In early 1985, a young economics graduate from Jadavpur University joined a Kolkata advertising agency called Response as a copywriter. The firm was helmed by Ram Ray. In those years, ad campaigns in Kolkata were drafted in English or Hindi and then translated into Bengali. In other words, the phrasing a Bengali consumer heard had never been conceived in their own language in the first place. Ram Ray was determined to upend this custom, and in Rituparno Ghosh he found someone who could think directly in Bengali.
Rituparno spent ten years in that office. For Boroline, he coined the immortal tagline: “Bongo jiboner ongo”—an inseparable part of Bengali life. Sharad Samman, Margo, Peerless, Frooti—one landmark campaign after another. In the reminiscences of former colleagues, the detail that resurfaces again and again was the sheer speed of his craft. Sumanto Chattopadhyay, who began his career at Response in the nineties before moving on to Ogilvy and other global giants, recalled an evening in a restaurant where, upon receiving a client brief, Rituparno pulled out a paper napkin and penned the entire advertisement on the spot—a scribble that went on to form the bedrock of a massive campaign. He recounted another incident: Rituparno once asked him to type up the script for a documentary, as his own fingers were awkward on a computer keyboard. Sumanto asked for the manuscript. Rituparno replied that there was no manuscript; he would dictate it. He proceeded to dictate the entire script flawlessly, without a pause, as though reading directly from printed sheets laid out before him.
His drafts did not dwell on paper. They dwelled in his voice.
In the vast corpus written in Bengali about Rituparno Ghosh, two themes recur with relentless frequency: first, that he illuminated the private, interior universe of women upon the screen; second, that he stood fearlessly in the public square regarding his sexuality and gender identity. Both are true, and both are profoundly significant.
Yet woven through his oeuvre, from his maiden feature to his last, is another persistent obsession: the voice. Which voice is grafted onto which body; who receives credit and who is erased; who mimics another’s cadence for cheap laughter, and who claims the dignity of their own throat. This interrogation surfaces repeatedly across Rituparno’s cinema. Yet on one fateful occasion, even he erred.
In 1992, Hirer Angti was released, adapted from Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s whimsical adventure story. Satyajit Ray passed away that very year. Ritwik Ghatak had departed more than a decade prior; Mrinal Sen was entering the twilight of his career. Bengali cinema was dangling precariously between desolate art-house films with empty auditoriums on one hand, and crass, cheap remakes of Hindi commercial cinema on the other.
The central protagonist of Hirer Angti was Gandharvakumar. On screen, he appears in the physical form of Ayan Banerjee. Yet according to the film’s credits, his voice was lent by Deepankar De. Thus, in Rituparno’s very first feature, body and voice belonged to two entirely different human beings.
The release of the film was plagued by distribution troubles. Sangeeta Datta, Rituparno’s close confidante who later directed a documentary on his life, noted that Hirer Angti never received a proper theatrical release, bringing Rituparno’s directorial aspirations to a near standstill. Two years later, Unishe April premiered, instantly establishing him as a seminal auteur of contemporary Bengali cinema.
The 2000 film Bariwali was produced by Anupam Kher. The lead role of Banalata was performed by his wife, Kirron Kher. Filming took place across thirty-two days in two decaying feudal mansions near Kolkata.
Kirron Kher did not speak Bengali. Consequently, every line of dialogue in the film was dubbed by the Bengali actress Rita Koiral—including the weeping sequences, which had required glycerine on set. In 2001, Kirron Kher was awarded the National Film Award for Best Actress.
Under the regulations of the National Film Awards, a performance rendered through a dubbed voice was ineligible for the acting accolade. Filmmakers submitting entries were thus obligated to declare whether an actor’s voice had been dubbed. That year, Bariwali plunged the jury into turmoil. The jury chair was Goutam Ghose. The central question was: when assessing acting, how indispensable is an actor’s own voice? One faction argued that dialogue delivery, cadence, and diction are indivisible components of acting; therefore, if an actor does not deliver their own lines, an award cannot be conferred. On the other side, Saeed Mirza contended that even if the voice belongs to someone else, an actor’s performance can be judged on physical presence, gesture, and body language.
