Review of Sandip Roy’s Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal

In Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal, biographer Sandip Roy explores the life and times of Chapal Bhaduri, the last great female impersonator of Bengali jatra. He opens with a rigorous introduction that establishes a clear interpretative frame. This is then gradually neutralised by a first-person voice presented as Chapal’s own, though clearly mediated and shaped by an archivist’s eye. Brief dramatised testimonials from those on the periphery of Chapal’s life interject the narrative, and there is a profusion of detail, which can at first feel unwieldy. But once the reader settles into the loose format, the result is a readable and often compelling account.

The childhood section is bookended by Rabindranath Tagore’s funeral procession, rendered with neatness through the image of a toddler spontaneously breaking into dance, and the death of Chapal’s mother, the pre-Independence stage actor, Prabha Devi. It is an origin myth formed within a powerful maternal universe of recipes, plays, performances, and theatrical lineage, and Chapal’s tentative steps into performing as a female entity on stage.

Once this is established, Roy attempts to sketch a hazy lineage of female impersonators, though it operates more through succession than influence. Chapal himself does not consciously inherit this hierarchy: his most formative model is his mother, whose femininity he observed and absorbed. This becomes evident at his debut in a leading role in Chand Bibi, when an ageing performer who had once played the part urges him to “do him proud.” Chapal receives the appeal with open scorn. This ethos is sharpened by small, unsparing reversals, as when Chapal, once mistreated by the ‘queen’ he replaced, later replicates that cruelty; elsewhere, a veteran reduced to the comic role of a milkmaid patiently learns, alone, to fashion a pot that’ll balance on his head.

Roy builds this world incrementally with archival discipline. What passes between impersonators, he appears to suggest, is not tradition or solidarity but cold technique — how to perform an ersatz femininity that can be learned but not owned. Offstage, these men shared rooms with other male actors, and moved through life without a protected space for their femininity. Chapal’s success in women-centric productions placed him in implicit competition with male stars in a way unavailable to female leads.

The world of jatra whirs in the background, accumulating texture as Roy inserts excerpts from landmark plays. Though framed as scenes Chapal remembers by heart, the method reveals an instinct to gather these fragments and scatter them headlong into the narrative stream. This mirrors Chapal’s adult entry into performance as Morjina in Ali Baba, thrust onstage with the rebuke that the scene is “flowing by.”

Roy treats jatra as a current within which Chapal’s life unfolds. The book does not attempt to assess the form’s excesses, aesthetics, or even its subversive possibilities; jatra simply is, carrying successes, failures, and audience devotion along with it. If anything, Roy pays homage to a form often derided with casual contempt, without attempting rehabilitation, and shielded by the omniscient first-person voice. 

What distinguishes the biography is Roy’s refusal to freeze Chapal Rani at the point of legend. Declared past his prime too soon, as prima donnas often are, Chapal’s withdrawal from the jatra spotlight might easily have marked the end of narrative interest. Instead, Roy devotes nearly half the book to an autumnal phase, which allows Chapal to exist not as a historical snapshot but as a life extended across changing forms of labour, visibility, and value, without diminishing returns. Even the present-day setting of the old-age home is rendered without pathos; it is just another lived context, in marked contrast to the depiction of his mother’s final years in a play that deeply offended him. This emphasis on duration over climax allows Roy to capitalise on Chapal’s prior persistence in the cultural landscape, through his semi-autobiographical theatre and artefacts of canonisation, such as Kaushik Ganguly’s Arekti Premer Golpo and Naveen Kishore’s Performing the Goddess. 

For a stretch, queerness in the book appears only in faint traces. In an early instance, Chapal declines a male lead role and instead suggests other male actors he would rather play opposite. This suggests a same-sex frisson that is enjoyed on stage, yet never expressed as personal identity. Under Roy’s ethical restraint yet patient coaxing, this eventually expands into a chapter on love, where the book finally edges the closet open, even as Chapal refuses its language. His verisimilitude as a stage diva repeatedly attracts male suitors, some of whose advances he accepts and others he refuses, without treating either choice as requiring explanation or self-definition. Crucially, Chapal’s performances were not built around the exhibition of femininity itself, but around inhabiting a wide spectrum of women characters for whom gender functioned as a given condition of the role. Yet, a chapter devoted to the meditative preparation for a performance, through costume, ornaments, and make-up, offers a glimpse of an electric gender transference.

The book is part of Seagull Books’ Pride List, but Roy’s introduction warns against reading Chapal’s life as queer in contemporary terms. Yet the narrative that follows does the heavy lifting, drawing undeniable queer meaning from the lived contradictions of a true icon.

Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator 

Sandip Roy

Seagull 

₹999

The writer is a Mumbai-based theatre practitioner, stage commentator, and artistic director of Theatre Jil Jil Ramamani

Published – March 14, 2026 12:54 pm IST