive hierarchy is forged, whereby the apparently sexually liberated film-maker exercises hir will on the uninitiated subaltern actor and aggressively takes upon hir the responsibility of representing the latter.17 Within Abhiroop’s project, Chapal increasingly becomes a commodified object, highly saleable in a prospective market of queer narratives, itself sanctioned by a neo-liberal discourse of the queer subject. By allowing Chapal to speak, and thereby in venturing to liberate hir, Abhiroop ends up discursively assimilating and thus delimiting hir. Arekti Premer Golpo thus

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underwrites how class position inevitably controls the very apparatus of representation where the process of allowing the subaltern subject to speak involves a reduction of the same into a puppet (beneputul) to be discursively marked and appropriated. The sense of identification (overtly signalled by Abhiroop playing Chapal in the film within the film) these two individuals share with each other is deeply undercut by their highly unequal access to the means of consumption.18 The hegemony of the remarkably westernised metropolitan middle class ‘gay man’ is thus established and local subcultures of resistance which have existed much prior to the advent of a globalised LGBTQ movement are thereby glossed over. The film within the film and Abhiroop’s essaying of the role of a younger Chapal in it merely function as a vehicle to draw upon a genealogy of non-conforming sexualities, in order to reinforce their ‘always already there’ status. Kothi and hijra subcultures have always existed; only, it was never available to the bourgeois consciousness in the way the LGBTQ subculture is in the post-liberalisation period. In reality, the bourgeois class has always maintained a studied distance from the local kothi and hijra subcultures, although a considerable number of kothis (counter-identified within the kothi community as kaditaaler kothi)19 belong to this class. The bourgeoisie have always been remarkably silent about this subculture in general, prior to the enhanced visibility of sexual identity politics in the public domain during the past two decades. When the kothi eventually finds access to the mainstream, that is, in Ghosh’s films, zie is found to have undergone, at the representational level at least, a ‘bourgeoisation’,20 owing to the adoption of this global libretto of sexual identity politics firmly located within an educated middle class. Zie is more ‘gay’ than kothi.21 Zie may be still subversive and non-conforming, but significantly lacks the revolting edge of the kothi subculture of resistance, having been subsumed by the sheen and comfort of a neo-liberal consumerist lifestyle. In other words, none of these films could take the rebellion to the streets and address the ground realities of the kothi and hijra subcultures: their regular conflict with the police, the disapproving glances and catcalls they have to deal with in public places and sex work in which they are willingly or unwillingly involved. Even the erotically charged ambience of cruising areas (public parks, bus stops, markets, etc.), casual hook-ups and sexual adventures22 and the practice of using a coded language (known as ulti-bhasa)23 to communicate with peers are conspicuously absent. Rather, these films tend to sanitise the existing narratives of resistance and appropriate them within a pre-eminently neo-bhadrolok normative framework, coterminous with Ghosh’s bourgeois aesthetics. These films, in a way, reconfirm what

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Ashley Tellis in an uncompromising critique of the LGBTQ movement in India observes: The fact is that the ‘queer movement’ has been, and is, a bit of a slick Boy’s Club, not old style and paternalistic, and making all the right noises to be sure but still participating in the Boy’s Club rules of exclusion and marginalisation of the less privileged.24

Mythical subtexts as strategy of assimilation Such studied appropriation of the queer within sanitised spaces of the neobhadrolok culture is to some extent effortlessly accomplished by the deployment of quasi-mythical subtexts which help establish non-normative sexualities as ‘always already there’, and therefore their naturalness: Arekti Premer Golpo returns to Gaudiya Vaishnavism and the androgynous figure of Lord Chaitanya; Memories in March deploys the Radha-Krishna myth; and Chitrangada, as we shall examine in a separate section, appropriates an episode of the Mahabharata, mediated through a celebrated Tagore text. It should be interesting to note here that Tagore himself had time and again returned to the Vaishnav Padabali in search of an alternative rhetoric for his conception of love (prem) and worship (puja). Ghosh, very intelligently, merges Vaishnavism and Tagore, keeping in mind that the concurrence would be easily recognised and appreciated by the elite Bengali audience, well-acquainted with Tagore’s works. Sharing remarkable similarities with Sufism and the Sahajiya cults of rural Bengal, Gaudiya Vaishnava ideology valorises androgyny as celebrated in the philosophical oneness of Radha and Krishna and in Krishna’s repeated assumption of radhabhaava. Vaishnava theology often refers to Radha as Krishna’s alienated self, and therefore, sees Radha as consubstantial with him. In Gaudiya Vaishnavism male devotees often identify themselves with Radha as well as the cowherd women who were Krishna’s lovers and Radha’s friends. In Arekti Premer Golpo, Abhiroop alludes to this aspect of Vaishnava theology, while explaining to Uday why zie wants to shoot at the Gaurango25 temple. Referring to the temple as a ‘nice symbol’, Abhiroop elucidates: . . . I think Chaitanya is the epitome of the cultural androgyny of this country. Radha and Krishna are almost symbiotic in him. Just think . . . he is the first person to stand against all forms of discrimination . . . he is bringing the concept of liberation through music, creating street bands . . . 500 years ago! And all this happened so organically. 212

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Uday, who has never seen Chaitanya from this perspective, is deeply impressed: ‘True. Now that you say so! Actually!’ Later in the film, Abhiroop shaves hir head in a local roadside salon, thereby developing a visual semblance with Chaitanya. This is followed by another conversation between Abhiroop and Uday on the precincts of the Gauranga Temple during the sandhyaarti. As they talk, Abhiroop casually plays with a peacock feather, a popular synecdoche for the eternal lover. The Vaishnav Kirtan – Banamali tumi para janame hoyeo Radha (O Gardener Divine!26 May you be reborn as Radha) − that plays like a refrain, functions as a wish for Abhiroop. And, hir decision to shave hir head becomes agential in concretising the androgyny zie aspires to. The trope of divine association is redeployed in Memories in March, where the Radha-Krishna myth functions as a subtext, particularly through two songs− Kahen sang khelu holi aj Brajpur? (With whom shall we play Holi in Brajtown today?) and Sakhi hum Mohan avisaare jaun (O friend! Am setting off for a love tryst with him!) – articulating Ornab’s agony of losing hir lover. In these songs, zie is imagined as Radha, the legendary birohini nayika.27 Ghosh hirself composed the lyrics for this film and the two songs mentioned above are in the Braj Bhasa.28 In both these compositions, Ghosh draws upon the myth of Radha and Krishna as it exists within popular imagination. Ghosh had earlier used the same trope in hir compositions for the heterosexual love story Raincoat (2004). By repeating the same trope as a vehicle for foregrounding ‘homosexual’ romance, Ghosh seeks to insert the narrative of ‘homosexuality’ within an idealised projection of ‘heterosexual’ love epitomised by the figures of Radha and Krishna. Ghosh’s resorting to Braj Bhasa and the symbols from marginalised Vaishnavite cult, it should be noted, underlines hir attempt to look for a queer rhetoric that would be free of the linguistic markers of the everyday masculinist language. Although, as mentioned earlier, a coded language (or  ulti-bhasa) was already available, Ghosh perhaps considered it aesthetically inappropriate to the kind of glossy neo-bhadrolok cinema he represented. Or it is quite possible that Ghosh was not even acquainted with this language at all.29 Even if zie was aware, zie was keen on inventing some other language pertaining to the refined taste of hir target audience, without declassing hirself. Ghosh thus seems to fashion a notion of aesthetics in relation to an articulation of a subjectivity that claims its approval by invoking popular myths that challenge heteropatriarchal discourses. But, this discursive shift from queer politics to queer aesthetics defined vis-à-vis self as subject, while providing a critique of heteronormativity, nevertheless risks a sort of depoliticisation. But, for Ghosh, a middle class aesthete, as zie was, it was perhaps 213

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more important to establish the cultural identity of the ‘queer’ within the neo-bhadrolok class than engaging with radical political polemics.

Queering Tagore Rabindranath Tagore has always been central to Ghosh’s aesthetics as exemplified by most of hir other films: the poet is the guiding force for Rohini, the protagonist of Asukh; he is the inspiration for the young Radhika in Sob Charitro Kalponik when she composes her first poem. The distraught heroine of Shubho Muharat finds solace in Tagore’s song Jibon mworoner shimana chharaye (Beyond the limits of life and death), while Amal dhabal pale legechhe mondo-modhur hawa (The bitter-sweet breeze has struck the serene white sails) poignantly evokes the atmosphere of early autumn, the setting of Utsab. In fact, Tagore’s songs have always functioned as important narrative devices in majority of hir films. Before Chitrangada, Ghosh had already adapted two of his novels, Chokher Bali and Noukadubi, to much critical acclaim. Reappropriating a Tagore text to tell a same-sex love story, therefore, is not only coterminous with Ghosh’s aesthetics familiar to hir audience, but it also had a greater purpose to serve. Owing to the sacrosanct, omniscient status he has acquired in the Bengali popular consciousness, Tagore, by default, functions as a revered figure of authority and repertoire of culture. By adapting a popular Tagore text to narrate a tale of queer desires, Ghosh gets them certified, as it were, by the poet. Ghosh’s analogical adaptation of Tagore’s Chitrangada (the 1936 dance drama version) to tell the story of Rudra’s desire to undergo a sex reassignment surgery is remarkably aided by Tagore’s own adaptation of an episode in the Mahabharata, where the poet had discovered an intriguing narrative that allowed him to reflect upon the fluidity of gender. Tagore’s play, as well as Ghosh’s film, opens with a small prologue which states: Pleased by the devotion of the King of Manipur, Lord Shiva granted him the boon that the royal family would only bear male children. Even then, when Chitrangada was born to the royal family, the King brought her up like a son. The two phrases ‘even then’ and ‘like a son’ demand attention: the first points to the fact that a woman who flouts divine decree by being born as a woman is expected to be unique; and the second entails that a woman, who is conditioned to become a man, epitomises the reality of the social construction of gender. Ghosh’s film opens with an invocation to Tagore – ‘Tagore’s Chitrangada is an Amazon warrior on a quest to discover her gender 214

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identity’. Thus, the very notion of identity as central to Ghosh’s own reappropriation of Tagore’s text is foregrounded at the very outset. While staging the first scene of the play within the film, Rudra gets terribly upset by the fact that Kasturi’s (playing the more masculine kurupa Chitrangada) hand gestures appear too ‘feminine’ and shouts at her: ‘Chitrangada is conditioned to be man! That is how she is brought up!’ – the idea of conditioning underlining gender as socially constructed, is thus disseminated and internalised. The film takes off from these two possible inferences that could be drawn from the prologue. Besotted with Arjun, Chitrangada realises the lack of feminine grace in her, when the former dismisses her, mistaking her for a young boy. Humiliated on being rebuffed thus, Chitrangada approaches Madan, the God of Love, to bestow upon her feminine grace and beauty for a year so that Arjun falls in love with her. Madan relents and she is transformed. However, Chitrangada, recognising the superfluity of physical beauty, returns the boon before that promised one year is over. Perhaps, the most recognisable literal link between Tagore’s text and Ghosh’s film lies here: Rudra, having fallen in love with Partho (incidentally another name by which Arjun is known in the Mahabharata) and having discovered the latter’s love for children, feels the desire to undergo a sex reassignment surgery, but calls off the cosmetic transfiguration in the end, choosing to stay the way zie is. However, the finest exemplification of the film’s negotiation with the Tagore text is the metaphoric staging of the sex reassignment surgery, in which the cosmetic surgeon takes the place of Madan, in attributing to Rudra hir desired body. In this, the enactment of Tagore’s dance drama assumes the quality of an allegorical pre-text to Rudra’s narrative, sanctioning its validity as it were. In another scene, with a spectacular staging of Tagore’s dance drama in the backdrop, Rudra, post hir breast implant, gazes at hir own reflection in a large bowl of water, as Chitrangada’s lines from Tagore’s text are narrated in a voice-over by Ghosh hirself. The subtext of the Narcissus myth is evident. At a metaphorical level, Ghosh inserts hir own subjectivity within Tagore’s text and thereby claims it as hir own, while the Narcissus myth suggests a near-obsession with the self as subject which is the overdetermining framework of the film’s exploration of sexuality. In connection to this, it is important to note that in the play within the film, Rudra hirself plays the role of Madan, the divine engineer of Chitrangada’s transfiguration. The suggestion seems to be that here Ghosh is literally acting out the role of the engineer auteur, who effectuates the sexual transfiguration and is simultaneously the object of it. In this intriguing auteur-character-actor nexus, Ghosh as Rudra, seeking a sex reassignment surgery and calling it off, Ghosh as Madan, engineering a cosmetic transfiguration in the play within the film, and Ghosh as the auteur, controlling their actions and 215

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desires, merge into each other in a strange way, reinstating in the process the projection of Ghosh’s self as subject. This is further strengthened by the distinctive aesthetics of the film, which bear the signature of Ghosh.

An unintended trilogy? The three films, taken together, seem to generate a meta-text for the same reason. In Chitrangada: the Crowning Wish, Rudra contemplates sex change on discovering hir boyfriend’s love for children. The origin of this desire may be very well traced back to Arekti Premer Golpo, where Abhiroop, the queer ‘other’, loses hir boyfriend to hir pregnant wife. The wife reclaims her husband on the pretext of her pregnancy and the husband relents out of a sense of duty, abandoning Abhiroop. In Memories in March, Ornob’s queerness is once again posited in opposition to the biological woman, split across two registers – the boyfriend’s oedipal mother, struggling to come to terms with the knowledge of her son’s sexuality, and Sahana who once nurtured amorous feelings for him. Perhaps, having identified this opposition with the other that is the biological woman per se, Rudra, in Chitrangada, makes an attempt to forego hir otherness and appropriate the biological body of the woman, thereby eliminating the opposition. Such a reading is remarkably facilitated by the fact that Ghosh hirself enacts all three queer characters, and the three films thereby become a journey which seeks a teleological end, but ironically does not find a closure in the last film. When Rudra finally decides to abandon the vaginal reconstruction surgery and requests the doctor to remove the breast implant, zie receives a text from the same mysterious sender who keeps on sending philosophical messages all through the film: ‘Why is a BUILDING called a BUILDING even when it is complete?’ The suffix ‘-ing’ that underscores continuity is also applicable to the idea of the body and identity as constructs which continuously undergo a process of becoming. The teleologically projected closure, therefore, is never reached. In fact, the third film may indeed be seen as committing a deliberate directorial aporia by refraining from a teleological closure and resisting the meta-narrative posited by the three films. Conversely, the very possibility that these three films might be read together as a trilogy, buttresses Ghosh’s status as a celebrity auteur, as we understand the term from a structuralist point of view. What David Bordwell notes about authorship in art cinema, can be applied here as well: Several conventions operate here. The competent viewer watches the film expecting not order in the narrative but stylistic signatures in the narration: technical touches . . . and obsessive motifs. 216

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The film also offers itself as a chapter in an ouvre. This strategy becomes especially apparent in the convention of the multi-film work . . . The initiated catch citations: references to previous films by the director or to works by others.30 **** The films discussed here thus seem to inaugurate a queer aesthetics visà-vis the sexual subjectivity of Rituparno Ghosh. While, on the one hand, this aesthetics derives its sanction from the already established tradition of neo-liberal middle class (or neo-bhadrolok) cinema pioneered by Ghosh hirself within the Bengali film industry, on the other, it traces a genealogy by routing itself through quasi-mythical traditions and an ‘authoritative’ text like Tagore’s. Apparently, at least, the films seem to lack, as we have argued earlier, the truly subversive potential of radical queer politics, for they are deeply rooted within the comfort zones of the neo-bhadrolok class. Such setting reveals a troubled modernity, which despite opening up space for liberal thinking has also erected certain limits to it, thereby curbing propensities towards radicalism. For instance, while the English-educated ‘gay’ man with access to sufficient cultural capital could find some acceptance, the disruptive potential of the kothi-hijra subculture could barely draw sympathies from the neo-bhadrolok, Ghosh’s intended audience. Hence, as we make such a claim that Ghosh’s films lack political edginess, we do so with the awareness of the necessity of evaluating them vis-à-vis the ideologies and aesthetics of the targeted viewership. Ghosh could once again shake hir middle class viewers out of their complacency or their ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ deportment towards nonnormative sexualities, but zie could not take the risk of being radically subversive in hir approach. In addition to that, what needs to be remembered is that no local literary or cinematic rhetoric conducive to voicing radical queer politics was available to Ghosh.31 Hence, Ghosh could not but route hir queer desires through canonical literary texts and artistic traditions and redeploy familiar images of hir own films, which had won considerable accolades within the neo-bhadrolok class for hir queer films. Besides, as we have argued earlier, it was important to give voice to deviant sexual desires through manipulating familiar cultural referents in order to establish the naturalness of the same, given that most of Ghosh’s viewers were either unaware of or deeply prejudiced towards non-normative registers of love, desire and coupledom. It is interesting how, guided by Tagore, zie has time and again returned to Braj Bhasa and the Vaishnavite cult, which provided hir with an alternative language and culture of the 217

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erotic, respectively, to articulate queer desires. Ghosh found in the Vaishnavite cult a vision of love, eroticism and desire, markedly distinct from the bourgeois, heteropatriarchal ways of looking at these. In Tagore’s texts, zie found a powerful rhetoric to dismantle the normative, testified by hir repeated use of the poet’s compositions in film after film, and in hir adaptations of Chokher Bali, Noukadubi and eventually, Chitrangada. Actually, Ghosh was only beginning to discover a distinctive libretto of queer cinema and a queer politics thereof. Had zie been alive, and we can only speculate that, Ghosh might have been able to develop a more radical cinematic language and aesthetics to represent the queer on screen.

