Journey To A Newer World - A Tribute to Rituparno Ghosh

  Hail to thee, blithe spirit!  

        Bird thou never wert -  

      That from heaven or near it  

    Pourest thy full heart  

     In profuse strains of unpremeditated art... 

"Eminent filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh passes away" -- that's the ticker on a news channel that carelessly caught mie eye while stepping into the office on a regular weekday morning. And, the walk from the reception lobby to mie cubicle had me in a weird state of awe, disbelief and a sense of an irrepairable loss. there have been loads of instances of rumors about famous men's deaths and i kept praying why can't this be another on those lines.

one of the the most erudite man of our times was no more. it's indeed very tough to decipher in words what He meant to me. excusing all the adjectives, for me Rituparno Ghosh meant a deeper world of knowledge, sensibilities, charisma and yet an individual adorable to the utmost degree of perfection. for the typical bengalee boy in me, if Tagore was God as i have not seen him in flesh, Ghosh was God-sent. pardon mie prodical words of praise. yes, i'm a little too biased about him and i'm not denying...

the man marked an era of his own, but certainly it would be a falsity to state that his death marked the end of it. rather, it was him who gave a whole new meaning to the Bengali cinematic art and in the most sophisticated style carved a niche for the vernacular motion picture medium amidst the international
audience. it'll always be less, as much as is said about how Ghosh brought back the literate bengali middle-class to theatres in a post Ray-Ghatak-Sen period. His style of film-making waved the green flag for a fresh new breed of directors, who in the days later could muster the courage to venture outside formula-films or box-office-appeasing cinema.

a man, who understood the multifarious shades of human emotions and defined his own ways of sensibilities that was agreeable to some and eye-sore to others,  was advertently a true-versed artist in the craft of movie making. Ghosh said many a number of times that it was Satyajit Ray who inspired him to make films and Abanindranath Tagore taught him unaware how to tell a story. "Among all the things i do with my limited knowledge, i think i've been able to do one thing consistently and that is making films. so, in the end, i would most likely be remembered for mie films," said Ghosh, who lived his life under his own dictations.

Ghosh mostly made films in bengali, a language he was immensely proud of and felt was his very own. He felt he knew his language and it helped him express aptly every time. Somewhere, the Bengali audience identified him as a successor of Ray or Ritwik Ghatak, while i personally feel Ghosh was more of a modern-day scion of Ajay Kar or Tarun Majumder. but, that's a subjective quotient and is hence, debatable.

"Ray set a masculine prototype for film directors. People were proud of his height and his English. People (like me) who wear danglers and kajol to parties (were regarded) as an insult to Ray," Ghosh had said. the succession of creativity probably brings along loads of responsibility. the fans, the followers never wished him to get distracted, at least that's how Ghosh looked at it. they thought, now that he's in to acting - portraying prosaic and the ever-discussed-about-him gender issues, he won’t make good movies anymore. then, they thought just because he's more into dressing differently unlike common men,  his focus was getting distracted from directing good movies.

Coming to his films. The first venture Hirer Angti (1992) was not a remarkable box-office hit. i still feel, it was one of the tidiest of flicks ever made for kids after Joy Baba Felunath, Fatik Chand and the likes. He arrived in the scene permanently with his second film Unishe April (1995) that bagged him his first National Award. Since then, there was no looking back. From Dahan ('97) or Bariwali ('99) to Noukadubi (2010) or Chhitrangada (2012), in his film-making career spanning about 20 years, he dealt with the quintessential nitty gritties of human emotions, sentiments and characters. But, we never ever felt he was being preachy. Or, he was trying to impose his beliefs and his thoughts on us. it always felt so comfortably justifiable.

Ghosh always made it appear so affirmatively look-believe. He touched our lives. the most average, and yet in their own existential way, little but special stories of the middle class Bengalee. here, please allow me share an excerpt of what one of mie closest pals and a fellow scribe, Nivedita had to say -- "When he told a story, you listened. Watched, but you know what I mean. And because Ghosh was an extremely intelligent man, he knew exactly how to hook his target audience: the well schooled but very averse-to-change middle class.
So his characters would sing Rabindrasangeet and quote Tagore and Shakespeare, and the middle-class erudite would feel safe in his movies. Look, these are people just like us!”

the unpretentious portrayal of physical intimacy in Antarmahal created a subtle discomfort among his middle class Bengali audience. perhaps because, the posters have not had given them the cue. and this happened, despite the fact that his earlier film Chokher Bali depicted the young widow Binodini menstruating in a rather poignant scene and yet did not have to greet out-of-the-window criticisms just because the director was working with a Tagore novel and the sexual explicitness was tolerated for the novelist’s essential ‘sanctity’. even after all this, when he acted as a gay adman in Memories in March or the parallels of the Chapal Bhaduri in Arekti Premer Golpo, and in the same tune as Rudra in Chitrangada, a certain section of his audience seemed to have forgotten about all his past ventures in representing sexuality and showcasing the intricacies out of real-life lures, but only juxtapose the homosexual imagery and full stop. Rituparno lived with a strong gender connotation and vice versa, but i'll came back to that later.

