Nagarkirtan


Nagarkirtan is a 2017 Indian Bengali film written and directed by Kaushik Ganguly. The film stars Riddhi Sen as Parimal, a trans woman from rural Bengal, and Ritwick Chakraborty as Madhu, a flute player from the Kirtaniya town of Nabadwip.
At the 65th National Film Awards the film won four Awards including, Special Jury Award and National Film Award for Best Actor for Riddhi Sen.

Plot

Unable to cope with the trauma of being ‘betrayed’ by her teacher Subhash-da, Porimal, a trans woman, runs away from home and joins a ghetto of eunuchs as Puti and sings at traffic signals to earn money. There she falls in love with Madhu, a delivery boy with a Chinese restaurant who moonlights as a flautist in kirtans. Their love blossoms while they dream of raising money required for the sex reassigned surgery after meeting the first transgender person in India who has completed Doctor of Philosophy, Manabi Bandyopadhyay. But transphobic society does not support their dreams. Puti is arrested and commits suicide by hanging herself with her towel inside the lock up at a police station. Eventually, Madhu joins the same ghetto of eunuchs.

Cast

The film is a document that frames this experience of an invisible community, rarely portrayed in Indian mainstream cinema. The fabric of Ganguly's film moves beyond the binaries of a linear and complex narrative and instead brings forth a breathtaking ruthlessness that mirrors the hidden lives and traumas of the Transgender/ Hijra/ Intersex/ gender non-conforming communities. The film embodies the visceral experience of these communities battling centuries of prejudice and taboo. The community's lived realities of being caught between questions of vice and virtue, desire and rejection sustains the film's body narrative – rather precariously – avoiding a moral position – yet examining the very contours that makes taking these positions complicated. In a society that largely considers trans bodies as dustbins to dump its traumas and miscarriages of justice, the film signals a language of change that can be used to build a narrative of resistance.

Awards