ROHIT K. DAS-GUPTA ET AL.
THE WORLD OF RITUPARNO GHOSH
20 years, Ghosh indeed took a long time to 'come out' officially in pub-
lie through his films, talk show (Ghosh & Company} and writings. But,
as Richard Alien convincingly theorises in his article in this volume, the
torment of being m the closet was much too conspicuous in his other non-
queer films such as Raincoat (2004) and NouWubi. Both these films, he
argues,
invoke the metaphor of the 'closet' to characterize the mortify-
ing ways in which desire is confmed and denied withm 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 homo-
sexual, and the rejection of love based on desire created by condi-
dons of what I shall call compulsory arrangement.
Other films too, namely Asukh, Bariwali, TitU (The First Monsoon Day,
2002), and CholAer Ball, carry recognisable signature of a queer film-maker.
In Asukh, the protagonist's (Debashree Roy) mostly half-lit and overfur-
nished room, quarantined from the world outside, literally and metaphori-
cally becomes a closet in all its claustrophobia and gloom. In Titli, a teenage
girl's (Konkona Sen Sharma) fascmation with an ageing hero of Bombay
Cinema ends in utter disillusionment when suggestions of mcest become
overt, as the girl discovers that her hero was actually her mother's boyfriend
in her college days. The film, told mostly from the perspective of this teen-
age girl, reveals the director's identification with the girl's self-anagnorisis
that her desire to marry the star would never be fulfilled. In ChoiAer Ball,
on the other hand, Ghosh effectively deploys the male body as spectacle,
notably subverting the conventional male gaze of the camera. Kaustav Bak-
shi (2011), evokmg Laura Mulvey (1975), observes in his .article 'Ckol<her
Ball: Unleashing Forbidden Passions':
There are several shots in which the camera almost lovingly films
the male body; in scenes of physical intimacy involving Mahendra
and Ashalata or Binodini, it is Mahendra's body that is exposed
rather than those of the female characters. The gaze of the spec-
tator and that of the camera are fused in all these shots thereby
transforming the male body as spectacle. In this sense, the film
makes an attempt 'to reverse the relation between the female body
and sexuality which is established and reestablished by the classi-
cal cmema's localizadon of the woman's spectacle'.
(N.pag)
16
In Bariwali, Ghosh's queemess articulates itself more explicitly through
the representation of Prasanna, the old servant of the house. Ghosh pro-
yokes a sense of discomfort with Prasanna (Surya Chattopadhyay) from the
very beginnmg. Banalata's loosening of her saree and baring her blouse m
the presence ofPrasanna unsettles the viewers. It becomes difficult to rec-
oncile this particular act of Banalata with that of her parochial conserva-
tism, which keeps her confined within the precincts of the house and does
not even allow her to visit the ground floor of the house and meet strangers
without a genuine cause. The piqumg of the sense of discomfort among the
view srs, for which the director definitely had a specific purpose, reaches its
height when Prasanna appears in the dream, dressed in a saree and partici-
pating in stree achar (wedding rituals performed only by women). Prasanna
does not merely accept his emasculation and infandlisation, but resists in
his own way. Apart from that, in Banalata's confinement in the decaying
mansion, her detachment from life, her repressed sexual desires, and her
eventual abandonment by the man she falls in love with, Ghosh's anguish
of being in the closet becomes indeed apparent. Prasanna is one of the first
queer characters we encounter in modem Bengali cinema and the first vis-
ibly queer character created by Ghosh. In his later films, especially through
his queer trilogy (Arekti Premer Golpo, Memories in March and Chitrangada),
Ghosh made a positive contribution to the changing social perspective and
knowledge of the 'queer'. Bariwaii, and Prasanna's character in particular
can be traced as the genesis of Ghosh's lifelong interest in narrating and
critiquing the neo-hberal sexual identity discourse.
Before and after the release ofArefcti Premer Golpo, Ghosh began appear-
ing in femmme clothes and loud makeup in public. He raised a contro-
very/ in 2009 by .publicly affronting a standup comic ofBengali television.
Proclaimmg himself the spokesperson of a community of men who had
to live through public humiliation for being 'effeminate' day in and day
out, Ghosh entered into a no-holds-barred critique of the standup comic in
Ghosh & Company:
^
When you are mimicking me, are you mimicking Rimpamo
Ghosh, the person or are you mimicking a generic effeminate
man? . . . What message are you putting across? Have you ever
thought that when you mimic me, you actually end up humiliat-
ing all effeminate men in Kolkata?... You should be sensitive to
the fact that you are hurting the sentiments of a sexual minority. I
am objecting to your act not because I am inconvenienced myself;
rather I am objecting to it on the behalf of all those for whom I
maybe a representative.
17
 8
CLOSETED DESIRES AND
OPEN SECRETS
Raincoat and Noukadubi

Richard Alien

^
What does our knowledge of Riturpamo 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
expecrations 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, Raincoac 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 homo-
sexual and the rejection of love based on desire created by conditions of,
what I shall call, compulsory arrangement.
