Borrowing, Becoming and the Question of the Self in Sob Charitro Kalponik 1

Contemporary Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh’s ² Sob Charitro Kalponik (Afterword, 2009) introduces from the outset questions of plagiarism and simulation not only to suggest in the Nietzschean sense that ‘[the artist] enters into any skin, into any affect: he constantly transforms himself’, but also to mobilise the notion of ‘poetic deceit’ for broader purposes. ³ In this chapter, I argue that Ghosh structures key sequences around the idea of ‘stealing’ or ‘lifting’ in a poet’s life to show how such ‘piracy’ is also a way of deconstructing class lines, opening up to alternate kinds of desire and breaking boundaries between the normative and the ‘deviant’.