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When Shirsho Bandyopadhyay’s cover story Beneputul on the male queens of the Bengali folk jatra performance world came out in the reputed Bengali cultural magazine Desh in May 1992, I was in school. My mother was not too happy to see me leaf through the pages and getting fascinated by the photographs of female impersonators. The unease and hesitation of a middle-class, university-educated, college-teaching woman reflected the gender politics embedded in the social perspective towards the gender fluidity embodied by these performers. More than three decades later, Sandip Roy’s extraordinary book on the life of Chapal Rani, or, Chapal Bhaduri as he is known more conventionally, captures this lived world of female impersonators of jatra not as exotica, but rather as a poignant tale of a journey balancing the public life of a successful artist and the private life of a homosexual man finding his place in a conservative society. 

‘Chapal Rani, The Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator’, Sandip Roy, Seagull Books, 2026.

Roy’s Introduction to the book may not be full of too unfamiliar historical details and historiographical reflections on female impersonation on stage to a scholar of theatre and performance studies, but it is an adequate entry-point to the life and times of Chapal Rani (born in Calcutta, 1939) for a reader eager to contextualise this unusual life story. It brings together academic and popular writings on jatra, interviews with scholars like Samik Bandyopadhyay, Ananda Lal, Naveen Kishore and film-makers like Kaushik Ganguly, who directed Ar Ekti Premer Golpo (Yet Another Love Story, 2010) loosely based on Chapal Bhaduri’s life.

Jatra began as a form of popular entertainment from the 16th century in Bengal, principally with the emergence of the narrative form of Mangal Kavya, long propitious poems about a deity, connected with a sect or a cult; and by the end of 19th century, it became a fusion folk-form of play-acting with costumes and make-up, songs with grand gestures played on make-shift stages in the open air and........

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