In his latest book, author and queer activist Sandip Roy revisits the extraordinary life of a Bengali folk theatre performer whose story reveals how people can live beyond conventional ideas of gender and sexuality, long before they have the language to describe them.
By Vinaya Patil
For decades, Chapal Rani occupied an uneasy space between the spotlight and obscurity. Once celebrated for playing female characters in Bengal’s travelling folk theatre tradition of Jatra, he eventually found himself pushed out of the profession that had defined his life. His story is one of artistic brilliance, social prejudice and a deeply personal search for authenticity.
In the book Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal, author Sandip Roy returns to this forgotten figure to explore not only the fading world of Bengali folk theatre but also the complicated relationship between gender, sexuality and identity. At the heart of the book is a question that remains relevant today: can someone live a queer life without necessarily identifying with the vocabulary or politics of the queer movement?
For Roy, who has observed LGBTQ+ activism in India and the United States over the years, Chapal Rani’s life offers a compelling answer.
“I came to the process with my own sort of fixed ideas about gender, identity, and all of that,” Roy says, reflecting on the experience of researching and speaking with his subject. “But the process of talking to him really shook up those ideas a lot.”
A star of Jatra, and a profession lost
Jatra, a popular form of Bengali folk theatre, traditionally relied on male performers to portray women. The reasons were both social and practical. Women were often discouraged from travelling for months with theatre troupes, while the absence of microphones and amplifiers meant performers needed powerful voices to reach audiences that could number thousands.
“Among the men who excelled in female roles, some acquired the honorific Rani, or queen, becoming celebrated performers in their own right. Chapal Rani, born Chapal Bhaduri, was among the best known of them,” explains Roy.
But the arrival of more women performers and the introduction of amplification gradually changed the landscape. By the 1960s and 1970s, audiences increasingly preferred women in female roles, and performers such as Chapal found their place in the theatre world shrinking.
Roy recounts a particularly painful episode in which Chapal was performing when someone booed him. “The humiliation drove him off the stage and marked the beginning of his disappearance from public life,” Roy tells the India Post, adding, “He lost more than a job. Because he was so closely identified with female characters, he struggled to transition into male roles. His distinctive voice and mannerisms, which had once made him an exceptional performer, became obstacles to finding other work.”
Eventually, Chapal survived by performing as Hindu goddesses at markets and in poor neighborhoods, depending on small payments from passers-by. Living with his sister, who was also an actress, he remained largely outside the public eye.
His fortunes began to change in the 2000s, when publisher Naveen Kishore encountered him and photographed him transforming himself into female characters. The photographs introduced his work to new audiences, while a documentary helped bring his life story into wider circulation. His story subsequently inspired theatrical productions and a feature film Arekti Premer Golpo, starring Rituparno Ghosh, in which Chapal appeared as an older version of himself.
As LGBTQ+ activism gained visibility in India, Chapal’s life also began to attract attention for another reason: he had lived outside conventional gender and sexual expectations long before the contemporary movement had come to recognize him as a figure of interest.
A queer life without the label
Did Chapal himself think of his life in terms of queer identity? Roy is careful to distinguish between the language used to describe a life, and the life itself.
“He didn’t care for these labels,” Roy says. Chapal had been in a long-term relationship with a man he met when he was around 18 or 19. The relationship lasted approximately 20 years, Roy explains, although his partner married and had children. Chapal himself chose not to marry, despite his sister’s encouragement.
In Roy’s account, this decision was not simply a rejection of marriage as an institution. Chapal recognized that marrying a woman would mean asking her to participate in a life that did not reflect his desires. ‘I can get married. But what about this woman? I don’t want to ruin the life of some woman,’ Chapal would argue.
For Roy, this is an important distinction. Chapal may not have used the contemporary language of sexual identity, but he understood something fundamental about himself and the life he did not want to lead.
Roy also warns against making assumptions about the sexuality of other Jatra performers simply because they played women. Some married and had children; others did not. The historical record does not allow easy conclusions about their private lives.
Chapal’s story, however, offers a rare personal account of a man who chose not to conform to conventional expectations, even without the support of a formal identity or political movement.
Beyond Western frameworks
Roy’s engagement with Chapal also prompted him to reconsider a familiar criticism of LGBTQ+ activism in India: that queer identities and the movement for equal rights are imported from the West.
Having edited a magazine focused on South Asian LGBTQ+ experiences and followed the movement in both India and the United States, Roy is familiar with the theoretical frameworks through which questions of gender and sexuality are often discussed.
