ABSTRACT
As India’s leading queer film-maker, Rituparno Ghosh always felt deeply ambivalent about the traditionalist element in Indian culture. Aware that the sort of pre-modern vision of Indian identity embodied in texts like the Mahabharata had played a central role in shaping contemporary India, he also knew that its deep conservatism posed a massive threat to his own more liberal, sexually nonconformist view of the world. Ghosh’s ambivalence towards Indian traditionalism was thrown into especially vivid relief in his film Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012). On the one hand, Chitrangada includes a respectful tribute to Rabindranath Tagore’s modern drama of the same name. On the other, Ghosh seeks to extend Tagore’s vision of Indian identity and individual autonomy by infusing it with elements of political, cultural and sexual liberalism. This chapter argues that in charting his response to Tagore, Ghosh, while engaging in a highly idiosyncratic rereading, is simultaneously dramatising the need for oppressed groups to create subcultures capable of decoding cultural texts along subversive or oppositional lines.