The idea of the homosexual closet as the container of a barely acknowl-
edged and disavowed desire that engenders the epistemology of the open
secret, really only emerges in 19th century Europe when, in a society of
compulsory heterosexuality, homosexuality began to be discriminated and
rendered conceivable as a form of identity, while at the same time, this
identity was phobically conceived as abject, degenerate and so on.1 It is
only in the recent past that this concept has gained purchase in the Indian
contest as the idea of homosexual identity, in contradistinction to hetero-
sexual, identity, has been self-consciously asserted.2 In this sense, it might
be claimed that given that the idea of the 'closet' arrives 'late' and from

153
 RICHARD ALLEN

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154
 RICHARD ALLEN
her, even as he loves another who is his equal, Hemnalmi (Raima Sen).
While Ramesh mcurs great personal cost by staying in the relationship
with Kamala, he fears 'coming out' to someone who is so vulnerable and
dependent. Ghosh's adaptation makes explicit the fact that, for Kamala,
the condition of 'fake' marriage is as real as any 'actual' marriage. While
remaining within the closet of deception causes pam, emerging from that
closet is potentially life threatening to loved ones.
Rcdncoat and Noukadubi provide contrasting perspectives upon the
prison house of arranged marriage that highlights not only the differences,
but also commonalities of gender. In Ramcoat, Neeru, as a wom,an ofhum-
ble origins, is imprisoned by the expectations of wealth and happiness that
colonise her desire as she 'marries up' with her arranged husband, such
that she becomes a hollowed-out self, empty of feeling. Ramesh, on the
other hand, is burdened by the expectations of responsibility and support
that accrue to the older man who marries a woman of humble origins for
whom he is a lord and master. Each illuminates one half of the double bind
of the closet; the excruciating emotional pain that issues from denying
one's tme desires in conformity to the expectations and norms of a culture,
on the one hand, and the social costs of 'coming out' and declaring once
true allegiance, on the other. In a society where the idea of the lifetime
'arrangement' of desire is so deeply embedded arid embraced by the parties
to it, the intemalisation of these social norms may have a deadening effect
upon the self, but the social costs oftransgressing them are also potentially
catastrophic.
The style of Ghosh's work, especially that of the intimate kammerspiel
or chamber drama, is perfectly suited to dramatising the estranged inti-
macy yielded by the closet. Raincoat is shot largely in a single interior, and
in Noukadubi, too, claustrophobic interiors predommate save for open air
shots at Benares fort. It is far more spatially restricted than Tagore's novel
Post-sync sound also adds to the feeling of intimate drama as voices are
heard in 'close-up'. Ghosh is a conventional and quite a conservative styl-
ist; his stylistic palette is a narrow one. Although the tempo of his stories
is slow, he works mainly within the standard shot/counter-shot in medium
close-up or two-shot character set-up style with a static camera. The pace
of Rcdncoat is reflected in the relatively small number of shots and high
average shot length: 524 shots at an average of 13.4 secondsi This aver-
age is explained by the fact that Ghosh consistently deploys extended
two-shot long takes in the film. There are many more shots in Noukadubi
in proportion to its length - approximately 1,200 at an average length of
7 seconds - in part because of the long opening montage and other song
montages in the film. The exception to the norm of cross-cutting that
156
CLOSETED DESIRES AND OPEN SECRETS
achieves observable salience in Noukadufci is the use of a two-shot, where
the speaker is held in focus in the foreground while his or her interlocutor
is held out of focus in the background. However, rather than sustaining
the foiig take, Ghosh will cut for emphasis to the background figure, but
then return to the two-shot with the figure occluded in focus. This device,
while occasionally used in Raincoat, is regularly deployed in Noukadubi to
orchestrate relationships of emotional proximity and distance between the
characters, and it is particularly effective in expressing the concealment of
feelings between the two parties involved.
The metaphor of the closet in Raincoat
The metaphor of the closet in Raincoat as a hidden or concealed place of
abjection emerges in the film through the figuration of the bathroom that
is initially associated with Manoj's sense of shame. When Manoj arrives at
Calcutta, we see his friend Alok reading to him a letter of introduction that
he has composed about Manoj's desperate financial circumstances while
Manoj stands on die threshold of the bathroom. Manoj's sense of shameful
self-exposure is palpable, and when his friend leaves he cries, half naked and
alone, in the bathroom. He is further shamed when Alok observes as he sits
down at die breakfast table that Manoj has not shaved properly. Manoj's
sense of shame is caused by the fact that he fails to meet the burden of
social expectation, yet it comes to be experienced by Manoj as a sense of
who he is, that is, less than a man.
