“’You never saw me in my jatra days,’ he would tell me sadly over and over again…. I sensed the sadness was not that he had once been beautiful and was no longer... it was that no one could bear witness to that beauty any more.”

So writes Sandip Roy in the introduction to his book on the life and times of the Bengali thespian Chapal Bhaduri. Better known by his stage name Chapal Rani, Bhaduri was celebrated for playing female roles in jatra, the popular (and populist) travelling theatre-in-the-round of Bengal. This lament surfaces several times in the pages that follow: that no photographs survive to bear out the memories of those golden years; that no one remembers. An erasure, a rendering invisible.

This book sets out to rectify that. And not just by bringing us the protagonist’s story but by building testimony to it. Using multiple points of view, diverse narrative strands, and many voices, Roy painstakingly reconstructs a detailed and nuanced panorama of Bhaduri’s world. While Chapalda’s own voice holds the structure together, it gains support from the voices of other players: fellow (often rival) ranis who played female roles in the jatra; the women who replaced them; the jatra company management; kith and kin who witnessed the rise and fall of Bhaduri’s fortunes; adoring fans, admirers; directors and drag queens. A chorus of witnesses drawn from his own life, commenting on and critiquing the central character’s drama.

This insertion of breakaway sections that bring in secondary and related viewpoints is an unusual and clever device in a biography. They bear witness to, testify, flesh out, and validate Bhaduri’s story. These fictionalised “interludes” are fashioned from characters and figures who formed part of his world, from equals and peers to observers and the audience. They open up the narrative, and problematise it, bringing in difficult subjects like the friction between women actors and men playing women; the question of identifying as queer; and issues of exploitation and discrimination.

The spine of the book is Bhaduri’s story filtered through Roy’s narrative agency. Born into one of the “first families” of Bengali theatre at the time (his mother was the celebrated actress Prabha Devi, his father Tara Kumar Bhaduri, the brother of the legendary Sisir Kumar Bhaduri), young Chapal grew up surrounded by theatre, watching rehearsals from the wings. His sister Ketaki Dutta, too, became a well-known theatre actor.

Although Bhaduri began his career acting in amateur theatre, he got drawn into the world of jatra, considered culturally and artistically somewhat inferior, where boys and men still played the women’s roles. Here he tasted fame and adulation, made money, and enjoyed exploring a range of female characters on stage, from Raziya Sultana to Kaikeyi.

As a young man, he found himself made obsolete when women began entering jatra and fell on hard times, scraping together a living wherever he could. One humble source of income was performing seasonally as the goddess of smallpox, Sitala, in makeshift neighbourhood venues. There was a brief resurgence of his reputation with amateur theatre, then television and film roles, until old age, poverty, and infirmity led him to a modest old-age home where he now lives out his days.

Along the way he fell in love with a man, lived with him in a committed relationship, faced heartbreak, loneliness, and depression, and grappled with his unconventional sexuality, even as he struggled to make ends meet while continuing to hold on to his dignity.

Bolstering the lone voice of the protagonist reliving his memories from childhood to old age is a re-creation of the world Bhaduri lived in. A world of narrow lanes and bylanes in north Calcutta, ageing theatre auditoriums and stuffy greenrooms, jatra company offices roosting in crumbling mansions overlooking the river, troupes of men on the move as they toured the countryside playing historical and mythological melodramas deep into the night to hundreds of men, women, and children watching spellbound under the moon and stars. Makeshift stages, live orchestras playing up a storm, tinsel and glitter, drama and romance enacted night after night: a heady cocktail that intoxicated the young Chapal Rani until it all ended suddenly when the audience simply did not want him any more.

When this happened, Bhaduri was still in his prime, still slim and attractive, and used to the adulation of fans. The transition to obscurity must have been brutal. Yet the rendering of his life, sparkling with stories and anecdotes, refuses to allow pity, although it does permit empathy. What comes through clearly is his personal dignity, his refusal to allow poverty or exigency to undermine his self-respect. This is one of Bhaduri’s most distinctive qualities. He is not aloof or formal, does not stand on ceremony, is modest in his bearing, and yet he clothes himself in an ineffable dignity that sets him apart.

Another distinguishing quality is how consummate a performer he is. Acting was his passion, his calling, his whole life. From learning pages of dialogue to researching his roles to devising the look and costume best suited to the part and transforming into the character on stage, Bhaduri immersed himself fully in all aspects of his profession: whether it was as a star on the jatra circuit, a character actor on television, or Goddess Sitala for a night.

A refusal to be labelled

Perhaps the most significant aspect of his personality is his unabashed refusal to be labelled and pigeonholed by sexual identity or gender politics. He resists identification with any tag on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. He does not see himself as an example or instance of anything; he is himself: “Chapal Bhaduri. Female impersonator.” No more, no less. When asked if he sees himself as third gender, his response is a proud “I am first gender”. By defying being subsumed into the metanarratives of the day, and by his insistence on the uniqueness of his voice and his story, Bhaduri, via Roy, holds open a space for diversity, for difference, for an identity that cannot be boxed and shelved under accepted categories.

This book could have remained at the level of simple storytelling alone and it would have certainly made for a lively and absorbing read, yet Roy has chosen to both broaden and deepen its scope. He has gradually enlarged the frame to bring in context and background by inventing voices and comments from the world surrounding Bhaduri, as already mentioned.

He has included recipes and sections of dialogue from various jatra plays, all integral parts of Chapalda’s life (and, in an inside joke, slipped in a couple of characters from his own novel Don’t Let Him Know). And he has introduced an additional layer of complexity in which he probes, and thereby invites us to question, important issues. For example, the subject of sexual identity keeps coming up: several characters talk about it, critique Chapalda’s stance, and express surprise, disapproval, or disappointment depending on their own point of view; Chapalda himself clearly states his own views more than once.

Another complicated area is that of women and femininity: women playing women vis-a-vis men playing women; what constitutes femininity and the performance of femininity; Chapalda’s own approach of “becoming” a woman as opposed to “imitating” a woman. A third tension is that of theatre vis-a-vis jatra: one seen as more “worthy” than the other; bias and discrimination; hierarchies and exploitation; and Chapalda’s straddling of the two worlds.

One cannot end this review without mentioning what a handsome volume this is, with the high standards of production one has come to expect from Seagull Books. A striking cover, a range of photographs that add visual interest, and an appendix listing the jatra roles played by Chapal Rani between 1959 and 1974 are some of the features that add value to the publication. A minor regret is the presence of some disconcerting proofreading errors, which one is not accustomed to encountering in Seagull’s carefully edited books. 

Anjum Katyal is a writer, editor, and translator. She is currently director of the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival.

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