Notes 1 In this chapter, we use ‘zie’ (instead of he/she) and ‘hir’ (instead of him/his/her) to uphold gender neutrality. Although no consensus has been reached about the universal adoption of these gender-neutral pronouns, the use of ‘zie’ and ‘hir’ appear to be most popular in the genderqueer communities across the globe. See, Anon., The Need for a Gender Neutral Pronoun. The Gender Neutral Pronoun Blog or The Search for a Polite Specific Gender-Neutral Third-Person Singular Pronoun, 24 January 2010, http://genderneutralpronoun.wordpress.com/tag/zieand-hir/, accessed on 23 September 2013. 2 The Young Creature Blog, focused on supporting queer musicians, artists, filmmakers, writers, troublemakers, and earth shakers, describes queer icon, Colin Self as: ‘Colin Self is a trans-disciplinary, post-riot grrl diva exploring themes of gay identity and hierarchical power struggles through live performance, video, music, and everyday life. Colin’s performances mimic and parody the modern conundrum as a utopic Dandy. Utilizing audience participation, he is inventing new forms of activism through communal body and voice, bringing social advocacy to the party’. See, ‘Colin Self’, Young Creature Blog, 27 April 2010, http:// www.youngcreature.net/2010/04/colin-self.html, accessed on 11 June 2014. 3 See Fiona Duncan, ‘Colin Self is the Embodiment of Queer Theory’, 22 March 2014, http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/colin-self-is-the-embodiment-of-queertheory, accessed on 11 June 2014. 4 Cross-refer Richard Allen’s article in this volume for a further elaboration of this idea. 5 Cross-refer the ‘Introduction’ to this volume, along with Sumit Dey’s article ‘Just Like a Filmstar’ and Anugyan Nag’s article ‘Locating Rituparno in Tollywood’ for a detailed analysis of Ghosh’s stardom and status as a queer icon in the metropolitan middle class circles of Bengal, especially Kolkata. 6 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 7 Helen Cixous (1976), ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. In H. Adams and L. Searle (eds), Critical Theory since 1965, Florida: University Presses of Florida, 1986, p. 316. 8 We are borrowing this term from Moinak Biswas’s article entitled ‘NeoBhadrolok Darpan’ published in a Bengali journal Baromash (Twelve Months),

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9

10

11 12 13

14 15

No. 33, 2011, pp. 255–260. We shall discuss its composition, its characteristics and its difference from the bhadrolok class in the course of the chapter. Article 377, known as the ‘Unnatural Offences Act’, which was incorporated into the Indian Constitution from an existing British law, states that: ‘Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine’. It is followed by a further explanation that: ‘Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offense described in this section’. Through a reading down of this colonial law, what became increasingly foregrounded was a certain notion of identity which drew upon universalising tropes of ‘Gay’, ‘Lesbian’, ‘Bi-sexual’, ‘Transgender’, and so on. The source of this information is articles, features, obituaries, talk-shows, and so on that were published or aired in the media immediately after the death of Ghosh. Several Bengali magazines, such as Prathama Ekhon (15 July 2013), Anandalok (12 June 2013), Robbar (9 June 2013), and so on had lengthy cover stories on the film-maker, in which hir friends, colleagues, actors, and relatives candidly talked about Rituparno the person as they had known hir from close quarters. On 31 May 2013, the day after Ghosh passed away, all the vernacular and English language newspapers in India had numerous stories on the deceased film-maker, in which film critics, socialites, industry insiders talked about hir films, career and personal life in revealing detail. David L. Eng, ‘Freedom and the Racialisation of Intimacy: Lawrence v. Texas and the Emergence of Queer Liberalism’. In G. E. Haggerty and M. McGarry (eds), A Companion to LGBTQ Studies, Malden: Blackwell, 2007, p. 39. Aveek Sen, ‘Yawning in the Darkness’, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1010415/ editoria.htm#head2, accessed on 10 August 2013. See Sumit Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India, Second Edition, Kolkata: Papyrus, 2000. Sarkar delineates the cultural history of the Bengali bhadrolok, a class that emerged in the 19th century in the wake of the Bengal Renaissance. Beneficiary of Western education, the bhadrolok class also fervently participated in the Swadeshi Movement, which began gaining momentum post-1857. This class, not a homogenous group however, underwent a remarkable transformation as regards to its composition after the Permanent Settlement. The bhadrolok class was ‘squeezed out of business of even comprador type business activities, and left dependent on the professions, services and land . . . Bourgeois-liberal values remained bereft of material content’. (p. 23). This bhadrolok class underwent another major transformation after the liberalisation of the Indian economy, the effects of which began to be felt since the late 1990s. This bhadrolok class, a varied social group, has been time and again represented in Bengali Cinema since it came into existence. See, Sharmishtha Gooptu, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2010. Moinak Biswas, ‘Neo-Bhadrolok Darpan’, Baromash, Annual Journal, 2011 (translation ours). The LGBTQ movement makes its entry point into the nation state of India early in the 1990s. Initially, it sought to articulate itself largely through the framework of HIV/AIDS prevention. In this context, it is significant to note that the 2 July 2009 Judgement of the Delhi High Court largely relied on the petition submitted by the Health Ministry of India to decriminalise ‘homosexuality’ as

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it interfered with HIV/AIDS outreach work, making it difficult to reach out to the MSM (Men Having Sex with Men) population. The aforementioned subcultures of resistance became organised around NGOs and CBOs dealing with HIV/AIDS outreach work. The categories of ‘MSM’ and kothi were established, almost overnight, as discursive categories in need of HIV/AIDS prevention intervention. Although a deeper exploration of this lies outside the scope of this chapter, it is crucial to note here that a series of players with vested interests (which also included the State) were involved in this process of thus organising and articulating a LGBTQ movement in the country. For a fuller understanding of the Delhi High Court verdict and what led to it, see Government of NCT of Delhi and Others v. Naz Foundation, No. 7455/2001, Delhi High Court, 2 July 2009, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/photo.cms?msid=4728348, accessed on 12 August 2013. Kothi, a Telugu word, is a sexual identity category, which pre-existed such labels as ‘gay’ and ‘queer’, and has been in use across India for a very long time. A kothi is generally identified by hir ‘effeminacy’ and is often perceived as the receptive partner in (homo)sexual intercourse. But such delineation is rather essentialist and flawed, for many kothis are married, have children and have participated as beneficiaries of the patriarchal system. In fact, kothi identity is a dynamic one, which is being constantly reinvented and reconstructed. After the advent of neo-liberal queer theory and the increasing domination of the LGBTQ movement by the metropolitan ‘gay’ men, the term kothi (and several other local terms) is gradually receding into oblivion. Not only that, a covert power hierarchy has been generated, in which the moneyed ‘gay’ man sufficiently dominates and marginalises the non-urban, non-English speaking lower class kothi. See, Ajay Majumdar and Niloy Basu, Samaprem: Samakamita Bishoyok Ekti Samaj-Monostwatik Anweshan (Same-Sex Love: A Socio-Psychological Investigation into the Subject of Homosexuality), Kolkata: Deep Prakashan, 2005. Also see, Ashok Row Kavi, ‘Kothi versus Other MSM: Identity versus Behaviour in the Chicken and Egg Paradox’, pp. 391–398, and Bhaswati Chakravorty, ‘Rights for the Third Gender: Problems of Identity and Recognition’, pp. 369–390, in B. Bose and S. Bhattacharya (eds), The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India, London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull, 2007. In this, Chapal barely outgrows the derogatory term beneputul, by which female impersonators of Bengali folk theatre were generally known. Although the lexical meaning of the term beneputul is doll or puppet, the word bene, meaning ‘trader’, seems to suggest that Chapal becomes almost a marketable puppet in the hands of the middle class director, Abhiroop. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Kaustav Bakshi’s argument in a seminar paper entitled ‘Arekti Premer Golpo: The yesteryear female impersonator, the post-liberalisation transvestite and a queer stereotype’ presented at a national seminar, ‘Gay Subcultures and Literatures: The Indian Projections’, held at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, in April 2012. See Majumdar and Basu, Samaprem (Same-Sex Love), pp. 160–163. For a detailed study of the emergence of the neo-liberal, metropolitan kothi and hir growing hegemonic power in commanding the LGBTQ movement in India, especially in the metropolitan centres, see A. Gupta, ‘Englishpur ki Kothi: Class Dynamics in the Queer Movement in India’. In G. Bhan and A. Narrain (eds),

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Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005, pp. 123–142. Current LGBTQ discourses in South Asia constantly challenge the hegemony of Euro-American queer theory that entered the sphere of queer politics after the liberalisation of the economy. The South Asian queer activists resist the complete colonisation of non-conformist sexual identities in the subcontinent by Euro-American discourses of sexual identity politics. They insist on interpolating the global acronym LGBTQ with local terms, such as kothi, hijra, do paratha, and so on, to mark out the difference of the South Asian queer from the Euro-American queer. According to them, being kothi in India is not the same as being gay in the United States. Also, subsuming diverse frameworks within which same-sex desires have found expression into the singular construction of a gay identity is considered reductive. However, several metropolitan queer Indians, beneficiaries of the open economy and culture, prefer to identify themselves as ‘gay’ rather than kothi, a term they consider almost abusive. Ghosh’s films are exemplary products of this elitist city-centric LGBTQ movement in India. For a detailed discussion of the imperialism of Euro-American queer theory, and a willing submission to the same, as observed among India’s elite queers, see Shivananda Khan, ‘Culture, Sexualities, and Identities: Men Who Have Sex with Men in India’, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 40, no. 3 and 4, 2001, pp. 99–115. Paul Boyce in an illuminating ethnographic study delineates a vibrant cruising culture in Kolkata in his article, ‘(Dis)locating Male to Male Sexualities in Calcutta: Subject, Space and Perception’ In Bose and Bhattacharya (eds), The Phobic and the Erotic, pp. 399–416. This coded language or ulti-bhasa has a notable feminine character. It deploys phrases, terms, interjections, and ways of addressing which are unmistakably ‘feminine’, the kind more popular among women in non-metropolitan regions. It is imbued with sexual innuendoes and abusive terms, rhymes and aphorisms, which are considered blasphemous in polite conversations within an educated upper/middle class. It also consists of words and phrases (mainly functioning as codes), which are unknown in the mainstream language spoken by the common people in a given region. Like all other languages, it is not a static but a dynamic language, which is constantly changing. It is not necessarily vernacular or confined to non-metropolitan spaces; it is very much in use in the cities within the kothi community, and with the growing importance of the English language ulti-bhasa has been notably abrogated by the same. Ulti-bhasa is not just spoken language, it also includes certain gestures, movement of the hands, facial expressions, which do have some coded meaning and are also well-known markers of identifying a kothi. See Majumdar and Basu, Samaprem (Same-Sex Love), Chapter X, pp. 197–221. Ashley Tellis, ‘Disrupting the Dinner Table: Re-thinking the “Queer Movement” in Contemporary India’, Jindal Global Law Review, Vol. 4, no. 1, 2012, p. 155. Gaurango is another popular name by which Chaitanya Deb is known. Although the official subtitle of the film has Banamali translated as ‘Gardener Divine’, the lexical meaning of Banamali is ‘someone who wears a garland of wild flowers’. A woman estranged eternally from her lover.

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28 ‘Braj’ or ‘Brij’ is an old Hindi dialect and was one of the predominant literary languages (along with Awadhi) of North Central India in the 19th century. The genealogy of this dialect can be traced back to the ficto-historical site of ‘Vraja’ or the birthplace of Krishna, according to the Bhagvata Purana. Many of the compositions of the Bhakti saints, like Surdas and Kabirdas, are written in the ‘Braj’ dialect. Interestingly, Braj is also the dialect used by Rabindranath Tagore to compose a number of songs based on the mythological romance of Radha and Krishna, a series which is known within his oeuvre as Bhanusinghyer Padavali. 29 Majumdar and Basu point out that the language is impossible to use in polite societies, given its sexual innuendoes and apparent indecency. In fact, Englisheducated upper/middle class kothis barely ever use this language or are even aware of it: ‘It has been observed that in most cases, it is impossible to master this language (ulti-bhasa) without socialising with kothis . . . Besides, kothis belonging to the upper and middle classes of society try their best to maintain a very clean image in their neighbourhood. The kothi never uses that coded language within these circles. The kothi tries not to use such language which might cause humiliation . . .’ Majumdar and Basu, Samaprem (Same-sex Love), p. 200 (translation ours). 30 David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, Vol. 4, no. 1, 1979, p. 59. 31 Chitrangada does betray Pedro Almadovar’s growing influence on Ghosh; but Almadovar is not indeed a familiar name amongst Ghosh’s middle class Bengali audiences. Ghosh had to channelise hir views on alternative sexuality through texts and myths, which are more commonly known to hir loyalists.

Works cited Anon., ‘The Need for a Gender Neutral Pronoun’, The Gender Neutral Pronoun Blog or The Search for a Polite Specific Gender-Neutral Third-Person Singular Pronoun, 24 January 2010, http://genderneutralpronoun.wordpress.com/tag/zie-and-hir/, accessed on 23 September 2013. Anon., ‘Colin Self’, Young Creature Blog, 27 April 2010, http://www.youngcreature. net/2010/04/colin-self.html, accessed on 11 June 2014. Bakshi, Kaustav, ‘Arekti Premer Golpo: The yesteryear female impersonator, the post-liberalisation transvestite and a queer stereotype’, National Seminar on ‘Gay Subcultures and Literatures: The Indian Projections’, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, India, 3–4 April 2012. Biswas, Moinak, ‘Neo-Bhadrolok Darpan’, Baromash (Twelve Months), no. 33 (Special Puja Issue), 2011, pp. 255–260. Bordwell, David, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism, Vol. 4, no.1, 1979, pp. 56–64. Boyce, Paul, ‘(Dis)locating Male to Male Sexualities in Calcutta: Subject, Space and Perception’. In B. Bose and S. Bhattacharya (eds), The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India, London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull, 2007, pp. 399–416.

