HOW A WOMAN SHOULD APPEAR IN PUBLIC AND WHO SHOULD PLAY HER ARE QUESTIONS THAT ARE AS OLD AS STAGECRAFT.
These days, I don’t talk to anyone, and don’t make new friends – what if they don’t recognise me, or refuse to acknowledge me? No one has understood me, and no one will. I have to accept it, even if it’s painful.
Unlike Sundari or Gandharva who projected masculinity off stage, Bhaduri was perceived as effeminate. Academic Niladri Chatterjee argues Gandharva was honoured with a postage stamp and a theatre was named after him because he wasn’t publicly associated with effeminacy, or homosexuality, and was seen as a “normal man”, unlike Bhaduri.
“The underlining homophobic anxiety of the society and the theatre was also palpable,” adds Biswas.
The other fulcrum of this public performance of gender is caste, one that Bhaduri’s contemporary Ramachandra Manjhi knows well. An exponent of Launda Naach, a folk art form in Bihar, the 92-year-old has spent a lifetime struggling against ignominy and poverty because the dance, performed by Dalit artists, is seen as disreputable. Manjhi, who recently received a Sangeet Natak Akademi award, is married with four children and leads his off-stage life as a simple heterosexual man, though as someone who is constantly battling gendered taunts. “To understand why Manjhi and his contemporaries don’t get the respect they deserve, we have to see who controls art, and defines what is respectable,” says Jainendra Dost, a Naach performer and researcher. “This art belongs to the Bahujans, but they are seen in a poor light.” Before every show, Bhaduri has an elaborate ritual and the crucial moment is when he puts on his bra – his voice suddenly changes, his eyes droop, and his manner becomes bashful. In his heyday when false eyelashes weren’t available, he would make a paste out of hot wax, and soot, and use a pointed brush to apply it on his eyelashes to look striking on stage. He looks at women on stage today with contempt. “It’s like a soap opera, the women are hideous, out of shape – we would take care of our bodies.”but he is clear that impersonation is just work, nothing more.
“I perform as a woman but I am a man. Maybe I could have been a woman, but I chose not to. There can be many ways of transformation, and this is the way I choose. While acting, I would often keep my femininity aside to perform, that is where I won, in surrendering my effeminacy to act. Womanhood and femininity are different. That is the truth of my life.”
Humiliation has thrown a long shadow on Bhaduri’s life. Once, his male lover on stage insulted him for stuffing his brassiere. “‘Did you put bricks or wood inside your bra’ he abused me.” He was also forced by a producer to have sex with him, and abducted and abused during a show. “I was pulled by groups of men from either side, screaming, it’s a she, no, it’s a he’.”
But love bruised him like nothing else. Bhaduri fell for a man four years his senior when he was 18 and their relationship blossomed over the next 32 years, in an era where same-sex love was forbidden in public but often bloomed in the shadows.
“After my mother and father, he was the one I loved the most. We completed each other.” In the 1999 film Performing the Goddess directed by publisher Naveen Kishore, Bhaduri calls his lover his “friend”, and is reluctant to categorise it as a sexual relationship alone. “What happens between a man and woman happened between us. I later read about it in magazines, and realised I got the same satisfaction as women. After that, I would often feel uneasy during the end of the month, like women do.”
But the bliss wasn’t to last. The man, already married, fell in love with another woman in the late ’80s, and abandoned Bhaduri, at a time when his savings were already dwindling. After a particularly ugly altercation, Bhaduri walked out and came back to his sister, artist Ketaki Dutta. “She told me, stage is your oxygen, go back to it. But I thought he would come for me.”
The man did come back, but only to get cheques signed, and the money from joint accounts transferred out. “I asked him, but what about me? He said he didn’t care.
That day, I knew everything was over. I signed over the money. I have no regrets. What I got, no one can take away from me.” Bhaduri has heard of the recent challenge to Section 377, which criminalises homosexuality, in the Supreme Court. But he says it makes little difference to him.
“Love between two men is natural. People didn’t talk about it then. But now it is in the open. If the law goes, in my heart I will feel happy.” He misses his fellow actors and friends, most of whom are dead. “I don’t talk to anyone, and don’t make new friends – what if they don’t recognise me, or refuse to acknowledge me?”
Kishore says Bhaduri has immense skill and presence, and the oeuvre of a consummate gender transgressor . “In a world that still dines out on titillation to anything that appears at a tangent to the ‘ordinary’, it is always going to be a problem recognising an artist for what he or she does.”
The last decade has resuscitated Bhaduri’s popularity after Kishore’s film, a loosely based biopic (where he was played by Bengali director Rituparno Ghosh), and a wildly successful play, Ramanimohan, based on his life . Bhaduri is now rehearsing for a second play, helmed by director Shekhar Samadder, who lauds the veteran actor’s energy and stage presence. “It is an honour to work with him ,” Samadder says. In this new play, which opens on August 5, Bhaduri plays a performer caught between his character, a woman, and himself. The play ends with the cry “Am I Sundar Bibi or Sundar Haldar?”
In many ways, this is the central contradiction of Bhaduri’s life. In his life, and work, gender has meant little more than heartbreak for him – one that continues to haunt him. “I fear no one will remember Chapal Bhaduri, nephew of Shishir Bhaduri. I am not just Chapal Rani,” he says as he calls for his evening beverage. Tea or coffee, I ask. “I am both man and woman, I can drink both,” he laughs.