Naveen Kishore

Woman/Goddess, India Center of Art and Culture, New York, June 21 - August 11, 2001

Anjum Katyal, Performing the Goddess: Sacred Ritual into Professional Performance, TDR: The Drama Review - Volume 45, Number 1 (T 169), Spring 2001, pp. 96-106, illustrated

Twelve digital prints. Each framed and mounted separately. 8 illustrated in catalogue. Good overall condition. Each signed and numbered. Edition 115.
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This series of photographs by Naveen Kishore is part of a  larger artistic project relating to the life and career of Indian actor Chapal Bhaduri. Throughout his career, Chapal Bhaduri played female roles, in particular, the role of Chapal Rani or Queen Chapal, the leading lady of Bengal's traditional traveling theatre. When the theatre's tradition changed and women began to play female roles, Chapal Bhaduri found himself dethroned and unemployed.  Out of work and ageing, he managed to support himself by taking on another female role, that of Sitala, the dreaded goddess of small pox and disease.

As an actor who has performed female roles throughout his career Chapal Bhaduri lives on the boundaries of conventional society. In the ongoing process of modernization throughout India, his lifestyle and the artistic traditions he follow have become increasingly marginalized, yet his performance and the Goddess he becomes remain integral to the belief systems of many of the poorest communities within India. 'The young women of the locality offer obeisance to the goddess, anoint the mother with sindoor (vermilion). One day I stopped a young girl. She was about 17. I said, "I want to ask you something. You touch me, put sindoor on me . . . I am a man, you're a young woman, doesn't it bother you, inhibit you?" She said, in this form, you are the mother. Not Chapal da (older brother). And saying this, she took my foot in her hands to paint it with alta.'

In Performing the Goddess Kishore documents the transformation of the male actor Chapal into the goddess Sitala. The actor states 'as soon as I apply color on my lips, I become the woman I depict.' Performing the Goddess  raises important questions about multiple persona, sexual identity and  the role of the female in rural India, and furthermore reveals the continued  importance associated with the worship and appeasement of malevolent deities through ritual performance.  (For an in-depth discussion on ritual performance in Indian theater see Anjum Katyal, Performing the Goddess: Sacred Ritual into Professional Performance, TDR: The Drama Review - Volume 45, Number 1 (T 169), Spring 2001, pp. 96-106).