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Chakravorty, Bhaswati, ‘Rights for the Third Gender: Problems of Identity and Recognition’. In B. Bose and S. Bhattacharya (eds), The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India, London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull, 2007, pp. 369–390. Cixous, Helen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. In H. Adams and L. Searle (eds), Critical Theory since 1965, Florida: University Presses of Florida, 1986. Duncan, Fiona, ‘Colin Self is the Embodiment of Queer Theory’, 22 March 2014, http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/colin-self-is-the-embodiment-of-queer-theory, accessed on 11 June 2014. Eng, David, L., ‘Freedom and the Racialisation of Intimacy: Lawrence v. Texas and the Emergence of Queer Liberalism’. In G. E. Haggerty and M. McGarry (eds), A Companion to LGBTQ Studies, Malden: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 38–59. Gooptu, Sharmishtha, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation, New Delhi: Roli Books, 2010. Government of NCT of Delhi and Others v. Naz Foundation, No. 7455/2001, Delhi High Court, 2 July 2009, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/photo.cms? msid=4728348, accessed on 12 August 2013. Gupta, A., ‘Englishpur ki kothi: Class Dynamics in the Queer Movement in India’. In G. Bhan and A. Narrain (eds), Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005, pp. 123–142. Kavi, Ashok Row, ‘Kothi versus Other MSM: Identity versus Behaviour in the Chicken and Egg Paradox’. In B. Bose and S. Bhattacharya (eds), The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India, London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull, 2007, pp. 391–398. Khan, Shivananda, ‘Culture, Sexualities, and Identities: Men Who Have Sex with Men in India’, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 40, no. 3 and 4, 2001, pp. 99–115. Kristeva, J., Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Majumdar, Ajay and Niloy Basu, Samaprem: Samakamita Bishoyok Ekti SamajMonostwatik Anweshan (Same-Sex Love: A Socio-Psychological Investigation into the Subject of Homosexuality), Kolkata: Deep Prakashan, 2005 (Reprint 2011). Sarkar, Sumit, A Critique of Colonial India, Second edition, Kolkata: Papyrus, 2000. Sen, Aveek, ‘Yawning in the Darkness’, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1010415/ editoria.htm#head2, accessed on 10 August 2013. Tellis, Ashley, ‘Disrupting the Dinner Table: Re-thinking the “Queer Movement” in Contemporary India’, Jindal Global Law Review, Vol. 4, no. 1, 2012, p. 155.

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Part II THE DIRECTOR’S VOICE

Figure PII.1 Rituparno on location in Benaras on the set of Chokher Bali Photo credit: Karna Basu

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12 SHOHINI GHOSH IN CONVERSATION WITH RITUPARNO GHOSH

❦ Interviewer’s note Rituparno and I met through our mutual friend Nandita Das, who had acted in Shubho Muharat. On our first meeting, we had exchanged phone numbers. Before long, we were talking to each other on the phone regularly despite living in two different cities. Both of us were early risers so our day would begin with conversations that, depending on how free we both were, would often last for hours. Everyone at home and work got used to seeing me talk to Ritu on the phone while going about my work; sometimes, they would even become part of the conversation. When we first met, Ritu had acquired some notoriety with Antarmahal, a film that I had found to be refreshingly audacious, and he was deeply interested in my work on films and sexuality. In July 2011, the University of Westminster invited me to deliver a keynote at their film studies conference. During the same time, the London Film Festival, which was being held concurrently, invited Ritu. The theme of the Westminster Conference was titled ‘What’s News about New Indian Cinema?’ and my paper was titled Audacious Birds of Dusk: The Emergence of Queer Bengali Cinema. The ‘audacious bird’ in the title was none other than Ritu himself. In Arekti Premer Golpo, Uday (played by Jisshu Sengupta) describes Abhiroop (played by Ritu) as a ‘Shundori shondher paakhi’ (‘a beautiful bird of dusk’). It was the first time that Ritu saw me make an academic presentation. It would also be the last time. The paper was followed by a conversation between the two of us, which is what I have attempted to reproduce here. As will be evident to anyone who watches the recorded conversation, Ritu has a uniquely animated manner of speaking where performative gestures frequently take the place of words. For this reason, a direct transcription runs the risk of seeming 227

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incoherence. In order to facilitate clarity and readability, I have taken the liberty of editing the structure of sentences, deleting repetitions and in certain places, inserting an explanatory word or phrase. Ritu and I would often help each with our writings. Sometimes, after discussing what needed to be written, he would say. ‘Tumi ektu theek kore likhe diyo’ (‘Please write it up properly’). And that is what I have tried to do with this conversation. SHOHINI:

I would like to start by asking a question that is connected to the theme of the conference. What do you think is new in your cinema or what is newness for you at this point of time? R I T U PA R N O : Creating a friendship with death . . . [Pauses dramatically and looks at Shohini.] S H O H I N I : Tell us more . . . R I T U PA R N O : This has a little history. My mother passed away five years ago. Till then I had looked upon death as something notional; as something which doesn’t exist. But having encountered death for the first time with someone so close to me . . . I was encountering in real life and for the first time what had hitherto been an abstraction. Death remained intangible except during the process of getting her cremated. Nothing seemed to have changed. The body looked the same but it was at the crematorium that I first realized she was gone. When I kissed her on one cheek, she didn’t turn the other to be kissed. I had to go all the way around to kiss her on the other cheek. That’s when I realized that the body is a mortal terrain. We know this but do not really feel it until it happens. For the first time for me, it was a felt-experience of death. But the abstraction remained. . . . I did not want to resolve it for it made Ma far more alive for me than she was before. This confrontation with the abstract . . . which actually is a concrete truth of life . . . brought in or rather, lured me towards a certain abstraction in my films. Death and grief and mourning and loss thereafter became my favourite acquaintances. Have I made it clear? S H O H I N I : Yes. You are looking at me meaningfully for some reason . . . R I T U PA R N O : Because we bonded over our parents deaths . . . S H O H I N I : Our mothers’ deaths . . . . R I T U PA R N O : Our mother’s death first then our father’s death subsequently. So our bonding was through our parents and their passing away. S H O H I N I : We worked together on a film that Ritu made. It was the very first film that Ritu had ever scripted. It’s called Sob Charitro Kalponik. The film is about a couple that is gradually moving apart. The wife has emotionally moved away from her husband and is in a relationship 228

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with someone else. She has decided to go away from him but before she can act on that decision, he dies unexpectedly of a massive heart attack. The rest of the film is about her building a relationship with her dead husband. R I T U PA R N O : It’s a posthumous love story . . . S H O H I N I : Yes. We both felt that the loved ones who had died had not really left us. Instead, our world had suddenly been peopled with both the living and the dead. That’s the idea that the film tries to explore. R I T U PA R N O : Before we proceed, I would like to add something to what was said in the introduction. The cinema that I was making and which was bringing the literate, educated classes back to the cinema halls was different from the other kind of non-mainstream cinema that was being made at the time by filmmakers like Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Mrinal Sen (who was still working) and Gautam Ghosh. Their films had more resonances of world cinema than Bengali cinema whereas my films were Bengali films presented through a sense of aesthetics that I had imbibed from cinema the world over. So Sob Charitro Kalponik has a lot to do with the Bengali language. The husband is a Bengali poet and the wife, who has grown-up outside Bengal and is not so familiar with the language, gets to know her dead husband through listening to audio-CDs of his poetry after his death. S H O H I N I : So she forges a new relationship not just with her dead husband but also with a language that she had rejected. Film Clip: Sequence from Sob Charitro Kalponik: In the aftermath of her husband’s death, Radhika (Bipasha Basu) comes home from work. She climbs the stairs, waits for the neighbours to pass so that she does not have to meet them and rings the doorbell. In a long shot, we see ‘Nandor Ma’ (Sohag Sen), the housekeeper, open the door and embrace her. Radhika sits in her room. She is thoughtful. A voice recites a poem written by her husband. She gets up from the chair, turns off the light and turns the handle of the bathroom door. As she steps in, the bathroom seems to have opened out into a forest. There are people standing outside; a curious mix of friends, acquaintances and hospital staff. Everyone is gathered around someone in a hospital bed. Could it be Indraneil? Radhika calls out to him. Everyone turns to look at her. The song ‘Lilabali Lilabali’ returns on the soundtrack as do the sound of the drums of Durga Puja. Radhika turns around and sees that enigmatic woman again who beckons to her to follow. 229

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Radhika follows her into the forest, but finds herself opening a door and entering what seems to be her own house. As the door opens, we see behind her a gigantic portrait of Indraneil (Prasenjit Chatterjee), one that we had seen at the memorial service in an earlier sequence. Drums and ululation are heard on the soundtrack. Radhika is dressed like a bride but a somewhat dishevelled one. Walking behind her is a solemn Shekhar (Jisshu Sengupta) in a white dhoti, kurta and jacket holding a clay pot covered in cloth. Is he carrying sweets? Or someone’s ashes? There are shadows of people on the walls, even though none can be seen. Nondor Ma appears in a bright green saree with sindoor in the parting of her hair. She seems ready to welcome the new bride. Then, as shadows of people surround her, Radhika finds her husband – looking just like he did on their wedding day – lying awkwardly on the ground. She looks at him and then at those surrounding her and asks, ‘Who has given him a shave?’ R I T U PA R N O :

The whole house is full of flowers because funerals and marriages are rituals that overlap. Therefore, there is a ritualistic similarity in her entering the house for the first time as a new bride and then as a widow. Moreover, ‘the real’ is also transposed onto the dream. Take the dream sequence in 36 Chowringhee Lane by Aparna Sen.1 The history of the protagonist Violet Stoneham finds visual reference only in this sequence. While references are made to her past in the film, it is only in this sequence that we see images that tell us that she was about to get married when her soldier-fiancé gets killed in the war. S H O H I N I : The idea of friendship is an abiding theme in Rituparno’s films. Friendship in unlikely spaces, between social rivals and . . . R I T U PA R N O : . . . social unequals. S H O H I N I : How did this theme develop in your films? R I T U PA R N O : My films represent a Bengali middle class household with all its emotions. Within this structure, the domestic helps become family members if they stay over a period of time. For instance, Nondor Ma and Radhika develop this relationship in Sob Charitro Kalponik. I have been through this myself . . . It’s almost like she becomes a guardian of the house. Today, after both my parents have passed away, I live in an old house with fourteen rooms and I am looked after by my domestic help and the old cook. They are my family. That’s why I find it interesting to explore the bonding that happens between the maid and the lady of the house in both Bariwali and Sob Charitro Kalponik. This idea is reflected in the clip that you saw. Second, Radhika’s 230

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dream provides a visual reference to her real life; to when she first enters the house after her husband’s death. She comes in with her colleague. . . . S H O H I N I : . . . with whom she is also having a relationship. R I T U PA R N O : In the next dream sequence that we will see from Bariwali, there is a visual reference to the past history of Banalata played by Kirron Kher who was on the threshold of marriage when her fiancé dies of snakebite a week before the wedding. So she is left suspended in a state of being neither married nor single. The dream sequence is a visual representation of that past. Behind the meshes of the mosquito net, Banalata (Kirron Kher) sleeps in her bed. Strange shadows of floating fish swim across the frame. The night sounds give way to a wedding song. A younger Banalata wearing kajal and a bright red bindi appears from behind a door. She tells Malati, the young maid, to go down and feed the companions of the groom. Malati, in a bright red ribbon and sindoor in her hair, is making tea. She replies sternly. ‘They won’t eat.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because the cat has licked the food.’ ‘Who will lay the plantain leaves then?’ ‘Ask Prasanna.’ Banalata in a red-bordered saree walks towards a window with long iron rods framed by an arch of brightly painted glass. Through the window, she watches women in brightly coloured sarees ritualistically circling around plantain trees. They have their heads covered. ‘Hurry up Prasannna, and lay the plantain leaves,’ pleads Banalata. The woman in the red saree lifts the cover from her head. It is Prasanna, Banalata’s male servant. ‘These plantains cannot be used.’ he says. ‘Why?’ asks Banalata. ‘They will be used to make the raft. He died of a snakebite and so the body has to be set afloat.’ A misty, stained mirror reflects Banalata’s image as she splashes water on her face. Night over, the morning rituals have begun. SHOHINI:

Would you like to say something about the’ kinship’ in that household? Banalata lives in this huge crumbling house and she is about to rent a part of it to a film crew for the purposes of shooting a film. Her companions are a cocky young maid and an elderly male servant. . . . 231

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. . . . who is very feminine so it’s like three women of three different ages living in the same house. In her dream she transposes a different gender onto her male servant who is seen wearing a saree. Banalata’s envy and constant anxiety that the young woman will one day get married and leave is also reflected in the dream sequence. In the dream Banalata sees Malati as a married woman. In lieu of the family she would have had, had she got married, Banalata has created a surrogate family with the servants. S H O H I N I : To move away a little bit from the philosophical preoccupation of our conversation, let us move to discussing the practicalities of making a film in Bengal. In the last couple of days we have discussed how with the coming of the multiplexes, a diversity of films are being produced. Despite that, top directors in Bengal have to struggle for funds. Even with your reputation and formidable body of work, you have to work with severe time and money constraints. Does it help to have stars from Bombay in films? R I T U PA R N O : The practice of Bombay stars working in Bengali films is not a new phenomenon. Satyajit Ray worked with Waheeda Rehman in Abhijan and Simi Garewal in Aranyer Din Ratri. Tapan Sinha cast Vaijayanthimala in Hatey Bazarey, Saira Bano and Dilip Kumar in Sagina Mahato.2 It was understood that these actors were part of a ‘national cinema’ not necessarily Bollywood or Bombay cinema. The Bengal film industry was very much a legitimate part of that national cinema. Now, there is a divide between Bollywood and language cinemas. I hate to call my cinema regional cinema because Bollywood is as regional as mine and therefore I prefer to use the term ‘language cinema’. It is noteworthy that the idiom of language cinema is also changing because it is becoming more and more cosmopolitan and that is a reflection of today’s Bengal. Bengalis tend to be ‘culture-parochial’ but today they are opening up to other cultures and that is allowing for a more cosmopolitan sensibility. S H O H I N I : Your films are full of women who constantly negotiate with what is taboo and transgress into forbidden spaces. Chokher Bali is one such film. There was some controversy when you decided to cast Bombay actress Aishwarya Rai. . . . R I T U PA R N O : It was a huge controversy! About why a Bombay actress should act in a Bengali film; especially one adapted from a story by Rabindranath Tagore! This is an irony because Tagore was a person, who did not believe in racialism or provincialism. He believed in one world and in that sense, very anti-nationalist. He loved his country but was a true internationalist. The funny thing is that today we have 232

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made him so much of a Bengali that his work cannot invite an actress from a non-Bengali speaking place to play a part. He is the man who invited K. L. Saigal, who was from Punjab, to sing his songs. He asked Sachin Dev Burman, who was from Tripura, to sing his songs. Sachin Dev hesitated because of his Tripuri accent but Tagore told him that if Saigal could sing his songs, why couldn’t he? S H O H I N I : Your films bear evidence to your abiding relationship with Tagore. In addition to the direct adaptations, other films reference him in different ways. In Asukh, for instance, the poetry of Tagore plays a major part. The female protagonist has a friendship with the dead poet. She is able to survive the trials and tribulations of her life with the help of Tagore’s poetry that her parents used to read to her as a child. You’ve recently adapted Tagore’s Noukadubi into a film while on a documentary on Tagore. Your new film Chitrangada is also an adaptation of Tagore. And I know that in your own life Tagore has been central. What is your connection with Tagore? R I T U PA R N O : . .  .  . I think empathy. .  .  . an all-encompassing sense of empathy with his idea of Justice for all. It was easy to talk about justice at a time that we were ruled by the British but he was the first person to caution the national leaders that we would not be ready for freedom unless a sense of justice was instilled in the country. Otherwise, we would continue to remain in a state of servitude. He cautioned Gandhiji against unleashing an emotional animosity in order to fight the British because once they were gone, the animosity would persist and we would be hunting for a second target within us. How would we then protect our countrymen from fighting with each other? And that’s exactly what happened. S H O H I N I : During the course of your making the documentary on Tagore, have you made any new discoveries? Have you found more resonance with him? R I T U PA R N O : Maybe with his personal life. He was perhaps the most universally condemned man of his time. When I look at the humiliations that I go through in my personal life .  .  . it feels like what Arundhati Roy once described, in another context, as being kissed on one cheek and slapped on the other. I am considered to be the spiritual heir to Ray but I do not conform to his masculinity. I think it was Ray’s persona and the films together that made ‘Ray films’ what they are. Then arrived Aparna Sen who was femininity personified so that was no problem but when a legatee of indeterminate gender arrived, they could not handle it. Over time one learns to break the myths created by one’s ancestors . . . which reminds me of an anecdote. . . . . 233

