When Shirsho Bandyopadhyay’s cover story Beneputul on the male queens of the Bengali folk jatra performance world came out in the reputed Bengali cultural magazine Desh in May 1992, I was in school. My mother was not too happy to see me leaf through the pages and getting fascinated by the photographs of female impersonators. The unease and hesitation of a middle-class, university-educated, college-teaching woman reflected the gender politics embedded in the social perspective towards the gender fluidity embodied by these performers. More than three decades later, Sandip Roy’s extraordinary book on the life of Chapal Rani, or, Chapal Bhaduri as he is known more conventionally, captures this lived world of female impersonators of jatra not as exotica, but rather as a poignant tale of a journey balancing the public life of a successful artist and the private life of a homosexual man finding his place in a conservative society.
Roy’s Introduction to the book may not be full of too unfamiliar historical details and historiographical reflections on female impersonation on stage to a scholar of theatre and performance studies, but it is an adequate entry-point to the life and times of Chapal Rani (born in Calcutta, 1939) for a reader eager to contextualise this unusual life story. It brings together academic and popular writings on jatra, interviews with scholars like Samik Bandyopadhyay, Ananda Lal, Naveen Kishore and film-makers like Kaushik Ganguly, who directed Ar Ekti Premer Golpo (Yet Another Love Story, 2010) loosely based on Chapal Bhaduri’s life.
Jatra began as a form of popular entertainment from the 16th century in Bengal, principally with the emergence of the narrative form of Mangal Kavya, long propitious poems about a deity, connected with a sect or a cult; and by the end of 19th century, it became a fusion folk-form of play-acting with costumes and make-up, songs with grand gestures played on make-shift stages in the open air and connecting emotionally with its audiences through mimetic connection with the strong flow of narrative. In the 20th century, it became a popular secular form often dealing with politically charged themes of nationalism, grassroot rebellions as well as contemporary social issues with artists like Mukunda Das, Brajen De and Utpal Dutt.
The Introduction is also important to break the ‘standard story’ of a queer man in 20th century Bengal. Roy explains that there need not be an essential ‘coming out’ moment, that a non-binary man need not own up any of the labels – gay, hijra, queer – and yet live and love on his own terms, that the sadness of a motherless child need not be about the difficulties of sexual identity within the family life. Chapal Rani’s artistic family lineage, however, is quite formidable.
He is the youngest son of the great Prabha Devi, the doyen of Bengali theatre in the first half of 20th century, and Taracharan Bhaduri, brother to Sisir Bhaduri and a stakeholder in the heydays of Srirangam Theatre, as well as younger brother to Ketaki Dutta, actress extraordinaire of Bengali commercial theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapal Rani, himself, became a star of the jatra world in the 1960s playing strong female roles in the productions like Chand Bibi, Mayur Singhhasan, Bharat Biday, Michael Madhusudan, Sipahi Bidrohoi, Nihoto Golap and Louho Kopat.
The book is written in Chapal Rani’s own voice, which is not especially rare in the field of ethnographic life-history writing, but it becomes a creative non-fiction with imaginary interludes contained in each chapter. These interludes allow us a glimpse into spatial setting of the jatra world where the jatra troupes or ‘company’ as they are called in popular parlance are located; the lives and tribulations of other male queens – Chhabi Rani (who was nicknamed the Elizabeth Taylor of jatra), Rakhal Rani, Satadal Rani, Babli Rani – who preceded and followed Chapal Rani; the professional rivalry, jealousy, lovers’ tiffs or admiration; and the desolate humiliations when the fame faded and money dried up.
Chapal Rani’s memories take the reader through a world of performers, troupe managers, audiences as well as everyday practices of skincare, food habits, costume designs, make-up that constitute, what we today call the ‘BTS’ – behind the scenes – of bright lights and props on stage. Roy’s language is lucid, accessible but, at the same time, full of the local flavours that convey the emotions, behavioural patterns, speech-acts typical to the world Chapal Rani inhabited.
The stars of the other spaces of performances – Uttam Kumar from Bengali films, Tripti Mitra from Bengali group theatre – make appearances in Chapal Rani’s life story as bewitched audience members. Uttam Kumar, after watching him play the mother of Michael Madhusudan Dutt on stage, came to meet him and could not recognise him in his ordinary clothes. Chapal Rani remembers the embrace of the Nayak (Hero) of Bengali silver screen fondly but he immediately intersperses his own success with a memory of her mother Prabha Devi, who had met Uttam Kumar in his early years and prophesied that he would do great things.
One can read his very own way of contextualising stardom and artistry through his lineage. This sense of personal history and the ease, with which the public and private worlds merge through the voice of the protagonist, acknowledge the tension between the tinsel brightness of the stage and the rigorous discipline of the craft of performance and yet the aura of an extraordinary world of make-believe never fades.
One may think that the nadir in the female impersonator Chapal Rani’s life came when he decided to do the street performances of Ma Sitala (Goddess of Small Pox), a mythological skit, to earn his livelihood. His roles in proper jatra came to end with the entry of women artistes from the mid-1970s. Academic explorations of this critical moment in the history of jatra by scholars like Bishnupriya Dutt, Manujendra Kundu and Prabhat Das reveal a particularly ambiguous transformation, the regular employment of women artists, who have been at the exploited fringe for long, signalled a new assertive gender politics and yet the loss of work for female impersonators, another marginalised group, meant the end of a specific kind of an artistry.
The male queens of jatra fell into penury and they had to resort to professions like pulling a rickshaw or sewing petticoats or to open small shops. Chapal Rani found a different way of taking his art to the public in the early 1990s. His street play Ma Sitala was part of a troupe that performed in street corners, dilapidated mansions and abandoned warehouses, begging for money, during the spring and summer when the disease was in full swing. Playing the goddess brought out a different aspect of Chapal Rani’s personality. The make-up did not remain a simple act of putting on a costume but rather a transformation with the drawing of a divine third-eye that gave Chapal Rani a lasting impact of a successful performance.
Ma Sitala opened a new chapter for him when he met Naveen Kishore and Samik Bandyopadhyay through his sister Ketaki Dutta. Kishore’s photographs of his make-up and organisation of his solo act that he wrote for himself and acted all the roles – goddess, crone, king, boy, queen – in Delhi and Mumbai and finally the documentary Performing the Goddess gave Chapal Rani a new identity to the film-going audience, the film-makers, journalists and academics. Chapal Rani’s critical reflections on Kaushik Ganguly’s film and Rituparno Ghosh’s performance in the film also alert us to the way real, lived lives become fodder for different artistic and/or academic products.
Roy’s book is brave enough to understand and communicate the complexities and dilemmas woven into the craft of creating art from ‘true’ stories. The poignancy of Chapal Rani’s days in the old age home bear a deeply tragic note. But, for me, the success of the book remains in its capacity to present Chapal Bhaduri who became a ‘Rani’ as female impersonator, and not as a proto-queer icon. No apologies.
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