Before Manoj leaves to meet Neem, Sheela (Mouli Ganguly), Alok's
wife, approaches the bathroom while he shaves again. 'Why do girls cry so
much when they leave home after marriage?' he suddenly asks her. 'Is it ust
because they are leaving their parents?' She thinks that he is talking about
Neeru, but he says that he was not at her leave talung. He is talking about
Sheela herself: 'I still remember you wept all the way to the car.' Sheela
replies: 'Next time you cry in the bathroom please turn the shower on. You
need to learn a few things from as girls, too.' The bathroom here is explic-
itly articulated as the spatial container for concealed emotion. Unlike her
husband, in front of whom Manoj feels deficient, inadequate and liable to
exposure, Sheela is someone with whom it is safe for him to be vulnerable.
He does not have to put on the facade of 'being a man' with her, while at
the same time she knows all too well the need to hide one's emotions from
public view.
Later in the film, when Manoj and Neem converse, and Neem spins a
fantasy of her traveling businessman husband, she says to Manoj that she
could not possibly travel with him because she is afraid of flying - she does
157
 RICHARD ALLEN
not want to have to use the bathroom on the plane. When Manoj points
out that the bathrooms are clean, she responds that her worry is not that
they are dirty but that she might get locked inside the toilet and stuck there.
Towards the end of their meeting, Neem again returns to the idea of travel.
She wishes she could be far away: 'So what if I got stuck in the bathroom.
The plane has to stop somewhere and move on.' When Manoj questions her
idea that she would be locked up all the way on her travels she blurts out: 'I
am locked up in here Mannu. Do you think this luxury is everything?'
She had commented earlier on her fears that if her husband discovered
that Mannu had visited he would lock her up in a bathroom, but now she
acknowledges that she is already incarcerated. Manoj responds that no one
can stay locked up forever for someone is bound to come and open the door.
Neeru confesses that she has lost all hope for that.
In relationship to Neeru, the bathroom is explicitly figured as a closet,
an enclosed place in which she fears being trapped. Her later remark makes
evident the sense in which her entrapment is writ large, that is, she is
trapped in the closet of her marriage. But the closet she is trapped in is not
in fact that of luxury. She is trapped by having to imagine that she lives m
luxury, by her expectations of luxury. Her 'confession' of her secret that she
is imprisoned in luxury, even though it acknowledges her unhappiness, is at
the same time a wishful fantasy, the fantasy of being able to bemoan luxury,
which serves to conceal her degradation and impoverishment even as it
reveals her unhappiness. In this respect, in her answer to Manoj about the
bathroom closet on the plane, she undoubtedly dissembles. Neeru's own
'bathroom', which actually encompasses the entire 'private' area of her
house, turns out to be a very dirty place indeed, which she prevents Manoj
entering at all costs.
When Manoj lets the man he discovers to be her landlord mto the apart-
ment, the landlord asks him whether he has used the bathroom that is
situated behind a translucent glass screen that bisects the room. He opens
the door for Manoj who looks through, but we do not initially see what he
sees. This withheld view conveys the sense of a secret beyond the door in
the manner of a gothic mystery. Furthermore, there is something unseemly
and shameful for us to share this view with the disreputable landlord under
whose unsympathetic gaze the nature of the bathroom's condition would
cast Neeru in the worst possible light. The landlord is like the figure of the
blackmailer - he is someone who uses the knowledge of another person s
secret, his capacity to see through the closet, as a source of power and sub'
jugation. In that sense, the domain of the 'bathroom' is actually his domain
and he is the figure who wallows in the abjection.
158
CLOSETED DESIRES AND OPEN SECRETS
So, it is only when the landlord has left that we return with Manoj to
the room behind the screen, after Neem has warned him in a flashback
recollection that if they ever meet again she undoubtedly will not convey
to h:.m the truth about her situation. Initially, we see the chaotic mess of
a kitchen. Dirty pots and pans cover the filthy countertops and food lies
uneaten. Cockroaches stalk the drawers. The bathroom is actually in the
farthest reaches of the room, behind the screen in the far comer, the inner
room. Visible from the outer room it stands as its most representative part.
It is disgustingly dirty and strewn with empty bottles, presumably discarded
by Neeru's husband whom the landlord reveals has become an alcoholic
who is enabled by Neem in her continued attachment to him.
But if the bathroom is a filthy closet within the cluttered abject space of
the kitchen, this kitchen space is, in turn, divided off from a larger room
that itself is essentially a storage closet or a cupboard. The room Neeru
lives in is cluttered with furniture and pieces of art. While she pretends all
this iituff is part of the burden of being married into an aristocratic family,
in fact, it does not belong to her at all but is the property of a furniture
retailer who is renting the room off her as a storage space. The doset-like
nature of the room is further reinforced in the way that Neeru shuts the
windows and keeps out the light This is ostensibly to keep out the rain, but
in fact it is to stop .her landlord, to whom she owes rent, demandmg money
from her. The ram. gets in anyway from leaks m the roof. Furthemiore, the
light;! are not working and so the room is dark. She claims it is because of
the storm, but actually it is because she has not paid the rent. Also, she is
completely alone. She claims the servants have the afternoon off but she
has no servants; and she tells Manoj that her husband is away on a business
trip to Japan and.Germany, while actually he is a business failure, a fraud
and probably out on a drunken binge.
