When Sachin Kundalkar adapted his own novel Cobalt Blue for the screen, he didn’t just translate words—he sculpted silence into image, memory into mood.

Set against the restrained quietude of a middle-class Maharashtrian household, the film unspools a dual narrative of love, loss, and rebellion, told through the voices of a brother and sister who fall for the same enigmatic paying guest, unravelling the fabric of their conservative family. Through cobalt-washed frames, fragmented time, and aching stillness, Kundalkar crafts a cinematic meditation on queer desire and emotional exile—one that feels as much like a memory as a movie.

The film Cobalt Blue was inspired by Sachin Kundalkar’s own novel of the same name, which he began writing at the age of 20 and completed by 22. The story was first published in Marathi in 2006 and later translated into English by Jerry Pinto in 20131.

Kundalkar wrote the novel shortly after moving to Mumbai, channelling his feelings of solitude and introspection into the characters. He began with Tanay’s monologue and then added Anuja’s perspective, crafting a dual narrative that explores same-sex love, longing, and the quiet rebellion against societal norms.

The film adaptation, which Kundalkar also directed, retains the novel’s lyrical tone and emotional depth.

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It’s a deeply personal and poetic work—one that blends literature, identity, and the ache of first love into a quiet storm of a story

Cobalt Blue is a quiet, aching meditation on love, identity, and the fractures within tradition. Here are its central themes:

Forbidden and Fluid Love

• The story explores same-sex desire and bisexual attraction through the siblings’ shared love for the same man. It challenges heteronormative expectations, portraying love as something that transcends labels and binaries.
• Tanay (Neelay Mehendale) is a sensitive, introspective, aspiring writer. His secret intimate relationship with the paying guest becomes a vessel for self-discovery and heartbreak. It unfolds in hushed tones and stolen moments—never overtly acknowledged, yet deeply felt. Their connection is tender, sensual, and ultimately heartbreaking, reflecting the invisibility of queer love in conservative spaces.
• Tanay’s younger sister Anuja (Anjali Sivaraman) is free-spirited, bold, and emotionally impulsive. Her infatuation with the same man is more openly expressed, yet equally doomed. Her heartbreak mirrors Tanay’s, showing how love, regardless of gender, can be both liberating and devastating. Her perspective offers a more outward, raw expression of desire and loss.
• The paying guest played by Prateik Babbaris is enigmatic, charismatic, and emotionally elusive. He becomes the object of both siblings’ affection but remains unnamed, turning him into a symbol of desire, freedom, and emotional absence.

Duality of Perspective

• Told through the voices of both Tanay and Anuja, the film reveals how love and loss are experienced differently depending on gender, personality, and emotional openness.
• The film is split into two halves—first from Tanay’s point of view, then Anuja’s. This structure allows us to see how the same events are filtered through different emotional lenses: Tanay’s is introspective and poetic; Anuja’s is raw and impulsive.

Rebellion Against Conservatism

• The siblings’ emotional awakenings disrupt their traditional Maharashtrian family, exposing the tension between personal truth and societal conformity. Tanay’s queerness and Anuja’s tomboyish independence are seen as threats to the family’s image. Their father’s authoritarian presence looms large, and the siblings’ emotional awakenings become acts of quiet defiance.

Art as Catharsis

• Tanay’s writing becomes a vessel for processing heartbreak and identity, highlighting how art can be both a mirror and a refuge. He pours his grief into writing letters and poetry, which serve as a lifeline to his identity. His words become a private archive of longing and self-discovery.

Loneliness and Longing

• The paying guest is a cipher—his mystery reflects the characters’ own yearning for connection, and the void he leaves behind becomes a metaphor for emotional abandonment.

Color Symbolism

• The title itself—Cobalt Blue—evokes a deep, melancholic hue, symbolising intensity, desire, and the bruises of love. The film uses cobalt blue as a recurring visual motif, appearing in lighting, clothing, and set design. It evokes melancholy, passion, and the bruises left by love. In one striking scene, Tanay walks past a wall plastered with posters of heterosexual romances, only to later see it replaced with queer cinema like Fire, signaling a shift in his internal world

It’s a film that lingers in the silences, in the glances, in the poetry of what’s left unsaid. It’s a film that doesn’t shout, like a memory you can’t quite shake.

Cobalt Blue resonates powerfully with ongoing societal conversations around LGBTQ+ identity, visibility, and emotional truth, especially in contexts where queerness is still marginalised or silenced

The film contributes to the normalisation of queer identities by portraying same-sex love not as spectacle, but as deeply human and emotionally nuanced. This aligns with global efforts to move beyond tokenism and toward authentic representation in media.

Tanay’s internal journey reflects the psychological turmoil of navigating queer identity in a heteronormative society. His quiet rebellion—through writing, longing, and self-reflection—mirrors real-world struggles for self-acceptance and emotional agency.

The film explores queer masculinity and the fluidity of desire, challenging rigid binaries. The unnamed paying guest becomes a symbol of both freedom and ambiguity, disrupting traditional ideas of masculinity and control.

The recurring use of cobalt blue as a visual motif speaks to loneliness, desire, and queer resilience. It’s not just aesthetic—it’s a coded language that reflects how LGBTQ+ individuals often communicate identity and emotion in subtle, symbolic ways.

As scholars have noted, films like Cobalt Blue can trigger broader societal conversations about gender, sexuality, and emotional truth. They offer a space for viewers—especially in conservative cultures—to confront biases and expand empathy.

Sachin Kundalkar’s journey from novelist to screenwriter and director

Kundalkar began writing Cobalt Blue as a novel at age 20, starting with Tanay’s monologue, which later became the emotional spine of the film.

