‘My sexual orientation has nothing to do with my artistic roots’
Interview with Sujoy Prosad Chatterjee, interdisciplinary artiste.
SUJOY PROSAD CHATTERJEE IS AN interdisciplinary artiste who has carved a niche for himself in the world of culture and entertainment. In an interview with Frontline, he spoke about the challenges and prejudices he still encounters as a queer artiste. Excerpts:
As a queer artiste in mainstream entertainment, what has been your main challenge?
It is not different from the challenges anybody faces to survive in society. The main challenge is coexistence. My situation is different from that of a transman in a mofussil town. His challenge is one of existence; mine is of “transcendence”. By that I mean my struggle to make people aware that my sexual orientation has nothing to do with my artistic roots.
As an actor my challenge is to make the director believe I can audition for an alpha male or hyper-masculine character, like any other actor. And I have done that. I played a wheelchair-bound grey character in a web series called Nokol Hiray, a big hit for Hoichoi (popular Bengali streaming service). But did I get more work from Hoichoi? I did not. I played a villain in Bidai Byomkesh,a mainstream feature film (2018). Did I get cast in more such projects ? I did not.
In Srijit Mukherji’s Shahjahan Regency (2019), I was congratulated by critics and viewers alike for my performance. Srijit himself told me that my role as the gay housekeeper had won national appreciation. But was I nominated for an award? I was not.
If you are a victim of prejudice, how come you are still so busy?
There is definitely a lot of prejudice. But in spite of it, I have achieved all I have because I did not restrict myself to the film industry. I am a brand beyond it. I started my career in the alternative arts spaces at a time when people did not want to move out of the proscenium.
In 2002-03, I was performing in bookstores, cafes, and multiplex lobbies. In 2004, when Mahabanoo Modi-kotwal was doing The Vagina
Monologues in the proscenium, I was doing it in a bookstore. Though it was non-proscenium, I was still breaking a lot of stereotypes by doing that.
The fact that I am a multidisciplinary artiste also helps. At the moment I’m doing wardrobes for a Bengali feature film; I’m doing acting supervision; I’m designing ceramic accessories for an exhibition; I’m doing stage readings, poetry solos and elocution.
Your fashion sense is distinctive and is often talked about. Are you aware of its impact?
A lot of people want to stigmatise me for wearing androgynous clothes, but the majority see it as a style statement. I’m glad that I see people not only emulating my style but also finding it liberating to wear my kind of clothes. I’m absolutely OK with a man wearing a saree; but if I were to wear one, I would drape it in a completely different way. In fact, I’m coming up with my own clothing line, which is unisexual.
How do you react to the way queer people are typecast in cinema and theatre?
I think Kaushik Ganguly’s Nagarkirtan (2017) is the first mainstream Bengali film which addressed the concept of binary in gender. Before that the idea of a feminine man was looked at as something to be ridiculed. The mindset today can be roughly divided into three categories: one, I’m absolutely OK with queer people in society. Two, I’m OK with it, but I like to keep away. Three, blatant homophobia. There is huge amount of homophobia in the theatre community as well. But a transition is taking place. Some years ago, at the National Theatre Festival organised by Nandikar, my solo play, Happy Birthday, was selected—a queer play written and enacted by me. I remember Rudraprasad Sengupta going up on stage and saying there ought to be more “texts” like this in Bengali theatre. People loved it. Now, if I have to do it again, I will possibly need to rewrite the play. m