Like Neeru, as we have seen, Manoj has his own closet of shame, though
his secret is more open. One feels though that he might truthfully share
his actual circumstances to Neeru were she not so tightly enmeshed in
the veil of illusion. Indeed, when he spins his own elaborate middle class
success story that mirrors her own imagined state of happiness, it is as if he
does it for her as a gesture of love. To be sure, like Neeru, Manoj is partly
motivated by pride. However, he is more conscious of his motivation; after
all, he speaks frankly of his sense of shame to Alok, early in the film. There-
fore, he is able to discern the nature ofNeeru's stubborn pride and the way
it engenders the suffering that she seeks to protect herself from. Thus, his
own dissembling is a way of acknowledgmg Neeru's mental prison; it is
a way of redeeming her from the web of illusion, without exposing her
159
 RICHARD ALLEN
shame. In contrast to the landlord, Manoj's knowledge ofNeerus secret is
one that, out of love, preserves it.
Manoj tells her that he gave up the jute factory a long time ago, and like
someone spinning a fantasy or dream out of the residues of a day's events,
he borrows the identity of his successful friend. He is the proud owner of a
'private limited company' (in English) that makes TV serials. She enquires
of him what programs he has done. He deflects the question by saying that
they are just local programs but they are soon going national. He is now
here to sell a slot for national syndication. Furthermore, his mother no
longer lives in the tiny ground floor house she used to inhabit. Now, his
mother has two whole floors in a six-storey building. She has the two top
stories with marble floors, attached bathroom and air conditioners. And
she has a dish antenna and watches TV all day (just like Neeru claims that
she does). He pretends the call from Sheela is from his secretary who he
flirts with, just as he imagines, and Neeru confirms that she flirts with her
personal fitness coach.
Neeru's closet is fundamentally created from anxieties about social sta-
tus and social role. She fears regression to a socially fallen, penniless con-
dition of life on the street that is close to where she finds herself. Indeed,
when Manoj meets the landlord, he expresses the thought that Neeru is
prostituting herself and that he, Manoj, is one of her clients. The regres-
sion she fears has aspects of both class and caste anxiety. She cannot afford
servants and so her house is filthy. Furthermore, she has no one to cook
food, no one to buy it for her and no money to buy it with m any case. As
a result, she is pale and malnourished. Indeed, so central are her anxiet-
ies about status that abjection is cast in Raincoat in terms of metaphors of
pollution.
The idea of contamination or pollution is explicitly raised at the begin-
ning of the film through the narrative device of the raincoat. The raincoat
belongs to Alok, and his wife lent it to their servant Govind, a figure whom
we see only briefly in the background cleaning some furniture. Sheela
assures Manoj that Govind is clean, yet she has put a little scent on the
coat just to make sure it does not smell. It is odd that this item of protec-
don is cast as a potential cause of pollution, and while Ghosh might seem
to endorse fastidious caste anxieties, his pomt I think is actually to denatu-
ralise them. The raincoat levels identity and masks apparent differences
it passes from Alok to Govind, and via Sheela to Manoj, then to Neem,
back to Manoj, and finally back to Sheela. It is also, obviously, a device of
protection from the ever-present rain. Although ram is often associated
with romance and social renewal in Indian Cinema, in Raincoat, a film
about depression, rain takes on connotations of pollution and corrosion
160
CLOSETED DESIRES AND OPEN SECRETS
and becomes an expressive correlative to the emotional storm that resides
within and the salty tears that manifest it.
The idea of polluting rain. is linked to the figuration of the 'bathroom'
closet :is a vale of tears through the Krishna-inspired poem and song that
accompanies Manoj's exploration of the kitchen and bathroom space.
Expressing Manoj's thoughts, the song begins '0 my beloved why are you
so proud'. Then, we hear the voice of the film's lyricist, Gulzar, narrating
a poem about the corrosive effects of the monsoon rain that are likened to
tears. In the context of the Krishna story, the tears are those ofRadha who
proudly waits for Krishna to return: 'In the last monsoon the walls were not
that damp. Who knows why there is dampness in the wall and the walls are
filled with cracks, and, on the damp floors as on the wan cheeks, wet tears
flow'. In this way, the closet of the 'bathroom' itself is conceived here as a
place where the boundary between 'mside' and 'outside' dissolves, objecti-
fying Neem's inner abjection. Gulzar continues: 'The rain on the glass of
the windows of the house writes a message with is fingers, as she sits sob-
bing behind closed windows'. The dampness that seeps through the walls
or is made visible on the window serves to objecdfy her inner despair. The
singer then narrates how her tears flow endlessly like a force of nature.
'From her eyes she rams tears that make the Jamuna flow', and yet her
desire to bathe, that is, to renew her spirit, remains unfilled: her hair is dry,
her clothes are morbid and her heart is lifeless.