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(Turns to Shohini and lowers his voice) Should I tell them that DVD store anecdote? S H O H I N I : Which one? (Then, turning to the audience) . . . Not that I want to censor him . . . (Laughter) R I T U PA R N O : . . . . It’s a funny anecdote, you have to hear this. That’s the time I had shaved off my hair for the first time and lots of people in Kolkata couldn’t recognize me. I went to a DVD store and discovered that on a shelf on which my DVDs had been displayed, they had also stacked a DVD of a new film by Sandip Ray, son of Satyajit Ray. I immediately told the sales person, ‘Remove this from my rack and keep it with his other films.’ Then a man appeared and started asking for that particular film which was called Nishijapon that translates asSpending the Night. I nudged the sales-woman to get her to persuade the man to notice my films! So she walked up to the gentleman and said: ‘Why don’t you look at some of Rituparno Ghosh’s films?’ The man turned and asked: ‘Rituparno Ghosh’s films?!’ The woman meekly continued and pointed to the films lined up on the rack when the man angrily said: ‘Can you watch Rituparno Ghosh’s films at home? With your family?’ The woman didn’t know what to say and was doubly embarrassed because I was standing there so I stepped forward and asked: ‘So what’s wrong with his films?’ He turned to me and asked: ‘Have you seen Rituparno Ghosh’s films?’ ‘Yes, I think I have,’ I replied. (Laughter) Then, he started picking up scenes from different films and describing them to me. I would say, ‘Why don’t you see Titli . . . it has a simple storyline . . .’ and he would say, ‘Titli?! A simple story? Have you forgotten the scene in which Aparna Sen takes her nightgown off and you can see her back?’ Then, I would say, ‘But what about Shubho Mahurat – that’s an adaptation of an Agatha Christie story so your family might want to. . . .’ The man was horrified. He said: ‘Do you remember what the cameraman did with the hair-dresser?’ (Laughter) These scenes were now coming back to me. And by this time, these stupid customers had arrived and started asking: ‘So Rituda, when is your new DVD being released?’ The man now felt betrayed. He realised he had been conned into having this conversation. Now, I too was forced to put up my defense. ‘Why are you so interested in Nishijapon?’, I asked, ‘Just because the title is “A Night Spent”? Well, don’t think that you will find any erotic images there.’ (Laughter) 234

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Figure 12.1 Ghosh with Sharmila Tagore on the set of Shubho Muharat Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

A lot of people took my name very literally as standing for ‘Ritupornography films’. (Laughter) SHOHINI:

Perhaps we should talk a little about how you got that sobriquet. This happened after Ritu made a film called Antarmahal whose English title is Views from an Inner Chamber. The film is a scathing attack on both patriarchal practices and religious dogma. The film was released at a time when the Hindu Right was politically powerful. . . . . R I T U PA R N O : .  .  . it is about a clay sculptor who is brought from outside Bengal to make the idol of Durga. He starts fantasizing about the body that is taking shape in his hands . . . the nude body that would be clothed later on. There is an erotic relationship between the idolmaker and the clay body that he is building. . . . S H O H I N I : . . . and he has a dream. . . . R I T U PA R N O : . . . about making love to his pregnant wife. This connection was seen to be completely outrageous. . . . S H O H I N I : . . . and horrified the Bengali ‘bhadralok’ tremendously. . . . .and Ritu was suddenly no longer the ‘bhadralok’ filmmaker who made 235

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respectable Bengali films. Soon there were people protesting in the streets and Ritu acquired had the new nickname, ‘Ritu-porno’ R I T U PA R N O : Ritu-Pornographer S H O H I N I : A recurring theme in your films is the idea of ornamentation or the adorning of the female body. Would you like to talk a bit about that? R I T U PA R N O : Let me share an anecdote from my childhood. As a child, when my mother would sit at the dressing table before going out, I would sit next to her and watch her doing the makeup. First she would do her eyes. I would ask: ‘Ma what are you doing?’ She would reply: ‘I am doing-up my eyes.’ ‘Why?’ ‘So that I look pretty.’ ‘Now, what are you doing?’ ‘I am doing-up my eye-brows.’ ‘Why?’ ‘So that I look pretty’. ‘Now, what are you doing?’ ‘I am wearing my lipstick’. ‘Why?’ ‘So that I look pretty’. Then, I sit watching her till she was done and ask: ‘Finished?’ My mother would say: ‘Yes’. And I would exclaim: ‘Oh, but you didn’t look pretty.’ (Laughter) ‘I was expecting the transformation to be so huge that this little improvement didn’t please me! But I liked to see the way she touched herself. . . . it was narcissistic and at the same time, a conversation with herself through various objects of adornment. I remember that she would often ask me help her with hooking-up her bra-straps. Or she would ask me to help her with a blouse that had buttons at the back. Or she would ask me to fold the pleats of her saree. So this intimacy through dressing and this creating of the feminine body was very interesting to me. In such moments she was like a sister to me – and I was like her friend. She was never awkward about asking me and I never found it odd that she should ask her son for an intimate favour. This continued even after I had grown up. In fact, as an adult we became more like friends. The sequence from Utsav in which Rekha dresses up Anuradha Patel left a deep imprint on my mind.3 The idea of two social

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rivals dressing each other up was an idea that appealed to me. I paid tribute to Utsav in a sequence in Choker Bali where Aishwarya dresses up Raima and sends her to her husband . . .’ SHOHINI:

When you were growing up who represented desirable femininity to you? R I T U PA R N O : Aparna Sen! S H O H I N I : (To the audience) I like to say that I grew up desiring Aparna Sen and Ritu grew up desiring to be like her. This brings us to the new Queer turn in your work. The first film is Arekti Premer Golpo by Kaushik Ganguly in which Ritu has acted and which I discussed in my paper today. Ritu was very happy that another filmmaker had extended an invitation to him to act and in a role that seemed cut-out for him. R I T U PA R N O : It was more dignified to have the offer of acting come from someone else as opposed to me casting myself. S H O H I N I : Which you would have done anyway if the offer hadn’t come . . . (Laughter) R I T U PA R N O : Eventually, yes. S H O H I N I : Ritu then went onto script and act in another film titled Memories in March which is again about death. It’s about a mother coming to terms with the sudden and tragic death of her son in an accident and discovering that he was gay. She meets her son’s lover – played by Ritu – and after a period of struggle is able to build a friendship with him. Once again, it’s a story about a friendship between two unlikely people . . . R I T U PA R N O : . . . and between strangers. She meets someone who is a stranger both literally and metaphorically. I am a stranger to her world of thought; her world of ideas. . . . S H O H I N I : And the film is also about confronting the homophobia of people who love us and surround us. But the third film in the Queer trilogy that Ritu is working on is called Chitrangada. It is adapted from Tagore’s Chitrangada which was inspired by a minor episode in The Mahabharata. The film is a contribution to Tagore’s 150th Birthday celebrations. It is written and directed by Ritu and he also plays the primary protagonist. R I T U PA R N O : My film is based on Tagore’s interpretation of Chitrangada. The eponymous protagonist is the princess of Manipur, then a place near Orissa. The king of Manipur had received a boon from Lord Shiva

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that only male heirs would be born to the family. But boon notwithstanding, Chitrangada is born. The king does not know what to do with a daughter so he brings her up like a boy. Chitrangada grows up to become consummate in archery, the art of warfare, hunting and the craft of administration. During one of her hunting expeditions she meets Arjun who neither acknowledges her femininity nor her valour. Feeling offended, Chitrangada goes to visit Kamdeva (cupid) who transforms her into a beautiful woman. But when she goes to Arjun, he expresses no interest in her as he has seen many beautiful women. But what he has never seen is a masculine warrior-princess who fought so valiantly. He is haunted by that memory. Chitrangada returns to Kamdeva and asks for her old form to be returned and finally confronts Arjun like an equal. The slant of gender-equality was provided by Tagore. ‘My film is a deconstruction of Tagore’s text. Irrespective of our biological sex, gender is frequently imposed upon us. We often have to play out gender-roles that we may not want to. In the film I act as the choreographer who is directing a stage performance of Chitrangada while rebelling against the body and gender that he has reluctantly inherited . . .’ SHOHINI:

Would you agree that in this film, like in Sob Charitro Kalponik, you are trying to make a transition in the language of Cinema. R I T U PA R N O : Absolutely. S H O H I N I : Ritu recently said to me in a conversation that he now wanted to make films that cannot be summed up by its story. No one should be able to see the film and go home to tell the story. . . . R I T U PA R N O : Yes. S H O H I N I : . . . because the story lies in the telling of it. And I can see the beginnings of that effort in Chitrangada. R I T U PA R N O : Or in Sob Charitro Kalponik . . . It’s not a story that you can carry home and describe. The viewing of the film would be an experience by itself. S H O H I N I : What is interesting about Ritu’s films is that he can do these experiments with form and then simultaneously make a mainstream film like Noukadubi. So on the one hand he does formalist experiments and on the other, he is keeping alive a certain tradition of popular filmmaking as in Noukadubi which the audiences have loved. R I T U PA R N O : Which can be heard as an audio piece and you will know what the story is.

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In Chitrangada, the telling of the story is central to the narrative. . . . S H O H I N I : We will close the conversation with a clip from Chitrangada. Thank you Ritu, for the conversation.

Notes 1 36, Chowringhee Lane, Aparna Sen, 1981. 2 Abhijan (The Expedition), Satyajit Ray, 1962, Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), Satyajit Ray, 1970, Haatey-Bajarey (The Marketplace), Tapan Sinha, 1967, and Sagina Mahato, Tapan Sinha, 1970. 3 Utsav (The Festival), Girish Karnad, 1989.

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13 KAUSTAV BAKSHI IN CONVERSATION WITH RITUPARNO GHOSH

❦ Interviewer’s note Commissioned by the editor of an online film journal to interview Rituparno Ghosh, I met the director on 13 July 2012. By that time, the theatrical trailer of Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish had already wisped up excitement, controversy, speculation, and apprehension among the city’s Bengali middle class audience. I had known Ghosh for the past two years, and had often talked on the phone and exchanged texts, but had never met. Preoccupied with the post-production of Chitrangada, Ghosh gave me the impression that he could barely spare half an hour for an interview, and after, changing three dates, he finally agreed to meet me on July 13 at 10 am. I reached his place, Tasher Ghar (The House of Cards), armed with some 25 questions. But, surprisingly, ‘Let’s get down to business’ mode of the interview soon transpired into an engaging rendezvous which went on for five hours at a stretch. I had initially made him hold a voice recorder while I had opened a writing pad to scribble down his responses; but both the devices were soon abandoned. Ghosh showed no sign of being in a hurry, got into a candid adda mood and went on talking as if he knew me forever. The dialogue that began on July 13 did not really find a closure, and I rediscovered a new Rituparno Ghosh every day I met him since then, till the day he breathed his last. A long interview was published in Silhouette: A Discourse on Cinema, a week before he passed away. But what has remained unpublished is difficult to accommodate within the constricted space offered by anthologies or journals. The conversation that follows has been pieced together from the various adda sessions I had with the film-maker at his place, while travelling with him around the city or on the phone. In this 240

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Figure 13.1 Ghosh on the set of Chokher Bali. Set design Indranil Ghosh Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

interview, I have picked up those bits and pieces of our conversations that specifically address questions of non-normative sexualities, identity politics, LGBT movement and activism, and his films dealing with queer desires. Before and after the release of Arekti Premer Golpo (release date 24 December 2010), Ghosh had become rather articulate about his sexuality, and by the time Chitrangada was released he was theoretically more well-versed in queer studies and philosophical discourses on the body, sexuality and identity. By December 2012, he forged a friendly bond with the LGBT community of the city: for the first time, he agreed to screen his film (Chitrangada) at Dialogues, the LGBT film festival of Kolkata, celebrating its sixth year. It should be borne in mind that although the conversation recorded below looks like a formal interview, the exchanges did not necessarily take place in the order they appear here. The conversations we had were mostly in Bangla; therefore, my questions and responses of the film-maker are my own translation. **** KAUSTAV:

Long before you actually began talking about your sexuality in public and associating yourself with films based on same-sex desires, all 241

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your so-called non-queer films often betrayed an unambiguous queerness. For instance, I have always felt Bariwali is your most queer film. Do you agree? R I T U PA R N O : Well, I wouldn’t disagree. It’s difficult not to miss Prasanna’s queerness, so to speak. Banalata does not even treat him like a man. The relationship they share is not typical of a mistress of the house and her servant. Banalata shares everything with him, uninhibitedly; Prasanna has ready access to her bedroom; she does not even hesitate to change in his presence. Prasanna’s queerness is best expressed in the first dream sequence, where Banalata dreams of him as one of the women, participating in stree-achar. K AU S TAV : Absolutely. In your films, you have always brought out of the closet things which were never mentioned in polite conversations. Be it marital rape or sexual desire of the widow! In scenes of physical intimacy, you have never used metaphors . . . you have been rather unpretentious . . . In doing so, were you all along preparing your audience for the mature subject of same-sex love? R I T U PA R N O : Don’t you know there is an entire discourse on how obscenity has entered Bengali Cinema because of Rituparno Ghosh? (laughs) But jokes apart, no! I wouldn’t say I was preparing my audience for films on same-sex love. I didn’t know I would be making films on this subject ever. K AU S TAV : But, I have always felt that the queer Rituparno Ghosh remained concealed somewhere behind his various heroines, rebellious or abandoned in love . . . R I T U PA R N O : Do you really think so? But that must be totally unintended . . . K AU S TAV : Well, there lies the fun! What you never intended became overt in the final product! Today, in hindsight, all your films might be interpreted as carrying the signature of a queer director. R I T U PA R N O : Well, if you insist so! K AU S TAV : Shall we say that with Chitrangada, Rituparno Ghosh eventually makes his life an open book? R I T U PA R N O : Well, I know a lot of people imagine Chitrangada to be my autobiography. K AU S TAV : Isn’t it? R I T U PA R N O : No! K AU S TAV : This denial is for the records only, I guess? Am I to believe that there’s no similarity between Rudra and Rituparno? R I T U PA R N O : Yes. There is. Rudra contemplates sex-change, but abandons it eventually. . . . he chooses to stay the way he is, reveling in his 242

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Figure 13.2 The director’s vision Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

in-between-ness. I know many of my viewers apprehend that I might start wearing the sari any day. Let me tell you, I shall never wear a sari. I remember someone asking me whether I shall ever wear the dhotikurta. My answer is I shall not. I’ll not wear any gender-determining attire . . . neither sari nor dhoti-kurta . . . I shall always go for something in-between. That’s the best way of celebrating gender fluidity. This is where Rudra is closest to myself . . . the resemblance ends there. K AU S TAV : Well, I’ll not pester you more . . . in any case, a work of art should not be judged in terms of the artiste’s life and intention. R I T U PA R N O : But, I would like to have your opinion on this: Do you think the film would be severely criticized by queer people for making Rudra abandon the sex reassignment surgery? K AU S TAV : Mature people shouldn’t criticize the film for that; for I believe you have neither tried to project Rudra’s story as representative of a community of sexually non-conforming people nor claimed to make a moral statement on sex reassignment surgery. RITUPARNO: But do you think everyone would look at it from this perspective? You know, this guy, who has successfully undergone a sex 243

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reassignment surgery, texted me after returning from the nursing home. She showed a lot of interest in Chitrangada which she has not yet seen. I suddenly felt that she should not watch the film in which the sex reassignment surgery is called off. K AU S TAV : But, haven’t you said at the very outset that this is the story of Rudra’s wish? It is not about whether Rudra undergoes or refrains from the sex reassignment surgery. Most of us do not have the freedom to express and fulfil our wishes. If Rudra can do so, first by contemplating SRS and then by deciding not to go for it, he exercises a freedom of choice, which should be appreciated. I can choose to live my life my way. R I T U PA R N O : Yes. That is the core idea. But I am anxious that the film might put across a very wrong message. K AU S TAV : I guess writers or filmmakers are totally incapable of controlling people’s response. Chitrangada is out there now . . . you can do nothing about it . . . therefore, what’s the use in getting anxious about the reaction of the audience? It’s desirable that a filmmaker does a painstaking postmortem of his own work, but it’s pointless worrying about how the film would be interpreted. R I T U PA R N O : Well, I have taken a lot of risk with Chitrangada . . . the very subject of same-sex love is so unsettling to a huge section of my audience . . . But the success of Arekti Premer Golpo had given me the strength to write the script of Memories in March and now Chitrangada . . . K AU S TAV : Shall I ask you something? Is it true, and am quoting the grapevine, that Rituparno Ghosh actually ghost-directed Arekti Premer Golpo? R I T U PA R N O : That’s not true. See, Kaushik (Ganguly) had a very romantic understanding of homosexuality. I mean he made this film out of a sense of deep sympathy he felt for queer people. I really had to bring in my ‘lived’ experience of the same. Therefore, as evident from the title cards, I looked after the production design of the film; and was also the creative head. Perhaps that’s why the film might be mistaken as a Rituparno Ghosh film. It isn’t. K AU S TAV : That explains a lot . . . But tell me something why are all three films, Arekti Premer Golpo, Memories in March and Chitranagada, dominated by a sense of gloom and dejection? Is it possible for a film on same-sex desire to end in the ‘they lived happily ever after’ mode? R I T U PA R N O : I think that is not possible. My ‘lived’ experience tells me so. At least not at this moment! If you do that you would be compromising with reality.

