From Desire to Selfhood: Mapping Queer Fluidity in Rituparno Ghosh’s Cinematic Journey

Abstract

Rituparno Ghosh’s late cinematic oeuvre marks a radical departure from conventional Bengali cinema by foregrounding queer subjectivities and gender fluidity within deeply personal and socio-cultural contexts. This paper examines three of his seminal works—Arekti Premer Golpo (2010), Memories in March (2010), and Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012)—as a continuum that maps the trajectory of desire, loss, and selfhood in queer lives. In Arekti Premer Golpo, Ghosh inhabits a queer filmmaker who draws parallels between his own identity and the historical figure of Chapal Bhaduri, a female impersonator in Bengali theatre, thereby situating queerness within a performative archive. Memories in March shifts the narrative from public to private spaces, depicting a mother’s journey of reconciling with her deceased son’s homosexuality through his surviving partner. The film interrogates heteronormative familial structures and foregrounds queer grief and love as equally legitimate. Chitrangada, arguably Ghosh’s most autobiographical film, fuses Tagore’s play with his own exploration of gender transition, embodying the fluidity of selfhood while negotiating the politics of body, desire, and social legitimacy. Read together, these films create a cinematic map of queer becoming in postcolonial India: from representation to recognition, and finally to transformation. They dismantle binaries of male/female, normal/other, and tradition/modernity, situating queerness as both lived experience and aesthetic resistance. Ghosh’s cinema thus becomes a site where postmodern fluidity, body politics, and the queer gaze converge, challenging the hegemonic constructs of gender and sexuality in Indian cinema.