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Editors Take: Chapal Rani and The Loneliness of Bengals Last Queen
Chapal Rani: The Last Queen of Bengal by Sandip Roy chronicles the life of legendary jatra artiste Chapal Bhaduri, who rose to fame playing female characters on stage and became one of Bengal’s most celebrated performers. The book explores his journey through fame, love, loss and changing times, while offering a deeply personal look at a life lived both in the spotlight and on the margins.
Filmfare’s Editor-in-Chief Jitesh Pillai writes about the biography and the remarkable man at its centre.
In his words:
The story of a queen without a throne—a queen who held her own despite dereliction, abandonment, and betrayal. Anyone who has seen Kaushik Ganguly’s Arekti Premer Golpo, a fairly sensitive and gripping film on the life and times of female impersonator Chapal Rani, will know what I’m talking about.
But that is where the rub lies, and that is where the similarities end. Sandip Roy’s book, Chapal Rani: The Last Queen of Bengal, deviates a lot from the film. The movie was a somewhat whitewashed truth of the female impersonator and more about Rituparno Ghosh, the director, and his attempt to prove his gender alliances. Roy’s book is a sensitive exploration of a young boy, Chapal Bhaduri, son of a famous stage actor and nephew of the illustrious Sisir Kumar Bhaduri, who at the age of 16 took to the jatra like waves to the seashore. He started with bit female roles as Morjina and went on to rule the world of jatra as a queen.
The somewhat unwieldy but unputdownable book is fascinating and well-researched. It starts with Chapal’s childhood and his forever probing and questioning nature. His thin voice and effeminate being may have brought his life into focus early within the family, but it was all glossed over for a job in the railways and small parts as a female impersonator.
It’s a brutally honest book. Chapal recounts his photographic memories, his tryst with makeup, stuffing falsies, and getting hurt by the strings that made up his petticoat. It’s all highly evocative. Roy shines a light on his sexuality through the voice of Chapal, who shares that he had a clandestine affair with a male lover for 34 years, starting at the age of 18.
He went on to serve his lover and his lover’s wife even as a maid and a midwife, at the cost of his own self-respect. The affair ended abruptly with the arrival of a new mistress.
Chapal, in between his lifelong servility and devotion to his lover “X”, ruled the stage with his hauteur and perhaps vanity. It was the beginning of the 1970s when women started joining the jatras, and men playing women began to be phased out. The best parts of the book are those where Bhaduri recalls playing female parts like Purnima and other feisty ladies with aplomb. With his career steeped in art and the folk form of jatra, Bhaduri is candid enough to admit that perhaps fame did go to his head, and he hadn’t prepared himself for his eventual and hasty curtain call.
He was then reduced to playing bit roles and even doing menial jobs. In his later years, he was reduced to playing the goddess Sitala, which won him encomiums but very little money. Bhaduri, while talking about his favourite dishes and their recipes, also briefly hints at his cannabis usage and how he steered clear of alcohol, possibly owing to childhood trauma dealing with an alcoholic father. The portions with his mother are tender and very moving.
Bhaduri doesn’t use fancy pronouns or LGBTQIA+ terms to describe himself or his adventures. While he suffered bullying and catcalling, he simply states he was a man who dressed up as a woman and felt like one while performing, and then happily slipped into wearing pyjama-kurtas in real life. There were no drag acts for him off-screen. The interludes in the book are irresistible, especially the one where a drag queen in Canada is both fascinated and disappointed by Chapal because he is unaffected, dismisses queer terms and lifestyles, and is unwilling to acknowledge the strident militancy of the gay subculture.
My only criticism is that Bhaduri perhaps didn’t entirely embrace his homosexuality and has been almost “antiseptic” in describing his personal life, perhaps in deference to those living, or perhaps just shy of telling it like it is. I missed the candour that he describes in everything else, which feels missing in his personal and romantic shenanigans.
The disappointment over Rituparno Ghosh hijacking his role and character in Arekti Premer Golpo and making it his own is very evident, though he does give a clean chit to director Kaushik Ganguly. Ganguly reworked his TV film Ushnotar Jonno to make Arekti Premer Golpo; perhaps Ganguly, a fledgling filmmaker at the time, couldn’t stand up to the tantrums and diva behaviour of a colossus like Ghosh. But Bhaduri is unsparing in his disappointment and criticism.
In the evening of his life, Chapal, who was once the queen of everything he surveyed, now spends his time in an old age home not too far from the streets he grew up in. His nieces bring him home-cooked food and look after him while he deals with age-related ailments.
Sandip Roy’s biography is not an easy read given our kindergarten attention spans and brain rot in the age of Instagram and algorithms. But it’s an intensely rewarding book. It makes you unbearably sad and yet makes you admire the fortitude of a jatra artiste whom history will hopefully remember more kindly than his own world did.
Also Read: Grace, Guts, Glory: Celebrating Dimple Kapadia | Editor’s Take
Filmfare was the first to report that Ram Charan had sustained a wrist injury on the sets of Peddi and that the actor would soon undergo corrective surgery. He reportedly suffered a cartilage tear during the filming of Peddi, his most recent theatrical release.