When adapting it into a screenplay, he focused on retaining the lyrical, introspective tone of the novel. Rather than expanding the plot, he pared it down, allowing silences, glances, and visual metaphors to carry emotional weight.

He described the adaptation as a process of emotional translation, not technical fidelity. He once said Pinto’s English translation of the novel was “not technically correct. It was emotionally correct”—a philosophy he mirrored in the screenplay.

As director, Kundalkar leaned into the poetic minimalism of the source material. He used long takes, ambient sound, and subdued lighting to evoke the characters’ inner worlds.

He deliberately kept the paying guest unnamed and emotionally opaque, turning him into a symbol of desire, absence, and projection—just as in the novel.

The film’s dual narrative structure (Tanay’s perspective followed by Anuja’s) was preserved, allowing viewers to experience the same emotional rupture from two distinct lenses.

Kundalkar used cobalt blue as a recurring visual motif, embedding it in costumes, lighting, and set design to evoke longing and melancholy.

He avoided melodrama, instead embracing stillness and ambiguity, trusting the audience to feel what isn’t said.

The film’s pacing mirrors the rhythm of memory—nonlinear, fragmented, and emotionally charged.

Kundalkar’s process is a masterclass in adaptation as reinterpretation. He didn’t just transpose the novel to screen—he reimagined it through the grammar of cinema, preserving its soul while letting it breathe in a new medium.

Sachin Kundalkar: Sculpting Silence, Writing Desire

“I wrote Cobalt Blue when I was 20. I was lonely in Mumbai, and I started writing Tanay’s monologue. That’s how it began.”

That confession doesn’t just reveal the origin of his most intimate novel—it maps the emotional coordinates of his career. Raised in Mumbai and trained at the Film and Television Institute of India, Kundalkar went on to study in Paris at La Fémis, where his short film One Café Please signaled his flair for minimalism and introspection. But it was in Marathi theatre and literature where he first found the pulse of his voice—queer, lyrical, and fiercely tender.

Crafting the Cinematic Interior

Kundalkar’s breakout film Nirop (2007) won the National Award for Best Marathi Feature, but it was Gandha (2009)—a triptych of sensory-driven stories—that hinted at his signature: emotion conveyed through atmosphere, silence, and sensory metaphor. His films are less about what happens and more about what is felt in the hush between two characters, in the soft glow of a cobalt-lit room, in the echo of an unspoken truth.

When he adapted Cobalt Blue into a Netflix film in 2022, he brought this philosophy to full bloom. Rather than merely transposing plot, he reimagined the novel’s poetic cadence into cinematic mood—letting glances, doorframes, and rain-slicked streets hold the emotional weight of monologue.

“Jerry Pinto’s translation is not technically correct. It is emotionally correct.”

This idea of emotional correctness—of privileging truth over literalism—guides all of Kundalkar’s adaptations. Whether directing or writing, he approaches storytelling as an act of translation: from life to page, from silence to scene, from absence to presence.

Themes of Desire, Domesticity, and Rebellion

What ties his body of work together is a recurring negotiation between inner desire and outer restraint. Characters in Happy Journey, Gulabjaam, or Vazandar often crave connection but are trapped by societal decorum, familial roles, or their own emotional vocabulary. Through them, Kundalkar writes not just queer narratives, but queer ways of feeling—expressions that curve sideways, duck under, flicker briefly, then vanish.

His protagonists are rarely loud revolutionaries. Instead, they reclaim space through art, food, fragments of memory. In Cobalt Blue, Tanay writes letters he never sends. In Gandha, smell evokes entire lost lives. Kundalkar reminds us that rebellion doesn’t always sound like a shout—sometimes it sighs.

A Love Song in a Minor Key

With every story, Kundalkar refines a cinematic and literary language that’s both delicate and deliberate. He doesn’t just tell stories; he curates emotional climates, allowing readers and viewers to dwell within them. His commitment to duality—between silence and voice, tradition and transgression, form and feeling—marks him as one of India’s most compelling narrative stylists.

As Cobalt Blue continues to resonate with audiences beyond the page and screen, Kundalkar stands as proof that stories need not be loud to echo loudly. They just need to feel lived—and felt.

Stage as Seedbed: Theatrical Roots of Emotional Precision

Before cinema claimed him, Kundalkar honed his emotional grammar in the world of Marathi theatre. Plays like Chotyasha Suteet and Poornaviram revealed a mind drawn not just to plot, but to the cadences of silence, subtext, and spatial intimacy. His characters often occupy liminal spaces—a closed room, a train compartment, a silent park bench—where dialogue is pared down to its emotional core.

This theatrical background enriched his cinematic eye. Scenes in Cobalt Blue unfold like minimalist stagecraft: sparse props, loaded silence, and gestures pregnant with unspoken feeling. Watching a character press their palm to a cool wall, or stare out of frame while a fan spins overhead, feels less like exposition and more like visual monologue.

Cobalt in the Stream: Finding an Audience on Netflix

With Cobalt Blue, Kundalkar found a platform in Netflix that allowed him to reach audiences beyond linguistic and cultural borders—while still telling a story rooted in Maharashtrian domesticity. It was a rare moment: a queer Indian narrative, adapted from a regional novel, released globally in over 190 countries.

Streaming gave Kundalkar the freedom to craft a film outside the tyranny of box office metrics, to trust in the poetry of stillness and the power of emotional honesty. In interviews, he emphasized that streaming audiences are more willing to engage with introspective pacing and nuanced queer representation, making platforms like Netflix fertile ground for films that would otherwise be stifled.