‘Jatra icon Chapal Bhaduri negotiated his sexuality without ever bothering about identity politics’

When I first met Chapal Bhaduri on screen, he seemed multitudinous. Narrating his life history in the 1999 documentary, Performing the Goddess, Bhaduri, an icon of jatra, splits himself three ways. There is Bhaduri, of course, an elderly man in a plain kurta, talking to the camera. He seems ordinary, everyday, miscellaneous. Then, he starts talking. About jatra, gender, body. Over the years, thanks to Naveen Kishore’s documentary, in which he remains a sole talking head, Bhaduri has become the most recognisable and venerated of the last bastion of jatra’s purush rani (male queens), a sobriquet for the form’s female impersonators. He was once Chapal Rani, resplendent in both femme costume and in jatra’s signature melodrama. In his masculine attire, Bhaduri reenacts some of the roles he had once played. And even though he is out of costume, he does not seem out of commission. When he reenacts his roles, Bhaduri peels right away in front of the camera, and there lies the queen: Chapal Rani.

Bhaduri has had a storied, if slightly shadowed, career as a purush rani. Blame it on the decay of jatra as a respectable theatrical form. Even at its peak, it was chastised: “Jatra dekhe fatra loke.” In other words, jatra was trash and so were those who sought it out. And yet, jatra, at least in terms of its cast, demanded a rigour that was classical, foundational even, for those who wanted to do more “respectable” kinds of acting: on the proscenium stage or in cinema (Utpal Dutta was Chapal’s fan, and, very recently, Moon Moon Sen visited a very ill Bhaduri to pay her respects). Nowhere is this rigour more apparent than in these little vignettes in Kishore’s documentary, where Chapal Bhaduri is Chapal Rani, is Chand Bibi in Natta Company’s eponymous play, is Kaikeyi in Bharat Biday, is Purnima in Sonar Bharat. There is no willing suspension of disbelief necessary. Chapal Bhaduri becomes Chapal Rani who transfigures into these women. Once Chapal starts acting, only these women – historical, mythological, familial – remain on stage. The final layer. And thus, Chapal is presented to us threefold: the man, the thespian, and their femme icons.

Each time that I have screened Performing the Goddess for my students, there is always this one response that chimes like a refrain: Chapal Bhaduri can be so many things at once. He is a historian of stage design, an anthropologist of jatra politics, a professor of character acting without the formal, unnecessary Stanislavskian acrobatics, a tender memoirist of his same-sex love for which English feels too crass a language to name. The documentary is a tease. I wanted to learn more, like my students. What was Chapal’s childhood home like? Did he ever play male roles? Who is this mysterious man with whom he struck a relationship?

Sandip Roy’s giant, immersive biography assuages those questions to a respectable point. It nourishes many of the strands of Chapal’s life and career that Kishore initiates with his documentary. Published under the aegis of the Pride List of Kolkata’s Seagull Books, headed by Kishore, and curated under the custodianship of editor Bishan Samaddar, Chapal Rani, The Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator is, in many ways, like its subject. “Roy’s book is more than a biography,” Kishore tells me. He describes it as “a travelogue of intimacy. Literally a ‘jatra’ of the within [that explores] the multiple vulnerabilities that made up Chapal’s life stories and the many narratives that shaped him as an actor.” Chapal Rani is an exceptional addition to Seagull’s Pride List because it is a book primarily written in English in a series dominated by translations. And yet, throughout the book, the tension of language, time, modernity, and the global flattening of our desires and relationships under some Anglophone standard prevail.

I met Roy in Kolkata, where we spoke about Chapal and this versatile biography that feels, in some ways, a farewell to and a farewell from a titan who did not get their due in the zeitgeist.

How did you first get acquainted with Chapal’s work? How did your connection with him come about?
I knew of Chapal Bhaduri but I didn’t know him. The proposal came from Kishore. I accepted it because I felt it was a rare opportunity to learn his story from the man himself. In the 1990s and 2000s, I lived in San Francisco and edited a magazine called Trikone, the world’s oldest South Asian LGBTQ+ magazine. We scrounged around and featured every story we could find that was remotely desi and queer at the same time. There were not that many at that time. But Chapal Bhaduri was around, had been around and active since the 1960s, but we never covered him. His world of jatra just never intersected with mine. I guess in some ways I was also trying to make amends for that omission.

