Rituparno Ghosh: A Pride Icon

My friends and I believe that outside the circus, the biggest ‘joker’ in Kolkata is me. Whenever I wish to experiment with my clothes, my brother and friends would say: “If you want to be a joker, go alone. We aren’t going with you”. I become more adamant when they say this and deliberately choose a more bohemian outfit. The joker is a strange mix of laughter and despair. Behind the painted face and undying attempts at making people laugh, there lies a long history of tears. The clown has become a tragic symbol in the popular imagination. But don’t think I am talking about myself. If you find my sartorial choices eccentric, blame it on my poor aesthetics.

The quoted extract is from Rituparno Ghosh’s editorial column ‘First Person’ in the Bangla weekly Robbar/Sunday (December 20, 2009) for the cover story of that issue, ‘Joker’. While penning this article, I chanced upon this column and paused: in the passage, Ghosh has neatly captured the idea of ‘queerness’—the disruptive, the dissident, the preposterous, the tragic—in the telling symbol of the ‘joker’ or the ‘clown’.

The queer and the clown are not very different from each other—both evoke laughter and both struggle through a painful life. In this piece, Ghosh does not use the term ‘queer’, but he uses the Bangla word udbhat, which literally translates into the same. Although, in the last line of the extract, Ghosh jokingly negates that the piece has anything to do with his personal life, he actually reinforces his queerness (aka his clownishness), which appears laughable and embarrassing to many. The underlying pain in it, as one can assume, goes unnoticed.

While queerness cuts a clownish figure and evokes disapproving laughter and bullying, queerness is actually a way of life—anti-establishment, subversive, anti-normative. One may recall one of Colin Self’s tweets (2010) which aphoristically articulates the basic idea: ‘If you are not queer, you are not paying attention’.

In other words, one needs to be queer in order to cultivate a sensibility to see through what appears natural and even sacrosanct. Ghosh, all through his career, as a prolific filmmaker with 29 films to his credit, columnist, critic, lyricist, actor and talk show host, has always wrecked stereotypes and directed attention to what has, so far, passed as inviolable or unspeakable.

Sexuality notwithstanding, a queer way of life is more about disrupting norms that are often responsible for unequal opportunities, discrimination, violence and social injustice. Ghosh’s films, columns, interviews and sartorial choices, all worked towards garnering a powerful counter-discourse to patriarchy, heteronormativity and bourgeois moral paradigms, making him a cultural icon—a symbol of queer pride—long before he formally ‘came out’.

Cinematic Closet and Gender Performativity

While Ghosh’s radicalism was unequivocal in all his films, from the time he became a household name with his second venture Unishe April (19th April) 1994, he did not formally come out to his audience till 2009. In our co-edited anthology—Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender, Art—we identify his ‘coming out’ moment in the television interview with the stand-up comedian Mir on Star Jalsa. Proclaiming himself the spokesperson of the queer community, Ghosh entered into a no-holds-barred critique of the stand-up comedian who habitually mimicked him on stage for cheap entertainment:

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 behalf of all those for whom I may be a representative.

While this interview made Ghosh a model of queer activism—the first Bengali celebrity to speak about his own queerness on national television—what followed were three explicit queer films—Arekti Premer Golpo (Director: Kaushik Ganguly, 2010), Memories in March (Director: Sanjoy Nag, 2011) and Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012)—in which Ghosh played the protagonist while being part of the creative process. All three films released after the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code at the Delhi High Court in July 2009 and were informed by a new discursive category of the queer subject which did not have a precedent in Bengali cinema.

However, Ghosh’s brilliance lies in using the cinematic medium for coming out and living his queer self through voice-performances, long before anyone took notice. In a very interesting way, Ghosh used his earlier films to play out his queerness from behind the scenes—Ghosh was present in many of his films as an ‘absent’ performer, by lending his voice to several female actors; but he barely ever claimed credit for that. Therefore, for Ghosh, his films had always been a medium of liberating himself, both at the narrative as well as the performative level, years before he actually ‘came out’.

Not only that, the metaphor of the ‘closet’ recurrently returned in his films with heterosexual protagonists, starting with his earliest films. In the volume I co-edited, Richard Allen theorised how the torment of being in the closet was much too obvious in Ghosh’s heterosexual love stories, Raincoat (2004) and Noukadubi (2011). Both these films, Allen argued ...

... 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 metaphor of the closet was also conspicuous in much earlier films such as Asukh (Malaise, 1999) and Badiwali (The Lady of the House, 1999). In Asukh, the female protagonist’s mostly half-lit room, quarantined from the world, literally and metaphorically, became a closet in all its claustrophobia and despondency.

In Badiwali, in Banalata’s confinement inside an old mansion, her aloneness, her repressed sexual desires and her eventual abandonment by the man she fell in love with, Ghosh’s anguish of being in the closet became apparent to an alert viewer. Notably, the film’s credits rolled on a closed door, and the film ended focusing on an empty bed.

Most of Ghosh’s earlier films, when revisited with the consciousness of his queerness, reveal layered queer subtexts —a queer artist leaving his footprint all through in an ingenious way, which the audience, not trained in viewing art queerly, often overlooked.