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art can afford to be Utopian, right? K AU S TAV : Of course, come to think of the fairy tales . . . R I T U PA R N O : True . . . K AU S TAV : Then, would you ever make a film that would be a queer fairy tale where there would be no heartbreak or all causes of despair would be ironed out in the end? R I T U PA R N O : Never thought of such a film! (pauses) I guess we already have a fantastic queer fairy tale . . . Ray’s Goopy Gayen Bagha Bayen! Isn’t it so? See, the last sequence of the film where Goopy and Bagha get married has no meaning for me. Believe me! The marriages fail to eliminate the homoerotic strain that runs through the narrative. I would have ended the film with the end of the war. K AU S TAV : Interesting interpretation. In fact, with the emergence of queer theory, films on male-bonding are being interpreted as hiding homoerotic desire behind socially approved homosociality. And that reminds me I was quite disappointed with Chokher Bali; I expected you to shore up the homoerotic dimension in the Mahendra-Bihari relationship. R I T U PA R N O : Yes, I should have. But I was under tremendous pressure. I was showing a widow menstruating and was also breaking a number of norms in the film . . . I thought it would be a kind of overdose for my viewers . . . I strategically downplayed the homoerotic bit, although the hint is clearly there in Tagore. Although Mahendra insults Bihari repeatedly, the latter cannot abandon him. He never stops visiting Mahendra’s house. A simplistic interpretation of this is Bihari is too emotionally attached to Rajlakshmi and Annapurna. That’s one reason, maybe! But, it’s his undying love for Mahendra that takes him back. The same is true of Shribilash-Shachish or Gora-Binay! K AU S TAV : Although you downplayed the homoerotic aspect of the relationship between the male leads, you have significantly paraded the male body . . . R I T U PA R N O : Yes . . . that’s all I could do! KAUSTAV: In all your films, you have attributed to your female characters a certain degree of agency, but have not been able to give them an alternative life, beyond the patriarchal model, notwithstanding how Romita walks out on her husband in Dahan or how Binodini abandons the confines of narrow domesticity to participate in the freedom

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movement in Chokher Bali. In queer relationships too, is it impossible to think outside the hetero-patriarchal model? R I T U PA R N O : Yes! In queer relationships too the same power equation that defines a man-woman relationship is discernible, at least in most cases. K AU S TAV : I guess in Arekti Premer Golpo this was much too apparent. Right? RITUPARNO: I know. The way I have essayed the role made me appear like a surrogate woman not a man! In that case, what happens in Arekti Premer Golpo is not really very different from what happens in any heterosexual triangle love story. Had a so-called manly man played Abhiroop, the impact would have been completely different. In the Indian context, it was easier to imagine an effeminate man as the ‘other woman’! K AU S TAV : I hope A Brokeback Mountain is made soon! R I T U PA R N O : Or for that matter something like Happy Together or The Wedding Banquet! K AU S TAV : We can only hope at this moment. Let me ask you a completely different question, apparently unrelated to your work. But, I guess this is something a lot of people wish to know. For a long time, why didn’t you socially connect with the LGBT community of Kolkata? R I T U PA R N O : Socially connect, as in? K AU S TAV : For instance, joining in the Pride March or participating in the LGBT film festival . . . R I T U PA R N O : Well, honestly speaking, for a very long time I felt that branding a film festival as LGBT was derogatory! For instance, having a separate film festival for women filmmakers . . . as if women are inferior artistes! It is important to have some markers of identity; but why do we need to put human species in specialized categories? The major problem in doing that is to marginalize them. For example, in my school on Sports Day, we had Fat Race. It was meant for obese children who could not possibly compete with the others. Don’t you think that in organizing a separate race for these children the school actually ended up victimizing them? I didn’t want to project myself as a victim, by putting myself into special identity categories. K AU S TAV : So, shall we assume that your views have changed? You have allowed the organizers of Dialogues to screen Chitrangada this year . . . R I T U PA R N O : Well, to some extent my perception of a separate festival on queer films has indeed changed. I have been socialising with a lot of people from the community and have been reading up books and have arrived at a realisation that such a festival is a part of a political activism

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which celebrates and reclaims non-normative sexual identities; it is not a projection of victimhood, but a cultural protest against hetero-patriarchy. Therefore, it is necessary. K AU S TAV : So, do you see yourself as entering into LGBT activism? R I T U PA R N O : No. An artist need not be an activist, and art doesn’t really need to be political all the time. As an artist, I have been participating in this movement in my own way. You can say my decision to enact queer characters on screen is an expression of my activism. I was aware that I would alienate a section of my audience which had never associated my sexual preference with my work. Even then, I could not be mendacious about my sexuality. That would have been dishonest. K AU S TAV : Do you think you have indeed estranged a section of your audience? R I T U PA R N O : Yes . . . But, my city, I know, can neither handle me nor ignore me . . . Jokes apart, I have indeed estranged a section of my audience . . . the middleclass audience, we were talking about . . . I am aware of the loss. A lot of them are wary of my cross-dressing in public! In fact, the respect I used to command has been seriously affected by my decision to proclaim my sexuality. K AU S TAV : Yes, I have always thought this decision of yours was indeed iconoclastic . . . R I T U PA R N O : You were asking me whether I would ever take part in LGBT activism. Let me share this experience. Arekti Premer Golpo premiered at Priya Cinema. I was there, and I noticed young boys coming in, self-assuredly cross-dressed! I could tell from their body language, they felt at home . . . the attitude was it was their film! I was so deeply touched! At least for a day, I had been able to hand over to them the ensign of victory! Isn’t that activism too? K AU S TAV : Yes. The artiste might not always walk the protest literally. I do appreciate your view. But do you believe that political or cultural activism can ensure a brighter future for sexually non-conforming people, given that it hasn’t yet garnered an all-pervading effect? R I T U PA R N O : Yes, activism in any form is necessary. But, I look at it more simply. Remember, for a few years I had been the editor of Anandolok? It was a predominantly gossip magazine, right? But it was a great learning experience. What exactly film gossips taught me, you may ask. You see, there was a time when Aparna Sen announced she wanted legal separation from her husband. A little later, Neena Gupta created much sensation as a single mother. At that time divorce was a social stigma for a woman, while the

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concept of single mother was scandalizing. There used to be endless moralizing about these things. But the times have changed . . . a woman seeking divorce is no longer stigmatized; single motherhood has also entered the social register. What I have learned from these significant changes is that a time would come when non-normative sexualities would also be recognized, and social resistance towards it would dwindle. . . . Perhaps! (smiles) K AU S TAV : Perhaps! . . . You have been reading up books on queer theory and LGBT activism of late. Do you find categories such as ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’, ‘transvestite’, ‘transsexual’, ‘intersex’, etc. which have entered everyday parlance, liberating or delimiting? R I T U PA R N O : Our understanding of sexuality is sadly limited by the binary heterosexuality/homosexuality. There are several sexual identities which none of these terms can possibly contain or define. In any case, our identities are subject to the body which again is a boundary . . . I believe in transcending that boundary . . . the body is in a state of transition . . . perennially . . . so, is my identity. Therefore, it is not desirable to identify with a single category. It is in fact impossible. In Chitrangada, Rudra receives an SMS which states, ‘Why do you call a building a BUILDING, even when it is complete?’ Everything is in a state of making . . . eternally . . . nothing is ever complete . . . the same is true of the body and therefore, identity. It’s a continuous process.

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Figure PIII.1 Rituparno, Aishwarya and unit members looking at a sleeping owl on location at the set of Chokher Bali Photo Credit: Karna Basu

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14 INTERVIEWER’S NOTE Sangeeta Datta and Rohit K. Dasgupta

❦ The interviews in this section were taken over the last one year (2013– 2014) with cast and crew who worked with Rituparno Ghosh. In deciding who to interview, we were keen to have a diverse range of voices from Ghosh’s acting talent to technical crew. Ghosh’s greatest strength was possibly his casting, handling and preparation of actors. With the cast interviews, we were fortunate to have conversations with three iconic actors who were greatly admired by Ghosh himself – Sharmila Tagore, Aparna Sen and Jaya Bachchan. We chose to speak with actors with whom Ghosh’s connection went beyond films. Their relationship extended far beyond the projects they worked on, they shared personal friendships which evolved over the years. They were lifelong friends and influences in his life. Ghosh’s childhood idol and inspiration was Aparna Sen, whom he directed in his second film Unishey April and later in Titli. Sharmila Tagore was cast as the glamorous film star in Shubho Muharat, but had met Ghosh over several script pitches over the years. Jaya Bachchan remained an adviser and friend from his early years till she acted in a later film, Sunglass. With all three, early introductions were formed during Ghosh’s stint as editor of a film magazine Anandalok and they continued to feature in his television chat shows and live stage conversations in later years. Ghosh’s formidable core team comprised of Avik Mukhopadhyay (director of photography), Arghyakamal Mitra (editor), Debojyoti Mishra (music), and his brother Indranil Ghosh (art design). They were his frequent and crucial collaborators, and as Ghosh remarked in his interviews, they were his family with whom he had grown artistically. Ghosh’s creative team indeed bonded as family, generating a creative

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Figure 14.1 Ghosh in his study at home Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh and Sangeeta Datta

energy which went far beyond professional involvement. Sangeeta Datta, who has been Ghosh’s direction associate and collaborator on several projects, got in touch with them and arranged interviews for this volume. Instead of following a conventional interview structure for this section, we decided to write it more as a narrative as it captures the professional rapport and private intimacies that the subjects shared with Ghosh. It also provides a different prism to view the persona and his work beyond the text. The interviews were not carried out in any

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particular order and form. They were done at various times of the year across several cities (Kolkata, Mumbai and London), and then transcribed and rewritten in a narrative form. The conversations have only been lightly edited for form and structure whilst the contents remain as narrated to us.

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15 CAST Sharmila Tagore, Jaya Bachchan and Aparna Sen

❦ Sharmila Tagore Interviewed by Sangeeta Datta Over the last 20 years, if there is one ‘regional’ film-maker in India who acquired a pan-Indian identity and was actively wooed by top stars of mainstream Hindi cinema it is without doubt Rituparno Ghosh. The only other name that comes to mind is Mani Ratnam; but Mani is a more commercially inclined director, so it is not surprising that stars vie with each other to be cast by him. In contrast, Rituparno was definitely a champion of the ‘small’ more intimate school of film-making, and thus it is remarkable that stars like Aishwarya Rai, Amitabh Bachchan, Priety Zinta, Ajay Devgn among others were so eager to star in his films. And therein lies the importance of being Rituparno Ghosh. By sheer dint of merit, he carved out a niche for himself where he could actually get these top stars to willingly deglamorise themselves and go against the grain in his films. What makes his journey even more remarkable is the fact that he began making films at a time when Bengali cinema had reached its nadir. The old guard, led by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, was ready to handover the baton to a younger crop. Film-makers like Aparna Sen, Goutam Ghosh and Buddhadev Dasgupta were being increasingly relegated to the festival circuit. The Uttam-Suchitra-Soumitra era was over and Bengali cinema had become a pale copy of bad Hindi films. His importance lies in the fact that for a long time he carried the flag of good cinema in what was without doubt the darkest phase for Bengali cinema. In many ways, he was the bridge that linked the old masters to the new generation of film-makers, and he proved that it was possible to make aesthetic yet commercially viable cinema. 254

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Figure 15.1 Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore and Rituparno Ghosh in Tollygunge Studio for Shubho Muhurat Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

My personal relationship with Rituparno goes back to the days before he broke through with Unishey April. It was Aparna Sen who recommended him to me as a talented scriptwriter and a man with a promising future in films. One hot summer afternoon, he just arrived at my place in Delhi, armed with many scripts. His scholarship, his charm, his quick wit, his intelligence, and his passionate engagement with words made him a fascinating companion. Day became night and we still talked and talked. That was the day he narrated the script of Unishey April. At the time, he was looking for a producer and he wanted me to work in it. I was really excited because I loved the script. But sadly, that did not work out. Later, I got to know that Rina (Aparna Sen) was doing my part. It would not be the last time that this happened with him. He approached me for Bariwali, and then forgot to tell me that he had cast Kirron Kher instead, since she organised the producer. Then again, he wanted me to play the mother in Memories in March. I was preoccupied with a reality show on television and I asked him to delay the film by a month. But he had to wrap up the film in 15 days; he could not wait. All this did result in a frosting of our relationship. For 20 years, we were always warm and cordial with each other without really developing a strong bond. It could also be that I sensed a contrarian 255

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streak in Rituparno, which despite my admiration and respect for him came in the way of a close relationship. But towards the end of our association, when we were not working together, we developed considerable fondness and could in fact laugh about all our misunderstandings. When he came over to my place the last time with Shohini (Ghosh), she asked him, ‘Why don’t you make a film with Sharmila-di?’ When he said very earnestly that he was thinking about it and that he had something in mind, I joked that he was saying that to please me; probably, when the film would be finally made, he would cast Deepti Naval or Madhuri Dixit! But none of these takes away from two important aspects of Rituparno. One, his unquestioned mastery over the medium of film. He was one of the few directors who actually understood the feminine psyche and consequently was able to extract the best from his female actors. He had an eye for detail which showed in the costumes we wore, the accessories we used; he gave us wonderful dialogues which were a pleasure to speak. Most importantly, he knew the art of storytelling really well. He could hold your interest till the end. Very few film-makers in the last decade or so actually had such wonderful production design as he managed. The rundown house of Raincoat or the Tagorean spaces of Chokher Bali and Noukadubi are examples of this. He was exceptionally fast at developing screenplays and his speed did not compromise quality. Unishey April, Dahan, Bariwali will continue to be definitive landmarks in contemporary cinema. Relationships always intrigued him and his films explore complex relationships. Towards the end, he had become more experimental, exploring gendered identities in a way no Bengali or indeed Indian film-maker has probably done. Two, it was a pleasure to know him and interact with him personally. He would address you in that informal way, tui; but he did that with a lot of candour. Ritu continued to surprise me with how much he knew. His interests were infinite. He was a great admirer of Tagore, fascinated with Ray and could talk exhaustively on Bengali literature and culture. He had tremendous curiosity about everything: artefacts and history of objects, jewellery, saris, architecture, monuments! Not just films. We used to have long conversations on the Tagore family: the house in Jorasanko, the residents of the house, the relationship between Tagore, his sisters-in-law and other family members. He had many anecdotes to share, not just dry history. He was considering making a film on the great house of Jorasanko, and he often exchanged ideas with me. When I asked him for some inputs on Sunil Gangopadhyay for a session I did at the Jaipur Lit Fest, he presented me with a memorable account of the background in which this whole generation of writers and poets lived and worked - Shakti Chattopadhyay, Buddhadev Bose, Jibananada Das. He 256

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brought their poetry alive in his own inimitable way, creating the ambience, the cadences and his stellar qualities as a delightful storyteller in full flow. He introduced me to the poetry of Joy Goswami. Over the last few years, he had emerged as a very important voice so far as gender and sexuality were concerned. He displayed tremendous courage in the choices he made and in his everyday life, as well. For example, his sartorial style was anything but usual. He knew he was being stared at but it did not seem to bother him. I think he enjoyed it. He loved dressing up and make heads turn. The same philosophy was also reflected in the complexities he articulated in some of his recent films. Given our reticence and prejudice about and the regressive attitudes that mark the gender and sexuality debate in our country, his presence on the scene gave a lot of inspiration and impetus to many activists engaged with the cause. The void created by his death will be difficult to fill. The last time he came over to my place was when he was in Delhi to receive his National Award for Chitrangada in May 2013. He came to dinner. He seemed tired, but was very happy and chatty. He joked and mimicked others, discussed his future projects and his health. He was a bit fragile, and Shohini and I asked him to come over to Delhi for a thorough medical check-up. His death came as a shock. I was in London at the time and my first reaction was one of great sadness. He was too young to die! He had so much to live for, so many more films to make. As the realisation seeped in, shock was replaced with a sense of loss. At some level, I also felt a kind of anger and disappointment. His death was such a waste. I felt he was just beginning to come into his own both as a person and as a film-maker, and it was as if he had abandoned us and himself by leaving so many things unfinished. Those of us who were fortunate to know him will greatly miss the person, but future generations of cineastes will continue to be enriched and inspired by the rich cinematic legacy that Rituparno has left behind.