Manoj's depression, like Neeru's, resides m his sense of failure to live up
to social expectations, but in Manoj's case his core of abjection seems to
have m explicitly sexual component. In an early memory scene, Manoj
remembers a time when he and Neeru were going out to a movie. We peer
through a black veUas Neeru tries to button up her top. She needs help and
asks Manoj. He steps behind the veil but he cannot do it because he is con-
strained m his action by the intimacy of the situation. She looks up at him
longingly in anticipation of a kiss but he withdraws. <What are you afraid
of,' she asks. 'Sitting and watching an adult movie with me, neighbors, or
yourself?' He says nothing. Later, in an excmciating scene that takes place
during Diwali, as Manoj lies on a bed with fever, Neeru declares to him that
she is getting married and he grips her wrists tightly so as not to let her go.
He insists that he will buy her a diamond ring and a car and that he too,
like he- intended, is six foot tall, as he struggles to get off his bed. It has
taken eight years for him to declare his love for her, and then only when he
is threatened by a rival.
Perhaps Manoj's inaction simply expresses the natural diffldence of a
shy and sensitive man who has been raised in a sheltered rural environ-
ment. He is still, we surmise, a virgin when he visits Neem m Calcutta
161
 RICHARD ALLEN
years later, even though he is probably a man in his early thirties. Yet, is the
character actually heterosexual? The actions ofManoj, his reticence widi
Neeru, who is after all the gorgeous Aishwarya Rai, and his belated self-
assertion in imitation of a rival are entirely consistent with. a man who may
not be heterosexual; so too, indeed, is his subsequent later diffidence when
he meets Neeru again. Yet the film does not invite us to ask this question.
His actions would be the same if he were heterosexual. The closet here is a
capacious one that denotes a core of reticence and shame m his self-identity
and in the expression of desire. But it is a core of shame that is intimately
entwined with his sense of deficiency as a public actor. Here, Manoj stands
in marked contrast to his buff, brash, confident, urban friend who works
in the media. Alok tells Sheela who suggests that he should try and find
Manoj work that Manoj is too 'cool gnd composed' (the words are spoken
in English) to work in the media. He lacks the requisite self-assertiveness.
Thus, we have, enacted in Raincoat, a relationship between two charac-
ters whose identities are forged around an umer core ofabjection, which is
itself formed out of the unbearable pressure to meet the social expectation
of worthiness with respect to normative familial social arrangements. The
flashbacks in Raincoat, whose bright saturated primary colours contrast with
the dark and washed-out drabness ofNeeru's rooms, sketch the classic situa-
tion of the Devdas story where a boy and girl grow up together and are insep-
arable. The boy it seems loves the girl, but he is constitutionally reticent and
his family lacks the resources to support her; he thus intemalises a corrosive
sense of self-deficiency - he is emasculated. Lacking a social sttucture that
might support and legitimate his desire, he cannot bring himself to articu-
late it or he is like the hero of male melodrama always too late. Meanwhile,
the girl's expectations are framed by the same social structure thatenjoins
arrangement to ensure prosperity. Even as she too might love the boy, she
intemalises those norms around a core ofself-denial, a vacuum of emotional
isolation and emptiness that comes to completely define her life when her
expectations are unrealised. Ghosh brilliantly succeeds here in laying bare
the emotional devastation yielded by compulsory an-Euigement - the man-
ner in which it is structured to yield a core of self-division and self-denial.
The 'fiction' of arranged marriage in Nouicddubi
The appeal ofRabindranath Tagore's Noukadubi to Ghosh is quite evident
The narrative conceit of the shipwreck that, unbeknownst to the parties
involved, engenders an accidental exchange of marriage partners, dena-
tures the institution of marital arrangement in a manner that is compa"
rable to Raincoat. In both stories, the arranged marriage is a fiction that
162
CLOSETED DESIRES AND OPEN SECRETS
lit
is nonetheless experienced as real, and thus made strange. However, in
Raincoat, die arranged marriage appears fictional yet real, because it is an
illusory ideal sustained in the mind of the central character; Neeru.can-
not let go of the fiction of marital plenitude lest she lose her sense of self
completely. 'Noukadubi, in contrast, lends the fiction of arranged marriage
an objective form: the protagonists, Ramesh and Kamala, appear married
to the outside world and initially believe themselves to be married, but
they are not, they are victims of a mistaken identity. While the arbitrary
character of this coupling seems to expose the stifling nature of an intimate
relationship that fails to be based on desire, and certainly the character of
Ramesh suffers, perhaps the most telling aspect of the novel and the film
is the sympathetic treatment of their relationship, which even though it is
fictive, carries for Kamala, and to some extent, for Ramesh too, the weight
and meaning of real marriage. In both cases, the result of exposing the fic-
don of arranged marriage is potentially catastrophic. For Neeru, the loss of
her paranoid self-identity might issue in self-destruction were she to con-
front her abject core, which is why Manoj protects her secret; for Ramesh's
partner, Kamala, the exposure of her arranged marriage as a fiction leads
directly to lier attempted suicide, which is why he is so reticent to expose
the fiction of theu- 'marriage' to her.
