Biography: Chapal Rani, a female impersonator of Bengali jatra, who blurred boundaries of identity

When I began, the concert party or musicians would line up on both sides, at a slightly lower level than the actors. The musicians would set up – a harmonium on each side, the tuba, the cornet, the clarionet, violin, flute, tablas and dholaks, cymbals, bells and the three-cornered “triangle” that you played with a stick. You needed all that for the “jatra sound”.

Someone would hold a gong up to his ear and strike it so hard, we could feel it reverberate in our hearts. As the orchestra started tuning their instruments, we in the green room would pick up the pace and the crowd would know that was the cue to start settling down. The show was about to begin.

The playbill, if there was one, was nothing but a thin cheaply printed piece of paper listing the characters and scenes. The audience would sit on the ground, on sheets of tarpaulin. The “VIP” seats were simply folding chairs. When the “second bell” rang out, the tempo of the music would rise, the drums would get into a frenzy, and as the music reached its climax, someone might shout “Raja! Raja!” “Who calls? Who dares disturb me thus?” And so the jatra would begin. That old heritage is long lost. The sakhir dal, the chorus of young boys who would sing in the background, is long gone. That had also served as a kind of training pool for future ranis. When that was axed, that talent pool dried up. The Bibek-er gaan, the song of Conscience, is gone. The old playwrights are gone, the old directors too. The very style of acting has changed. No one became another Shekhar Ganguly or an Arun Dasgupta. Bela Sarkar was an excellent actress as was Bina Dasgupta. But they were few and far between. Even in our time, some cinema actors like Jahar Ganguly and Tulsi Chakrabarty did jatra but those were amateur shows. Then film stars started flooding in because there was money to be made. Some could sing, some could not, some could dance, some could not. Troupe owners wanted to cash in on their name and glamour, so they offered them big money. Soon, television actors followed. The real jatra actors were pushed aside. People complained that this jatra didn’t feel like jatra anymore. It was like watching bad cinema on stage. But the film stars kept coming. Now jatra feels like an old mansion, ruined but with a tacky coat of new paint, clinging to the memory of glory days.

For historical plays, you need actors with a certain stage presence and physique. In real life, a warrior like Prithviraj Chauhan might have been short and fat. But on screen you need someone who looks manly, like the Bollywood star Akshay Kumar. Nowadays, in jatra, I see actors and actresses who don’t take care of themselves … the women squeezed into obscene outfits. We too had cabaret scenes but they had class. We were fully covered, except for a slit at the end so we could show our legs.

But I cannot just blame jatra. Once, my mother discovered that in one of her plays they had added a dancer who performed in a bra and skirt, making obscene gestures while the audience whistled loudly.

“The stage is my temple,” Ma told the stage manager. “I cannot let it be sullied like this.”

The stage manager said, “What can I do? This is what the audience wants.”

Ma said, “Well, in case I can’t come from tomorrow. Please find someone else to replace me.”

I think the last decent jatra I saw was called the Ram Rahimer Ma [Mother of Ram and Rahim]. Ruma Dasgupta directed it. She had once acted with Natta Company, so she had some of that rigorous training. By then, jatra had crossed all limits in its desperation to please audiences. Bela Sarkar told me that she had to sometimes jump into the fire pit not once but thrice when she played the mythological character Amba. The audience would demand it.

In my day, the musicians set the mood. Drums would rumble to warn of ominous times. Trumpeters would blow to signal war. Thunderclaps would underscore a dramatic moment as the lamps blew out. The flute player would gently bring us back to earth. Now, even the musicians are gone. When I first saw jatras begin with the sound of a Casio keyboard instead of a clarionet, I wanted to weep.

At Natta Company, they would sing Radha-Govinda devotional songs for half an hour to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals before we got ready to go on stage. The very air would be saturated with that music and devotion. I knew they did it because they were Krishna devotees.

At first, I was not interested in it.

Surya-babu told me, “Whether you sing or not, listen to the kirtan songs.”

“But why?”

“Why? See these big stars, they stay up late. Not one comes for the kirtan. They come in right before their scene, put on their make-up and go on stage, Afterwards, they eat, drink, gossip and fall asleep. But if you listen to these songs, the melody will enter your very being. If you sing with them for half an hour, your vocal cords will grow warm and open up. It will help you on stage. If the melody is already in your head, you will be able to hit the right notes more easily. While you are doing your make-up, keep your ears open. Note the scale where it ends, so you can pick up from it as you enter.”

