The Last of The Purush Ranis: Chapal 'Rani' Bhaduri

LAST QUEEN OF BENGAL, SANDIP ROY’S biography of Chapal Bhaduri, or Chapal Rani—the jatra performer who spent five decades playing women on Bengal’s travelling-theatre stages, and whose life has since become an important part of India’s queer history— has been gradually finding its readers since its publication earlier this year. When I sat down with Roy over Zoom from his Kolkata apartment, he let me know that the book’s steadily building reception has not surprised him one bit.

“It is a book about someone known in very select circles in Bengal itself, let alone outside in the rest of India,” Roy says. “There was no reason a biography of Chapal Rani would suddenly have the world waiting for it.” Unlike a memoir by a nationally recognised actor, which arrives “tailor-made for a wider audience,” this was always going to be, in Roy’s words, a slow burn. It is, he says, as valid in January as it is during Pride Month, and just as valid after Pride Month ends.

This patient understanding of the reception surrounding his second book comes from what Roy sees as the project’s real purpose: archiving a history on the verge of vanishing entirely. Published by Kolkata-based Seagull Books, the book came about after its founder and publisher Naveen Kishore approached Roy. Kishore, who had made a documentary on Bhaduri in 1999 titled Performing the Goddess, turned to Roy—whose debut fiction, Don’t Let Him Know, was published by Bloomsbury India to widespread critical acclaim in 2015—with the hope of finally delivering what Roy calls “the curse of the second book.” What emerged was a five-hundredpage memoir voiced entirely as Bhaduri but spliced with invented interludes.

Roy had the rare fortune of speaking to the veteran performer at his old-age home, while he was “still alert, active and able to share those stories,” a privilege none of Bhaduri’s contemporaries ever got. “Nobody told their stories, and now there’s nobody left to tell them either,” Roy adds with a sigh.

Despite growing up in Kolkata, Roy had no childhood awareness of Chapal Rani. Jatra belonged to a different social register entirely, best summed up in a line Bhaduri often repeated during their interviews: jatra kore rastar lok, natok kore bhadralok (jatra is for the street, theatre is for the respectable). Although Roy’s mother knew of Prabha Devi (Bhaduri’s mother and a theatre actress herself ), jatra was never assigned the prestige offered to proscenium theatre in the middle-class, English-speaking world of Roy’s South Kolkata childhood. Even during his stint as an editor at Trikone, the oldest-running South Asian queer publication in America, coming across the life story of someone like Bhaduri would have been a miraculously rare occurrence.

Men essaying female roles on the proscenium has been a theatrical practice for centuries across Europe and Asia. In Bengal, for decades, female roles in the jatra tradition were played by men known as purush ranis, or male queens. Born in 1939, Bhaduri entered this lineage of female impersonation in 1956 at the ripe age of sixteen, when his mother’s sudden death left their family without an active breadwinner. For years, he appeared on stage under layers of heavy cream, with kohl-painted eyes and a bosom shaped by sponge, successfully playing courtesans, queens and goddesses for a fiercely loyal audience of ordinary men and women. “He started at 100 rupees a month and at his peak he was making 6,000 a month in the mid 1960s,” shares Roy. “His lover, who held a corporate job at that time, was making 250 rupees a month while Chapal babu was making 3,000.”

But as more and more women started taking to the stage as performers in the late 1960s and 1970s, the need for performers like Bhaduri dissipated. In a deeply poignant passage from the book Bhaduri reflects on this shift: “My dilemma was [...] never whether women should come into jatra. It was: what do we do with those who played the female roles all these years? [...] Where are they [going] to go?” Bhaduri’s fears eventually came true as many of his contemporaries found themselves without a job overnight and were forced to become seamstresses or run tea stalls. Bhaduri himself survived as a cleaner in libraries, eventually taking up the performance of Goddess Sitala (a Hindu deity known to protect commoners against infectious diseases) on the streets of Kolkata as part of a folk tradition in which performers offer blessings in exchange for food or small change from pedestrians.

Whimsically structured and lyrically narrated, Roy’s book recounts this very rise and fall of a less than ordinary queer life. The fiction, he explains, wasn’t a standalone stylistic choice: the deeper he delved into Bhaduri’s accounts of his life, the more questions kept surfacing that his own narrative could no longer answer, because the very people who might have answered them were long gone. When women began entering jatra and displacing female-impersonating performers like Bhaduri, he framed it in his accounts as a kind of betrayal of a craft he had spent a lifetime perfecting. But what did those women, Roy asks, make of being told that a man’s performance of femininity was the “real art”?

“It’s not fair for me as a biographer to impose that question on Chapal,” Roy says. “That’s a question for the women.” And so, he invented them: a chorus girl, a niece, and a contemporary drag performer, among others. Grounded in historical fragments, these voices began to pose counter-questions to Bhaduri’s own voice, without ever veering into a territory of outright factual distortion.

BUT THIS INSTINCT TO ENSURE AUTHENTIC reportage soon paved the way for something deeper, akin to a sense of protection. During his interviews, Bhaduri would continue insisting: “I am not third gender, I am first gender,” a proclamation that could easily be read today as reductive, or even transphobic. But for Roy, the answer to his contradiction lay in a more nuanced truth: Bhaduri, a self-admitted gay man, simply never wanted to live life as a woman offstage. For him, the performance of femininity was a skill that he had honed and perfected over the years as an actor, and one that he was deeply proud of.

“How could I, sitting in 2026, put this man into boxes when he spent his entire life living outside the box?” Roy asks. “The vocabulary that exists for queer expression today did not exist in 1964. We might have created more labels and names today, but these labels are still boxes. And I did not want to impose any of them on Chapal babu.”

For Roy, working Roy, working on this project also took a personal turn when sifting through Bhaduri’s transcripts led to reflections on his own childhood. Growing up as an effeminate boy, he spent years watching classmates get bullied for the traits he tried to bury under quiz-team achievements. He admits to never once defending them, afraid of being marked himself. Bhaduri, he realised, had done the opposite; by turning the very femininity most queer boys of that era learned to hide into a proud, commercially viable shield, or “his USP.”

As a queer man from a different generation himself, Roy was “stunned by how much we have in common with Chapal babu in terms of our anxieties and fears as queer people around loneliness and life.” Despite the progress of the queer movement, he reflects, queer lives remain vulnerable to the whims of others. As conservative legislations and policies gather pace worldwide, there is a gnawing sense that everything you fought for can be taken away within seconds. “And as a creative person, that lingering fear of what happens when the world loses interest in your work? That made me pause and realise this was in many ways my story as well,” adds Roy.

By the time Roy carried the finished book to Bhaduri, now bedridden and spending his days listening to songs on his Saregama Caravan radio, the actor, who read no English, could only remark, “Baba, pachsho pata?” (Five hundred pages?). For a man who never went past eighth grade, the sheer existence of a book about him in English was proof that he had been taken seriously. “It meant he mattered,” Roy says. “And that it hadn’t all been in vain.”

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Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator by Sandip Roy is published by Seagull Books