The imaginary marriage in Noukadvbi engenders three interlocking
secrets. First, Ramesh conceals his actions to Hem and her family. After
he agrees to an arranged marriage to please his father, in the novel, and
mother, in the film, he writes to tell Hem what has taken place. How-
ever, he deKtroys the letter before he posts it, and once he has found out
that Kamala is not really his wife, the very fact that he holds out tangible
hope of uniting once ag^in with his beloved Hem prevents him narrating
to her his tangled story. He isolates himself from the world with Kamala
in their darkened apartment with its barred windows. Although Kamala
reaches to the light outside in the courtyard and the girls of her own age
who play there, we perceive Ramesh to be confined and diminished. As his
secret is preserved, it becomes more'entrenched. Kamala is finally 'outed'
as his 'wife' when Akshay, Ramesh's rival, and Jogendra, Hem's brother,
retrieve her from the school where Ramesh has sent her away, in a scene
that is deeply humiliating to them both. This 'outing' is at once true and
false. It is tiue, for it reveals that Ramesh and Kamala are cohabiting as if
man and wife, yet it misrepresents the actual state of their intimacy. Both
Ramesh and Kamala are shamed, but for different reasons. Ramesh has
been exposed as apparently duplicitous, and Ramesh's willingness to leave
Kamal^at school during the holidays has exposed his lack of interest in
establishing full conjugal relations, which is shameful for her.
163
 RICHARD ALLEN
Second, Ramesh conceals his love for Hem from Kamala. However
much he might wish it, Ramesh cannot isolate or suppress his love for Hein.
Indeed, he harbours and nurtures that love in secrecy from Kamala. The
physical proximityof Kamala, within the confinement of shared space they
inhabit, serves to dramatise and express Ramesh's emotional confmement,
which can be transcended only in imagination or spirit that is expressed
by Ghoshm song. In a self-reflexive gesture, the songs Hem sings are the
songs of Tagore that serve, as so often in Indian cinema, to miraculously
connect through the spirit, lovers who have been separated. Furthermore,
Ramesh's confinement is contrasted with the joy that Hem can find in
being ensconced together with him in an attic room. As in Raincoat, the
prison the character inhabits is a mental one created by frustrated or unre-
alised desire and the pressure to Assemble its existence.
After the shipwreck, when Ramesh and Kamala set up house, Ramesh
sits down in the foreground of a darkened interior while Kamafa sets up
her shrine, out of focus, in the background. We cut to Kamala's activities
behind him but Ramesh, though he inhabits the same space, is detached
from her. When Kamala intrudes into his space to fan him, in tight two-
shot, Ramesh^ abruptly gets up and leaves, switching on the mechanical
fan instead. This cues a reaction shot of Hem remembered by Ramesh that
mimes the reaction of Kamala. Ramesh then, secretively, opens a drawer
that conceak Hem's photograph, an action which, as Hem sings a love song,
cues him to a memory that overwhelms the present: Hem and Ramesh, like
lovers, enter his tiny attic apartment together and switch on the fan.
The idea of the 'closet', as a hidden or concealed space of intimate emo-
tion, is registered through the shrine that Ramesh constructs for Hem
within the confines of the house, which is compared by Ghosh to the shrine
that Kamala creates to the mother goddess. Ramesh's shrine takes the form
of a secret closet in which Ramesh encloses Hem's photograph, previously
hidden in the drawer, behind an array of books (we might imagine them to
be those of Tagore), as we hear Hem's voice sing from Tagore:'For my new
playmate, my very own, I keep reserved this special throne. He will mend
what is broken by some magic spell'. It is as if, here, there is established
an inverse ratio between the contraction of space and the reaching out of
the spirit, where this tiny closet houses and sustains the infinite expanse of
love. After he has created his secret shrine, he is left alone in tears, bereft
of Hem's company, as we hear her echoing voice: 'Spending nights wake-
fully, making a playhouse for you and me'.
Ramesh harbours a third secret, the most important of all. In addition to
hiding Kamala from Hem and Hem from Kamala, he leaves Kamala in the
dark about the fact that she is not actually married to him. His motives foi
164
CLOSETED DESIRES AND CPEN SECRETS
this are entirely honourable; he wants to preserve Kamala from dishonour
and shame and in the meantime search for her missing husband.
logic of the secret here works only to confirm their de facto^statusas a mar-
ried couple. Kamala undergoes excruciating suffering as Ramesh rendei
her'into a companion who is untouchable, withdrawing from her proximky
when db.ey are confined at home, and then sending her away to school. At
the same time, he shows her a level of companionship and solicitude, espe-
a.aUy"m'his~support of her schooling. Furthermore, Kamah herself proves
more than capable of building a home in the film, and Tagore spends^
number of chapters drawing a portrait of her as a capable homemaker.^
fact", she "is portrayed as both a wife and a mother, since she -adopts'a^lkde
boy. In the context of my prior discussion ofRflincoat, it is tempting to -rea^
this rekitionship as analogous to that of a 'closeted' gay man and Us wite,
characterised by intimacy and detachment, at once 'fictive' and real.^
'Here,"there is a marked difference in treatment between novel^and film.