How would you describe the interview process? I can imagine it was long and at times could be arduous. How did you approach where and how to start with Chapal’s story, the transcription process?
The interview process was actually straightforward. We would usually meet at the Seagull Bookstore and after he had his cup of tea, he would begin. And once he started, he could tell story after story. I just had to keep up. He is a great raconteur and though I approached the project chronologically, he would leap decades as one story led to another. Everything had to be transcribed, organised, and filed away according to the chapter where it fitted best.

How did you negotiate translating a Bengali offering from Chapal for an Anglophone audience?
I think in terms of language, I tried really hard to keep his voice even while writing in English. The greater challenge in terms of writing for an Anglophone audience was not the translation or the transliteration but that I wanted to really try and keep the cadence of Bengali. I wanted the reader to feel that Chapal Bhaduri was telling them the story just the way he told me, to retain some of the mischief and the wit, and the abhimaan (pride) which was part of his storytelling.

You mentioned in your introduction that Chapal is an unreliable narrator. Could you talk about moments during the interview process where you might have confronted this unreliability? I can assume that it might have been a bit confusing or frustrating, at times, to make his storytelling cohesive for the reader. At what junctures did you have to step in (or perhaps intervene) to make a vignette thorough and less contradictory?
We are all unreliable narrators. All of us will construct the image we want to portray to the world. A cursory look at anyone’s social media feed is proof enough of that. Chapal is interesting because in 1999, when Kishore made a documentary about him, he chose to talk about his long relationship with a man. It was a choice he didn’t need to make. It gained him little. He was not looking to become the figurehead of the nascent LGBT movement in India. I doubt he was even aware of it. Gay did not carry the “cool” cachet it does in certain circles now. But he did because he felt a documentary must document the good, the bad, the ugly. But at the same time as he spoke to me, I knew he was also quite aware that he was also laying down the story for posterity. He was conscious of the image he was presenting. I could not access Chapal’s peers and colleagues anymore. So I had no access to their perspectives on Chapal’s account. That’s where the fictional interludes came in. It allowed me to explore some of the questions raised by Chapal’s own account.

I first encountered Chapal through Kishore’s documentary. There are sections in your book that feel resonant of some scenes in the film (like Chapal’s reenactment of a scene where he portrays Purnima, consort of Jaichand). What already extant sources on Chapal and his work did you draw from for your book? What did you incorporate from these works? How do you imagine your work being in conversation with Kishore’s film, or, say, Dipankar Datta’s 2014 documentary, Chena Kintu Ajana? How does your biography add to or extend their work?
Chapal himself wrote a short memoir in Bengali about his years in jatra. Kishore made a documentary about him. All of those were supplementary sources for me, as were some people who knew him and worked with him in his later years in theatre. But of course, the primary source was Chapal himself and his remarkable memory. Jatra, because it was not regarded as high art by Bengali bhadralok, was not as rigorously documented as proscenium theatre. It’s telling that there were more photographs available of Prabha Devi, Chapal’s mother, a theatre actor who died in the 1950s, than of Chapal, a jatra actor in the 1960s and 70s.

But there were other sources that really helped – like a book that was an interview of his sister Ketaki Dutta from Thema books and the autobiography of jatra proprietor Makhanlal Natta. The documentary Chena Kintu Ajana was hugely helpful not so much for the light it shed on Chapal but for the insight it offered into other jatra ranis who had come before him and faded into oblivion. I salute Debojit Majumdar and Sanjay Singha, who researched that film for the work they put in in tracking down their stories.

When I started the project, I thought I was merely writing one man’s biography. As it progressed, I realised I was archiving an age. That’s why the book comes not just with the story of his rise and fall in jatra but recipes, beauty regimens and chunks of script from jatras that are long out of print but still play inside his head.

This is so much more than a biography of Chapal that you have written, partly because the way Chapal tells his story takes us so many places. It is a history of jatra, a history of Bengal, in some ways, a life history, of course, an anthropology of Companies and Operas in North Kolkata that staged jatra, a survey of gender and sexual politics. He talks to you and us about stage design, cast and crew hierarchies, familial troubles, his own same-sex personal relationship. In many ways, it is a very versatile story. How did you navigate how to arrange these varied aspects of his life and work, and not lose the flow or momentum?
At some point a few months into my interviews with him I sat down and mapped out a structure of the book, figuring out what its chapters would be and then as I spoke with him I had to decide where each anecdote he shared belonged. I naively thought this would be a few months work. I would interview him about childhood, his jatra years, his years in the wilderness, and then his rebirth in theatre and film. But I quickly realised the story he was telling me was much bigger because he was really bearing witness to an age and I had to try and do justice to the trust he was placing in me. I thought a lot about each chapter, where it should begin and end, much like a scene in a play and I visualised his life in acts. But at some point I realised mere chronology would not do his story justice. I really need an entire chapter to talk about the act of transformation into a woman, which is so key to his story. And another to discuss his approach to love because it runs like an undercurrent through his life.