Jaya Bachchan Interviewed by Sangeeta Datta and Rohit K. Dasgupta I did one film with Ritu, Sunglass, which unfortunately was stuck for eight years. Ritu was so upset about it. There are parts of it which are so natural. As an actor, I could actually do what I enjoy doing in Ritu’s films. That is, act real. In Ritu’s films, the drama comes out of the situation, in dialogues which are very simply said. I disagreed with a lot of his work; he had certain obsessions of the aesthetics like clothes, sets and jewellery. He has spoken to me about many of his films, in almost all of which he wanted to cast 257

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me but we had many disagreements. He narrated the story of Bariwali to me, but I disagreed because I told him I did not feel so vulnerable. I have a problem doing a role where I desire a man; I suggested Kirron (Kher) for the role, for I thought she would be able to deliver what he wanted. He wanted me to do Titli too; but then he cast Aparna (Sen) without even informing me. I was very upset with him. He was in such hurry to move on, my god! In 20 years, he made so many films. It’s staggering! Of all his films, I have a special liking for Raincoat. There are certain Indian films that I love, one of them is Piravi, and one of them is Raincoat. I thought Raincoat was better than Chokher Bali. Chokher Bali is a lot about glamour and Bengal and history and beautiful faces. Raincoat was amazing! What performances from every actor! Ritu was wonderful in that confined space of the film, evoking the interest of the audience and sustaining it all through. One of the great things about Ritu’s films is that they barely have any distractions. It’s not easy. Suppose somebody is standing by the window and saying shei shomoy (that time . . .) and then, cut to flashback. He did not indulge in all that; he remained within that space, usually. I haven’t seen Bengali cinema in a while, but it would pain me to see Bengali Cinema go the Hindi Cinema way. If you see the looks of the people who are performing, it seems you are watching a Bombay television serial. However, Ritu’s work was very different. Somewhere, his personal life and cinema got mixed up. I wish he had lived and he had made some more good films. As a film-maker, he had the knack of making a story out of a line which was indeed unique! I also loved the technique that Ritu used. You know, for a film-maker to do what he has done with such limited resource was no easy task. It was a quality that Hrishikesh Mukherjee had. If Ritu was in a room where things were happening, he would not cut into a song, you know what I mean. He stuck to his plot, he stuck to his location, he stuck to his area; he didn’t go into flashback or flash forward, though he used a little bit of it in Sunglass, because of its surrealism. Ritu had this rare quality of visualising the film before he even started the shoot. He was much like Hrishikesh Mukherjee who was such a fantastic editor. He almost shot an edited film. He did not believe in too many retakes. A good director should also be a good technician. For me, a technical director is more than just the creator of the film. Today, you have two kinds of directors: a technical director and a creative director. This is perhaps necessary because productions have become bigger. As an actor, I like it when a director ties you and tells you ‘Get out of this knot without opening it’ as a performer and you slowly wriggle out of it. It’s beautiful! Think if somebody is tied with a rope and you have to come out, 258

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like a magician. What do you do to get you off it, and I think that’s what Ritu got out of me. He gave me a lot of space; but there were certain scenes he directed. I remember one scene where he wanted me to do this soliloquy and I told Ritu that I am not a very dialogue person. He said you have to go into this dream world. I told Ritu, ‘I find it very difficult but I will try as I am too much of a real person.’ Even something that I dream of I would say in the present. I would not become Hamlet. I would say it more like ‘Ei torkarir daam ta ki, ei alur daam ta ki’ (‘What is the price of this vegetable, what is the price of this potato’). He said, ‘Bah bhalo!’ (‘excellent!’), ‘tai kor’ (‘do it that way’). I dubbed the scene in Bengali and it is very interesting because when you are doing a scene where you are saying ‘Janish Munni aj ki dekhlam janish, oi meye ta ashlo tar lomba lomba chul, chhaat e darie ache’ (‘Do you know what I saw today, Munni? I saw a girl with long hair, standing on the terrace’). He wanted me to say this in a very dreamy kind of way like clouds, terrace and I didn’t and I did it this way and when he heard me he was very happy. Actually now that I think of it, he was very indulgent with me. Then, he also observed actors a lot. I remember he wanted me to do the film that he did with Deepti Naval (Memories in March). He called me up and said, ‘Jayadi, I have bought a sari for you (for this role), you will be wearing this jewellery, this sari.’ I told him, ‘Ritu it’s not important to me. Tell me what role is this,’ and then he told me the role. I told him the script was too self-indulgent. In the entire film, you do not show the picture of this boy (the son who dies in an accident) even once, I think that is impossible. And then he said he was acting in it and then I said no; it was a bit eerie and I told him, let’s talk about it, but then he didn’t and he went and did the film any way. However, I would say Deepti was very good in the film. Bhishon tara chilo (He was always in a great hurry!), and so he could not remain loyal always. Maybe he knew he did not have enough time; he was always in a hurry to make more films, as if he was running out of time. He called me on my birthday and said, ‘Jayadi, I am missing you very much. I want to come and see you . . . will you hold me?’ I said, ‘Of course I will, Ritu. I have so much to talk to you,’ and really the number of subjects that Ritu could talk about was immense. I was in New York when I heard about his death. I was so shocked! I couldn’t believe that he was no more. The year before, when I heard he was in the hospital, I asked him what was wrong; he never told me anything and he would just lie about his health. He was a great liar in such cases. For all the truths he said in his films, he would constantly lie or hide things about his own life. 259

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Figure 15.2 Ghosh briefing Amitabh Bachchan. Working still from Last Lear Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh and Sangeeta Datta

Aparna Sen Interviewed by Sangeeta Datta I first met Rituparno in the late 1980s when he was 20 something and a copywriter at Ram Ray’s advertising agency Response. Ram, an old friend, called me up one day. ‘I’m sending a young chap across. Writes rather well. Can you find some time to listen to a film script he’s written?’ So that was how I met Rituparno Ghosh at our Alipur apartment one morning in 1986, a slightly plump, curly haired young man in jeans and t-shirt with huge glasses on, bright eyes shining behind thick lenses, a very far cry from the style icon that he had developed into later. Ritu ended up becoming not only a close friend, but also someone akin to a brother. The script he read out was about Radha and Krishna. A bit over-lyricized I felt, but extremely detailed and very well written. I knew straightaway that the young person sitting across the room from me was a major talent, knew without a doubt that he would go far. What I did not know was that he was already a star of sorts in Ram Ray’s copywriting team, and had created lines like Boroline Chirodin for Boroline and Twak er aponjon for Margo soap. I asked him if he would like to collaborate with me on my scripts and he agreed readily. 260

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Figure 15.3 Ghosh with Aparna Sen and Kalyan Ray Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

We never did collaborate after all. Every time he came, we would end up chatting. For hours on end. About everything under the sun. Films, poetry, Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Bergman, Kurosawa, the Tollygunge film industry, Uttam Kumar, Soumitra Chatterjee, my experiences as an actress . . . We enjoyed these sessions hugely! So much so, that soon he began to accompany me to shoots, to poetry recitals where I sometimes performed, to rehearsals of stage plays that I was then acting in, and even when I went shopping. Or we’d simply hang out at home, swapping story ideas for future films. Sometimes he would help Konkona, then a little girl, with her Bengali grammar or he’d sit with me through a script narration. Afterwards, we’d discuss the merits and demerits of the script we’d just heard. He always had something very insightful to say, and I benefited greatly from his sharp intelligence, often turning down or accepting a film offer on the strength of his comments. And, of course, we read our own scripts out to each other, although he was far more prolific than I was. I had heard many of his scripts long before they were made into films – Hirer Angti, Unishey April, Dahan, Ashukh, Khela (then titled Nalok), Titli, Chokher Bali . . . Ritu had told me once that if he had a piece of blank paper in front of him, he felt an insatiable urge to fill it up with words. In later years, he had once 261

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gone to a film festival where the hospitality was terrible. He found himself in a hotel room without food and with no money to buy a meal. There were packets of coffee, however, and an electric kettle. He made himself endless cups of coffee, and in order to distract himself from thoughts of food, drew out the notepaper supplied in the room and started writing. That was how the script of Ashukh got written. I felt that his facility with words was both a blessing and a curse, and told him as much. Interesting and well-written dialogue came so easily to him that he tended to make his films verbose unless checked. He would often fall in love with the dialogue he had written and continue a conversation between two people endlessly and effortlessly. I often played the role of conscience with him and he insisted that I do. This was one of Ritu’s qualities that I never tired of admiring! He could take criticism with an open mind and never held a grudge. If he didn’t agree with you, he would tell you so to your face. I believe this happens only with people who are perfectionists and have a strong self-image. It is only when artists are unsure of their ability that they become defensive and vulnerable to criticism. In any case, our friendship was too important to both of us to risk jeopardizing with intellectual dishonesty. If I told a lie to spare his feelings, he would know instantly, just as I would with him. This was part of our comfort zone with each other. We knew that we could always be sure of brutal frankness. I think our respect for each other would have been diminished had it been otherwise. So I told him about something Satyajit Ray would do as an intellectual exercise – use dialogue in a scene only if it were impossible to communicate an idea through visual means. After that, both Ritu and I would keep trying to do this in our own scripts, even though we didn’t always succeed. Ritu also had an insatiable curiosity about everything. In my case, he was curious about the saris I wore, my hairstyles, my make-up, my interior decoration, my relationship with my daughters, everything! I realize now that he was then a director in the making, soaking up every experience around him like a sponge. I happened to tell him about my guilt because I couldn’t give my daughters enough time, and that my elder daughter had once said, ‘I kept waiting for you to find time, till one day I discovered that I had grown up!’ I realized how intently Ritu had been listening to all my confidences the day I first heard the script of Unishey April. He had put those exact words in Debashree’s mouth: tomar jonye wait korte korte I grew up Ma! People go to film school to learn film direction. I don’t think film direction can be taught. You can learn about framing, lenses, lighting, photography, editing, and so on – but in order to be a director, you have to take your lessons from life itself. Ritu was doing just that. Hirer Angti, Ritu’s first film, was produced by the Children’s Film Society. Shabana Azmi was then heading it, so Ritu asked me to write a letter of 262

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introduction for him to Shabana. He came back to Kolkata not only with the contract for the film tucked firmly under his belt, but he had also laid the groundwork for a lifelong friendship with the Bachchan family during his trip to Mumbai. That was another of his many wonderful qualities – his personal charm. He could bond effortlessly with almost anyone and this stood him in very good stead in his career as a film-maker. His relationships with people may not always have been entirely free of trouble, but his charm was not facile; Ritu was genuinely interested in people – how they lived, how their minds worked – and his sensitivity, combined with his considerable intelligence, allowed him to get to the core of almost anything, be it a human being or an idea. In later years he had earned the reputation of directing his actors minutely, sometimes even asking some of them to imitate him. But I never saw that side of him. Although he was a very good actor himself, in Unishey April he left me largely to my own devices. Of course, I knew the screenplay inside out. In many senses it had become mine as much as his after our endless, detailed discussions about it. Interestingly, Ritu asked me to decorate Sarojini’s (my character in the film) bedroom set. I now realize that it was a director’s device to get his actor to identify with the character – an acting workshop of sorts. Unishey April forged a strong bond between Ritu and me. We took the script to one producer after another with me promising to act free of cost if only they would fund the project. It never ceases to amaze me that all, without exception, turned us down. How did they not realize its worth, being in the film business? At that time a friend called Renu Roy had suddenly got hold of some money. She suggested that she and I form a film production company and that I make its first film. But by then, I was determined to get Ritu’s film off the ground, come what may. Finally Renu, Ritu and I jointly formed Spandan Films and used the money to produce Unishey April. Most of the actors acted free of charge and everyone helped, as they often will in the case of a first film. The film won the Golden Lotus at the National Awards, and the rest is history. I saw Ritu through many stages of his sadly short life. He was initially a slightly effeminate boy, but no more than that, at least not on the face of it. He still hid the fact that he was gay, although it obviously pained him to hide it from those he loved. I remember badgering him to get married and even threatened to look for a suitable girl if he couldn’t manage to find one himself. He brushed my suggestions aside lightly enough, but I was puzzled at the sadness on his face. A few days later he gave me a book of poetry to read, gifted to him by a male friend. ‘You do poetry recitals,’ he said, ‘. . . you might find something interesting here.’ After he had left, I started turning the pages. On the flyleaf were inscribed the words ‘to you, from me’. Understanding dawned. 263

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I never badgered him again. But that incident broke whatever barriers of inhibition had existed between us. I became his confidante, and he mine. He began to tell me about his relationships, about the pain of the sexually marginalised, about his loneliness, about his desire to be accepted for who he was. Gradually, as he became more and more successful as a film-maker, he started becoming increasingly open about his sexuality. He discarded his jeans and t-shirt in favour of long flowing kurtas and handpicked scarves. He lost weight and shaved his head, looking beautifully and elegantly ascetic – a Buddhist monk in designer clothes! But he was shaping his mind too, not just his exterior. He had always been an avid reader and an early riser. Now he disciplined himself into spending those early morning hours reading and writing. He delved deep into Rabindranath Tagore who had always been an inspiration for him, developing a greater understanding of the androgynous quality of Tagore’s writing. He also loved the Mahabharata from which he had chosen his name – Rituparno – rejecting the name Shouroneel that his parents had originally given him. The androgynous characteristics of Shikhandi, Brihannala and, to some extent, Chitrangada in the Mahabharata fascinated him. His last fiction film Chitrangada was inspired both by Tagore’s play of the same name, and by the episode of Arjun and Manipur’s warrior princess Chitrangada in the epic he so loved. In a masterstroke, he envisioned Kamdeva or Madan of Tagore’s play as a plastic surgeon who transforms a male Chitrangada into a feminine and desirable woman, and then he went on to use that section of the play as a metaphor for a transsexual choreographer’s desire to become a woman through a sex re-assignment surgery. He also started acting in these roles himself, thus effectively blurring the line between and fiction real life. Without sending out a message within quotes that a lesser film-maker might have done, Ritu managed to bring the hitherto marginalised into the domain of the mainstream to an extent. Ritu cannot be seen simply as a film-maker. Indeed, I am not a hardcore fan of all his films, some of which I find more decorative than deep. He must be seen in totality – as a conglomerate of his films, his writing, his considerable scholarship, his eccentric lifestyle and his sexuality. It is as if he were creating himself from scratch in his own laboratory – right from the point of choosing his name to becoming a formidable film-maker who flaunted his trans-sexuality with fearless aplomb. Ritu’s presence was magnetic. His absence is no less powerful. It will take a long time to get used to it.