Surya-babu might not have had much of a bookish education but I learnt so much from him.

When the theatre actor Utpal Dutt came into jatra, he modernised it. Originally, we would enter and exit through the same gangway. dutt set up different passages for entry and exit. That sped up scene changes considerably. He changed how we used lighting too. When I started, there were no electric lights in jatra. We performed by the light of Petromax and hurricane lanterns. When electric lights arrived, they would be placed in sets of three on each side with a big light in the centre. After that, lights became more sophisticated and directors like Dutt showed how they could be used for special effects.

In Louho Kopat [The Iron Door], for example, we showed the passage of time from daybreak to the dead of night just through light and sound. At Satyambar, my first big production was based on the tragedy of the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, where British troops killed a crowd of protesters gathered in a park that had only one narrow exit. Historians say anywhere between 379 and 1,500 people died that day. And at least 1,200 were injured.

We needed to show the scale of that tragedy, but we didn’t have hundreds of people on stage. Utpal Dutt used lighting to make it seem like Jallianwala Bagh was teeming with people. He used sound to give the impression of many rifles firing. As the guns rang out, it seemed as if the people in the compound were running helter-skelter to escape the gunfire, but it was all done through lighting.

I had to play Mahinder Kaur, a Punjabi lady, the wife of Subedar Arjun Singh. I had only four scenes. I wore a salwar suit like Punjabi ladies wear, tied my hair in a tight bun. It was not a glamorous role, so I used very little make-up, just drew my eyebrows lightly, added a touch of eyeliner, no lipstick, no blush. Once we were in Jamshedpur, and I was standing outside, getting some fresh air, when a man came and told me, “Maa-ji – Mother – why are you standing outside? You should go in.” He thought I really was a middle-aged Punjabi woman!

Audiences were also becoming more demanding. We needed to do special effects on stage to satisfy them. When my mother acted in Chand Bibi on stage, it was famous for a scene where the character Joshibai comes on stage on a horse. The first few days, the actress would ride onto the stage on a real horse.

Instead of being awestruck, the audience would start laughing as the stage would shake, the sets would tilt and almost fall over. After a few days, the company dispensed with the horse. But one always looked for new ways to entertain and amaze the audience. In Plabon [The Flood], I played a Muslim girl who falls in love with a Hindu boy. She kills her father, then surrenders. Towards the end, she steps up to the gallows, crying “Allah hu Akbar”, a cloth is put over her head, the azaan sounds – and she is hanged. Her body writhes and twists and falls out of sight … into a passage below the stage that took me straight to the green room. We had come a long way from the old jatra days where the dead body would get up and walk off the stage!

In Sipahi Bidroho [Sepoy Mutiny], a jatra based on the 1857 War of Independence, I played a mother. It was based somewhat on Maxim Gorky’s Mother, a role I have done as well. Except this mother had half her face burnt by fire, and was left with one eye bulging. So we used a dab of spirit gum to keep one eye closed, and cut a ping-pong ball to make it resemble an eyeball and stuck it on that eye. Then I used make-up to suggest that the skin on half the face was burned and scarred. It looked gorily realistic in the end. Though I did have to put my poor eye through a lot of torture every time.

Shekhar Ganguly was the director for many of those plays. He would point out everyone’s mistakes and give them suggestions on how to do better. But he never told me anything. One day, I asked him to give me some feedback as well. He smiled: “We go back a long way as actors. Why, in the old days, we even went to the fields together to do our toilet. I can’t teach you acting. Even women have a lot to learn from your acting. To me, you are a great artiste.”

I stood there staring at him, astonished. At a time when my star was fading, I didn’t expect to hear something like that from him. I have kept his words close to my heart.

In 1972, I went to Bangladesh with the Satyambar Opera. The 1971 war of liberation had just ended. Bangladesh was a brand-new country. It was a beautiful country. I remember drinking coconut water everywhere. Big green coconuts, just a few paisa each. I brought back an exquisite sari – the creamy colour of magnolia flowers with a broad golden border. But amid all the beauty, the signs of the war were still everywhere, even in an old schoolhouse where we put up. The wall was pockmarked with bullet holes. There were rusty stains on it. Those are blood stains, they told me. “This is nothing,” a student said. “We saw all this with our own eyes, the killings, the torture. We can never forget those days.”

When we came back, the season ended and with it my contract. The company owner said, “We are taking Bandana Devi back this season. There won’t be any roles for you. Please try elsewhere.”

I went home.

Excerpted with permission from Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator, Sandip Roy, Seagull Books.