Rituparno Ghosh: what he showed an average movie goer

There are famous men, and then there are famous men. There are those that you know of, because they are on TV, have won awards and are popular. And then there are those that touch your lives. You don’t know them personally but wish with all your heart you did, because when you know them through their works, you feel like it makes you a better person.

I was inadvertently introduced to Rituparno Ghosh by my mother in the early 90s. The mother, you see, is hugely responsible for turning the daughter into a lover of Indian cinema. I watched Qayamat se Qayamat Tak even before I was enrolled in school and fell in love with Salman Khan in Maine Pyaar Kiya when I was 4 years old. Yes, that happened. And continued, till our man decide to go black-buck hunting, at which point I decided sanity is important even while crushing on screen actors.

Anyway, so ma was making plans to go watch a movie (Bengali!) and I was not a part of it. Grumble, grumble, some heated words and a conversation that ended in “it is not a movie for kids.”

This was before Google was omnipresent and at our beck and call, so it took me some time before I read up on reviews of Unishe April, and whatever I could find about this new director. Background here: this was at a time when no self respecting middle class Bengali bhadralok would go watch a Bengali commercial movie in theatres. And I don’t blame them. The 90s gave us some really really mind numbingly stupid atrocities in the name of cinema. At least in Bollywood, the women were pretty and the men were handsome, and there were good songs.

Bengali movies during this time were really just on-screen versions of jatra, (look it up, I don’t know how to translate that in English) with garish red lipstick and yellow blouses and high pitched dialogue delivery. How do I know? Well.

Eventually Ma said I could come if I wanted to. I went, with a big show of reluctance (who wants to go watch a Bengali movie? Also, you said no, so I won’t go any more, etc) and 30 minutes into the movie I knew I had watched one of the best movies in my 10 years of living. Note here, after that, every time I watched a Ghosh movie, I felt the same. I haven't watched Sunglass yet, but am very familiar with every other movie made by him that has seen the light of day.  

So Ghosh took Bengali commercial movies by its horns and completely turned it over. People in his movies did not yell and scream, they did not wear strange clothes and actually felt like real people.

Much like Rowling did with reading, Ghosh re-introduced the Bengali middle class to Bangla movies. And remember, for a people whose standards are the likes of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak that is no small task.

But here’s the thing, Ray and Ghatak were long gone, and then there were none. Except for the one odd Aparna Sen, but her movies were/are too few to bring a massive cultural change. It was almost like the cinema gods were punishing the local industry in their attempt to maintain equilibrium of quality. Like the gods were saying “you Bengalis have gotten too used to high quality in Ray, Sen, Ghatak, so now you’ll have to deal with just the opposite. We give you inanity like there never was.”

In the meanwhile, an entire generation grew up going to English medium schools, went out for fancy dinners and had started experimenting with foreign concepts like “dating”, had already made jeans and making-out a part of their growing up, and equaled bangla movies with rustic nonsense.

Then Ghosh came along, changed all of that, and even made his audience think.

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!”

Then, they would cheat, hurt, fight and even rape behind closed doors. “Look, these are people just like us!”

He “got” women, and when he recreated Binodini on screen, you were enamored by her silent strength.  Then, because you are a good middle class man/woman, you’d say you’d rather an Asha than a Binod, but Ghosh showed you how just like there are men and boys, there are women and girls. His Binod can, without missing a beat, retort, “shongo korbey, chinho rakhbey na, taai kokhono hoy?” (Somewhat crudely, "you'll want to mate but you won't have any imprint on yourself, how is that fair?") I think Tagore would have approved. 

Then he took his prowess to Bollywood and gave the industry one of its finest dramas in the name of Raincoat. In which he retold O’Henry’s Gift of the Magi, and said so clearly. But because he was a man who knew what he wanted and knew he was the best at it, he largely stuck to Bengali and instead of chasing famous actors in their industry, got them to come down to his land and remade them. Aishwarya Rai, Amitabh Bachchan, Rakhi, Abhishek Bachchan, Sharmila Tagore. All remade by Ghosh.

And while doing all this, he boldly cross-dressed and shred a mimicry artist to pieces in a talk show when he decided the world had had enough cheap humour at the expense of men like him. Effeminate, like he put it. 

And he does it confidently, gracefully, with a smile and never once raising his voice. Just like in his movies. While the infinitely more “manly” TV artist looked on like a deer caught in headlights, and struggled to find coherent words.

And he was brave. He retold Tagore’s Chitrangada to suit today’s world, he used his own voice to dub for a woman’s character in a movie, he portrayed the story of a gay man and his mother’s shock when she found out, he talked of marital rape ages ago when the Indian legal system will still not recognize it, he composed songs in Brajbuli and he told us, much like many many great authors have told us over and over again : it is important to think, it is important to be compassionate and liberal and open to ideas, and it is important to stand up for your rights and against encroachment and it can all be done beautifully, without raising your voice. 

This is how the middle class Bengali went back to the theatres. Which is how they can now dare to experiment within the commercial framework and even get funding for these movies. I can still remember a time, not very long ago, when a movie about three girl friends would be only released in Nandan (art-film circles) and sink without a trace. And many movies, like Bhooter Bhobisyot would not be made because, maybe, no one would fund it. Today, cool hipsters go watch them with popcorn and sodas.