ABSTRACT
What does our knowledge of Riturparno Ghosh as a queer film director contribute to our understanding of his films that are not explicitly gay- or queer-themed works? Raincoat and Noukadubi are both films that intricately anatomise a condition of unrealised desire that is created by the social expectations and constraints of arranged marriage, yet a desire that still exists at a level of ‘open secrecy’, at once acknowledged and disavowed. I argue that both films, Raincoat especially, invoke the metaphor of the ‘closet’ to characterise the mortifying ways in which desire is confined and denied within arranged marriages. By doing so, they evoke, albeit in a manner that is itself closeted or disguised, an analogy between the closet created by compulsory heterosexuality for those who are incipiently homosexual and the rejection of love based on desire created by conditions of, what I shall call, compulsory arrangement.