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16 CREW Avik Mukhopadhyay, Arghyakamal Mitra, Indranil Ghosh and Debojyoti Mishra

❦ Avik Mukhopadhyay Director of Photography I met Rituparno in the year 1997. He was producing and directing a commercial, when he called me up to do the cinematography. At that time I was mostly doing only commercials and corporate documentaries. I agreed to work, and he was very happy with it. After a month or so, he rang me up to say that he was planning a feature film and asked me if I could do the cinematography. That’s how Asukh happened – my first film with him. Afterwards, we worked together in many feature films until his last – Satyanweshi. It’s been a long journey for a director-cinematographer collaboration. There are a couple of films I couldn’t shoot because of my other commitments; for example, Bariwali, Noukadubi and Sob Charitro Kalponik. I think there are two kinds of film-makers: one is just a film-maker; the other is a visionary. Ritu always had some vision, some image in his mind prior to making a film. At times they were too literary, close to poetry; but it was not difficult to understand them. In Chokher Bali, one of his most literary films, Ritu brought a sense of dark inferiority. I felt if there was any visual reference which is close to that is the work of Rembrandt. Rembrandt is beautiful, pristine, but not just pretty. So, I worked out a kind of lighting which lights up the character, and then drops down into a darkness behind the character. Therefore, there was always a wider penumbra, in which the set and the objects were visible in a muted form. During the preparatory period, I realised that this effect was difficult to achieve, and couldn’t be possible only by lighting. Of course, lighting was an important

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part of it, but I had to use a special laboratory processing technique called ‘silver retaining process’. I knew theoretically what the effect could be, but I had never put it to practical use before. So, we thought of testing the effect before applying it. With a planned production design, and actor Prosenjit Chatterjee (who plays Mahendra in the film), we went for it. When it came back from the lab, we were delighted to find that the desired effect had been captured. Ritu was very happy and we proceeded to achieve effect for the final film. As Ritu insisted that we avoided any kind of cosmetic period recreation, this method helped the film to have a very distinguished look. Ritu was very much instinctive in his scene staging, mise en scène or shot division. He always liked to put the character in the situation and tried out a staging which connected the character meaningfully with the set and the set props. Shot division emerged out of that. So, the shots and camera movement remained organically connected to the content. We hardly see any stray or out of context shot in his films. Today, I rarely see a film-maker with this quality of restraint and focus. Arguments and discussions are very well part of a collaborative process. I had conflicts and arguments with him in terms of the mounting and look of a film, but he used to buy my ideas if he found them logical. But, we mostly discussed about much larger context of the film rather than talking about the lens or the camera angle alone. Ritu was extremely well read and well exposed to different genres of visual art forms; our discussions, therefore, always grew out of a particular forthcoming film project to a greater platform. Out of those discussions, I somehow sensed his intentions and aesthetic leanings. With Chitrangada, we shifted to digital from celluloid. I had shot digital on and off before that. That was the transitional period when cinema was testing out this new tool of expression. We chose digital just not because it was new, but we felt it was necessary to film a new kind of narrative. In Chitrangada, Ritu started breaking new grounds in terms of storytelling. The digital medium allowed us some advantages of using multiple cameras quite cost effectively. That changed the style of shot taking, lighting and camera placement. The narrative of the film floated between real and imaginary spaces, and the cinematographic style constantly changed from the theatrical to the cinematic. A continuous shift of space happened between the stage, the home and the hospital. Sometimes, shift of space was created just by lighting. Digital helped to accommodate this shift effortlessly and attributed to the film a fresh look. In most of his films, Ritu worked with art director, Indranil Ghosh, his brother. Indranil is good friend of mine too. Before every production, we used to sit down and tried to sketch out a set plan. Afterwards, Indranil 266

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finalised his technical drawing and we decided the colour palate which suited my cinematographic plan. Ritu loved to dress and prop up his set by himself. Though an art team was there to assist, he liked to place props on his own. Probably the unique kind of inferiority he was working with, this working style somehow helped him to explore a mise en scène in a more organic way. I always try adopting different styles in different films. But it’s not always easy to be experimental. We work within a lot of constraints in the Bengali film industry. Therefore, on many occasions, I try to fabricate and design gadgets, and lights as per my requirements. In Chokher Bali, in the Benaras ghat location, I needed a much bigger source light to light the ghat during night time. As, the scenes were set in a pre-electricity era, there could be no source of light in the ghat, barring a few oil lamps in the boat. I wanted to create a starlit and not a typical moonlit night. I designed a big iron frame with multiple small light fixtures, which I put on a high building to illuminate the ghat. Because of multiple sources, light had a very soft and muted quality and it appeared non-directional. That was how I invented something or the other in every film to meet my cinematographic requirements. I have worked in many kinds of cinema, from big banner Bollywood projects to small independent films. At times, I have faced lot of challenges to formulate the style. Amongst the films of Rituparno Ghosh I shot, I found two films extremely challenging: Chitrangada, which I have already talked about at length, and the other one was Antarmahal. In Antarmahal, the biggest challenge was to place the film in a contraposition to Chokher Bali. In Chokher Bali, we had already set a model for period cinema which we didn’t want to repeat. The narrative of Antarmahal was much deeper, denser, darker, and very violent. I was little stuck and didn’t know what to do. One day I was going through the work of Carravaggio, one of my favourite painters, when I realised that nothing else could be more appropriate for the visual inspiration for Antarmahal. Caravaggio used a strange bold sharp light which created sharp shadows of the character. His paintings had an extreme violent colour palate, which was not present in the work of any other painter of that time. It fitted well into conceiving and filming the film’s dark interiors. It was good fun to work with Ritu. We had a common friend group who worked in most of his films, and we used to talk about many things. Most of the time, it was Ritu who did most of the talking, for he loved to talk. As he was a brilliant storyteller, it was always interesting to listen to him. Actually, most of the ideas and planning for different film projects came out of those adda sessions we had with him. It was easy to work 267

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Figure 16.1 Ghosh with Avik Mukhopadhyay on location for his last film Satyanweshi Courtesy of Venkatesh Films

with Ritu, for he was open to ideas, and had a very great understanding of visual aesthetics. He had a very definite and distinguished style of his own, which made a remarkable impression on many contemporary filmmakers, as is evident in their works. But, as many of them don’t really have an in-depth understanding of life and art, Ritu’s influences on them remain cosmetic only. ********

Arghyakamal Mitra Editor My association with Rituparno began in 1992–1993, when he was shooting an ad film for Raju, a hosiery brand. But I actually knew him from school. He was two years senior to me in South Point, and I remember him as someone who impersonated Helen in the rains; he would dangle out his leg through the slit in the raincoat and dance to her songs! We were infinitely amused by his eccentricities. In fact, he was perhaps the only male dancer 268

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in the school dance troupe supervised by Uday Shankar. Ritu’s love for dancing never deserted him, really! Years later, when we were waiting at the office of R. C. Cola for the CEO to arrive and the latter didn’t turn up on time, Ritu, all of a sudden, began to dance. The person, we were waiting for, stepped in through the unlocked door after a while, but Ritu was undaunted. He smartly said we were just entertaining ourselves. I still remember the first day I met him as a director. When I was asked to do an ad for Response, the name Rituparno Ghosh rang with a familiarity. I wondered whether he was the same guy I knew from school. I reached the studio almost two hours after I had promised to. In those days, there wasn’t any cell phone and I could not inform them that I would be late. The moment I arrived, Ritu began scolding me as if he knew me forever: ‘Why are you late? Why are we going to wait for you? Who are you?’ But immediately afterwards, he forgot all that! We were soon friends. Later, I worked with him on many ad films which he did for Response, and even short documentaries. He had asked me to edit Unishey April. I knew about this film, and asked him whether the crew wasn’t already finalised. He said it was. I declined to do the editing, telling Ritu that it would not go in his favour if he dropped the earlier editor and recruited me. Ritu understood. But later after the film was made, he asked me to take a look and give my inputs. I relented. Ritu had acknowledged my little contribution in the credits. It was with Dahan that my journey with Rituparno Ghosh the film-maker began. Before Dahan, I had edited only one film, Kahini/The Story. That film was an editor’s delight. I could do whatever I felt like doing with the film. But when I saw Dahan, I was rather taken aback by its construction – the film was so well-planned, performances were marvellous and dialogues were very realistic. As I worked on Dahan, I knew that I was a part of a film that would go down in the history of Bengali Cinema. Ritu was particularly concerned about the long conversation that took place between Jhinuk (character essayed by Indrani Halder) and her Thammi (played by Suchitra Mitra). He sought my suggestion as to how to reduce it, for it was getting uncontrollably prolonged. I suggested he might jump time and space, while the dialogues might continue in the background. This worked wonderfully; in fact, so well that this came to be known as the Dahan-cut in the industry! Ritu repeated this cut in many other films as well; for example, Shubho Muharat and Chokher Bali. Ritu’s films were indeed so well-scripted that it was easy to work on the film on the editing table. For example, Bariwali! It is one of his most interesting films, and I have indeed enjoyed working on it. The dream sequences which have been appreciated so widely did not require any intervention of 269

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the editor. They were shot and kept as they were scripted. I have rarely seen a more organically scripted film. Earlier, Ritu used to come and sit with me as I edited his films. He did not interfere much, only came up with his suggestions, some of which I accepted, some of which I did not. Later, he barely came while the editing was on. In fact, I used to send the edited DVD to his place and he used to instruct me or debate with me on the phone. You know, Ritu used to often joke with me that I would never win awards for his films. For, his films were mostly dialogue-driven chamber dramas which did not give much opportunity to the editor to show his expertise. Chokher Bali was one film which required a lot of editorial innovation. For instance, Ritu told me that his characters would talk and act as people of a bygone era; their actions would be rather slow paced. But I had to bring in a touch of modernity in this period piece through the editing. Although the characters and their actions had to appear as belonging to the early 20th century, the flow of the narrative had to be contemporary. But, if you ask me, I would say, Raincoat is one of my best works. I know a lot of people found the film boring; I would say it was slow, but not boring. The film had an underplayed pace which brought in a sense of stasis. This was indeed in tune with the theme. I had to bring in a sense of pace, without affecting the performance of the actors who kept on talking in a claustrophobic room. That was indeed challenging. Abohoman was another film which took a long time to release and Ritu and I reviewed the film multiple times on the editing table. The idea of the complete ‘blackout’ was actually a literalisation of the blackouts the ailing protagonist (played by Dipankar De) was suffering from. After a few time and space jumps in the first half of the film, the narrative was rather linear in the second half. I brought in a structural change by breaking the linearity of the second half. That sped up the flow. Ritu wanted to shift to a different mode of storytelling, as is evident in Sob Choritra Kalponik. This was to some extent reinforced in Chitrangada, where there were several time-space shifts. However, this was one film which had undergone many cuts, for Ritu never seemed to be happy with it. I guess by that time he was too concerned about theoretical and political correctness and brought in changes keeping in mind the reaction of the LGBT community. I tried to make him understand that Rudra’s story was the story of a particular individual, not a representative of a community. But Ritu was much too anxious, and the failure of the film affected him rather badly. But I had always felt that the film would not win favours with the audience, for a lot of people would find it difficult to relate to Rudra’s story. 270

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Ritu and I have often discussed why a film should have a story. The act of viewing a film can be an experience in itself. In fact, there are several good films the story of which cannot be related. One needs to watch it. Ritu often expressed his wish of making such a film, which would not have a story. People had to experience it visually. But then, Ritu’s real strength was in his writing. He was an excellent writer. The backbone of his films is the stories he told. Maybe he wanted to break out of that. But that of course never happened. **************

Indranil Ghosh Art Director I was assisting Nitish Roy in Bombay for Shyam Benegal’s monumental teleserial Bharat Ek Kho/India, a Search. The sets were on the first floor of Film City. At that time, there was a lot of work going on for Nitish Roy’s team – Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay and Gulzar’s Mirza Ghalib. Once a set was complete, we would be sent on to another set. At that time, my brother came to Bombay to do a commercial. He said he was planning a feature and asked if I would work with him. After that, I came back to Calcutta but couldn’t work in the industry because the guild would not give me a card. My mother’s class friend in Art College, Ashok Bose, would work on the sets, I would stay on as an observer. Both our parents were artists; my father was a documentary film-maker, besides a painter. The ambition to work in films, understanding the art, all this started from a young age. My father would shoot and edit his own film. The dining table at home would be converted into his edit table. Sometimes, the film work would get stalled because the funds ran out. Then, work would resume when money was raised again. At home we knew clearly when father’s film would start and when it would end. Ritu and I imbibed visual aesthetics from our parents. My mother would also keep us strongly grounded; although she was very proud of us, she would tell us we hadn’t achieved anything great. She would also drive home the truth that once a work was done we would only see the flaws and never find the happiness that we had in creating it. Ritu would write exceptionally well from a very young age. He had an incredible memory and an exceptional imaginative power – he loved to tell stories. He would actually memorise his mathematics, the trignometry, the formulae, everything! When my friends would come to play in the evening, 271

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he would grab hold of one of them to check as he rattled off his formulae and figures. Ritu had planned a big set for a detergent product. Ashok kaku (uncle) asked me to do the drawing for the set. I planned to base this on our local grocery store from where all our family provisions were purchased. I brought the drawing to Ashok kaku, when a gentleman came up to me and said he would arrange for my guild card. He was Kedar Singh, the industry light supplier who had seen me at Film City several times, and he immediately secured my card. Then, I worked with Ritu on his television serial Bahanno Episode (52 Episodes). The first feature with him was Asukh which concentrated on domestic interiors, largely dark claustrophobic spaces, but also a film within film. As far as working methods go, I would be part of the process from the beginning, involved with the spatial growth of the script. We would discuss and grow together. I would suggest let’s move to the balcony, from one room to another, discuss depth of field. Ritu was a brilliant production designer as well. I have seen very few directors with that sense of production design that he had. By the time the script was developed, Ritu would have perfectly visualised the film, the frames and the camera movement. He was lucky to have Abhik, who understood his vision very well and executed it almost perfectly. Often, before production meetings, Abhik and I would conspire to persuade Ritu and decide on a studio set instead of real locations. Ritu would often be concerned about the producer or lack of funds, but we would go in and convince him about making our own set and not work in someone’s home or some friend’s flat. It wouldn’t take long to persuade him; he completely shared the joy of creating our own spaces which would be so artistically liberating. The most artistically gratifying set and the biggest learning curve was when I created the house for Raincoat. There have been grander scales, but only in this film we got to create an entire house, a full architecture, all the rooms, and behind the house a road, a whole row of houses – this was before use of vinyl. Architecturally, a sound set is one in which both sides are finished. The entire drama was within the house, so everything had to be very fluid in that space. Everything was in real-life scale as the characters inhabited that space. I had to be totally real from level zero to one and a half feet – it had to be justified. At the same time, I had to create the magic that was very exciting and exuberant. For Chokher Bali, Ritu broke into a larger scale of production. A period film which involved detailed research, we modelled on a few old mansions in North Calcutta to create the set in Technician Studio. After delivering the main set, I went off to Benaras to make the large 100 feet boathouse 272

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outside the Ramnarayan Palace gates. I waited for the boat to arrive from Allahabad; in fact, two boats which then had to be designed into decorative bajras. And I must admit that Venkatesh Films co-operated with us and generously financed us. I would send my requisitions and there were no questions asked. I would call and say I want this and the producers made sure everything fell in place. I would sit on the ghats and make my budget and they would get back with approvals in five minutes. Sometimes, the drawings were wrong; I would throw away the glass patterns, and then they were sent another pattern. They did not know the details and technicalities of art direction, but they never questioned. Then, there was Chitrangada! As an art director, there was so much to do! The magical reality of the stage, the middle class home, the hospital room, the screen which often moved apart to reveal a fantasy world, and the constant shift from real to fantasy. This is an important film; it was his vehicle to challenge all the gender controversies surrounding him and he showed his audience that he was beyond simple binaries. So, having worked with Dada I got to make these enormous sets for Chokher Bali, Antarmahal, The Last Lear, Chitrangada, and Satyanweshi. And secondly, I had these wonderful producers who had a lot of respect for Ritu and gave us the artistic liberty to create our best. That was indeed great.

Figure 16.2 Young Ghosh sharing a lighter moment with his Mother Courtesy of Indranil Ghosh

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Figure 16.3 Rituparno sharing a laugh with his crew. With Bibi Ray, Jaisri Bhattacharya, Sushanto Pal and Karna Basu Courtesy of Karna Basu

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Debojyoti Mishra Music Composer I had been training under Salil Chowdhury as a violinist and working in Bombay and Chennai studios since I was 17 or 18. I met Ritu at Salilda’s studio Sound on Sound when he was working with the advertising agency Response. I was struck with his depth of knowledge and reading – he was also quite young at that time. In the early films, budgets were so stringent, Ritu did not think of elaborate music or soundtrack. The occasional song would be filmed on a character singing, quite static in treatment. In Raincoat, working for a Hindi film, he wrote his lyrics in a dialect of Braj Bhasha. He always had a flair for rhyme and meter and he was learning the dialect, he revived it in the Bengali context. Gulzar added some poetry and I asked Shubha Mudgal and Hariharan to sing the songs and the scale mounted. The song in Memories of March, Sakhi hum, also written by him, has been hugely popular with young audiences and has travelled through all arms of modern technology – social networks, youTube and mobile ringtones. Some songs that he wrote before, for instance, Meghpeon (Titli), then Khela Khela (Khela), had already become very popular with young listeners, playing on FM radio channels and music channels. He would describe certain ideas which inspired orchestration. There is a sequence in Raincoat when Ajay Devgn is standing by the road and there is sound of traffic all around yet he is immensely lonely – this had to be captured through the soundtrack. For Ritu, music had to have a purpose; he did not want any unnecessary embellishment, too much of personal enunciation. He was argumentative and also wanted to be a diva as well, but we did not take that seriously. Much of film music is collaborative work, like drawing a picture, then adding colours. Bimal Roy did not understand the details or grammar of music but he worked with such masters like S. D. Burman and Salil Chowdhury who transformed his films with such brilliant scores. On one occasion, after a music session, Roy was packing off the musicians when Salilda offered that classic number, O sajna barkha bahar ayee (Parakh, 1960). It was same with Ritu. He did not understand the grammar of music, but he had a keen ear for it. Often, I gave him a lot of Western music to listen to; he tried studiously for a while. At that time, all day in his office he went on playing Western classical! Then he said, ‘If all these influences are in Tagore, I may as well hear his songs!’ Tagore brought the whole world together for him – he said he could hear Mozart, Bach, Handel’s mass in Antara momo bikashito koro.

