Chapal Rani

Female Impersonation in Bengali Theatre

Now I am Chapal Rani, not Chapal Bhaduri
 Female Impersonation: Extinct Theatrical
Tradition
• ‘Female impersonators are not mere surrogates for missing women’.
• ‘Female impersonators were desired in their own right, as men who
embodied the feminine’.
• ‘They often co-existed with stage actress and were chosen by their fans in
preference to them.’

Kathryn Hansen
 Emergence of the ‘Bharatiya Nari ’
• ‘Cross-dress actors set new standards for feminine standards and fashions’
• ‘They formulated attitude of modesty and vulnerability that became the
hallmarks of new femininity’

Kathryn Hansen
 Chapal Rani: Not a drag queen
When Chapal performs the feminine
• Does not parody hegemonic gender construction
• Chapal’s art erases the ‘masculine’ as much as possible, so that only one gender- the feminine-
completely takes over the actor’s body.
• But, what is revealed is the essentially masculine/patriarchial construction of a fictive
femininity.

Niladri R Chatterjee
 Subverting the drag notion
• Chapal expresses his off stage femininity, artistic sincerity and the lines
attributed to his onstage characters to subvert the patriarchal notion that
‘drag’ is meant to be ironic performance of gender.
 A thin line between on-stage and off-stage
identity
• Attention of young men
• Likeness to single woman as iconized by patriarchal popular culture
• Survived kidnapping, attempted rape, victim of casting couch, involved in romantic
and sexual relationship with a man, deserted by the man for another woman
• This is remarkable because that happened to a body biologically assigned as man.
Acquired physical as well as psychic markers of
a woman
• Contra-patriarchal identity formation by foregrounding his mother and
neglecting his father.
• Called himself as son of Prova devi and never mentioned Tara Kumar
• By calling him Chapal Rani, and not Bhaduri, he tries to legitimise his
matriarchal roots and disown the surname of his father
Played role of powerful women
 Images in the public domain
• Narayan Shripad Rajhans (better known as Bal Gandarva) played
mythological women characters and never played a man’s role. But on a
postal stamps appears as an ‘intelligible’ face of a man.
• In contrast, Chapal can be seen in the public domain applying gender
transformative, and yet, gender constitutive red to his lips.
• A series of photos published in The drama review show him in
mid gender.
 An instance of woman in a male body
• Performance as not mere mimesis, mere imitating or mere play acting
• ‘This is really what I am’
• Make-up not for hiding but for self expression
 Embracing feminine gender
• Embracing feminine gender that formed a psychic entity that seemed to
manifest itself psychosomatically as well as physiologically.
• At puberty his voice refused to break
• From age 18 his body has been apparently mimicking the symptoms that he
interprets as resembling to menstrual cycle
‘There is nothing in her account that guarantees that ‘one’ who becomes a
woman is necessarily female.’
Judith Butler

Chapal, therefore, becomes a woman just as any female becomes a woman: by

taking on the cultural markers of womanhood.
 Effeminacy and female impersonators
• Female impersonator Julian Eltinge regularly leaked stories about his macho
exploits in the loyal print media to demarcate his on-stage femininity and off-
stage masculinity.
• Similarly Balgandharva’s off stage masculinity earned him a postage stamp
and a theatre named after him in Pune
• They were accorded positions of cultural centrality because they upheld the
patriarchal heteronormative binary in their off-stage life.
Effeminacy and female impersonators
 Bhaduri becomes ‘useful’ in two ways
• In pre-queer theory era his body is only ‘useful’ and ‘intelligible’ when fully
transformed into that of a woman.
• Due to the post modernist queer valorisation of effeminacy and gender non-
fixity, he has been rendered ‘useful’- suitable image in colour in an academic
volume.
His body’s ability to hover in mid-gender while resisting the label of
transgender or transsexual.