Some seventeen years later, on a talk show on Zee Bangla, Rita Koiral offered her own testimony. She recounted that Goutam Ghose had telephoned her directly to ask if the voice was indeed hers, to which she had candidly replied yes. Soon after, a phone call came from Anupam Kher. According to Koiral, she was pressured to deny the dubbing before the press, and when she refused, threats were leveled against her career. Kirron Kher denied the dubbing at the time. Rituparno later acknowledged in several television interviews that it was indeed Rita Koiral who had dubbed the role. Discrepancies persist in accounts of who said what, leaving certain details shrouded in uncertainty.
What is beyond dispute is that Koiral’s name never appeared on the official entry form. Thus, any prospect of sharing the award was foreclosed from the outset. Following Rita Koiral’s demise, the Times of India observed that the wound of being denied her rightful recognition was one she carried for the remainder of her days.
It is easy to pass summary judgment here, but the matter is rarely that simple. Dubbing was a routine, standard industry practice in Bengali and Indian cinema at the time, not an invention of Rituparno. Aparna Sen herself had dubbed for Debashree Roy in 36 Chowringhee Lane, arguing that dubbing can often elevate a performance. The offense was never the dubbing itself; the offense was that Rita Koiral’s name was absent from the single document where it rightfully belonged. In the end, Kirron Kher received the silver lotus, while the voice that breathed life into her character was left entirely unacknowledged.
Three years later came Chokher Bali. Aishwarya Rai as Binodini. Rituparno later revealed that from day one, Aishwarya had been informed she might not be able to dub her own dialogue. On the final day of shooting, Rituparno asked if she could attempt it. Aishwarya declined outright, recognizing that speaking Bengali with the requisite nuance was beyond her command. The dubbing was performed by Sreela Majumdar. Rituparno once played that dubbing over the phone for Aishwarya, who was delighted by the outcome.
The voice of Raima Sen’s Ashalata was provided by Sudipta Chakraborty, who had previously played Kirron Kher’s domestic maid in Bariwali. Writing in Anandabazar Patrika, Chandril Bhattacharya singled out Sudipta’s dubbing for special praise in his review of Chokher Bali.
Tucked inside the film’s credits lies another name that almost no one notices. Ashalata’s maternal aunt, Annapurna, was portrayed by Suchita Raychaudhuri. Her voice was dubbed by Rituparno Ghosh himself.
In other words, in 2003—nine years before Chitrangada, long before he ever brought his own physical body before the camera—Rituparno had already inhabited a female character. Solely through his voice. He did not conceal it; it was recorded in the credits. Yet because nobody reads dubbing credits, the transgression passed almost completely unnoticed.
In Greek mythology, there is the legend of the prophet Tiresias. A native of Thebes, he once came upon a pair of copulating serpents, struck them with his staff, and was instantly transformed into a woman. Seven years later, encountering the same scene and delivering the same blow, he reverted to a man. Later, when Zeus and Hera fell into a dispute over whether man or woman derives greater pleasure from sexual intercourse, Tiresias was summoned to arbitrate, being the sole mortal to have inhabited both bodies. Tiresias replied: woman. In a fury, Hera struck him blind; in compensation, Zeus bestowed upon him the gift of prophecy.
The myth is striking: because he had lived in two bodies, he was called upon to bear witness. He spoke the truth. As punishment, his eyes were stolen away. What remained was solely the power of voice.
In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, this very prophet arrives at the palace at the king’s summons. He wishes to remain silent; the king compels him. When Tiresias speaks the awful truth, the king denounces him as a charlatan and mocks his blindness. The very seer summoned to speak is insulted for the body that afforded him insight.
Here, a remarkable virtue of the Bengali language becomes evident. Scholars writing about Rituparno in English have wrestled with he, she, they, and even zie, finding none entirely comfortable. In Bengali, the third-person honorific pronoun carries no gender. Tini simply means tini. Thus, for Rituparno, Bengali never had to invent new neologisms, nor rupture antique vocabularies. What the language had endowed from its very inception, polite society had refused to grant.
On Star Jalsha, Rituparno hosted Ghosh & Company. Before that, on ETV Bangla, he anchored Ebong Rituparno. On both programs, he addressed his guests with the intimate pronoun tui, and the sets were dressed like private drawing rooms, complete with tea and savories. He shunned the word “interview,” calling it an adda.
