Postcolonial Resistance of India's Cultural Nationalism in Select Films of Rituparno Ghosh

The paper would focus on the cultural nationalism that the Indians gave birth to in response to the British colonialism and Ghosh’s critique of such a parochial nationalism. The paper seeks to expose the irony of India’s cultural nationalism which is based on the phallogocentric principle informed by the Western Enlightenment logic. It will be shown how the idea of a modern India was in fact guided by the heteronormative logic of the British masters. India’s postcolonial politics was necessarily patriarchal and hence its nationalist agenda was deeply gendered. Exposing the marginalised status of the gendered and sexual subalterns in India’s grand narrative of nationalism, Ghosh questions the compatible comradeship of the “imagined communities”.