Chapal, however, had little awareness of these debates. He did not know about Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized consensual same-sex sexual activity until the Supreme Court read it down in 2018. Nor was he familiar with the evolution of the queer movement in the United States. “Yet he had lived a life that challenged conventional ideas about sexuality and social respectability,” Roy states as the reason behind what makes Chapal’s story so powerful.
“To me, that’s a pretty reassuring thing since the queer movement in India is frequently attacked by people saying it borrows too much from the West, or it copies the West and it’s not really Indian but Chapal’s life emerged from his own desires, relationships and choices,” insists the author, adding that the performer’s queerness was not the product of familiarity with Western identity politics or contemporary activism.
The implication is not that labels or political movements are unnecessary, but that lived experiences do not always wait for the language through which society eventually understands them.
The movement after Section 377
Roy’s reflections on Chapal lead to a broader assessment of queer rights in India. For years, the movement was united by the goal of overturning Section 377. The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision was a landmark victory, but it also left the movement confronting a more complicated question: what comes next?
Some activists and organizations have prioritized marriage equality, Roy says, while others have argued that more immediate concerns, including workplace discrimination, social exclusion and the vulnerability of queer people outside supportive family structures, deserve greater attention.
The Supreme Court declined to recognize a right to same-sex marriage in its 2023 judgment on the issue, leaving marriage equality unresolved. Meanwhile, everyday obstacles persist even where formal discrimination has been challenged, Roy argues, as he points to situations in which institutions may announce policies accommodating same-sex couples but frontline employees remain unsure of implementing them.
“There are many other day-to-day challenges beyond decriminalization. The lesson is that legal recognition is a beginning rather than an endpoint. Equal rights must also be made meaningful in the routines of banking, healthcare, employment and family life,” he suggests.
The experience of the United States offers a similar caution. Roy notes that gains in queer visibility and acceptance cannot be assumed to be permanent, particularly amid political disputes over transgender rights, gender identity and institutional protections. “Just because you’ve made certain progress, it doesn’t mean that progress has been etched in stone,” he says.
For Roy, the movement’s changing priorities are not necessarily a sign of failure. They reflect the fact that once a shared legal goal has been achieved, a community must grapple with a wider range of needs that cannot always be addressed through a single campaign.
South Asians finding a community
Roy also reflects on the experiences of South Asian queer people in the United States, where the search for acceptance has often involved negotiating two overlapping identities.
Historically, queer spaces could be predominantly White, while South Asian cultural spaces often left little room for open discussions of sexuality. The result was a sense of having to choose between identities that were both integral to a person’s life.
Roy says that support groups and publications devoted to South Asian queer experiences emerged to bridge that divide, creating spaces where people could be both South Asian and queer without having to explain or defend either identity.
He even credits digital platforms with transforming the ways in which people find one another, in India as well as abroad. What once required considerable effort, secrecy and luck can now be facilitated by online communities and dating applications.
Yet greater access does not mean that racism, cultural stigma or the pressure to conform have disappeared. Rather, the ways people build community have changed, and some of the institutions that once served as essential meeting points have become less central.
It is a shift that echoes the larger themes of Chapal Rani: identities are lived within particular social conditions, and the ways people understand themselves are shaped by the possibilities available to them.
The enduring power of Chapal Rani
What makes Chapal’s story especially resonant is that it resists a neat narrative of progress. He was celebrated, discarded and later rediscovered, but his life cannot be reduced to either the triumph of a pioneering performer or the tragedy of a forgotten artist.
His story also challenges the tendency to view the past exclusively through the categories of the present. To call Chapal a queer figure is to recognize something significant about his experience, but it is equally important to acknowledge that he lived without necessarily adopting the identity that others might assign him.
Roy’s book brings together the history of Jatra, the vulnerability of a performer whose livelihood depended on changing public tastes, and the intimate choices of a man who refused to enter a marriage that would have misrepresented his desires.
In doing so, Chapal Rani asks readers to look beyond the familiar markers of identity and activism. It reminds us that people have always found ways to live outside convention, sometimes without a movement to support them, a vocabulary to describe them or a society prepared to recognize them.
Chapal Rani’s story may have emerged from the fading world of Bengali folk theatre, but its questions belong to the present: who gets to define an identity, whose lives are remembered, and how many people have lived truths that their time did not yet know how to name?
