Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish (2012)

A story of longing. A person—male in form, female in thought. An engineer by education, a choreographer by profession, a dancer by passion. A high-caliber artist. Life has given them much. Talent, skill, focus. Many want to be near them, enchanted by their work. The person has everything, yet something is missing! Let their own words clarify: “So many people admire me, but how many have the courage to love, tell me?” Yes, loneliness. The common trait of extraordinary people. This person was contentedly passing their days with solitude and work.

Then one day, they met a young man. The boy was wayward, rootless, restless. The type who lives by momentary impulses and decisions. On top of that, he used drugs. They were utterly charmed by him. From attraction came closeness, gradually love, finally devotion. When such free-spirited souls feel love for someone, that feeling becomes intense beyond measure. Seeing the boy’s response, the person drowned in boundless love. They loved the boy accepting all his limitations and flaws. Same-sex love. Forbidden and pure.

One day the boy said he loved children. He wanted a child of his own. They could just adopt a baby, couldn’t they? No, they couldn’t. Two people of the same sex cannot do so even if they wish. The law forbids it. By then their love had reached such depths that the choreographer could do anything for that boy. They decided they would become the mother of the boy’s child. They would fulfill their beloved’s wish. How? By becoming a woman! As simple as that!

They went to a doctor. They would undergo sex reassignment surgery. An excruciating process. Still, they would do it. For their beloved boy. In the name of their love. The task wasn’t easy. The entire process takes time to complete. One must go from one step to another. During that journey, the boy disappeared again. Such boys don’t stay—they vanish. People don’t understand beforehand, they understand after losing them. They are creatures one feels compelled to love, and having loved them, one suffers later. It happens! The very person for whom they were putting themselves through such agony, changing even their very existence, half-transformed already—that same person was now saying, “If I need a child, I’ll have it with some woman’s womb. Why would I have a child with a transformed woman’s (in his words, a synthetic woman’s) womb?” Something like that doubt. The person’s identity became more important to him than the person he loved.

But yes, they hadn’t walked that pale path of transformation entirely alone. Someone else was with them. That “someone else” gave them time, talked with them, listened to their problems. Who was this person? Were they anyone at all? Or, to ask more clearly… were they someone separate? What is clearer than clear, more visible than the visible, more constant than truth—does its existence depend merely on touch? Or are some presences so vivid they’re more reliable than touch? How much must body and mind change before a person becomes someone else? Does that change bring a different body-mind to the same person? Or does it change the entire person? What does the Ship of Theseus say?

Rituparno Ghosh’s ‘Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish’ is essentially a gray tale of desire and self-realization. This film raises questions related to human gender and identity. Those questions cannot be answered; it takes audacity to attempt answers. Looking at the myth, we see that Chitrangada’s father wanted Chitrangada to live with a man’s mind and a man’s capabilities. After meeting Arjuna, Chitrangada wished to become a woman. Love shows us the path to self-identity, and changes it too.

Rituparno also showed how the boy’s father wanted him to become an engineer. Made him study for it too. The boy’s desire lay elsewhere. He went that way too. Became a choreographer, also a dancer. The son never really heeded his parents’ words much, but when he was becoming a woman, he didn’t have beside him the person for whom he was becoming one, yet he certainly had his parents. That is true love—the love that teaches one to accept the beloved as they are, and even if the person keeps changing, the name of not abandoning them is love. In the movie ‘Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish,’ I’ve seen such love felt by the choreographer’s parents; the boy they had loved, their external transformation—which they were undergoing for that very boy—he could never accept, and moved away from their life. Love teaches acceptance.

Whether someone loves you or not, be what you want to be.

Whether someone stays beside you or not, walk the path you wanted to walk.

No matter how many boundaries you see around you, if your desire wants to cross limits, then accompany that desire, no matter how much pain it causes you!

What someone said matters far less than what your heart told you. Don’t break yourself within convention; break convention within yourself.

‘Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish’ is a story of false love that throws a question: How much suffering will you take for me? No answer was found. And because no answer was found, the story is far more about wish-fulfillment than about love.