'We often lament that even now no mainstream actor wants to come out as openly gay. But Chapal Bhaduri has not hidden his sexuality. He has been open about his relationship with a man for decades. He could well be our first out mainstream actor.'
Prancing fronds of snowy kash phool or wild sugarcane significantly heralds the arrival of a season of happy days in Bengal and next-door regions.
It signals the harvest is approaching. And that the beloved Mother Goddess and Pujo are auspiciously close.
It's also when theatre comes as jatra to all the wee villages of the area, that are barely dots on a map. That's always a chapter of special excitement.
The humblest variety of the art, this type of folk theatre has been around since the 16th century and Bengal, for instance, still has some 4,000 venues.
Jatra has evolved with the times. It had to. Where once the local maidan doubled as the stage, with a rudimentary green room attached and petromax lanterns served as stage lights, the props have become far more sophisticated.
But Chapal Rani aka Chapal Bhaduri, a top-paid actor, was a product of an earlier arguably more true era of jatra. One of the last of the great female impersonators in Bengali theatre, he belonged to that peculiar breed of stage artistes that adeptly essayed women's roles in dramas back when women actors did not populate the jatra genre.
And how well he did it!
It is sometimes said that men make better women thespians and Chapal was sort of the living QED to this corollary.
In a career spanning nearly 65 years, Chapal remarkably played, with the greatest elan, every female character that existed on this circuit be it Chand Bibi, Sultana Raziya, Keikeyi, Goddess Sitara.
His life tale is colourful, earthy and spiced with his rare brand of chutzpah. It's also poignant as modern times slowly and inevitably stole his stardom away from him.
Sandip Roy, writer, podcaster and columnist for leading Indian and international publications and the author of Don't Let Him Know, chose to tell the 87-year-old jatra performer's story.
Chapal Rani, The Last Queen of Bengal, the saga of a life, an identity and a gender subsumed by art, is a 500-plus page book that eventually took several years to write.
In an interview to Vaihayasi Pande Daniel/Rediff, Roy explains that jatra and his profession literally gave Chapal a stage for his femininity.
Why did you decide to make Chapal Rani the subject of a book? Why was it important to you? Why him?
Naveen Kishore, publisher at Seagull, had done a series of photographs of Chapal Rani and a documentary about him years ago.
But he always felt that despite many articles, he deserved a full-length biography. He asked if I would be interested in interviewing him and telling his story.
It had been a while since I had published my first book Don't Let Him Know. And I had not been able to focus on a second book.
I thought this would be a simple project. I would stick a tape recorder in his face. He would talk. I would transcribe and translate and massage it into a narrative. But it took several years, became more complicated as it progressed and turned into a very different book than what either of us had envisaged.
As for Chapal Bhaduri himself, he always maintained that if anyone did a biography of him it should be Seagull Books. He felt that when he was at his lowest, when his jatra career had ended abruptly and the world at large had forgotten him, Naveen's photographs of his performing as the Goddess Sitala on the streets had given him a new audience and led to a second innings in theatre, television and film.
But I think there was a deeper reason. Chapal Bhaduri himself isn't proficient in English. People ask me if he can read the book. He has not and will not. But it matters to him that the book exists, that people around the world can read it. For someone who was doubly-marginalised in life, as a jatra artiste in a Bengali cultural scene which looked down on jatra as 'common' and somewhat 'lower-class' and as a member of a sexual minority, I think the book reassures him that he mattered.
When I took the book to him, he held it and said in great wonder, 'Goodness, 500 pages!' I found that really moving.
Chapal Rani, as you stress many times in the book -- in his voice -- describes himself as belonging to the first gender. But he neither belongs to the first gender nor the third gender but a gender particular to India and his art form.
Chapal Rani really predates the LGBTQ+ movement in India.
So, we now try to put him into boxes which he himself never thought about. One of the first things he told me was that he identified as 'first gender', not 'third gender'.
When the film director Rituparno Ghosh asked him why he did not go in for gender reassignment surgery he said he had no desire to live as a woman off-stage. He never even wore women's clothes when he was off-stage.
In today's terminology one might say he is a cis-gay man, who played female roles for a living. But then he also says that when he transforms himself into a woman, he forgets he was ever a man.
Men who worked with him testified to the fact that even they treated him differently once he finished his transformation. Before that they would be laughing and joking but as soon as he finished his make-up the dynamic would change.
'His gaze changes. He becomes a stranger. I would not dare to be familiar with him at that moment,' the director Kaushik Ganguly told me.
I think Chapal Bhaduri just tried to be true to himself and live life the way he felt was most authentic to who he was, without thinking about labels. We now try to fit his fluidity into boxes and it's never a perfect fit.
One could describe him as gay -- because he didn't have a relationship with any woman -- but it is maybe slightly more complex than that and gay is not an Indian enough word in this case?
He didn't exactly seek homosexuality, his profession brought it to him (although not to all female impersonators) and he never faced the more typical crossroads deciding which gender he preferred. Or maybe you don't agree?
He did not have a relationship with a woman but he did have one for decades with a man, even living for years with the man (who was married) and his family in their home. So. these are relationships that are hard to name and pin down.
One point I will beg to differ is that his profession brought homosexuality to him. Instead, I would like to say that his profession literally gave him a stage for his femininity.
