What’s your first memory of Chapal Rani and what made you decide that this is a story you want people to know?
Chapal Rani is somebody I knew of rather than knew personally. I had seen him around, as I mentioned in the beginning of the book. But I never really talked to him. When Seagull approached me about doing a book chronicling his life story, I thought it would be an interesting project for me to find out more about him. It would be interesting to find out about this artist who was almost unwittingly a queer icon. He was from a time before we had this LGBTQ movement and had somehow still managed to live on his own terms. From these various things, I was actually interested in finding out about Chapal Rani rather than it being a story I felt people needed to know.
In the book you’ve called him a “queer survivor”. Please explain.
Chapal Badhuri really lived his life on his own terms as much as possible. It would have been very easy for him to give in to social expectations and norms and perhaps get married to a woman as many people around him must have. He had no real queer community that supported him. There was no sense of an LGBTQ movement in India at that time. He certainly was not looking for inspiration in places like New York and San Francisco. Words like Stonewall and Castro did not mean anything to him. But he still somehow found it within himself to be true to what he wanted out of life, what he desired and who he desired.
He made his own rules as he went along, and that’s why I say he’s a queer survivor, because he’s queer in the sense that he does not really conform to social expectations, even though he’s very much a part of society. He’s a survivor because he took the effeminacy – which is still so hard for young men to deal with – and made it his career strength. Jatra gave him a platform in which his effeminacy actually became an asset for him. I really marvel at the fact that when I asked him about how much he had been bullied, he was very casual and say, yes, some people would tease me, but in the end, they didn’t. That’s because, from his teenage years, he made a living by playing women on stage, something that many of his peers did not have the talent for. That, to me, was always very inspiring.
During your time interviewing him for the book, were there moments when he strayed away from what you posed before him and did that help or hinder the process?
Almost every single time. I think I had in my head the idea that this would be a fairly simple project where I would stick a microphone in his face and he would answer these questions and we would be done in a few months. Instead, it took several years, probably because he had so many stories to tell. Also, he digressed from the questions I would pose to him. I remember the first time I met him, I started very chronologically asking him about his first childhood memories and he started talking about that. But within minutes, he was into his adult years. Then he was talking about something that happened long after his jatra career had ended. He would jump from topic to topic, following the thread of his thoughts. I would be scrambling with my recorder, trying to keep up. Most importantly, when I would ask him for an example of something, he would often use some role he played in Jatra to illustrate that point. Then before I knew it, he had embarked on five minutes of recitals of his Jatra roles, pages and pages of dialogues which he knew by memory.
At first, when I heard him go into those dialogues, I would think, “Oh, this is not something I can really use in the book because this is just part of a role he played on stage once; it’s not about his life”. But then, I later realised that most of those jatras that he was reciting from were all long out of print. They didn’t really exist even in the jatras bookstores like Diamond Library. But the one record, the one archive in which they still remained was his mind. I suddenly realised that I was sitting in 2022 listening to this man recite from memory, page after page after page of dialogue from a role of Sultana Rizia or Mohiashi Koikei, which he had done in the early 1960s. In a way, this might be the only archive of those performances and plays remaining in living memory. I had the privilege of listening to it. I also started transcribing those and incorporating those into the text. It entirely altered the form that I thought this biography would take. Now, instead of just his own life story, it had pieces of jatra, it had fictional interludes, which I introduced, it had his beauty regimen, it even had recipes of dishes his mother would make.
In that sense, it isn’t just a story about Chapal Rani but a larger story of the things we lose and of an artist who, at some point, discovers the world doesn’t have great need for his art. I felt like I wasn’t just chronicling his story, but I was bearing witness to it somehow. That made it a very different book than what I had thought initially.
What was the most difficult information to get from him?
He’s very forthright in his views on things. What was difficult was to somehow align his views on sexuality and identity with the kind of terminology that we are used to now. I realised quite early on that the words we are used to now — the rainbow flag, LGBTQIA+ — those terms were fairly meaningless to him. I have heard “gender dysphoria” being used to describe someone like Chapal Bhaduri, but these were not terms that really meant anything to him. In that sense, I think it was difficult to put him in that context or even to be asking him about what, say, gay life was like in the early 1960s in Kolkata when he was growing up, because he had no real concept of the word “gay”. He just knew about his relationship with a man. It is only in retrospect that we are giving that label gay and putting it in a box. At that time, I would say he was more romantic sexual than homosexual. He was in love with this idea of a romance with this love of his life, who happened to be a man.
Since the book has been written in first person from his point of view, how did you resist amalgamating your own voice into what he narrated to you?
