From Amitabh to Aishwarya: Rituparno Ghosh wasn't in awe of superstars

By Dipankar Mukhopadhyay

Ritu, as many of us called Rituparno Ghosh, joined the Bengali film industry at a very bleak time. The Eighties was a dark decade. Following the death of the actor Uttam Kumar, commercial films in Bengal were mostly appalling copies and remakes of Hindi and other regional films. Satyajit Ray suffered his first severe heart attack in the 1980s and he was forced to slow down and retreat. (He had to finish Ghare Baire with his son Sandip’s help and one can say his creative best were behind him by then.) The entire industry was in disarray and the Nineties didn’t see much improvement until 1994, when Ritu made his debut.

His first film was Hirer Angti and soon after came Unishey April, which won the Golden Lotus award. It was a gamechanger. Ritu was barely in his 30s when this happened. I met him for the first time after he’d made his second film, Dahan. He was already being labelled something of a legend. A common friend introduced us and I was immediately impressed. His films were sensitive and he was charming, intelligent and erudite. So that was how our relationship began. To write this today… Ritu would surely understand that the most difficult part of writing about him today is to constantly refer to him in the past tense.

As far as Bengali cinema is concerned, Ritu’s biggest contribution was that he single-handedly blurred the distinction between art and commercial film in our time. He believed in good cinema, sans those labels.  A brilliant storyteller, his films usually had tight scripts and sharp dialogues.  Ritu’s other singular quality was that he was neither shy nor scared of superstars, whether in Mumbai or Kolkata. Unlike most arty filmmakers, he believed in using the star system to promote good cinema. So, he was comfortable with everybody: from Amitabh Bachchan to Sharmila Tagore and Raakhee Gulzar (this glamorous duo came together in Yash Chopra’s Daag and then in Ritu’s Shubho Mahurat) to current heartthrobs like Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Preity Zinta and Bipasha Basu.

Ritu had the confidence in his storytelling to give meaningful roles to pulp movie stars like Prosenjit, Debasree Roy and Rituparna Sengupta, as well as showcase the talents of young actors like Raima Sen, Konkona Sen Sharma and Ananya Chatterjee. He helped bring the audiences back to the empty cinema halls and so was a critical part of the resurrection of Bengali cinema. He was also a successful magazine editor, columnist, lyricist, television presenter and scholar extraordinaire. No wonder, he became an icon to the next generation of film-makers.

Refined and suave, Ritu’s life in the recent past blended with his art.  He was never ashamed about his unconventional lifestyle and his strong views on gender and sexuality earned him controversy and even downright hostility from different quarters, but he remained undaunted. Ritu’s performance in Arekti Premer Golpo (“Just Another Love Story”) startled many – as much because he’d chosen to play such a controversial role as the fact that he was clearly a talented actor too. His last completed film, Chitrangada, is an elegant weave of life and fiction, and I think it’s a masterpiece.

I told him as much after I saw the film. Since last year, it’s been mostly SMS exchanges with him. The messages were casual – new year greetings, thank you’s and so on – and I remember thinking that Ritu seemed to be retreating into himself a little.

The sudden and untimely demise of Rituparno Ghosh is a shock to all film-lovers. In a career spanning barely a decade and a half, he had already earned 12 National and a handful of international awards. From the most talented filmmaker of the post-Satyajit Ray generation, we all expected a lot more from him and much more time with him.

(Dipankar Mukhopadhyay is a critic and the author of Mrinal Sen: Sixty Years of Indian Cinema. Formerly the managing director of National Film Development Corporation, he is now based in Kolkata and writes about history, literature and cinema. )