ABSTRACT
This chapter makes an attempt to look afresh at the cinema of Rituparno Ghosh from the vantage point of urban cultural studies. Ghosh was at the forefront of a new cinema in the mid-1990s that purportedly ‘brought the Bengali middle classes back to the theatre’. But this claim cannot be vindicated unless it stands up to a range of critiques, especially those enquiring into the nature and scope of this new middle class and how in the initial years of globalisation they located themselves in the imperatives of cultural and global capital. Since class categories are always problematic and part of a larger social and cultural formations, his work must be interrogated accordingly. And in doing so, this chapter hopes to locate Ghosh’s cinema as a major contributor to middle class’s conscious, cultural self-fashioning under globalisation and the construction of their spatial and locational aesthetic. That aesthetic, as this chapter hopes to show, was achieved by a conscious disenfranchisement of the idea of the City, which was part of the broader depoliticisation process that the middle class went through as liberalisation seeped in. In fact, the absence of the city was so total that it would not be an exaggeration to claim that the vanishing city reinforced Ghosh’s cultural authority and created the necessary capital for his kind of cinema to dominate middle class imagination for more than a decade. A detailed critique of Ghosh’s production and appropriation of space further leads us to reinterrogate Ghosh’s apparent critique of phallocentrism in his cinema, which concludes this chapter.