In Tagore's novel, having been thrown into conjugal indma
in the belief that she is his wife, Ramesh finds reasons to be attracted to
Kamala, even if the attraction is not a deep one: 'He felt strangely drawn
towaids,' the little maid and even his erudite mind could not resist
charm'.3 Once he finds out the truth, he withdraws from her on
groundi and his desire for Hem is reawakened. However, he does ncrtqmte
reckon on the nature of Kamala's growing attachment to him tor wnom me
marriage is real and he feels duty bound to respond to her: 'Not^his happ^
ness alone but Kamala's love for him must be the guiding_factor\''He writes
alettei proposing that they assume conjugal relations. Ramesh's recogni^
tion of the fictive nature of the marriage is less ir
themarriage'hasbe.en experienced byKamala as real^althoyghit turns out
to be too late, for Kamala has, meanwhile, discovered the shocking truth.^
For Tagore, it is less that Ramesh's desire is known, but nonetheless h^
den,"tli£m-that he is somehow unsure of his desire in relationship to
obligations and duties he is supposed to have to others.^ is as ift^ nat^e
ofhlsdesireTsnot fully formed or known to him, and is thus profound
shaped'firstby social expectations about how he ought^to behave,^
by-his-experience of intimacy itself. In that sense, too, Ramesh in^l
is'moreT&eKamala herself in his sensibility, in spite of the class difference,
becauseTor her, under the conditions of arrangement, obligation and love
are fused. In contrast, Ghosh simplifies Ramesh's motw
desire something about which he is certain. This is a more modem concep-
tioncf "desire, one in desire pre-exists both obligations and intimacy.
Ghosli's film/Ramesh does not touch Kamala. Initially, this is bei
his allegiance to Hem, and then it is because of his discovery .
165
 RICHARD ALLEN
that they are not man and wife. Ramesh remains chaste because he loves
another and this love is an authentic expression of his desire. His desire,
while closeted, is fully known to him. Different viewers will have different
responses to this. I find it to be a simplification of Tagore's more subtle
intent.
When Kamala finds out by accident that she is married to the wrong
man, ironically, by using her developing education to read an advertise-
ment that Ramesh has placed in the newspaper, the shame that is caused
to her by this discovery prompts her to contemplate taking her own life in
a manner that justifies Ramesh's reticence to reveal the truth, even as his
concealment has arguably made matters worse. In the novel, she contem-
plates suicide, but then, driven by a resolve she has shown throughout, she
makes her way along the banks of the Ganges towards Kashi. In the film,
she actually enters into the waters of the Ganges to die, or die again, for
she had, in the shipwreck, already once been rebom. However, miracu-
lously, she is rebom once again, rescued by a holy man on the ghats of
Kashi. There, circumstances bring her to the house ofNalinaksha (Prosen-
jit Chatterjee), whom she discovers to be her lost husband.
At the conclusion of the film, havmg fallen ill after Nalinaksha discov-
ers her identity, Ramesh comes to visit her. He tells her that he had given
her a fake home before, so he wanted to find her a real one. But now he has
come to visit her and found that she already has one. But, m contrast to
the novel, where she finds secure comfort m. Nalinaksha's home, here she
remains attached to Ramesh in a manner that underscores the emotional
reality of their fictional marriage. She asks Ramesh: 'Do you know the dif-
ference between what is fake and what is real?' He defers answering the
question, but then she asks him, with tears streaming down her face, who
cooks for him? He may know lots of people in Calcutta, but in Gorakhpur,
why not ask Mrs. Mukherjee? He tells her not to worry, and that fake and
real are two different homes, and she cannot look after them both. But
here, unlike the novel, though we have come to know and trust Nalinaksha
as Hem is drawn to him, Nalmaksha is still unknown to Kamala. She has
been forced to leave the man she loves, because she is not married to him,
for someone she knows not.
As I have ab-eady intimated, the figure of Tagore himself is central to
Noukadubi, and his presence is woven into the portrayal of the reilationship
between Ramesh and Hem and the articulation of unrealised desire. At
the beginning of the film, Ramesh recognises that he has a rival for Hem s
love, which is none other than the handsome Rabindranath Tagore himself
whose picture adorns her room, and Hem tells her sympathetic father that
she would marry Tagore were it not for the fact that he is already married
166
CLOSETED DESIRES AND OPEN SECRETS
Hem's love for Ramesh is kindled in the film through Tagore's songs that at
once ssrve to comment upon Ramesh's state of mind and evoke Hem's pres-
ence to his consciousness, even as he is confined in the house with Kamala.
Here, Tagore is celebrated by Ghosh as the 'father' of the Indian film song
as well as being self-consciously acknowledged as the source of the romance
that die director seeks to portray. If Hem imagines herself to be a lover of
Tagore, her songs, living m the mind of Ramesh, casts Ramesh himself in
the role of Tagore. This suggestion is made explicit m the film.
