THR India's 25 in 25: 'Nagar Kirtan' And The Madness of Love

Boy meets girl. Except that the boy, Madhu (Ritwick Chakraborty), or Madhu da, is almost a man. And the girl, Puti (Riddhi Sen) — to the cold, incurious eye — is almost a boy. Kaushik Ganguly’s raw Bengali feature, Nagar Kirtan, revels in the slipperiness of identity and desire. A wrenching love story between a young trans woman and a kirtan (devotional) musician in Kolkata, it’s the kind of film that mocks academic categorisation: call it a ‘queer romance’ or a ‘social critique’ or a ‘treatise on marginalised lives’ and it runs off, slips away, giggles back in your face.

Instead, we’re encouraged to see the film as Madhu first sees Puti: in the isolating glow of a solitary vapour lamp, fascinated and transfixed. The film, which won four National Awards, including Best Actor for Sen, draws its power from profound pain and longing, yet it can spring the occasional surprise. One of the leading voices in contemporary Bengali cinema, Ganguly has a way with juxtapositions, melding the ancient and the everyday, the urban and the provincial, a Radha-Krishna parable with a tune from Karan Johar.

 Nagar Kirtan picked up a few thematic threads from Arekti Premer Golpo, Ganguly’s 2010 film starring the late Rituparno Ghosh, to whom Nagar Kirtan is dedicated. The two films bookend a tumultuous period for gay rights in India, with Section 377 scrapped, reinstated and scrapped again. “Through our movies we can send the message of love, that love is equal,” Ganguly told The Statesman in 2019. “It is the noble relation between two souls and not body. So, gender is not an issue in love.”

Riddhi Sen on His Performance in Nagar Kirtan

“I was all of 17 when KG (Kaushik Ganguly) cast me in the role of Puti,” Sen, now 27, tells The Hollywood Reporter India. “He wanted to capture the vulnerability of a teenager, of the chaos and torment that can grip us in that delicate age.”

To prepare, Sen studied Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar-nominated turn in The Danish Girl and spent time with members of the transgender community in Kolkata. A cis-male actor, Sen was all too cautious not to turn in an imitative performance. “In mainstream Bollywood, a transperson is treated either as comic relief or a character with negative shades. There’s a scarring lack of empathy in such portrayals.”

In rehearsals and on set, Sen found his biggest support in his co-star, Chakraborty. As Ganguly made clear to his leads, if the central love story in the film didn’t work, nothing worked.

“Ritwick is one of the finest actors in Indian cinema,” Sen says. “He helped me step out of my identity and embody Puti. When he held my hand or looked me in the eye, I actually felt like he was treating me as his lover.”

There’s a charming scene with Puti and Madhu in a rickshaw, en route to meet the latter’s family in Nabadwip in Bengal, pretending to be a straight couple. “Don’t address me as your bandhobi,” Puti mandates, preferring the more posh, English ‘girlfriend’. There’s also a lush romantic undertow to Sen’s reading of the word ‘da’— literally, elder brother in Bengali but carrying myriad meanings. “It’s a uniquely affectionate word in our language,” Sen agrees. “The subtitles don’t do it justice.”

Nagar Kirtan was shot in just 26 days — a standard production schedule in mid-budget Bengali cinema. Ganguly cast real transgender people from the hijra community in Bengal as supporting actors. The sequence where Puti and her compatriots are begging for alms at a traffic signal was filmed guerilla-style, with Sen in costume. It’s one of the most treasured experiences of his career, he says. “I actually collected ₹150 from passing cars and bikes. A schoolgirl gave me money and asked me to bless her for her exams. I have kept that money till this day.”