Revival of the bhadra man in Rituparno Ghosh's Unishe April and Dahan

The paper interrogates how hegemonic Bengali bhadralok masculinities are performed, contested, and reconfigured within changing socio-cultural institutions and gender orders in Kolkata, with a focus on Rituparno Ghosh’s films Unishe April and Dahan. It situates the bhadralok as historically tied to caste privilege (Brahman, Kayastha, Vaidya), English/Sanskritic education, and an ethos of refinement (bhadra), noting Calcutta’s institutional networks (schools, colleges, printing press, clerical jobs) that produced this elite status. Post-liberalization transformations diversified and expanded bhadralok markers beyond caste/class, reshaping middle-classness through practices of taste, education, cultural capital, and consumption. Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of epic time and Bourdieu’s concepts of taste and capital, the introduction argues that contemporary bhadralok identity operates as a nostalgic performance of virtue, even as neoliberal urban change, mass education, and new consumption patterns unsettle older hierarchies. The study aims to chart shifts in bhadralok ideology and masculinity as performed in Ghosh’s cinema and to question the invisibilization of masculine power, privilege, and performance under changing gender dynamics.

The paper synthesizes a broad literature on bhadralok identity and masculinity. Historical and sociological work (Sarkar, Cronin, Mukherjee, Chattopadhyay) links bhadralok status to English education, cultural capital, and an ethos of refinement distinct from both aristocratic decadence and chotolok coarseness. Post-liberalization scholarship (Donner, De Neve, Appadurai) traces middle-class transformations in India, highlighting heterogeneity, consumption practices, and gendered family dynamics. Masculinities research (Connell; Hearn; Kimmel; Messerschmidt; Elias & Beasley) frames masculinity as relational, intersectional, institutionally embedded, and historically variable, emphasizing the patriarchal dividend, homosociality, and the globalization of business masculinity. Colonial-era constructions of Bengali effeminacy (Sinha) and the counter-emphasis on buddhibal over bahubal (Chattopadhyay) contextualize bhadralok masculinity’s emergence alongside emphasized femininity (Connell) embodied in the bhadramahila. Work on Kolkata’s urban modernity and bhadralok culture (Gooptu; Chatterji; Chakrabarty) informs readings of family, adda, and spatial politics. Prior studies of Ghosh’s cinema have foregrounded feminine/queer subjectivities; this paper addresses a relative gap by centering masculine power, privilege, and performance within Ghosh’s bhadralok worlds.

This is an interpretive, theoretically informed film analysis employing close reading of two cinematic texts by Rituparno Ghosh: Unishe April (1994) and Dahan (1997). The authors analyze narrative structure, dialogue, character arcs, and mise-en-scène to interpret performances of bhadralok masculinity across domestic and public spaces (e.g., home, workplace, Kolkata’s New Market). The analysis mobilizes multiple theoretical frameworks: Connell’s concepts of hegemonic masculinity, gender order, patriarchal dividend, masculinities as a linking concept, and globalization; Hearn’s theorization of world patriarchy and differences between public/private masculine performances; Bourdieu’s habitus and forms of capital (cultural, social), and distinctions of taste; Kimmel’s homosociality, shame, and masculine overcompensation; as well as insights from studies of salaryman masculinity (Dasgupta), transnational business masculinity (Elias & Beasley), gendered space (Massey; Spain; Lico), and the male gaze (Mulvey). The methodology juxtaposes the films’ male protagonists (Manish in Unishe April; Palash and Tunir in Dahan), the gendered spaces they inhabit, and the socio-economic shifts of post-liberalization Kolkata to elucidate how masculine power operates through both non-physical (symbolic, discursive) and physical/sexual violence. No new empirical datasets are generated; the study is grounded in textual analysis and engagement with existing scholarship.

• In Unishe April, Manish exemplifies a bhadralok salaryman masculinity anchored in provider/protector roles, occupational prestige (doctor), and cultural authority. Sarojini’s autonomy as a celebrated dancer and primary cultural earner unsettles this order. Manish’s responses—benevolent sexism, satirical put-downs, and attempts to reassert domestic authority—reveal masculine shame tied to a perceived loss of patriarchal dividend and status, highlighting the fragility of bhadralok masculinity when confronted with women’s public success and income parity/superiority.
• The film situates Sarojini as a “new” bhadramahila whose public artistry and bodily display (read through the male gaze) destabilize parochial codes of bhadrata. Manish’s intellectualized control and symbolic violence substitute for overt physical dominance, showing how hegemonic masculinity adapts to maintain hierarchy.
• In Dahan, public urban space (New Market) is depicted as masculinist, where women’s mobility and sartorial choices (e.g., Romita’s desire for a skirt) are policed. Romita’s molestation is framed as a disciplining act to restore the bhadra order and contest women’s access to neoliberal public spaces; it reflects a habitus that normalizes male spectatorship and violence.
• Palash performs a “crossover” bhadralok masculinity—outwardly modern yet protective of patriarchal norms. After failing to defend Romita in public and facing homosocial scrutiny at work (locker-room style adda), Palash overcompensates through marital rape, reasserting control over his wife’s body to repair a wounded masculine identity.
• Jhinuk’s public heroism (rescuing Romita, pursuing legal redress) assumes a traditionally masculine role, destabilizing bhadralok expectations across families. Tunir embodies transnational business masculinity—workaholic, technologically adept, globally mobile—benefitting from patriarchal patronage networks. Yet he discourages Jhinuk’s legal entanglements when they threaten his upward mobility, revealing how cosmopolitan success can coexist with conserving gender hierarchies.
• Across both films, hegemonic bhadralok masculinity is shown as performative, anxious, and contingent on women’s compliance and male peer recognition. Neoliberal transformations (mass education, dual incomes, consumer culture, global careers) generate contradictions that expose the fragility and defensive overcompensation of bhadralok men.

The analysis demonstrates that contemporary bhadralok masculinity is not a neutral or fixed identity but a relational, institutionally embedded performance shaped by changing political economy and gender regimes. In Unishe April, domestic negotiations over status, income, and cultural capital show how men leverage symbolic power to sustain patriarchal dividends when women gain public prominence. In Dahan, the gendering of urban space and homosocial surveillance reveal how public failures of protection are converted into private assertions of dominance, underscoring masculinity’s dependence on both the regulation of women’s bodies and validation by other men. The films collectively argue that neoliberal shifts in Kolkata—consumerism, workplace reorganization, global mobility—do not dissolve patriarchy; rather, they reconfigure the sites and scripts through which bhadralok men attempt to maintain hierarchy, often producing defensive, sometimes violent, overperformances of masculinity. This addresses the study’s central question by exposing the mechanisms through which the revered bhadra order persists and falters amid modernization, indicating that the project of reconfiguring bhadralok masculinity has largely failed to yield egalitarian gender relations.

The study contends that the Indian middle class, often taken as a beacon of modernity, continues to secure ideas of purity and morality through women’s bodies, while celebrating and normalizing hegemonic bhadralok masculinity. Through close readings of Unishe April and Dahan, the paper shows that Ghosh’s cinema for the bhadralok calls into question the normalized bhadralok ideology and proposes alternative performances as idealized notions fade. A masculine reading foregrounds masculinity’s relational and fragile nature: bhadralok men respond to a shifting gender order with defensive overcompensation—Manish’s curtailment of Sarojini’s agency, Palash’s marital rape, and Tunir’s discouragement of Jhinuk’s legal pursuit—aimed at avoiding the stigma of effeminacy. These portrayals constitute failed masculinities, revealing the anxious, performative efforts to uphold the phantasmatic ideal of the real bhadralok man.