I can imagine that life would have been much harder for an effeminate young man, who never finished school, had he not found the jatra stage.
It gave him a certain stature and respectability that protected him against much of the bullying a girlish boy might have endured otherwise. Jatra saved Chapal, the director Kaushik Ganguly told me. 'The rani inside Chapal Bhaduri got some acknowledgment.'
How does the Chapals of this world connect up the present gay scene? And vice versa connect up the fluid gender scene India always had? And what truths about this topic does his life story impart?
Yes, as I mentioned, Chapal pre-dates much of the LGBTQ+ scene in India. He did not even know about the existence of Section 377, which criminalised homosexuality, until it was repealed.
He told me that when he was doing anything that was criminalised by 377 he didn't know such a law existed. And by the time he heard it had been read down he was an elderly man living alone in an old age home. 'My shop had been shut for a long time,' he laughed.
For me though I feel Chapal's story is very important for another reason. Many people involved with the LGBTQ+ rights movement in India take great pains to assert they are not trying to copy the West, that this is not some kind of Western import being imposed on Indian culture.
Chapal to me is an entirely homegrown queer Indian story. He did not grow up with references to events like the Stonewall riots in New York or the Castro in San Francisco. He figured out his own journey himself, stayed true to his feelings, refused to get into a heterosexual marriage because he did not want to ruin some woman's life. And he did it while having very little of a support system around him. For that I truly admire him.
But most of all, as we spoke, I realised something else. We often lament that even now no mainstream actor wants to come out as openly gay. But Chapal Bhaduri has not hidden his sexuality. He has been open about his relationship with a man for decades. He could well be our first out mainstream actor.
It's just that because he is not part of the Hindi (or Bengali) commercial film industry, we do not think of it that way. But jatra, which drew tens of thousands of people every night, is as mainstream as it gets.
In what way did his life journey emotionally move you?
Though I am a gay man, born and raised in Kolkata, I come from a very different life-experience than Chapal-da. I am the kind who grew up knowing about Stonewall riots and Castro.
I never really watched jatra. My family regarded it as somewhat gauche and lowbrow.
But as we spoke, I really understood how much our stories were connected. When I would see his loneliness in his old-age home I knew that deep inside I had that same anxiety in me as well.
And while he is a very jovial man and a great raconteur, with a fabulous sense of humour, there is pain in being an outsider that every queer person, no matter how accepted and out they are, understands deeply.
I think the other thing that moved me was realising that beyond the queerness, this is the story of an artiste, who was once tasting immense success and fame, who then suddenly got cast aside. He literally had a clay cup thrown at him on stage by a booing audience who wanted to see real women on the stage, the scene with which I begin his story.
And I think all of us who work in some creative field, whether as actor, painter or writer, have that anxiety. No matter how successful we are today what if tomorrow we wake up and find the world has moved on and has no need for our art anymore?
Talking to Chapal-da brought me face to face with that anxiety.
How would you describe the deep pathos in his story?
Some of it is outlined in the answer above. But I think it was driven home for me when I talked to theatre director Rakesh Ghosh, who had worked with Chapal Bhaduri and known him well.
Chapal-da, although much older, had for a time been close to Rakesh and his partner and accompanied them and their parents on trips, a sort of chosen family almost.
'I have seen his familial ups and downs, I know about his troubles, I have watched him move to the old age home,' Ghosh told me'And sometimes I feel that the time I spent with him was time spent with my own destiny.' Those words 'my own destiny' shook me.
While I have a lot of privilege compared to Chapal Bhaduri, not least being my facility with English (he always rued his inability to have mastered the language), and I have an accepting family, I think all of us, especially queer people, deep inside, do worry about aging and loneliness.
And every time I visited Chapal Bhaduri at his old-age home I too would feel that pang. But at the same time, he is never one to wallow in his misfortune. Even now when ill health confines him to bed he still will laugh, joke and recite lines with gusto when I visit.
What did you like about his personality? Or rather what intrigued you the most?
His resilience is extraordinary. He is really never fazed by what life hands out to him. He keeps going. His health is sadly quite poor now. So, he was unable to come to his own book launch, something that made me really sad.
However, the actress Moon Moon Sen wanted to see him. And she went to his old age home with a copy of his book. It was an extraordinary encounter. While he was confined to bed, he never spent any time lamenting his fate.
Instead, he held her hand, sang songs made famous by her mother Suchitra Sen, laughed and talked about acting in a film with her daughter Raima. And I understood he is really a survivor.
He lost his accomplished actress mother when he was just a boy, his schooling ended in Class 8 because no one was looking out for him. He stumbled into acting in female roles as he was desperate to make a living. This is really the story of a survivor, more than anything else.
How many times did you meet him and how much time did you spend with him in total and what did he teach you about life?
I spent several years interviewing him, mostly at the Seagull bookstore, sometimes in his old-age home.
We would start with a morning cup of tea and break before his lunch time. I don't know how much time it added up to but it was a lot because at one point he rather plaintively told me 'Listen, this book will actually happen toh?'
I am relieved I was able to hand the book to him.
I think he taught me many things but foremost is this -- no matter what life throws at you, keep going. He did. He still does.
