Film Review
Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012) is an effort to
Look Beyond and Within
Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish is a National Award winning film directed by
Rituporno Ghosh released in 2012. Starring Rituporno Ghosh as the protagonist
Rudra Chatterjee, a trans celebrity theatre director and dancer. Jisshu Sengupta
plays his lover as Partho Majumdar and Anjan Dutt as Shubho , his counselor. The
film follows a sequence of scenes from the past and the present, mainly through
Rudra’s conversations with his counsellor in the hospital. In an artistic twist
to Tagore’s Chitrangada, Rudra questions the dilemmas and insecurities the
mythical and fictionalised Chitrangada may have undergone, the exclusion and
marginalisation she may have faced despite being the king’s child and ponders
over the gaps in the narrative. The whole narrative unfolds in the physical space of
a hospital room with Rudra having imaginary conversations with his counsellor
who does not exist. Interestingly, Rudra’s alter ego is a man. Rudra’s story,
interspersed with snatches from the dramatised version of Chitrangada’s story as
Tagore wrote it, stops at a point to reflect: What is it to feel like a woman? What
is the one thing that makes you realise you are a woman? In one of the
conversations with his counselor Rudra is curious about the reactions of the raja
when Chitrangada comes back, transformed as a woman. The film beautifully
portrays the daily struggles of a queer man, his relationship with his parents and
the society around him. It does a brilliant job of highlighting his loneliness and
selflessness and at the same time and educates the audience about the several
difficulties faced by members of the LGBTQ community. The tragedy in Rudra’s
life is that while he’s willing to undergo six months of pain and suffering for
Partho, the latter breaks it off with him by saying, “If I have to have a woman, I’d
rather have a real one, not this half-thing”. Who is a transperson for a cis man
or cis woman informed by normative heteropatriarchy? There is never much
clarity on that. Are they people with ‘mixed genitalia’ are they women trapped in
men’s bodies and vice versa but then what do one actually mean by the phrase, ‘a
woman trapped in a man’s body’ if both man and woman in the end are
constructs?
Does this mean that one’s realisation of being a woman inside, is triggered by the
attraction one feels for a man, or the opposite sex? In doing this, isn’t one falling
into the same trap of the social construct of heterosexual attraction? Why can’t
one be a man and be attracted to another man? But that leads to another
disturbing question. What is a man or rather who? And for that matter a woman?
There is no such thing as the ideal man or the ideal woman; these are just ideas
which we would like to conform to and live by. And yet the ideal man or woman is
a point in the gender continuum that is constantly deferred.
You think you are the ideal woman if you have the perfect breasts or the perfect
hips and perhaps a perfect vagina or the perfect voice or display some of the
traits of femininity like compassion and grace but is there any end to it? To
desiring? To chasing?
Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish is the journey of a being who finds solid ground
in his own being, of someone who learns to love themself not because of, but
despite having undergone a physical transformation to cross over to the other
gender. It is the power to say ‘no’ to Chitrangada’s Madan, the god who gives her
a woman’s body for a year, in other words, a cosmetic surgeon who can enable
sex change. It is a ‘no’ that comes from a far deeper realisation perhaps of being
what one is, of not trying to correct oneself of not internalising the hegemonic
patterns of gender and sex identities and roles perpetrated by a heteropatriarchal
and heteronormative society, of not being tied to one’s anatomy or the expected
manifestation of it but of being free in one’s own being, of seeking liberation
through accepting oneself, body and soul, of making peace between the two
warring selves and giving space to both. The element of dance in this flim,
“Dance is not just dance for Rudra, it is a partial solution for Rudra’s quest for
identity . Partho tells Rudra that once his sex change operations done; his dance
will be affected, to which Rudra replies: Partho: What about your dance? Your
body is the instrument, tamper with it....... Rudra: Shut up. I don’t dance with
my body Partho. It comes from within. Fortunately, my dance is not limited to
my gender Partho. And neither is my identity.”
The classical dance form, Odissi is experimented in the film. The dance drama is
miniaturist and minimalist in style. The costumes are in Oriental style. The stage is
black and the hospital (where Rudra is admitted after the breakdown) will be a
clinical grey. The stage is used as a language. For instance, it is used as the
spotlight. The stage is an emotional space here. The two spaces where dance is
placed (the stage and the hospital room) uses dance as a tool to express the
emotions of Rudra. The emotions of Rudra are also portrayed through the
mudras. The gestures speak in the movie. As the counsellor remarks that Rudra
has the ability to speak with hands, hand gestures plays a very important role in
expressing the emotions. Ghosh challenges the idea of identity through socially
constructed paradigms. He uses brilliant techniques in representation of
emotions. The selection of beautiful Rabindrasangeet in his films makes
unforgettable visual experiences. His films were lauded as being in line with
Satyajith Ray’s legacy, he was, at the same time, censured for his non-normative
sexual and gendered persona. Gender is a construct that is ingrained in our lives
from childhood; Ghosh deconstructs these techniques and present it before his
audience with charm.
It is a shame that what constitutes perfection in the plant world should be
treated as an anomaly, an aberration in the world of humans. But in the end both
are linguistic attributions: perfection and imperfection exist because of language
and culture, because of parameters that have been established and have gone to
such immeasurable heights that they have blocked out the possibility of life and
of an existence beyond what they project. Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish is an
effort to look beyond and within…simultaneously.
