The endangered city in Rituparno Ghosh’s early cinema of confinement

Abstract

This essay looks at the cinema of Rituparno Ghosh from the vantage point of urban cultural studies. Ghosh was at a forefront of a new cinema in the mid-1990s that purportedly ‘brought the Bengali middle classes back to the theatre’. Under the rubric of this claim which is verifiably true, lies the understated idea: who or what was the nature of this new middle class and how in the initial years of globalization did they relate to the imperatives of cultural and global capital. One obvious critical paradigm in the early cinema of Ghosh is its internality, a parcelling out of larger conceptions of space and place into metonymic, drawing-room dramaturgy, a chambering of orchestrated relationships away from the politically volatile, lived, identifiable vestiges of the city of Calcutta, where the films are apparently based. This article hopes to add to contemporary debates about the de-politicization of the middle classes by looking at Ghosh’s cinema as a major contributor to middle class’s conscious, cultural self-fashioning under globalization and the construction of their spatial and locational aesthetics. It concludes by looking into how Ghosh’s films severely challenge notions of space around the idea of the ‘cinematic city’, and how that ultimately relates to his assumed position as a feminist filmmaker.