(Class)ifying the Queer in India: Reading the Intersection of Class with Sexuality in the Bengali Film Arekti Premer Golpo (2010)

Abstract

This article examines how class structures queer visibility in Kaushik Ganguly's Arekti Premer Golpo (2010). Building on scholarship that has already identified the film's classed contrast between the urban filmmaker Abhiroop and the materially precarious former female impersonator Chapal Bhaduri, it places that inequality within a longer history of bhadralok representation in Bengali cinema. Through close textual analysis, the article considers space, English-language cultural capital, consumer culture, documentary authorship, and hierarchies of masculinity and effeminacy. It argues that queer visibility is unevenly distributed: Abhiroop's mobility, education, and control of the documentary apparatus provide representational authority that remains less available to Chapal. The film's parallel temporal structure therefore reveals how class, caste-coded respectability, gender expression, and sexuality intersect, shifting the analytical question from who becomes visible to who controls the conditions of visibility.