In Chapal Rani, Sandip Roy Brings Back Bengal's Last Jatra Queen From Archival Silence

Sandip Roy's Chapal Rani, The Last Queen of Bengal opens not with the queen in her element, sari-clad, thunder-voiced, commanding thousands across open-air stages in the Bengal countryside, but with a man in a kurta-pyjama sitting silently at an LGBTQ+ art show in Kolkata, looking rather out of place. It is a disorientation that Roy deploys with enormous deliberateness. The first time he saw Chapal Bhaduri, the celebrated purush-rani, the male queen, of Bengali jatra did not look like a queen at all. What follows across nearly three hundred pages of creative nonfiction is the painstaking, urgent restoration of both the queen and the man: their triumphs and abandonments, their loves and loneliness, and the vanishing art form that gave them a stage on which to be, briefly and magnificently, themselves.

Published by Seagull Books, Chapal Bhaduri's preferred publisher of long standing, whose founder Naveen Kishore had first brought Chapal to wider attention through a 1999 documentary, the book arrives as a work that defies easy categorisation. It is biography, oral history, cultural archaeology, and elegy all at once. Roy, the Kolkata-born journalist and novelist best known for his debut Don't Let Him Know, spent several years embedded in Chapal's life, initially meeting him weekly at the Seagull bookstore in South Kolkata, recorder in hand, and eventually touring with him through the disappearing lanes and demolished theatres of North Kolkata. What began as a straightforward biographical exercise evolved into something far more layered and, ultimately, far more necessary.

The Queen in the Room

Chapal Bhaduri, stage name Chapal Rani, was one of the last and greatest of the purush-ranis, the male queens of Bengali jatra, that peripatetic folk theatre tradition which drew audiences in the thousands across rural Bengal for performances lasting upward of six hours. Hailing from the storied acting lineage of Sisir Kumar Bhaduri, he emerged as a major presence on the Bengali stage in the 1950s, playing queens, seductresses, and goddesses with a vocal range and bodily command that left contemporaries and critics dumbfounded. By the early 1970s, as women entered jatra and the form began its long commercial decline, his career disintegrated. He was subsequently discovered by a second generation, one that had never attended a jatra in their lives, and became, somewhat incongruously, a queer icon.

Roy is careful never to project more onto Chapal than Chapal himself claims. The book is admirably honest about the awkwardness of a 21st-century queer vocabulary being applied to a man who never had any use for such terminology. 'I am not third gender. I am first gender,' Chapal states categorically in one of the volume's most electric passages. He was openly homosexual in the 1960s, not as a political statement, not as a declaration of identity, but, as Roy describes in the introduction, 'because he felt that was being true to himself.' He was not a pioneer. He simply lived. That distinction, which Roy holds onto carefully throughout, is what gives the biography its moral seriousness.

Roy brings formidable prose instincts to his subject. His introductory sections on the history of jatra, its origins in sixteenth-century Vaishnav devotional performances, its secular evolution through the Vidya-Sundar romances, the grand 'opera' companies of Chitpur, the institution of the Bibek or Conscience as a running moral interlocutor, are amongst the finest condensations of this history available in English. Jatra is a form that has been written about sparingly and, when it has been, mostly in Bengali. Roy's excavation of it for an Anglophone readership is itself a contribution of no small significance.

The Archive as Act of Love

Roy's editors at Seagull encouraged him, as the project deepened, to think of the book not only as a narrative but as an archive. Talking to us, Roy explained, 'Don't just think of it as a narrative. Think of it almost as if you're creating this archive, this museum in which you're storing these aspects of his life.' The results of this expanded mandate are amongst the book's most affecting passages. The volume includes Chapal's mother's recipes, shared mid-interview and initially dismissed by Roy as extraneous, as well as transcriptions of entire jatra scenes recited verbatim by Chapal from memory, preserved now in no printed source anywhere else. 'Those scripts also don't exist anymore,' Roy told us. 'Those books are not in print. The only archive we have is what's in Chapal's memory.'

The process of gathering all this was considerably more intensive than Roy had anticipated. He had imagined weekly meetings, a recorder, a tidy transcription. Instead, he found himself driven through North Kolkata's vanishing streets in Chapal's company, pausing outside the narrow-laned house where Chapal had grown up, only for the current residents to emerge from work, recognise their visitor, and promptly usher everyone inside for tea and sweets. The city itself becomes a character: its demolished theatres, its disappeared lanes, its apartment buildings rising where jatra stages once stood. 'I realised I was not just documenting Chapal's story,' Roy said, 'but the story of a city and an art form that themselves were changing dramatically before our eyes.'

Because most of Chapal's contemporaries are no longer living, and those from the theater world who remain could offer only partial testimony, Roy found himself unable to reconstruct how the world viewed Chapal from primary sources. This lacuna becomes the generative pressure behind the book's fictional interludes: imagined perspectives, rigorously grounded in the historical and biographical record, that fill in what interviews could not retrieve. It is a methodology with precedent in literary nonfiction of the highest order, and Roy executes it with sensitivity. He is at pains to mark these passages clearly, offering readers the interpretive agency to weigh them accordingly. The result is a text that feels scrupulously honest about its own limits whilst remaining fully alive to its imaginative obligations.