On one episode, his guest was Mir Afsar Ali. The popular radio jockey and comedian had, for years across various award ceremonies, mimicked Rituparno—caricaturing what was perceived as his effeminate cadence and gestures. In a scholarly paper by Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit Dasgupta, this episode is dated to October 6, 2009. A contemporary Kolkata blog, however, chronicles a similar confrontation in an episode broadcast in November 2008, leaving a slight ambiguity in the calendar.
What admits no ambiguity is the incisiveness of Rituparno’s cross-examination. He asked Mir whether, when performing his mimicry, he was impersonating the individual named Rituparno Ghosh, or parodying the archetype of an effeminate man. He asked whether Mir had ever considered that through his routine, every effeminate man across Kolkata was being publicly humiliated. Then he added that he was not objecting out of personal slight, but speaking for those for whom he had perhaps become a representative.
Kolkata was divided over the exchange. Some argued that inviting a guest to one’s show only to corner him in that manner breached decorum. Others countered that Rituparno had transgressed once, whereas Mir had done so for years with impunity. Scholars mark this broadcast as Rituparno’s public coming out—a watershed moment of queer self-assertion.
Now set these two episodes side by side. In 2000, in his film, a dubbing artist’s name was expunged from an official form; in 2009, that same filmmaker stood on national television and proclaimed that no one possesses the right to expropriate another’s voice for sport. One cannot label this repentance or atonement, for there was no declared link between the two, nor did anyone make such a claim. What can be said is this: the machinery that can strip a person of their voice was an apparatus whose inner gears Rituparno understood from within—for he had operated that very machine once himself.
In 2010, in Kaushik Ganguly’s Arekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story), Rituparno stood before the camera for the first time as an actor, having also co-written the screenplay. The unveiling of the poster alone set Kolkata abuzz.
The narrative follows Abhiroop Sen, a transgender documentary filmmaker arriving in Kolkata from Delhi to craft a non-fiction film on Chapal Bhaduri. Chapal Bhaduri was a living legend. Born into the illustrious Bhaduri family, brother of actress Ketaki Dutta, he had risen during an era when respectable women were barred from the Jatra folk-theatre stage, becoming one of the highest-paid “actresses” by embodying female roles. Audiences called him Chapal Rani. In 1999, Naveen Kishore’s documentary Performing the Goddess had brought him back into contemporary discourse.
In the film, the elderly Chapal Bhaduri played himself. And as the young Chapal, Rituparno cast his own self. For the man who had spent his entire life lending his body and voice to female characters on the folk stage, Rituparno substituted his own body and his own voice to portray that youthful incarnation.
Two years later arrived Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish. In the Mahabharata, Chitrangada is the warrior princess of Manipur, raised by her father as a son in the absence of a male heir, who later weds Arjuna. In Rabindranath Tagore’s 1892 dance drama, Chitrangada entreats Madana, the god of love, for celestial beauty for one year to win Arjuna. Having attained that form, she presents herself anew to Arjuna, only to ultimately discard that borrowed splendor and stand before him in her true identity.
Rituparno’s Rudra is a choreographer. Even as he stages Tagore’s Chitrangada, he undertakes gender affirmation surgery, for without legal recognition, adopting a child with his partner Partho remains impossible. Throughout the film, people around him persistently warn of the surgical hazards: his parents retreat into stony silence, and his lover urges him to reconsider.
For Tagore’s Chitrangada, the ultimate question was: can a person who transforms to appease another’s desire reclaim their sovereign self? Rituparno’s Rudra pushes that dilemma into far more radical terrain. The body we receive at birth is not one we chose either. What, then, do we truly mean by “one’s own body”? And who decrees which body is natural, and which altered?
Tagore’s drama works within an established framework of identity. Rituparno pushes the question further from within that very architecture. For his Rudra, altering the body is not merely cosmetic metamorphosis; it is the sovereign right to determine one’s own existence.
