Borrowing, becoming and the question of the self in Sob Choritro Kalponik

Abstract

Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh’s Sob Choritro Kalponik (Afterword, 2009) introduces from the outset questions of plagiarism and simulation. In this essay, 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’. Ghosh prepares his audience for such crossings and merging by introducing the notion of the dispersal of the name or self. The essay substantially engages Ghosh’s situating of non-normative forms of sexualized desire in the film, specifically gay and transsexual desire. In an intertextual reading of Sob Choritro and Ghosh’s Chitrangada (The Crowning Wish, 2012), I address how the films offer commentary on how forms of ‘becoming’ are received or rejected in an aestheticized art world or ‘dream’ world and in a day-to-day lived reality. In this regard, this essay draws on a special issue of the magazine Rōbbar (Sunday) published in Kolkata 10 days after Ghosh’s death and dedicated to him. I focus specifically on a series of editorials written previously by Ghosh in which he muses on sexual identity, gayness and transsexuality; the amendment of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code; and media representations of homosexuals in India in the twenty-first century. Finally, the essay utilizes Coleridgean and Nietzschean notions of idealizing to show how in Sob Choritro 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.