Dress Like A Queen

Worker bees by day, queens by night. The drag scene blooms in pockets of a new India where men rejoice in their feminine avatars.

- Chinki Sinha

Drag is freedom,” says Prateek Sachdeva, a young dancer from Delhi. On weekend nights, Sachdeva, who also holds a degree in hospitality management, puts on his makeup, his most glamor­ ous dress, his tallest heels, and hits the clubs. He is part of a cohort of new­age queens, female impersonators in a country with a long tradition of men impersonating women. Much of this history can be traced back to folk theatre, to what in Bengali­ speaking parts of India is known as jatra, where men played female characters because women were barred from the stage.

The new breed of urban Indians wearing drag owes more, perhaps, to American superstar RuPaul—a 57-­year-­old drag queen who is so main­ stream, so entrenched in the popular imagination, that she fronts her own reality show, RuPaul’s Drag Race— than to jatra but it must serve as some comfort to be able to give the contem­ porary scene some perspective, as fresh new pages in an already voluminous cultural history.

Not that any of this makes doing what they do any easier. For all the glamour of lipsticked, mascaraed faces, for all the thrill of transformation, the language of self­empowerment, drag queens face an uphill battle in their bid to be recognised by the public as artists, to be recognised as exponents of an established art form.