The Evolution of Queer Subjectivity in Bengali Cinema from Rituparno Ghosh to the Ott Era

Abstract

Bengali cinema, informed by a deep legacy of literary humanism, political engagement, and formal experimentation, provides a rich cultural space for examining the articulation of queer subjectivity. Yet for much of its cinematic history, queer lives remained largely invisible or indirectly expressed. Rather than being openly represented, non-normative desires were frequently displaced into metaphor, suggestion, and subtext. This absence was not simply an aesthetic decision but a consequence of entrenched social taboos, legal restrictions, and dominant heteronormative ideologies that rendered queer identities socially unrecognized. As a result, early Bengali films often relied on ambiguity—portraying intense same-sex emotional bonds, cross-gender performances, or figures marked as unconventional or “other”—to gesture toward queerness without explicitly naming it.

DOI - https://doi.org/10.65525/SVUP.9788199963313.2026.43-62