I want to ask you about the interludes. After every chapter from Chapal’s perspective, you do something so incredibly fascinating: you buttress his perspective with the perspective of others. Whether it is Chapal’s “nondescript” middle class niece who is wary of both Chapal and his Chhordi, Ketaki Dutta, or a ghost in Putulbari who observes the way a young Chapal Rani is being put through the ringer in the politics of his jatra troupe and coaxes him to “join” the ghosts of Putulbari. How did these interludes come about? Did you model these after a text you read? What was your philosophy behind slipping in interludes that shift the “talking head” in the narrative, but still feel tonally continuous?
The interludes came about because as I spoke with Chapal I became more and more conscious of the missing voices in the story since he was really the last of his kind (the purush ranis). I had his perspective on what it felt like for him when women started coming into jatra but didn’t know firsthand what women made of these male ranis who were more “woman” than them. I was curious what a contemporary drag queen, versed in today’s gender politics might make of Chapal. Fiction became a way to explore these questions. They were to me the ghostly voices that would gathered on the fringes of the story he was telling me. At first I thought it would be just a couple of interludes but as I started writing them the fiction writer in me was more and more intrigued. I realised his life was so multihued and multifaceted each chapter lent itself to some kind of interlude that was its ghostly sibling. But perhaps in the end, this was my first nonfiction book and the novelist in me couldn’t resist the challenge of letting my imagination run wild, something I was careful not to do while inhabiting Chapal’s voice. In fact, readers of my first novel, Don’t Let Him Know, might recognise a character from that book becoming one of the interludes – a case where a fictional character I created meets a real life character via Chapal blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction.

The book showcases a great deal of archival materials that I feel would be lost if it were not incorporated into your biography. I was so surprised to see portraits of Rakhal Rani and Chhabi Rani, Chappal’s forebears, sometimes peers, and finally put faces to the names I had heard before. But, I was also surprised to see Chapal himself in a rare male role in Raktalekha. Could you talk a little bit about the archival process? What moments can you recount when you experienced some form of joy from your archival discoveries, and perhaps despair and dismay from loss that attend so many queer south asian archives?
I should say much of the material came from the archives of Natya Shodh Sansthan, and I spent many an afternoon there going through their files and poring over articles and clippings about jatra. I honestly knew very little about jatra myself so it was a huge education for me. And some great “aha!” moments occurred when I came upon an article or a picture in the archives (for example from Raktalekha) and a lightbulb went off in my head as I realised that was the scene Chapal had told me about in one of my interviews. Chapal himself had no photographs from his jatra days so one small gift I could give him was to take a photograph of those scenes or of his predecessors like Chhabi Rani and show him. He was so delighted to see that. And I was really moved when at the book launch in Kolkata a man stepped up during the audience Q&A and revealed himself to be the son of Rakhal Rani.

Which sections of his vignettes were particularly new and remarkable to you?
I knew before I embarked on the project that later generations, who were not jatra-going, really encountered Chapal Bhaduri in the film Arekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story) starring Rituparno Ghosh. Even now many social media comments on posts about the book come from people who loved the film. I too think the film was really a landmark film in Bengali cinema in its portrayal of queerness. However what was new to me is how Chapal felt the film that made him famous also wrote him out of the script in some ways. And it was very interesting to hear Kaushik Ganguly the filmmaker corroborate his version by saying the star power of Rituparno Ghosh essentially turned Chapal into just an actor in a film that was based on his own life story.

What was also really eye-opening for me was the matter-of-fact way where he negotiated his sexuality without ever bothering about identity politics. I realised at some point I was struggling to fit him into a box but he really embodied the fluidity we talk about but are afraid to really embrace. He says he is not transgender but feels like a woman when he finishes his makeup. He did not know the word gay and yet spent 30 plus years with one man. He lived with the man, his wife and their children in the same house. At one point, I wondered what colour of the rainbow could I assign him. Then I realised that was my problem. He didn’t care. He was just being true to himself as best he could.