Many years ago I edited Trikone, the world’s oldest magazine on South Asian LGBTQ+ issues. It was published out of California and we were always on the lookout for stories that were both South Asian and queer. There weren’t that many.
Anything that vaguely fit the bill, say a minor gay character buried in a novel set in India, we included.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
When some 15 people in Kolkata, my hometown, decided to embark on what would become India’s first Pride Walk on July 2 1999, it was big news for Trikone. It was the middle of the monsoon in Kolkata but the event was timed to coincide with global celebrations marking 30 years of the Stonewall riots in New York which sparked the LGBTQ+ movement in the USA. Though I lived in San Francisco at that time, this felt like a Pride Walk in my own backyard.
What I did not know then that even before this Friendship Walk as it was called, there was a real pride icon in my own backyard. Chapal Bhaduri was the nephew of Indian theatre giant Sisir Bhaduri, his mother was the great actress Prabha Devi. But he became a star in his own right as Chapal Rani, playing female roles on the jatra stage. Night after night in the 1960s and 70s he transformed himself into characters from Indian history and mythology - Chand Bibi, Queen Kaikeyi and the mother of the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt.
CHAPAL1
Even more astonishing he resisted family pressure to get married, content in a decades long relationship with a man he had met in his teens. Chapal Rani didn’t know about Stonewall. Or Trikone for that matter.
I grew up in his city but didn’t know about him although I knew all about Stonewall. Activists in India often have to work hard to reassure friends and family that the LGBTQ+ rights movement in India is not some facsimile of what happens in the west. Chapal Rani is living proof that it can be entirely homegrown.
Years later I had the opportunity to write his life story, a biography called CHapal Rani the Last Queen of Bengal for Seagull Books. I spent several years interviewing him hearing his stories about his life. And hearing him reenact the stories of queens like Chand Bibi
CHAPAL2
Recently on a rain swept night at Seagull Books. educationist and performer Gourab Ghosh came to Kolkata and did a solo show Atha Chandbibi Katha, based on a vignette of Chapal Rani as the historical queen Chandbibi. I had not seen Chapal Rani in his heyday. And Chapal Bhaduri himself, elderly, unwell and confined to his room in an old-age home, could not attend. But as Ghosh cried out “Aasman ka chand dhal sakta hain, lekhin Ahmednagar ka chand, hamesha Chand hi rahega” meaning the chand or moon in the sky might set, but the chand or moon of Ahmadnagar will always remain Chand it felt like he was talking about both Chand Bibi and Chapal, connecting our queer history to the present.
GG1
This is the connection we keep missing. Queer histories often seem to exist in a vacuum. As if it all started with Stonewall or the Castro. But queer people existed long before them, trying to carve out their space in the world.
In India, the late Bengali director Rituparno Ghosh was famous for putting queer stories on the big screen. The film Just Another Love Story starring Rituparno was actually loosely based on Chapal Bhaduri’s story and had him playing the older version of himself.
JUSTANOTHER
Rituparno Ghosh is gone but the told me film’s director Kaushik Ganguly told me even in the 70s jatra and popular culture used effeminate men as comic relief. But Chapal fought to make space for himself, turning his girlishness into his meal ticket. “If the Chapal Bhaduris had not fought to survive, the Rituparno Ghosh-es would not have gotten the lives they did,” Ganguly said.
And not just Rituparno Ghosh. All those who walked on that rainy day in Kolkata in their yellow Friendship Walk t-shirts were walking in Chapal Rani’s footsteps. As was I in far-off San Francisco though I didn’t know it then. In some sense my book Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal - The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator, is both a biography and a mea culpa. It’s an apology for the cover story we never did in Trikone.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW