May 30 this year marked 12 years since the passing of Rituparno Ghosh, Indian Bengali filmmaker, writer, actor, and cultural icon. A full decade since his absence began. This piece is a remembrance of that absence, a reflection on how his presence and body of work continue to shape and transform many of our ways of thinking.
“You’re just like Rituparno Ghosh.” I can’t clearly remember who first said this to me, now that I’m in my mid-thirties. But I do remember how, in my early 20s, this comparison left me stirred, part embarrassed, part afraid of being too easily read, and mostly, deeply self- conscious. I had a good idea what the comment meant – effeminacy. Yet, I often wondered, was it about my dark brown skin, or the overly delicate way I spoke Bengali (some would say in a coquettish tone)? Perhaps it was all of those things. Still, beyond the embarrassment, I began to love the idea that this strange comparison was, in some way, a celebration of my own desire to be like him – Rituparno.
Whoever made that comment likely didn’t mean it precisely. But in their eyes, there was a flicker of recognition, as if they had caught sight of something others hadn’t quite seen yet. The way I moved my hands, the rhythm of my walk, my soft voice had reminded them of someone. A name. One that appeared now and then on Indian TV channels aired in Bangladesh. Someone who wore jewellery on talk shows, who dressed ornately, and who spoke of cinema in a feminine, uncommon manner. Someone whose films were filled with women who spoke slowly, within carefully decorated rooms, who fell into love messily, and floated in longing. A strange kind of ache, where the male lovers always seemed to experience love in contrast to a woman’s emotional labour. For many of us who were neither quite men nor women in our early 20s, watching Rituparno’s films felt like a mirror. “I’m just like him,” we thought, adrift in unstructured love, floating and drowning.
At that time, I didn’t fully know Rituparno Ghosh, but I knew that being compared to him meant something different. It made others uncomfortable, but gave me, in secret, a strange sense of pride. To me, he was initially a celebrated director of ‘different’ Bengali films. Then slowly, he became more than that; he became a tone, a gesture, an influence. Someone whose presence told others that it was possible to inhabit your body on your terms. It was possible to articulate your internal complexity, one word at a time.
Growing up in a struggling lower-income family in Dhaka, I didn’t often have access to the world of films Rituparno created. Every time I did stumble upon one, or sought one out, it didn’t feel like just watching a film; it felt like glimpsing an alternate life. A different possibility for who I could become.
In Rituparno’s women characters, I constantly found traces of myself. Women who waited, who gave, who loved, who returned without ever receiving fully. Or left, but always with some lingering desire. Their bodies, their subtle sharpness, their sexuality, the architecture of their relationships, it all felt like kinship. I didn’t know why exactly, but I wanted to be like them. Or perhaps, I already was. I knew my lover was like the husband in Dosar, he sought refuge in another love without warning. And yet, even after finding out, I sought refuge in him. I knew I was like the wife in Antarmahal. I may never receive love, but my eyes would still long, relentlessly.
These yearnings, these recognitions, these cinematic understandings, they all unfolded in a society where being told “You’re becoming like a girl” was enough to make you shrink in shame. Where love meant something hidden. A kind of quiet sorrow. In that silence, I found refuge in Rituparno’s cinema, and that refuge taught me that sometimes to understand yourself, you have to witness someone else from afar. For me, that distant someone was Rituparno.
Our lives couldn’t have been more different. He belonged to Kolkata’s elite cultural sphere, upper-class, educated, Hindu, and assigned male at birth. He gradually made his gender presentation visible. I, on the other hand, was a working-class Muslim trans girl from Dhaka, whose body still felt unclaimed, whose future was always uncertain. And yet, I felt like we knew each other through his films, through his voice, through the contemplations he offered about selfhood.
I understood that connection even more deeply when I moved to the US for higher education. Back in Dhaka, I had studied fine arts at Charukola, the public art school. Here in the West, I encountered queer theory in a private art school. That’s where I came across José Esteban Muñoz’s writing. His book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics initially confused me, but slowly, one idea began to stick – sometimes you find yourself in a culture that was never made for you, yet you find ways to relate to it, to repurpose it. You take what speaks to you, reject what doesn’t, and build a third space in between, where your existence can finally make sense.
That framework unlocked something. I realized I hadn’t related to Rituparno’s work because it represented me directly. No, I had found parts of myself in him, parts that he may never have intended to offer, but that I claimed anyway. I read him “against the grain,” as Muñoz would say. Despite our differences of class, religion, city, and experience, I made him mine.
Of course, this kind of reading requires cultural access. In Bangladesh, Rituparno’s work was never widely understood. The few who could engage with his films or appearances, like me, were mostly city dwellers with relative privilege. His complex femininity, his visible queerness, these didn’t easily enter the public imagination outside elite circles. And even when they did, it was often through ridicule. “What’s this?” “Why’s a man dressing like that?” These questions produced discomfort, but also, for some of us, sparked a quiet longing. Watching Rituparno, some of us thought, there, someone is doing it. Someone is becoming.
I saw this class divide up close when I met queer and trans friends who had never watched his films. They knew his fashion. They knew his body. But not how a director could transform difference into something normal. A friend once said to me, “Rituparno is for your kind of people,” trans folks with access to books, to theory, to TV, to art school. I felt embarrassed hearing that, but it was also true. And yet, within that privileged access, I learned something important – visibility isn’t always power. Visibility can be recognition, but it can also be exclusion. When I walked the streets of Dhaka, not quite a man, not in a saree, people sometimes called me “Rituparno.” Not as praise, but to mark me as different. To say: “You don’t belong.”
As Muñoz wrote, disidentification isn’t simply resistance. It’s not a yes or a no. It’s a negotiation, a third place between acceptance and rejection. Through Rituparno, I found that third space. I can’t say he was entirely mine; he didn’t speak in my language or location. But I can’t say he was a stranger either, because he helped me understand myself.
For me, Rituparno was a crossing, a journey between borders. Not India, not Bangladesh. Not man, not woman. Not familiar, not foreign. Somewhere in between, a new way of understanding emerged. What connected us wasn’t language or geography, but a shared longing. A shared desire to become.
His characters resemble people like us, those on the margins, who don’t always know what they want, only that what exists isn’t working. Like Binodini in Chokher Bali, they walk outside norms but don’t know where they’re headed. Like Radhika in Shob Charitro Kalponik, they remain in relationships that neither define nor free them.
Through these characters, Rituparno brought queerness away from spectacle and closer to pain. Not loud pain. Familiar, numbing pain. He showed that sorrow isn’t only about heartbreak, it’s about being trapped in structures that won’t allow desire to be named. In his words: “Despite possessing every capacity to live, one is denied life.” That kind of denial is familiar to many of us.
When I see his films, I don’t just think, “This character is like me.” I think, “I know this feeling.” That recognition brings a strange kind of comfort, and a quiet grievance as well because such recognition is deeply personal and socially unwelcome. You can’t always speak it aloud, but if someone dares to show it, on screen, in character, it feels like finding home.
I found that home in Rituparno’s films, and later, in Muñoz’s writing. One helped me feel. The other gave that feeling language.
As I write this, I realize Rituparno wasn’t just a filmmaker. He was a process – a way of seeing difference through visual intimacy. He was body, face, gaze, incomplete love, and a society where the question “Who are you?” doesn’t always have a clear answer.
I don’t think I’ve explained him fully in this essay. That was never the goal. I only hope this piece becomes a space where some of us might pause, reflect, maybe remember our own stories. Because Rituparno was someone who made people wonder: “Who’s this person?” And in that wondering, he won.
Main photo credit: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Credit for author’s photograph in the bio: Ernesto Diaz
