Happy Birthday, Rituda

Rituparno Ghosh in Chitrangada

[I am fondly calling Rituparno Ghosh Rituda here, as they were widely called. Although 'da' means elder brother, I mean it as elder sibling. I am using they/them pronouns for Rituda as I believe they would've preferred it if pronouns were a thing then. I could not find a better way to introduce everyone to this website, and me as a student and discourser of film]

Rituparno Ghosh was the first person that I really found like me. Now that I think of it, that's because we both fall into a very niche community of people, trans and Bengali/Indian. And as I study them more, I understand it is more so because we share two more identities - that of being an artist and being lonely.

Hirer Angti was the first film of Rituda that I watched, when I was probably in class 5 or 6. It is coincidentally the first film Rituda made, released in 1992. It was their only film made for children, produced by Children's Film Society of India.

A few years later, I saw Subho Mohurut (2003), which I distinctly remember was my introduction to Realism in Cinema. I was astonished to see people cursing in Bengali, people having really messy relationships, and Sharmila Tagore and Rakhee acting like real human beings in real life! I was blown away.

Dahan opened my eyes to a more nuanced movement of feminism, as it was told through a then rare feminine gaze, humanizing the two women protagonists, and showing women supporting, as well as oppressing each other via their various degrees of conditioning within the patriarchial family and societal structures.

After that, I watched Dahan (1997), which is still one of my favourite films, starring two of my favourite actresses, Rituparna Sengupta and Indrani Haldar. Another lesson of cinematic realism for me. it was the first time I saw women wearing nighties inside their house, like I've seen women in most middle-class Bengali households in real life. They both won National Film Awards for Best Actress for that film, making history as the first two awardees from the same film. Dahan opened my eyes to a more nuanced movement of feminism, as it was told through a then rare feminine gaze, humanizing the two women protagonists, and showing women supporting, as well as oppressing each other via their various degrees of conditioning within the patriarchial family and societal structures. The film didn't end with a huge climax, but left a much longer effect on me than most films I had seen before. It taught me what's important in a story, and that not all stories need to have the same Western structure to capture the audience's attention. In fact it was a very Indian form of storytelling: more cyclical, nuanced, parallel and artistic.

I had fallen in love with this storyteller, in the way they looked at the world, in the way they made us look at it. Their sense of aesthetics, the things they noticed about life and stressed on on-screen; the way they seemed to be enraged by the same things I was enraged by in life; all of this made me feel something I had seldom felt: understood.

I obviously felt most understood by their trilogy of explicitly queer films, Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012) which they themself wrote and directed, Arekti Premer Golpo (2010) which they co-wrote, and Memories in March (2010) which they wrote, and all of which they starred in as the protagonist. These three films starred Rituda in characters that were all queer and creative people, seemingly extensions of themself as a person, and gave Bengal the first mainstream queer representation ever.

Chitrangada was a milestone film for me, I watched it at a time I was struggling with my own sexual orientation and gender identity, and I cried in almost every scene. Rituda had reached their most reflexive in themes and complex in form in that film, very near to the end of their career. The film was an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore's dance drama Chitrangada, which was in turn inspired by a tale from the Mahabharata, so watching the film in its extremely rich cultural context made me find a huge sense of history in my identity, firmly rooting myself in Indian and Bengali history, and thinking to myself "I have a place in this culture." Rituda's character Rudro partly undergoes sex-reassignment surgery in the film, although for different reasons, but I felt a euphoria in their on-screen transition like I could suddenly connect to something deep within me and finally felt like I found myself.

Watching [Chitrangada] in its extremely rich cultural context made me find a huge sense of history in my identity, firmly rooting myself in Indian and Bengali history, and thinking to myself "I have a place in this culture."

In my first year of college, I wrote an essay analyzing the overall body of work of Rituda (although I have yet to engage with all of their work, and barely introduced my readers and re-introduced myself to their works), and in my second year I started doing research on Queer representation in their films, and did a case study on their Queer Trilogy that I mentioned above. Now that I am expanding my relationship with them, beyond knowing them as a screenwriter-director-actor, I am getting acquainted with them as a writer, talk show host, celebrity, poet, spoken word artist, scholar, connoisseur of culture, and so on. But to me, like Rabindranath Tagore was to them, Rituda will always first and foremost remain my friend, a companion who understood me when no one did. When even I couldn't make sense of myself, they showed me the path of art, that today I am treading on, to find myself truly.

When even I couldn't make sense of myself, they showed me the path of art, that today I am treading on, to find myself truly.

I always wondered how people just accepted Rituda as the first glaringly blatantly queer celebrity in Bengal, when I used to see how extraordinarily popular they were as a celebrity in the state, and how people, "despite" their visible queer gender non-conforming identity will undoubtedly recognize them as one of the finest directors of Bengal, and even India, and is unanimously regarded as the inheritor of Satyajit Ray's legacy. On doing more research, I found out that that wasn't true at all, and to the extent that it was, was an exception. I feel that even today, as I saw in the recent documentary on their life, "The Bird of Disk" by Sangeeta Datta, or in various academic writings that I am reading (with the exception of a few such as those by Kaustav Bakshi and Parjanya Sen), and the various comments on their movies on YouTube, Rituda is regarded by various interviewees as a gay man who wanted to be a woman, and whose "wish" (even greed) in wanting to become a woman lead to their early demise, or in many comments, blogs, articles, completely ignoring or almost erasing their sexuality and GNC (gender non-comforming) expression. As a person who falls under the trans umbrella, I personally feel that I understand them in a way that very few people can, and gender dyphoria is something that they really grappled with in their films and life. Keeping the discourse of their gender identity and orientation into account is very important to understand their art, and we see that inclusion and analysis happening in the first scholarly book published on their life, Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art, edited by Sangeeta Datta, Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta. I am really thankful for this edition, and am currently reading it as part of my research.

As a person who falls under the trans umbrella, I personally feel that I understand them in a way that very few people can, and gender dyphoria is something that they really grappled with in their films and life. Keeping the discourse of their gender identity and orientation into account is very important to understand their art.

One of the few reaons they could dress like themself ("cross-dress" as it would be called then) was because they had the "celebrity" card, and had earned that space to be "eccentric," as they mentioned in an interview. They wore kohl, and dangly earrings, and androgynous clothes, and fancy sunglasses in the last few years of their life. Seeing them grow from the curly haired feminine boy into the bald fashion icon, looking so splendid and more comfortable into their own being, was a euphoric joy for me as I looked up to them as someone who walked this path from a generation before me.

I am so sad that I never got a chance to meet Rituda in person, and will always regret it. When they passed away in 2013, at the age of 49, I had recently moved to India and didn't really have any idea about who they were, or had not seen any of their films. I only heard the radio covering how much they meant to Bengal and how fans were extremely emotional about their demise.

Today, Rituda would have turned 60 years old. I would have found them down, somehow, somewhere in Kolkata and made my first film with them. I would've hugged them and cried so much. I just want to give that lonely misunderstood adolescent "boy" a sense of self, and tell him that you can be who you are. "Chitrangada ekta ichher golpo, that you can choose [to be who you are]" (Rituda had said 'your gender', but I'm sure this is what he meant in today's language. I hope they knew the impact they had on the Queer people in Bengal, India and the world, and how much (even if little) we have progressed as a community.

Rituda, I love you. You inspire me to be the person I am today.

~ Komolika.