‘Jatra icon Chapal Bhaduri negotiated his sexuality without ever bothering about identity politics’

When I first met Chapal Bhaduri on screen, he seemed multitudinous. Narrating his life history in the 1999 documentary, Performing the Goddess, Bhaduri, an icon of jatra, splits himself three ways. There is Bhaduri, of course, an elderly man in a plain kurta, talking to the camera. He seems ordinary, everyday, miscellaneous. Then, he starts talking. About jatra, gender, body. Over the years, thanks to Naveen Kishore’s documentary, in which he remains a sole talking head, Bhaduri has become the most recognisable and venerated of the last bastion of jatra’s purush rani (male queens), a sobriquet for the form’s female impersonators. He was once Chapal Rani, resplendent in both femme costume and in jatra’s signature melodrama. In his masculine attire, Bhaduri reenacts some of the roles he had once played. And even though he is out of costume, he does not seem out of commission. When he reenacts his roles, Bhaduri peels right away in front of the camera, and there lies the queen: Chapal Rani.

Bhaduri has had a storied, if slightly shadowed, career as a purush rani. Blame it on the decay of jatra as a respectable theatrical form. Even at its peak, it was chastised: “Jatra dekhe fatra loke.” In other words, jatra...

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