Returning to the home of Ramesh and Kamala, Kamala mistakenly
thinks that Ramesh is a doctor when he is actually a lawyer. Her confusion
functions as a cue for Ramesh's mind to wander back to his relationship to
Hem, !as Hem vocalises the song ofTagore: 'For my new playmate, my very
own, I keep reserved this special throne'. Her song transitions to Ramesh's
memoi-y of a conversation between them in which she tells Ramesh that
she always felt that he was not cut out to be a lawyer. His lawyer's conjec-
ture that she would feel suffocated in his attic room, she declares to him,
was actually a weak supposition, pure imagination. She then goes on to say
that such a supposition is better suited to a poet and that Tagore started off
life living in an attic room m his ancestral mansion with his child bride.
Tagore was subjected to a marriage arranged by his father with a child
bride of 10 years old, Bhabatarini, whose name was changed to Mrinalini
upon marriage and who bore him several children, beginning at age 13.
Hem's comparison ofRamesh to Rabindranath, one that strikes any reader
of the novel, might initially invite us to think of Hem as like Tagore's
'child bride' living happily in Ramesh's attic room. Yet, Hem does not
resemble a child bride at all, the resemblance is provided by Kamala. The
subtext here is that Rabindranath's marriage to his child bride was suffo-
eating and we are invited to think ofRamesh's marriage to Kamala in the
same terms.
At the time of his marriage to his child bride, Rabindranath had engaged
in an intimate emotional retationship with his sister'in-law Kadambari,
who subsequently committed suicide at the age of 25.5 This relationship
was the subject matter ofTagore's novel The. Broken Nest (1901) and Satya-
jit Ray's Charulata (1964). Hem effectively casts herself as Kadambari in
her remark to her father that she might have married Rabindranath were
it not for the fact that he was married ah-eady. Thus, the comparison is
complete: Hem, Ramesh and Kamala stand for Kadambari, Rabindranath
and Mrinalini.
Ritupamo is inviting us to think that in the novel, Noulwduhi, Tagore
imagined a scenario where his marriage, the marriage between the learned
older man and the naive semi-educated child, turned out to be a fiction
167
 RICHARD ALLEN CLOSETED DESIRES AND OPEN SECRETS

and where Kadambari was available for him to marry and realise his true References
desire. At the same time, he also imagmes the arranged marriage being Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranaih Tagore: The Mynad-Mincled
happily consummated with the right man, Nalmaksha. Actually, it seems, Mar.. London; Bloomsbury, 1995.
Tagore remained in a state of emotional isolation throughout his life that Khanna, Akshay, 'US "Sexuality Types": A Critical Engagement with the Postco-
he wrote about poignantly. According to his biographers, Krishna Dutta loniality of Sexuality', in Brinda Rose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya (eds), The
and Andrew Robinson, his relationship to his wife was distant. He did not Pholnc and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexwdities in Contemporary India. Calcutta:
remarry after her death, nor, it seems, did he enter into any other intimate SeaKull Books, 2007.
relationships during the course of his long life. In remaking Noukabubi as Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University ofCali-
a work that is about Rabindranath and the love of Radmdranath, it is as if fornia Press, 1990.
Ritupamo, the auteur, declares his own emotional and spirkual connection Tagore, Rabindranath, The Wreck. London: Macmillan, 1921.
to the author, at once identifying with him in his isolation, but also affirm'
ing his allegiance to the power of art itself to transcend that isolation.
In this chapter, I have sought to understand .Ramcoat and Noukadubi
through a comparison between the closeted desire created by compulsory
arranged marriage and the closeted desire created by compulsory hetero-
sexuality. I am not suggesting that these two forms of closeted desire are
the same. Of course, they are not. But these films do mvite us to discern
affinities; perhaps, most of all, in the way that compulsory arranged mar-
riage, like compulsory heterosexuality, involves matters of life and death.
Furthermore, the affinities suggest the extent to which, within India, the
closet created by compulsory heterosexuality and the choices it affords and
precludes is historically framed by the intemalised norms, customs and pro-
tocols of arranged marriage within which the freedom to discover and act
upon one's heart's desire is a hard won freedom.

Acknowledgement
Special thanks to Dalpat Rajpurohit for help with Hmdi translation.

Notes
1 The anatomy of the closet and its emergence in the Anglo American context is
conceptualised in the now classic literary study by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The
Epistemology of the CIoset.Beikeley: University ofCalirbmia Press, 1990.
2 Akshay Khanna, "US "Sexuality Types": A Critical Engagement with the Postco-
loniality of Sexuality', in Brinda Base and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya (cds), The
.Phobic and the Erotic: The PoMcs of SexMalities in Contemporary Jruiia. Calcutta
Seagull Books, 2007, pp. 159-200.
3 Rabindranath Tagore, The Wreck. New York: MacmiLan, 1921, p. 12.
4 Tagore,TheWWc,p.l72.
5 For details, see Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The
Myriad'Minded Man. London: Bloomsbury, 1995, pp. 78-91.

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