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Ritu’s script reading (which was legendary) would be the starting point, sometimes giving me a lot of what I needed to know. His creative team would wait with great anticipation, to listen to that first reading. In Shubho Muharat, I used the shehnai to bring nostalgia/surprise/loneliness. He would trigger off a sequence and I would go into a hypnotic trance pulling out oblique notes but he did not want any indulgence. Chokher Bali, with its larger scale of production, gave us the scope to use kirtan, baul, folk, Bandey Mataram, Tagore songs. I had asked for strings and the producers (Sri Venkatesh Films) allowed me to work with the wonderful Chennai strings. The music director had to hold all these elements in one thread, the director had to give the scope for that vast range. Take the chanting on the ghats of Benaras when Bihari offers to marry Binodini, the soundtrack shifts from death rituals to marriage vows; the courtesan’s song Muraliya nadaan was orchestrated with strings; the use of Raga Bhairavi for Binodini’s changing consciousness when Ritu instructed me, ‘It’s a new morning for her’ – the move away from desire. I worked on the contrast score on cello/violin/viola. In the sunset track, the tabla is replaced by a muddy track, cello and voice, and with the morning there is Brahms’s philosophical place. I was using elevation as a device. Ritu would offer the mood of the scene or an emotional place of the character. He did not go into the musical details. It was about understanding each other’s language. I remember I was travelling to Pondicherry and Ritu called me to talk about the sequence in Chokher Bali where the woman will have her last kiss, almost leaving the world behind after that. For the phrase bikashita preeti kusumey hey, I used 30–32 vocalists/harmony lines. This was groundbreaking work for Bengali film music, to use a soundtrack in this scale, in empathy with the character or landscape. Before Chitrangada, I tried making him listen to a lot of Western classical. It was about musically creating the surreal transformation of Chitrangada. The soundtrack had to have a mystic, magic element. I also had to break the familiar Tagore dance drama music which is overfamiliar, performed endlessly in Bengal. With oriental elements like veena and flute, I brought in new age sounds – drums, synthetic pads, analogue synthesiser, bandpipes, duduk, breath. To create this new music, we used rough voices on the song Guru, guru ghana megha garajey . . . to create this rough-edged sound. To add to that like a fountain, the pure classical voice of Kaushiki Chakraborty. For the hunting scene, the extended choreographed stage scene, Ritu had told me he had the idea of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala in mind, something almost primeval. He tried his best to come out of his space with that film, working with opposites, creating a new vocabulary. It is a shame it did not

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get acknowledged. Somewhere he had raced ahead and was thinking/working much ahead of his times. Ritu was a friend, a very, very rare artist. We worked together, fell out, and came back again. The energy and sheer enjoyment of creating work together – that is the joy of being in tune. In his last years, I was struck by his courage to stand by his beliefs. But he also needed much more support than he received. He broke a lot of blocks I personally had about life, about gender and sexuality. After Chokher Bali and Dosar went to Cannes, Mani Rathnam praised him high. Javed Akhtar said his scripts were exceptional. Ritu had grand plans to make the Mahabharata, but he was also very self-reflexive. After every award and media attention, he would sit back and ask ‘Do you think I am a serious film-maker?’ He never lost his head as he could be objective about himself confessing, ‘Once you know your limitations, you cease to surprise yourself.’ We talk about being at the right place at the right time, but Ritu was a genius trying to work amidst extreme mediocrity. Consider the general state of the industry at that time; his contemporaries who, by that very definition, could not be sitting next to him. It is true every artist needs acceptance, acknowledgement, but in such an environment how would that genius survive? I am still trying to come to grips with the fact that he is gone.

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FILMOGRAPHY

Feature films As director 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Hirer Angti (Diamond Ring), Children’s Film Society, India, 1992. Unishey April (19th April), Spandan Films, 1995. Dahan (Crossfire), G P Films Pvt. Ltd., 1997. Bariwali (The Lady of the House), J Radical Entertainments, 1999. Asukh (Malaise), Suresh Productions Pvt. Ltd., 1999. Utsab (Festival), Cinemawalla, 2000. Titli (The First Monsoon Day), Cinemawalla, 2002. Shubho Muharat (The First Day of the Shoot), Jagannath Productions, 2003. Chokher Bali (The Passion Play), Shree Venkatesh Films, 2003. Raincoat, Shree Venkatesh Films, 2003. Antarmahal (Views of an Inner Chamber), ABCL and Rituparno Ghosh Productions, 2005. Dosar (Companion), Planman Motion Pictures, 2006. The Last Lear, Planman Motion Pictures, 2007. Khela (Game), Sa Re Ga Ma and Shree Venkatesh Films, 2007. Sob Charitro Kalponik (Afterword/All Characters Are Imaginary), Reliance Big Pictures, 2008. Abohoman (The Eternal), Reliance Big Pictures, 2010. Noukadubi/Kashmkash (Boat Wreck), Mukta Arts, 2011. Sunglass/Taak Jhaank, Planman Motion Pictures, unreleased. Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish, Shree Venkatesh Films, 2012. Satyanweshi (The Truth Seeker), Shree Venkatesh Films, 2013. As scriptwriter

Memories in March, Director: Sanjoy Nag, Shree Venkatesh Films, 2011. 279

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As production designer and creative director Arekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story), Director: Kaushik Ganguly, Cinemawalla, 2010. Short film Urge (a part of Mumbai Cutting), Sahara One and White Cloud, 2008. Telefilms 1 2 3 4

Abhinay (Performance), ETV Bangla, 2003. Pichhutan (The Pull from the Back), Zee Bangla, 2006. 20, Malatibala Lane, Zee Bangla, 2006. Tahar Naamti Ranjana (Ranjana is Her Name), Shree Venkatesh Films and Star Jalsa, 2013.

Television serials As writer and director Bahanno Episode (52 Episodes), Kolkata Doordarshan, 1996. As creative director Sahib, Biwi aur Ghulam (The man, the wife and the slave), Director: Amitava Bhattacharya and Indranil Goswami, Sahara One, 2004. As scriptwriter Gaaner Oparey (Beyond the Songs), Director: Joydeep Mukherjee, Star Jalsa & Ideas Creation, 2010–2011. Documentaries 1 2

Vande Mataram, Doordarshan, 1990. Jeeban Smriti (Selective Memories), Ministry of Culture, 2012.

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INDEX

Abohoman 4, 9, 12–13, 29, 32–3, 36, 38, 40, 43–4, 71, 98, 146, 148, 210, 270 activism 218, 241, 247 Akhtar, Javed 4 Anandabazar Patrika 69 Anandalok 3, 69 Antarmahal 2, 4, 7, 13, 70–1, 146, 227, 235, 267, 273 Arekti Premer Galpo 4, 43, 72, 94–7, 105, 170, 175–81 arranged marriage 11, 16, 153–4, 156, 162–3, 168 assimilation strategy 212–14 Audacious Birds of Dusk: The Emergence of Queer Bengali Cinema 227 auteur theory 29–30 authorship 95, 98, 196–8, 216 autobiography 196–8 Bachchan, Jaya 257–60 Bakshi, Kaustav 14–16, 24, 87, 91, 95, 109, 198, 204, 240 Bandopadhyay, Manabi 172 Bandyopadhyay, Saradindu 144–5 Bariwali 3, 17, 42 Baudrillard, Jean 94 Bengali films/cinema 1, 3, 14, 20, 63–4, 66–70, 72, 74–5, 99, 106–8, 141, 143, 184, 217, 219, 223, 229, 232, 254, 258, 267 Bhattacharya, Spandan 99 Bhaumik, Mainak 20 Bombay cinema 16, 232 The Bong Connection 67, 70 The Broken Nest 167

cartography 143–7 Caughie, John 30 Chakraborty, Swapnomoy 18 Chapal-Abhiroop dichotomy 175–81 Charulata 11, 13, 36, 59, 140, 167 Chatterjee, Partha 116 Chatterjee, Prosenjit 32 Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish 2, 9, 43, 49, 74, 130, 131, 170, 175, 181–6, 190–200, 214, 237 Chokher Bali 2, 4, 6, 10–13, 16, 39–40, 44, 49, 51, 55–60, 63–7, 76, 140–1, 143, 146–7, 195, 245–6, 267 Christie, Agatha 8, 114, 147, 234 cinematic style 56, 58–9 cinematography 73, 265 cinemawalla 64–5, 279–80 class, bhadrolok 65, 209–10, 219 Colin Self 218, 222–3 Connell, R. W. 93 Contemporary India 190, 220–3 corporatisation 23, 67, 69, 75–6 Dahan 113 Das, Tista 172 detective films 140–1, 143, 145 Dionysian intoxication 127, 133, 135–6 dispersal 125, 127 Dosar 112 Dyer, Richard 30, 85, 92, 97 Ebong Rituparno 3 eroticism 52–3, 218

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Ghosh, Shohini 95, 196–7, 227–39 Gopal, Sangita 142

film-maker 1, 3, 9, 11–12, 24–5, 45–6, 52–3, 55–6, 58–60, 105, 208–9, 218–19, 254, 256–8, 265–6 films: colour 74, 126; commercial 41, 64, 70, 72; early 32–3, 44, 109, 115, 275; non-queer 16, 242; regional 68 First Person 6 freedom, idea of 10, 51, 55–8 Ganguly, Kaushik 20 gender identity 97, 172, 178, 181–2, 184 gender variance 171–4, 178, 180–1, 186 Geraghty, Christine 3 Ghai, Subhash 11 Ghosh & Company 3, 17, 89 Ghosh, Indranil 271–4 Ghosh, Rituparno: absent performer 95; androgyny 91, 94; audiences 19–23; Bakshi, Kaustav, conversation with 240–8; Banshi Bajey, meanings of music 40–1; cast and crew, interviews 251–3; cinema of confinement 104–18; cinematic art 52; cinematic freedom 59; class distinction, in films 170–86; dream, desire and song 37–40; freedom, pursuit of 49–61; game changer 1–6; gendering and 139–50; imaginative inhabiting, stages of 127–9; influence and inspiration 10–13; inner spaces, women and detectives 147–50; intertextuality, freedom and agency 6–10; Khela Khela/all, film within film 41–4; media icon, emergence of 85–90; mise en scène and metteur en scène 140–3; non-normative desire and sexuality 129–32; normative and insane 132–6; normative family and dinner table conversations, films 32–5; Onyo Kothao 44–6; performance and transposition, films 35–6; preparatory notions of dispersal 125–7; queer aesthetics of 204–18; queerness, performing 14–19; Shohini, conversation with 227–39; stardom 98–9, 218; style and 83–99; in Tollywood 63–76; transgender narratives, in films 170–86; wardrobes 90–5

heterosexuality, compulsory 6, 16, 153, 168 hijras 18, 172–5, 221 Hirer Angti 1, 105, 145 Holliday, Ruth 94 homosexuality 14–16, 96, 132, 153, 177, 213, 219–21, 223, 244 humanism 50–1, 56–7 Indian cinema 4, 23–5, 58, 117, 160, 164, 190 Indian queer films 196 Jorgensen, Christine 173 juxtaposition 10, 53, 133–4 Kipen, David 30 language cinemas 232 The Last Lear 9, 44, 71 LGBT activism 247–8 LGBTQ movement 205–6, 219–20 liberalisation 68, 75, 104, 108, 219, 221 The Lost Jewels 139 Mahabharata 11, 13, 182, 190–1, 212, 214–15, 237, 264, 277 Manihara 139 marriage 6, 44, 51, 156–8, 163, 165, 167, 230–1, 245 Mazumdar, Aniket 29 mentor Girish Ghosh 38, 43 The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side 8 Mishra, Debojyoti 275–7 Mitra, Arghyakamal 268–71 Mohta, Shrikant 64 Mukherjee, Srijit 20, 74 Mukherjee, Srimati 21 Mukhopadhyay, Avik 143, 265–8 Mulvey, Laura 16 neo-bhadrolok queer aesthetics 206–12 Noukadubi 16, 49, 72, 154, 156, 162–8 parallel cinema 85 patriarchy 8, 54–5, 195

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INDEX

queer: aesthetics 204–18; characters 17, 208, 216, 247; films 21, 204–5, 242, 246; politics 15, 213, 218, 221, 223; relationships 246; stereotype 19, 220, 222 Queer Movement 212, 220–1, 223 Rabindranath (1964) 12 Raincoat 16, 32, 37, 40, 67, 146–7, 153–4, 156–65, 168, 258, 268, 272, 275 Ranciere, Jacques 56–7 Rathnam, Mani 4 Ray, Satyajit 59, 139 reading, queer ways of 199–200 recovery 195–6 recuperation 195–6 retrospection 195–6 Rituparnoesque 85, 99 Robbar 3, 18, 22, 69, 83 Robinson, Andrew 168 Sarris, Andrew 29 Satyajit Ray 11, 13, 23, 59, 64, 83, 85, 87, 107, 110, 232, 234, 239, 254, 261–2 Satyanweshi 74, 141, 146 scopophilia 59–60 seeing, new ways of 198–9 self-articulation 53 Sen, Aparna 3, 260–4 sex reassignment surgery 34, 182, 197, 206, 208, 214–15, 243–4 sexual identity politics 210–11, 221 Shahni, Parmesh 93 Shree Venkatesh Films (SVF) 64–7, 70, 72–4, 155, 192, 279 Shubho Muharat 8, 42, 66, 141, 147 Sob Charitro Kalponik 2, 9, 44, 69, 71, 123–36, 146, 214, 228–30, 238 Soni, Mahendra 64 sophistication 33, 174–5 space, off-screen 54 spectators, emancipated 56–7 Staiger, Janet 30 stardom 3, 9, 19, 35, 41, 69–70, 85–6, 98–9 storytelling 2, 42, 256, 266, 270 Streer Patra 13

SVF see Shree Venkatesh Films Swamy, Anshuman 67 Tagore, Rabindranath 10–13, 40–1, 43, 50–2, 54–5, 65, 90, 96, 117, 139, 154, 162, 164–8, 182, 190–1, 193–5, 200, 212, 214–17, 222, 232–3, 264; Chitrangada 130, 182, 196, 214, 237; dance drama 43, 191, 215; work of 182 Tagore, Sharmila 254–7 Tahar Naamti Ranjana 8 telefilms 3, 6, 280 television 23, 40, 75, 86, 90, 98, 107, 109–10, 114, 116, 132, 255 Tollygunge 1, 63, 65, 67–8, 74 Tollywood 63, 69–72, 74–5, 87, 98 transgender identities 8, 171–3, 175, 184, 219, 248 transition, surgical 173, 182, 185 transsexuality 9, 94, 128–9, 130–2, 134, 172, 173, 175, 179, 184, 248 transvestism 93–4 transwomen 179, 182, 185–6 triangular love story 40 trilogy, unintended 216–18 truth 6, 35, 37, 39, 154, 159, 165–6, 181, 205, 259, 271 20 Malaltibala Lane 6 ulti-bhasa 211, 213, 221–2 Unishey April 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 20–1, 32, 44, 98, 105–6, 108–11, 209, 255–6, 261 Utsab 115 visual reference 230–1, 265 woman 7–8, 14, 17, 21, 34, 37, 39–41, 44–5, 91–3, 96–7, 128–31, 133, 141, 143–4, 146–8, 150, 171–6, 178–9, 184–5, 194, 198–9, 206, 214, 232, 234, 247–8, 264; biological 193, 216 world cinema 229 zie 174, 176, 179, 181–3, 204–6, 208–13, 215–18

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