Sandip Roy: One size cannot fit all gender identities

The first time I saw Chapal Bhaduri, it was hard to imagine him as a woman. A stocky man with a square face and thinning hair, dressed in kurta-pyjama, he looked quite avuncular. But I knew he was one of the last great female impersonators of the Bengali stage from the 1960s and 1970s, so famous he was known as Chapal Rani. Some simply called him Queen.

In his heyday even the Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar had apparently been completely fooled when he saw Bhaduri playing the mother of the 19th century poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt on stage. He asked to meet the “actress” and was dumbfounded when a man clad in trousers and shirt was brought to him.

I knew this story because it was one of the first anecdotes Chapal Bhaduri told me when I started interviewing him for a book about his life. It was a story he was proud of. More than any medal or award, for him this was the ultimate testimonial to his skill as an actor, a man who straddled genders with such elan. “If only we had mobile phones then, I would have taken a selfie,” he told me ruefully.

But in the last few weeks, watching the furious protests against the government’s transgender bill, I have been thinking about that brief encounter between Bhaduri and Uttam Kumar differently. At that time there was no LGBTQ+ movement in India and yet somehow society accommodated a Chapal Rani who didn’t fit in the gender binary. Uttam Kumar hugged him, held him close. Bhaduri spent decades in a relationship with a man, living ultimately in the same house as the man and his wife. The man’s children called him C. When the man’s daughter got married, Bhaduri was the one in charge of the wedding arrangements.

Now we live in supposedly more enlightened times. None other than the Supreme Court passed a judgement in 2014 recognising transgenders as a minority, honouring their right to self determination and instructing the government to look after their welfare. But the government, in the name of protecting the most vulnerable, removed that right to self-determination and constricted the definition of transgender so much that even trans men were erased from the picture. Something does not compute. We seem both more aware and yet more wilfully blind.

The government’s obduracy is actually unsurprising. When the court orders it to ensure the welfare of a group, it’s in the government’s economic self-interest to define who might be eligible as narrowly as possible. Especially with a census looming.

Bhaduri, now in his 80s, never identified as transgender. He doesn’t care about pronouns. The pronouns in Bengali are not gendered anyway. He never wanted to dress as a woman off-stage. And yet he has always maintained that when he put on his lipstick, he did not just feel like a woman, he would forget that he had ever been a man. As I spoke with him over the years I realised I didn’t know where to place him, what colour of the rainbow to assign him.

He was not transgender. Yet he could “forget” he was ever a man when onstage. He dressed as a woman for professional reasons but he was no drag queen. There was not a hint of camp in his performances. He had loved a man but didn’t know words like “gay”. He worked as a chain man in the railways by day and danced as Marjina on stage at night and no one batted an eye. In fact his femininity, which should have made him an object of ridicule, became his trump card.

I realised that labelling him was wholly my problem. He didn’t care which box I put him in. As our understanding of gender and identity has grown, we have added more boxes and more letters to the LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup to try and cover everyone. But somehow we have lost track of the fluidity that someone like Chapal Rani embodied. He was a reminder, as actor director Nandita Das told me, of the importance of the + in LGBTQIA+.

But as a society, fluidity makes us nervous. Fluidity feels like the great unknown, uncharted waters without land in sight. We feel safer when we can put people in clearly defined government-sanctioned boxes. But in the process we erase so much. In the book Globalizing through the Vernacular: Kothis, Hijras and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India (2025), Aniruddha Dutta recounts a story about how a member of the West Bengal Transgender Development Board dropped in at the office of a CBO in rural north Bengal.

She, like many members of these boards set up after the 2014 Supreme Court verdict, was a dominant caste metropolitan trans woman. The board’s job was to help trans people with employment options. A member of the CBO recommended some Dalit kothis who did precarious informal work like weaving bamboo mats. Dutta writes the board member was dubious. She said, “The kothis here are not exactly trans like you or me.” Some, she pointed out were even in heterosexual marriages.

Long before the current law, Dutta demonstrates this push to create watertight compartments where transgender and MSM (men who have sex with men) become “mutually exclusive categories without potential for overlap”. But there was always overlap, there was fluidity, there was literally cross-dressing across these labels. An activist Anik tells Dutta about keeping a wig and padded bra in their bag. “If they say ‘this person looks gay, this person is MSM not TG (transgender)’ then Anik could put on the bra and wig and say “Look, I was MSM, now I am coming here as TG, next time I’ll come as hijra.’”

A desi friend in the US always identified as a cis-gender gay man. Until he fell in love with a woman who was in a lesbian relationship. She was about to transition into becoming a man. But they wanted children so she paused the process in order to have a child. My friend laughed and said his mother complained she had spent years trying to teach her cousins to be accepting of her son’s male partner only now to be confronted with a pregnant woman at the family dinner. That’s why it feels ridiculous when the government tries to come up with a one-size-fits-all box to accommodate identities that have always lived outside the box.

A Chinese-American woman I met recently in New York wondered if perhaps naming the boxes was part of the problem. She talked about the story of the “cut sleeve” in Chinese history where the emperor reportedly cut off the sleeve of his robe rather than wake his sleeping male lover. Emperors had empresses and same-sex lovers and it was somehow all acceptable, she said. Could it be that we were more tolerant of the other at a time when we did not have to find a box for everything and put everything in a box?

She had a point. It is in some ways easier to tolerate the other when we do not have to name it. It can exist in plain sight yet we do not need to acknowledge it if we choose not to. But then again without a name it also has no rights. It relies upon the kindness of strangers for its well-being. When Bhaduri’s relationship ended abruptly, he found himself out on the streets. The man who had been his partner for years chose not to give him even his old photographs. And there was nothing much Bhaduri could do.

Laws matter because they can give protection. There is and will be a fight against a law that humiliates and renders invisible the very people it is supposed to protect. But as much as the law tries to pin people down, it cannot completely eradicate the slippery fluidity that comes naturally to us.

We live our lives. The law at best tries to catch up. When I asked Chapal Bhaduri what he felt when the Supreme Court read down Section 377 which criminalised people like him, he said that he did not even know such a law existed when he was actually with his lover, doing the acts the law called criminal. “Now I live in an old age home. My shop has been shut for a long time,” he laughed. “What do I care about the law?”

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host. His most recent book is Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator.