A performance of an epical scale was unfolding before my eyes. The long winding queue— some passionately discussing hir* films, some staring into nothing, some exasperated with the static queue, some just talking weather, food, sex and anything— at one end, the police trying to manage the crowd at another, a queer collective conducting a condolence meet a little further from the core zone, and then the hundreds congegrated to star gaze and gaze at nature’s “freak shows”, who had all come to pay tribute to their icon, Rituparno Ghosh, whose body was kept at the Nandan Film Centre and of course the media lapping up the visuals to deliver them, oven fresh to you.
Solemn faces, sobbing faces, inquisitive faces and the calm face. As I walked away from Rituparno, who lay there in a Zen like state, thrown into surrealistic relief by the cacophony of singers belting out Rabindrasangeet listlessly and the steady stream of people walking around the body and stepping out, my mind wandered off to a performance I had seen on video sometime back. The Artist is Present by Marina Abramović, the dame of performance art. The woman who had ceaselessly used her body as a vehicle which trundled through the viewer’s complacency, performances so disturbing and violent at times, they begged the question, “Why or how is this art?” For 40 years she had lived with the label alternative. But at 63, she would set a new benchmark, a catharsis through which neither she nor her audience could emerge unscathed. At the Museum of Modern Art, while a retrospective of her pieces were being performed by young artistes handpicked by her, Marina would sit on a chair in the atrium and across her would sit an audience member. There would be a table between them. No physical contact, no verbal communication. Just the audience member making eye contact with Marina, as long as the viewer wished. The performance would start just before the museum opened for the day and would continue until it closed. With time, at Marina’s instruction, the table was also removed. A needless intervention, it had become. This way, she made herself more vulnerable to the viewer’s aggression (Not all viewers would remain seated, would they? After all, the veneer of civilization is paper thin. All it requires is an exhortation by a leader and we are all out with our blinding bestiality). Day in, day out. For three months at a stretch. Two pairs of eyes meeting amid the noise of spectators. Some even trying to impede the performance by throwing pamphlets and shouting, “Is aiming a gun to the forehead also performance?” But nevertheless the performance would go on. Time was not merely an ephemera, it was a solid block that could break your back. But you had to walk it. Alone. Amidst all.
The curator and Marina’s assistant started panicking at the end of 2 months. Her back was giving away. But giving up was no option. The body is only the trap that the artiste has to transcend, says Marina. Finally the performance concluded at the end of the stipulated 3 months.
And here I was at the Nandan Film Centre. One of India’s most celebrated and definitely the most ridiculed filmmaker had suddenly died. The suddenness was bizarre. But equally bizarre was the State managed carnival. A group of transwomen and hijdas were attempting to get into the queue midway. Suddenly a police officer walked upto them, “You don’t need to wait! Just get in directly!” The group chuckled and walked into the “performance zone” with a Kunderasque lightness. Inclusion yet exclusion, alone yet connected. How would Rituparno react to this kind of ‘benevolence’? After all, wasn’t the concession, a mark of respect for the deceased director, even in a perverse way? Throughout hir lifetime, the media, the society strove to mark hir sexuality, hir body into a gender box and simultaneously Rituparno refused to pander to such efforts, celebrating and performing hir androgyny. So even in death, to me, the performance continued. What if Rituparno in hir handwoven turban, silk kurti and clunky silver jewellery sat across the table? And one by one, walked in the audience members, the lovers, the family, and the journalists? And just two pairs of eyes rested on each other? What kind of a dynamic would this engagement make? Would this solo performance, still require the accompaniments of music?
On one hand were Rituparno’s searing editorials, brilliant in their sentence construction, choreography of words, and luminously morbid and frank in their approach (piece after piece ruminating on death, loneliness, society’s crude homophobia), hir films that framed the upwardly mobile middle class and their angst with a surprising candour and on the other was hir gender bending dressing sense. On one hand, was hir acute sense of aesthetics, encyclopedic knowledge of literature and on the other was hir body, which became a seat of an ongoing performance. And caught between the crossfire, was the Bengali bhadralok. How were they to negotiate their aversion for his body and the love for his creations? Rituparno had time and again spoken about this predicament of hir audience. On one hand, they had annointed hir as the next Ray but on the other, hir gender fluidity was a stumbling block in their preset image of suave masculinity aka Ray. So mimicry, vulgar speculations about hir personal life on one hand and Rituparno’s flamboyance and diva like persona that brushed off all criticism, on the other. Alone.
However, this body also became the limit which the director ultimately could not transcend. Hir last three films (in all three Ghosh acted but it was the last one,Chitrangada where Ghosh was the director) did bring the third gender to the drawing room. They remain important markers in the history of Indian queer cinema. But just that. They wallow in languorous depression, affected accents, clunky dialogues, overwrought set design, a superficially imposed Tagore and an overarching claustrophobia which alienates the viewer. The emotional graphs of the characters do not feel organic. This (if all these films are taken as one project) is one manifestation of loneliness, that to me, is mediocre cinema because it is only about using your difference and poking and prodding it in a luxuriant celebration of defeat and loss. The status quo remains undisturbed, it is only stirred.
Yet, if solitude and loneliness were states of mind to be discovered only through cinema, then I shall always remain thankful to Rituparno Ghosh. Growing up solely on a diet of video cassettes of Bollywood action flicks like Suhag, Mohra, Gopi Kishan and the Westerns (my father being an action aficionado), it was only after his sudden death (so far back, that I can’t remember whether it was equally bizarre), that I understood that cinema could also be about moments, you could identify with. The year was 1999. I was in Class VIII. Back then, Doordarshan used to telecast national award winning regional films on Saturdays. One such Saturday, I had seen Rituparno’s Unishe April (19th April). A complete break down of communication between a mother-daughter, where each interaction is a burdensome formality, the daughter running her finger through fire contemplating suicide, the complete silence pricked by the leaky faucet, the tears… all this was way too real. How I had resented my father when he refused to believe me when I told him about the inappropriate behaviour of the cook, how I resented my mother who failed to protect me… and how I learnt to protect myself… how my interaction with my mother went through sharp crests and troughs… the film seemed to validate my mindscape, my own world where it was just me and my thoughts, my books and now cinema. A solitude that became the salve against the taunts of classmates because my mother never allowed me alone anywhere (this was her defense against more loss in life), the loneliness that became the shield against the jeering because I never showed any enthusiasm for outdoor sports (and that’s why reading about Amitav Ghosh’s aversion for sports later, only fortified that shield)… And here character after character, naked in their longings, emotions, desires, complexities…. films that helped me respect my mother as a woman, and not just a mother, an asexual being up on a pedestal. Ghosh became the new accompanist in my solo world, for a while. However, it was only later that I realized through other people’s cinema and through life, that the director who had opened up new vistas for me was also limited by his mindscape. Life doesn’t provide the neat solutions that Rituparno’s verbose chamber dramas did. There is a vastness and inherent incompleteness to life that Rituparno failed to encapsulate.
In Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a guide takes a writer and a scientist to the Zone, created by the fall of a meteorite. It’s a place where people go and never come back. It nestles within it The Room, where all your desires are fulfilled. Now, such a place can be the seat of immense subversion or terrorism too. So the Zone is cordoned off by the police. However, the guide knows ways to circumvent the guards. So after great detours, setbacks and obstacles, he succeeds in bringing the writer and scientist to the threshold of The Room. But are our desires ever absolute? Is the ‘me’ of 1999, the ‘me’ of today? Then, how can one say that there can be no incompleteness after one’s desires are fulfilled? After all, are we even sure of what we want is what we want? The writer and scientist refuse to enter The Room. But they have traveled a long way. They may be on their way back home, but the journey they had undertaken ensures that they are not the same men they were before they hit the road for the Zone. This solitary quest to delve within as well as without is what Ghosh doesn’t give me.
Even in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the quest for truth, one’s love and one’s conscience constantly conflict with each other to open up new zones of ambiguity. The dialectics that must go on. And on. To quote the master, “Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”
But then, the foundation of a great part of ‘me’ today rests on the ‘me’ who had discovered Rituparno Ghosh one Saturday afternoon. All by myself. For myself. The person who taught me to engage with disproportions of the world, the person who taught me to not remain rigid and static… to keep moving.
And for this I go back to Stalker again. At one point, the stalker, the guide says, “When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”
The many journeys, the many possibilities towards what is known as truth. Only towards.
*Rituparno Ghosh has time and again clarified in interviews that ‘he’ is not a woman. He will never wear women’s clothes. He has extensively spoken about his gender fluidity. But English is a gendered language. Hence the use of the pronoun ‘hir’ respecting Ghosh’s gender politics. Ironically, Bengali has no gender pronouns. The same Bengal which still doesn’t know on what firmament to place the director.