I tried very hard to keep it in his voice, and this was something that my editor at Seagull Books, Sunandini Banerjee, also really helped with in the edit where she would read a paragraph and say, “This sounds good, but it doesn’t sound like Chapal Bhaduri speaking,” and then we would go and rework that. I’m sure in the end, my own voice will seep into whatever I write, but because I did his interviews in Bengali, and had that voice in my head, I found it easier to try and keep to that voice as much as I could. It’s true that the stories he narrated raised certain questions for me while writing it. I thought the best way to explore those questions was in the fairly lengthy introduction to the book, which is in my own voice, but also by intercutting it with sort of fictional interludes, which are in the voices of what I call the ghosts of the stories, the people I didn’t get to interview, but whose viewpoints and perspective also shed some light on Chapal Rani and his times. Like, what might a woman who had come into the profession at that time when only men played women’s roles have made of these jatra ranis? Or, what might one of his own heroes or one of the other jatra ranis who preceded him and who never actually enjoyed a second innings in a way that Chapal Rani did, as in, they just faded away into oblivion, what might they have made of his success? Questions like that would arise as I talked to him. In the end, I thought the best way to explore them was to create these little fictional interludes, which are in the voices of these other people, but because they are fictional, that is where my own voice can also get into the story. I took some very authorly license there and incorporated a drag queen from my own novel, Don’t Let Him Know, as one of the characters who meets Chapal Rani in the book. So that’s a little bit where my fiction meets his nonfiction.
He comes across as someone for whom queerness is a sense of being and he effortlessly invites the conversation of loneliness into it. Please expand this conversation further.
There’s a tendency, when interviewing a very colourful raconteur like Chapal Rani, to also put him on a bit of pedestal as a queer elder. You want him to be this jovial person who tells you slightly naughty jokes, perhaps naughty stories, but at the same time is a cheerful example of a gay success story of someone who lived by his own terms and, now just has entertaining stories to tell about gay life long before you were around. To some extent, he is that. He is a fabulous storyteller. He has a great sense of humour. He can be very arch and naughty and at other times very serious as well. But the conversation of loneliness was something that really moved me because it showed that just because I wanted him to be some kind of fairy godmother who would be a sort of symbol of hope for another generation of queer people, he kind of resists that. In the end, he can say that he was okay being alone, but not always equipped for the loneliness that came with old age. That is something many queer people, especially those who live somewhat outside the usual social structures, also fear. This is a question that many parents ask their children when they come out to them: “Who’s going to look after you when you grow older?” And you’re very brave and you say, I can look after myself or I have a partner or I build a chosen family, community of friends. But some of that anxiety always remains. Chapal in his old age, especially in recent times with his ill health, is a repository of many of those anxieties. So, it is sobering to meet him. Even as he regales you with his stories, he does not shy away from discussing loneliness as a fact of life in terms of how he grapples with it, even though he’s very fond of his nieces and he always talks about them coming to visit. More than just loneliness, I didn’t expect to grapple with this anxiety or the poignancy of an artist who feels that his art is no longer required by the world. This is not unique to the world of female impersonators. Writers, filmmakers, anyone involved in some creative field always lives with the anxiety that perhaps even if you’re riding high on success right now, next week or next month or next year, you will be forgotten and the world will have moved on. Then, what will you do with that loneliness? Those questions came up again and again as I talked to Chapal.
With the life of Chapal Rani, the reader also sees the progression of entertainment and how its market changed with time. While he got the opportunity to reinvent himself, many others have been forgotten. What could we have done to circumvent that?
I don’t think we can predict a way one could reinvent themselves. In Chapal’s case, it sort of happened almost serendipitously. The market had changed with time. People like him didn’t just have roles, they didn’t have a profession anymore. His path happened to cross Naveen Kishore’s at Seagull. Naveen took pictures of him and made a documentary about him which won him a different kind of audience. Not the ones that had just seen him in jatra, but a different kind of arts audience, an audience that went to galleries and film festivals and that allowed his story to become of interest to a whole other non-jatra going world. I think he always appreciated that. That’s why he said that if anybody ever wrote his life story, he would like it to come out from Seagull because he felt this connection to Seagull and Naveen Kishore. And that’s why Naveen then asked me and all of this happened. So, it sort of happened. The most poignant story I heard was actually when Naveen told me that one day Chapal Bhaduri came to him and said, could you give me a job? I can make tea or coffee at your office or dust the books in the bookstore, but I really need a job. Naveen was shocked that somebody who was an artist and at one time had tens of thousands of people coming every night to watch him, should be looking for a job making tea in an office. That kind of led him to make the documentary on Chapal. I don’t know whether the same opportunity would have worked for someone else. In some sense he was fortunate that his story didn’t end in humiliation in the 1970s when he was literally booed off stage and he swore that he would never wear a sari again. Instead, more than two-three decades later, he wore the sari again and found a new life – in film, in tele films, in theatre, and then going to perform in places like Prithvi Theatre, Habitat Centre in Delhi or all the way to Vancouver.
So, in that sense, it was definitely a Phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes kind of story. As a writer, I was drawn to that as well. It is a story of someone who manages to reinvent himself. Because, ultimately, while Seagull and Naveen might have offered him certain opportunities in terms of this documentary or these photographs, it is Chapal who seized it and reinvented himself as Chapal Rani.
Chittajit Mitra (he/him) is a queer writer, translator and editor from Allahabad. He is co-founder of RAQS, an organisation working on gender, sexuality and mental health.