Ghosh is one of the very few queer artists who judiciously used the medium of cinema for performing his sexuality when circumstances in the real world were not conducive for ‘coming out’. Later, in 2010, when Ghosh and I became close friends, he actually revealed to me how Asukh—with a female film star as protagonist—was in several ways autobiographical. I was not surprised, for, as a queer viewer such as me ‘paying attention’, the insinuations were way too blatant to be missed.

In Search of a Queer Language

As I became more and more intimate with Ghosh, I realised that his understanding of queerness stemmed primarily from lived experiences. We often discussed Euromerican queer theory, but Ghosh, as an artist, did not care for theory much. His approach to queerness was aesthetic, emotional, and deeply rooted in local cultures, as it should be with a genuine artist. Today, as debates on decolonising sexuality studies are raging in academia and on social media, one may find Ghosh’s films inaugurating this discourse more than a decade ago.

As I have argued in A Room of Hir Own: The queer aesthetics of Rituparno Ghosh (2015), Ghosh often resorted to regional vistas of queerness as his artist medium of expressing non-normative sexualities:

Arekti Premer Golpo returns to Gaudiya Vaishnavism and the androgynous figure of Lord Chaitanya; Memories in March deploys the Radha-Krishna myth; and Chitrangada…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 … Bengali audience, well-acquainted with Tagore’s works.

All through his career, Ghosh was in search of a queer language of cinema—be it in his voice impersonations, in his choice of cultural subtexts to mediate his understanding of sexuality, in creating the closet within cinematic spaces, or in his choice of Brajabuli in composing lyrics for his films, such as Raincoat and Memories in March. In Brajabuli as a vehicle of queer desires: love songs in Rituparno Ghosh’s films (2018), I have argued that the literary language Brajabuli is a mischsprache, that is, a mixture of many languages: Maithili, Bengali, Hindi and Braja-bhasa (distinct from Brajabuli):

[T]his language is neither limited by geopolitical space nor to a single linguistic community; rather it is transient, flexible, and open to accommodate mutations brought about by individual poets…Such an elastic language could therefore appropriately capture in-between-ness, excesses and fluidity of gender identities as well. In addition to that, as evidenced by Vidyapati’s poems and those of the neo-Vaishnavite poets, this language has been the vehicle of extreme passion, sexual abandon, and erotic romance, throwing to the winds puritanical reservations about them. For Ghosh, who strongly believed in locating his art in native traditions, what could be a more suitable language to channelise and also historicise queer desires and agony?

Herein lay Ghosh’s decolonising tactic of making queerness intelligible within local cultures, without once using the term ‘queer’ anywhere. It is a pity that he died too soon to fully realise his lifelong quest for a queer language.

Death and Legacy

Ghosh’s untimely demise on May 30, 2013 had a huge impact on the queer community. While one witnessed a collective mourning for this irreplaceable loss, his death also invoked a paranoia among those seeking gender reassignment surgery. The reason being the disclosure by Ghosh’s doctor Rajiv Seal—who also briefly appeared in Chitrangada—to the media about how Ghosh’s decision to undergo abdominoplasty, hormone therapy and breast implantation surgery for his role as a transvestite character in Arekti Premer Golpo (The Times of India, June 28, 2013) cost him his life.

Already suffering from diabetes mellitus type 2 and pancreatitis, the gender reassignment procedures Ghosh underwent eventually proved fatal. The debate that this revelation spurred was over the safety of gender reassignment surgeries.

While many admonished Ghosh for undergoing a sex-change, calling it reckless and unnecessary, others, familiar with the pains of gender dysphoria, empathised with him deeply. Ironically, this debate reinforced Ghosh’s status as a radical, iconoclastic artist who lived life on his own terms.

The legacy Ghosh left behind is unrivalled in the sense that he has transformed millions of lives suffering in the shadows of compulsory heterosexuality and lent them a voice. While Bengali cinema has not been able to carry forward Ghosh’s cinematic legacy due to the lack of talent in the industry, in Bengali theatre, a few interesting works, inspired by Ghosh, have appeared in the past one decade. As I have argued in my essay, ‘Rituparno Ghosh, performing arts and a queer legacy: an abiding stardom’ (2021), two of his celebrated queer films, Arekti Premer Golpo and Chitrangada, which extensively deployed theatrical techniques and tropes, inspired several plays that followed, underlining an exchange between two popular art forms and their engagement with same-sex desires. Because theatre has a limited audience, Ghosh’s influence on stage has largely gone unnoticed. But it is indisputably his films which encouraged queering of the Bengali stage, as my interviews with playwrights have confirmed.

However, the sad part is, with Ghosh’s demise, the Bengali film industry again returned to its mediocrity, and since then, there has not been a single filmmaker who could impact lives as he did.

Note: Ghosh passed away before gender-neutrality and pronoun-consciousness became a thing. Ghosh preferred ‘he’, for there was no other choice. However, in my book, I used zie, hir, etc for political correctness. Here, I chose to stick to the masculine pronoun, for I thought what’s the point, if Ghosh himself was never wary of his pronoun?

(Views expressed are personal)

Kaustav Bakshi teaches English literature and queer studies at Jadavpur University