female psyche and character motivations in their most intimate spaces? His empathetic capturing of female desolation through films like Dahan, Bariwali, Titli, Antarmahal etc. had made a welcome addition to Bengali cinema ‛ s admirable forays into exploring female identity and exploitation issues in the league of Satyajit Ray ‛ s Charulata or Aparna Sen ‛ s Paroma. But where Rituparno perhaps took further the former tales of ornate housewives wasting away to desolate lifestyles amidst family ruins was in his on-screen evocation of the female gaze in its most raw and need based sexual nitty-gritty( Chokher Bali, Antarmahal, Noukadubi...). Ghosh ‛ s heroines may be shy, but they have rarely been ashamed of acknowledging their natural urges.
I personally consider Antarmahal his most passionate statement, apart from being his most underrated film, for its robust and mature evocation of passion on screen, in its many opportunities and possibilities to the‘ female gaze ‛. It is erotic but not‘ sexy ‛ in the cheesy and cheap connotation of the term. It also remains Ghosh ‛ s most sexually charged offering to date that does not shy from a frank and un-aesthetic depiction of sex on screen, as it often is, in real life. Antarmahal invites you to explore some fascinating emotional foibles, creating pockets of tangible rasas – shringara( love), bibhatsa( disgust), hasya( comic) and ultimately karuna( tragic) – for the audience to savour and retain. Shringara and karuna incidentally have been the most recurrent rasas in Ghosh ‛ s oeuvre of films on romance or otherwise.
The idea of‘ romance ‛ however had ventured into an altogether unexplored gender zone in his last films with his taking up of themes on alternate sexualities with almost a vengeance like zeal – serious, sensitive and assertive – like a reformist working towards the social acceptance of a lost cause, with little concern for personal reputation. He didn ‛ t even shy to come in front of the camera to act, if need be, to make up for the lack or hesitation of good actors to play gay characters in Areykti Premer Galpo( director Kaushik Ganguly), Memories in March( director Shankar Nag) or in his most personal act on-screen, Chitrangada. The latter perhaps came closest to being his celluloid autobiography given the many rumours around his own experimentation with the idea of sex change. The overt passion in his stories with female protagonists did exchange itself for a muted unspoken articulation to make the repressed sexuality of the protagonists of these films permissible in the popular space. Yet not often have so many doomed characters in the space of one narrative disturbed us so convincingly to wrench us out of our habitual expectations of entertainment to recall and repeat our engagements with them again and again. For the still struggling for a voice LGBT cinema of India, Ghosh ‛ s above films pitch him as India ‛ s pioneer auteur in that genre.
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