Unleashing Queer Possibilities

The inability to listen, internalise and empathise marks many Indian movies on marginalised characters and themes Rituparno Ghosh's Chitrangada is different-because Ghosh was different

- Tanul Thakur

RITUPARARNO Ghosh’s Chitrangada (2012) opens with a shot of a choreographer, Rudra (Ghosh), in a hospital bed for a sex reassignment surgery. The camera descends on him, forming an eventual frame where the bedside rod partitions his face. This economic cinematography encapsulates the whole film in a few seconds: a (biological) man split in two halves. The person the world wants him to be, and the person he is. Or, more appropriately, who he is not. Not an engineer, not macho, not normal. Not enough. This imposition of identity, though, can find its resolution in a simple question: Why not ask Rudra?

The inability to listen and observe—and internalise and empathise—marks many Indian movies on marginalised characters and themes. The counterparts of ‘white saviours’ are less interested in talking, and more obsessed with talking down, to their audiences. But Chitrangada is different—because Ghosh was different. Over 19 films spanning two decades, he first untangled his audiences, then untangled himself. In the first phase of his career dominated by elite domestic dramas—such as Unishe April (1994), Bariwali (1999) and Utsab (2000)—he wooed the Bhadralok audiences, fed up with brain-dead kitsch, back to the theatres. He broadened his ambition in the aughts, casting Bollywood stars in Chokher Bali (2003), Raincoat (2003) and The Last Lear (2007). And in his last few years, he turned the lens on himself, both as a filmmaker and as an actor, directing and appearing in movies that probed the confusion of same-sex desire, the tyranny of propriety and the prison of identities—a swansong doubling up as both filmmaking and homecoming.

Based on Rabindranath Tagore’s play,