Blending biography with evocative vignettes, Chapal Rani traces the career of Bengali stage actor Chapal Bhaduri and his struggle for artistic identity in a changing world.
Author: Sandip Roy Format: Hardcover Publisher: Seagull Books Publication date: March 2, 2026 Pages: 520 Language: English ISBN: 978-1803095516
As the last great female impersonator of Bengali theater, Chapal Bhaduri—known as Chapal Rani—once held audiences spellbound in the jatra tradition, where men became goddesses and heroines. But when women finally took their place on stage, Chapal found himself exiled from the world he had ruled. In this groundbreaking biography, Sandip Roy captures the rise and fall of a performer whose art was inseparable from his identity.Told in Chapal’s own voice and interwoven with evocative fictional vignettes,Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengalbrings to life Kolkata’s golden age of theater and the resilience of a man who refused to disappear. Through decades of research and deeply personal interviews, Roy crafts a moving portrait of gender and belonging.
About the Author
Sandip Roy is a Kolkata-based writer, columnist, and podcaster. He hosts The Sandip Roy Show (Indian Express) and is a columnist for Mint Lounge and The Hindu. His work has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, BBC, The San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR; he was for many years a commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition. He previously edited Trikone, the world’s oldest magazine on LGBTQ+ South Asian issues, and authored the novel Don’t Let Him Know (2014). Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal, published in 2026, is his second book.
Reviews
"This first person-narrative…contains endless, entertaining, piquant and revealing anecdotes and digressions about Calcutta’s life, high and low, holding up a mirror to India since independence. Sandip Roy interjects fictional chapters, imagined incidents with ghosts or interviews with people long deceased. The unusual approach to writing biography works. Books about showbusiness are often predictable. This one is magical."
―Asian Review of Books
“Using multiple points of view, diverse narrative strands, and many voices, Roy painstakingly reconstructs a detailed and nuanced panorama of Bhaduri’s world. . . . By defying being subsumed into the metanarratives of the day, and by his insistence on the uniqueness of his voice and his story, Bhaduri, via Roy, holds open a space for diversity, for difference, for an identity that cannot be boxed and shelved under accepted categories.”
―Frontline
"Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal ultimately emerges as an important work of non-fiction because it explores art in its truest and most humane form. The book presents theatre as a space that was once deeply inclusive, secular, and democratic, and in some ways continues to remain so. At the same time, it documents the life of a person who might otherwise have disappeared from cultural memory….Through Bhaduri, Roy preserves not only the memory of an artist, but also the memory of a theatrical tradition, a social transition, and a revolution that might otherwise have faded away with time."
―Outlook
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