just because, i've talked about his first film let me also quickly touch upon his released last. Chitrangada - The Crowning Wish. i firmly believe, if it was not him, it would have never been possible for anyone else to have woven the characters out of Mahabharata and the famous Tagore novel in sheer poetic narration in the context of a present day plot. the whole idea of Kaamdev being some kind of a plastic surgeon or a beautician to transform the conceptually Kuroopa princess to the Suroopa (beautiful) Chitrangada in order to make Arjuna fall in love couldn't have been more neat.

however, Ghosh, who won twelve National Awards out of his nineteen released movies, always credited his luck somewhere behind his exploits and said he was an overrated director. "how much i try i will never be able to feature among the first 200 filmmakers of the world, so might as well spend rest of the time watching their films," he had said to Moon Moon Sen on her chat-show for TV Southasia.

an ardent lover of hilsha and sleep, Ghosh loved his city Calcutta and said he probably cannot live without it. Unlike Ray, who composed many of the scores for his films himself, Ghosh said he loved all kinds of music but did not understand the intricacies much himself. He loved Rabindrasangeet more than anything and that probably reflected in his films too. Renowned music composer Debajyoti Mishra, who also scored music for many of Ghosh's films, said he knew music like nobody else. The lyrics of various songs penned by Ghosh, especially the ones in Maithili for his own film Raincoat bears testimony to the fact that he was no less of a remarkable poet or a lyricist.

now beyond the world of films, for which people better know him for, there are much more to the versatility of the maverick. Ghosh had been into costume designing for acclaimed theatre director Suman Mukhopadhyay's plays. He was an elaborate fashion connoisseur himself as designer Sarbari Dutta describes. He had also been into jewellery designing. After having started his career with advertising, Ghosh laster had edited copies for ABP, was appointed the creative head of the Bengali section of Broadcast World Wide, popularly known as Tara, hosted two most prominent chat shows on Bengali television, scripted one widely-followed tele soap revolving around Tagore in a modern Bengalee mindset, etc, etc, etc. however, Ghosh once said, due to the entire limitations of a regional channel and the dictates of a market, he couldn't enjoy TV just for the sake of creative joy. for him, making a film was like having a picnic with all the unbound creative fun involved.

despite all his achievements and the following he garnered to himself, somewhere somewhat his mannerisms drew undue attention. He was tagged as an LGBT activist, a gay icon or even a transgender elite. He never denied he was effeminate and admitted that his success as a celebrity entitled him or, rather gave him the freedom to choose his own terms that many common people cannot.

in his own words, "gender is fluid. there's nothing called a gender monolyth." how can one ensure that a man is bound to behave only as a man oozing only machismo all the time and in no way entitled to be vulnerable or even unwillingly bestowed with the rigidity that he cannot let go a woman-like expression ever? it's not about a sexual minority cause minority is a subjective quotient. he was definitely not the only man effeminate. Ghosh never demanded that he can rope-walk between the loose nooses of sexual boundaries.

"Yes. I enjoy being in the third gender. I am not a 'man-man'. Neither am i a woman. I've heard people asking if i'm now going to wear a saree. my answer is no. the whole concept of being unisex has been usurped by women. if a woman wears a pair of jeans, nobody questions her. but if a man wears a necklace, he is never called regal. i have not worn anything that Indian men have never worn traditionally. indian men have neither worn a saree nor a ghagra choli. hence, i don't see myself doing that either. there was so much speculation over whether i had a sex change operation. i haven't done that. to reduce my waistline, i have only done an abdominoplasty for "Just Another Love Story" [Dir. Kaushik Ganguly, 2011]. i don't want to be a woman. if i ever consider it, i would not be secretive about it. After all, there is no shame in it," Ghosh said in an interview.


putting aside the calculations and miscalculations of the differences between sensitivity and weakness, appropriate sensibility and unwarranted tenderness, or even that of learning and pride, for me, Ghosh can never be dead. His works will forever keep nurturing all the fondness towards him. just that, his untimely demise snatched the opportunity from us to amaze ourselves with -- movies on Jorasanko Thakurbari, where Ghosh thought about putting Tagore only as a side actor, a biopic on Bankim Chandra Chatterji's Debi Chaudhurani - the bandit queen of Bengal, a movie on the life of Buddhha or, a new-age narration of his
favourite epic the Mahabharata -- Ghosh had been planning to work on these projects, which are now going to miss out being interpreted by His genius.

for me, there'll be no more wait for his movies, no more arguments with friends on his plots or his consciously-forced-upon-himself cissy acting, no more showing off pride just because he belonged to my alma mater... for me, Rituparno will continue to stay as an inspiration to knowledge, class and sheer sophistication, just as Tagore stays with me as a part of mie living...

"For he being dead, with him is beauty slain,

And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again."

Credits:

Various Interviews given by Rituparno Ghosh
Percy Bysshe Shelley - To a Skylark
William Shakespeare - Venus and Adonis
academia.edu - Koustav Bakshi's interview with Ghosh
Saregama Bengali Channel
http://nivisbollywoodblog.blogspot.in/ - Nivedita Bhattacharjee
Picture Courtesy - Google Images
And, lots of love and respect for the Man