Then came what lent certain scenes an eerie, prophetic weight. On the morning of May 30, 2013, Rituparno Ghosh suffered a massive heart attack at his South Kolkata residence and passed away. He was forty-nine. He had lived with Type 2 diabetes and chronic pancreatitis. Following his death, speculative debates arose regarding the physical toll of surgeries and hormone therapies, though whether these bore any direct causal relationship remains difficult to confirm. Yet an unsettling coincidence lingers: the surgical perils repeatedly forecast to Rudra on screen sounded chillingly altered after the filmmaker’s own premature demise.
Sunglass—released in Hindi as Taak Jhaank—was adapted from Rituparno’s own short story, “Chaitali Chashma.” A deceptively simple tale of an ordinary woman who comes into possession of an antique pair of spectacles that allows her to read the unspoken thoughts of others.
The production history of this film was stranger than its fiction. Rituparno had approached Aparna Sen with the screenplay back in the nineties. In 2006, Konkona Sen Sharma signed on. For the male lead in the Hindi version, Arshad Warsi was initially cast but withdrew over budgetary disagreements. Sanjay Suri followed, stepping aside over misgivings regarding the character’s depth. Eventually, R. Madhavan stepped in. Madhavan agreed without even reading the script, purely on hearing Rituparno narrate the tale. An illness suffered by Jaya Bachchan delayed shooting by a month, until production finally commenced concurrently in both languages in Kolkata in October 2006.
Thereafter, the film languished in cans for years. It finally saw the light of day on November 10, 2013, at the 19th Kolkata International Film Festival. By then, its director had been dead for nearly six months. The plot concerned a pair of glasses that deciphered the secret thoughts of others. Yet the film itself could not find its way to an audience for seven years.
His final directorial effort was Satyanweshi, adapted from Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh adventure Chorabali. In the titular role of Byomkesh was Sujoy Ghosh—a director himself, making his acting debut. Shooting took place at the historic Gaine Rajbari in Dhanyakuria. Rituparno wrapped the principal photography, but did not live to oversee the post-production. The remaining sound and edit were completed by his core team. The film released on September 6, 2013.
For two decades, the man who had orchestrated whose voice would belong to which physical body had his own final cinematic soundscape completed by others.
Rituparno edited Robbar, the Sunday literary supplement of Sangbad Pratidin. Each week, he contributed a personal column titled “First Person.” On Sunday mornings, copies of the paper would vanish from newsstands within a couple of hours. In that column, he wrote candidly about his sexuality, reflected upon fractured relationships—prudently withholding the names of those involved—and meditated on solitary living and physical affliction. In the August 1, 2010 installment, he recounted that his father had been hospitalized for a month, leaving him entirely alone in the two-story house at Indrani Park; perhaps, he mused, his father was preparing him for the solitude of the rest of his life.
According to documentation published by Sahapedia, the column ran from December 24, 2006 to June 2, 2013. He had passed away on May 30. Thus, his final column reached readers three days after the author was already dead. The columns were posthumously anthologized into a two-volume set by Dey’s Publishing that very year. In Sangeeta Datta’s documentary Bird of Dusk, excerpts from “First Person” are read aloud by other voices.
In sum, the portrait resolves into this: the figure in Bengali cinema who spent twenty years determining where each voice would reside saw his own voice, in the end, migrate outside his body. It was set in type on paper; it was bound into books; it resonated in documentaries through the throats of others; and the soundtrack of his final film was brought to rest by other hands. The very terms of Tiresias’s bargain: the eyes perish, but the utterance endures.
A counterargument is natural: did Rituparno weave this thematic thread consciously? He did not, or at least he never committed such an intent to writing. In “First Person,” there is no exhaustive self-critique of dubbing, nor in his interviews. Consequently, one cannot claim this was a pre-meditated manifesto. What one can do is arrange his works in sequence and observe that they all face the identical horizon: Gandharvakumar in the voice of Deepankar De; Banalata in the voice of Rita Koiral; Binodini in the voice of Sreela Majumdar; Annapurna in the voice of Rituparno; Rituparno in the voice of Mir; young Chapal Bhaduri in the voice and body of Rituparno; and finally, the sound design of Satyanweshi arranged by grieving friends. An artist’s work often articulates realities far more lucidly than their spoken proclamations. And in the cinema of Rituparno Ghosh, that truth resonates not inside the visual frame, but along the soundtrack.