What stays with the reader most potently is Roy's account of Chapal's memory, extraordinary, almost unnerving in its fidelity. Talking to us, Roy reflected, 'It's embarrassing how little I can remember what I did last month. But Chapal would tell me in great detail about some encounter and conversation he had 60 years ago.' There is something deeply moving, and also deeply unsettling, in this disproportion: a man whose external life has been largely unmemorialised, whose photographs from his jatra years barely exist because the form was not considered respectable enough to document, carries an entire world inside him, intact, luminous, trembling, with nobody yet to receive it. This book is the receiving.

A Minority in a Minority in a Minority

The book's most politically incisive sections concern the structural marginalisation of jatra by the Kolkata intelligentsia, a marginalisation that left its greatest practitioners without pensions, without recognition, and, in several harrowing cases, without a livelihood at all. Roy is unflinching on this point. Talking to us, he described the attitude of Kolkata's cultural establishment as treating jatra as 'basically riffraff for lowclass people'. The irony is almost too cruel to bear: whilst jatra drew tens of thousands to open fields, the proscenium theatre of Kolkata attracted a few hundred; yet it was the proscenium that the bhadralok claimed as Culture, and jatra that it dismissed. The stories Roy uncovers of former jatra queens reduced to stitching petticoats, selling lottery tickets, or, in at least one instance, taking their own lives because they could not feed their families, constitute an indictment as damning as anything in recent Indian cultural history.

Against this backdrop, Chapal Bhaduri's position is one of layered precarity. He is, as Roy articulates with quiet precision, 'a minority in a minority in a minority': a practitioner of a disdained art form, a man who performed femininity professionally, and a homosexual man in a society that barely had language for what he was. The contrast with comparable figures in other Indian performance traditions is pointed. Bal Gandharva, the celebrated female impersonator of Maharashtra's musical theatre, received a Padma Bhushan and had a theatre named after him. Jaishankar Sundari of Gujarat likewise. 'If they could get a Padma Bhushan, why not Chapal Bhaduri?' asks director Rakesh Ghosh in the book's pages, and the question, once posed, does not leave easily.

The book's treatment of queerness is notably sophisticated in its refusal to impose retrospective frameworks. Roy, who himself edited Trikone, the world's oldest South Asian LGBTQ+ magazine, admits candidly in the introduction that Chapal never appeared in its pages, not because he was unknown, but because 'Jatra sort of existed outside the worldview I had at that time.' There is real intellectual honesty in this admission: a gay man who covered South Asian queerness for years, missing the most publicly queer figure in Bengali performance because jatra was too far outside the cosmopolitan frame of reference. The book is, in part, a long and generous act of reparation for that omission.

The archival silence around Chapal and his contemporaries is, Roy makes clear, not simply an oversight but the product of active cultural hierarchies. The absence of photographs from Chapal's early career, whilst his sister, a stage actress, was extensively photographed, is symptomatic of an entire system of valuation that deemed jatra unworthy of documentation. What Roy has done, in spending years with Chapal before ill health confined him entirely to his room, is rescue a life from that system. The fact that Chapal was too unwell to attend his own book launch gives the project an urgency it would have had anyway, but which now acquires the quality of a last rite performed just in time.

Once a Queen, Always a Queen

If the book has a limitation, it is one endemic to the form. Biography told largely in its subject's own voice must reckon with the subject's own mythologising. Roy is admirably alert to this: he notes that 'Chapal was not always the most reliable narrator,' and that his recollections sometimes deviated from things he had said in earlier interviews. The fictional interludes are Roy's mechanism for triangulating around this unreliability, and they work, though occasionally the reader wishes for more sustained critical interrogation of the Chapal self-narrative rather than imaginative supplementation of it. The book is, at its most honest, a hall of mirrors, Roy's own phrase, and some readers may wish for firmer glass.

These are minor cavils against a work of genuine importance. Roy writes with a confidence and a lyricism that honours its subject without sentimentalising it. The book's structure, moving between oral testimony, historical exegesis, and fictional interlude, mirrors the hybrid nature of jatra itself, a form that mixed song and prose, sacred and secular, high sentiment and low comedy in a single evening. That formal echo feels entirely purposeful. And Roy's prose, at its best, achieves something close to what he describes watching Chapal achieve on stage in Asansol before a crowd of over six hundred: a transcendence of the script, a moment when craft dissolves into truth.

The launch event Roy describes, at which the son of Rakal Rani, one of Chapal's predecessors, a jatra star who ended up hawking peanuts on the street, came forward to thank Roy on behalf of his father's unrecorded life, is one of the most quietly devastating passages in recent Indian memoir. Roy tells it plainly, without orchestration. That plainness is the measure of his trust in the material and in the reader, a trust that Chapal Raniearns and repays in full.

Chapal Bhaduri once said, in an interview for the Bengali daily Aajkaal, 'I love to act because I do not like being alone.' He is, today, very much alone, confined to a small room in an old-age home, the windows opening onto nothing but the walls of the adjacent house. This book does not pretend otherwise. But it ensures, with great tenderness and great rigour, that the queen is seen. And perhaps, for Chapal Bhaduri, that was always the point.