‘Just like a film star!’: being Rituparno Ghosh

Abstract

Rituparno Ghosh had an ambiguous position in popular media discourses and the Bengali bhadralok public sphere. On the 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 et al.; on the other hand, 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 middleclass 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. For Ghosh, his larger persona was all about performance, and about presenting oneself to the world. He indeed displayed several facets that were not essentially linked to his director’s persona, appearing in protean avatars in the cultural sphere. At a later stage of his career, he forayed into acting. At the same time, he almost had an absent-presence in many of his films. Consequently, his status as a director was repeatedly being reconstituted by his role as a performer and celebrity. Ghosh, it therefore seems, quite unequivocally embodied all three aspects of stardom, as explained by Geraghty: a celebrity, a professional and performer. This article investigates the performance of Ghosh’s star text and the varied layers which enabled that construction. It will inquire into his performance linked to his sartorial style and the expressive nature of his queer identity. The texts and contexts that contributed to the style of being Rituparno Ghosh, the star performer, who was much more than a filmmaker, can possibly be given an umbrella term: the ‘Rituparnoesque’.