Queer Culture in Delhi: An Interview with Kushboo The Kween

Kanishk Devgan, Class of 2020

On a fairly ordinary afternoon at Ashoka, a roomful of people had the opportunity to meet someone quite extraordinary. Kushboo, the drag persona of Ikshaku Bezbaroa, conducted a one and a half hour session, accompanied by two dazzling performances, to share the experience of being a drag queen, from personal liberation and deconstructing gender to crafting outfits and designing performances. Afterwards, a few of us stayed back to chat with Ikshaku, a human rights lawyer by profession. I had the privilege of conducting an in-depth interview where we talked about the art and commerce of drag, controversial issues, make-up and costumes, media, gender, family, boyfriends, and much more.

Be sure to follow her on Instagram!

The Birth Of Kushboo

Q. Starting off with the normal, boring questions that I have to ask: what is drag? Like, how would you explain it to someone?

A. From my point of view, drag is an art form that lets me take out the imagination that I have in my mind, the creativity, and put it out there on a canvas. And the best canvas I have is myself. So, I can do the painting on myself as well as perform as I want to — it’s got theatre. I can put the very elements of my imagination into one place.

It’s also very important to me that drag is one thing that’s resource intensive and flexible. You can use whatever props you have around you to create that fantasy, to become that superhero you want to be. For me, it’s to be my best superhero self.

Q. How did the persona that you’ve created — Kushboo — come about? How did she become your best superhero self?

Kushboo is a vulnerable person and I speak of her in the third person, but she’s very much a part of me. She’s vulnerable, sweet and wants to spread love and community. That’s her goal. As Khush, I’ve had to play various roles but Kushboo gets to be who she wants to be — her beautiful self. Her personality has a got a lot to do with my name “Khush”, which is what I was called as a boy — it was my “boy nickname”. And in school, they would call me Kushboo to tease me. So, I took that and turned it around. I took that soft, sweet delicate person who would not pick fights and made them a drag queen.

Ah, so it’s reclaiming that name for yourself. Like, no one else would know this but for you.

A. Yeah, I was very much like this back in school. I would never pick fights and that’s one of the biggest reasons you get picked on in a boys’ school. If you’re not a fighting type, you get bullied.

Q. Were you in a hostel?

A. No, but an all-boys school. And I was the type to you know, read my book and I would go to the theatre — but that was very not acceptable at school. I reached back into my childhood and brought that person out.

Yeah, you get forced into your classmates’ culture, doing their things. I was in an all-boys school for two years, my cousins for 12 years…

Yeah, I was there for 12 years, and it’s horrible because I remember being a person who was much more innocent; who was nicer, simpler, and brighter. Who had more fun. Who enjoyed things in a different way than I do now. Kushboo is a part of bringing that back. You know, it’s very personal. I feel I grew up too fast.

Drag culture in Delhi

Q. Do other drag queens, who you know, also take something so personal to create their name and image, or is it about creating a more divorced artistic creation — a character. What are the different methods of going about it?

I personally think that it’s a bit of . . . a mixture. What is personal does become art and is the best form of art. All the names I’m thinking of right now are very personal. These names are connected to who they want to be, what they want the image to be. That’s the art aspect but also the personal. Can I drop names?

There’s Lush Monsoon — she’s a friend. Her name is literally “lush” and she’s about body positivity and focuses on celebrating your body. Lush Monsoon makes sense because it’s like a tropical forest.

Yeah, it gives you that image.

Exactly. And then there’s “Betta Non/Naan Stop”. There are various connotations to her name. I don’t want to speak on their behalf but this is what I know: she said it’s a species of fish and ‘fish’ is a term used in drag to denote femininity. It’s got to do with “fishiness”.

She told me ‘Betta’ is a kind of fish and fishiness refers to a very woman-woman, and she is like that — she’s very graceful and stuff. And you know “Betta Non-Stop” and “Betta Naan Stop”, so a reference to butter naan… then you have, Remy Heart and she did a pun on, well, it’s very sexual…

She did “Remy Heart” as “Rim-Me Hard”, which is also inspired by Roxy Heart from Chicago. Her drag is also very dainty and pretty.

Q. It’s pretty cool how the names are generally puns, and references, and representations of that person’s style. So when did this entire culture of drag — all these people you know — since when have they been doing this, who were the first people to start this, and when did it really take off?

A. It’s been happening in India for a long time. It’s been happening inside doors and in private spaces, because people have these gatherings and they do drag performances. There are people like Sandy Saha from Calcutta who was on Big Boss, and she’s kind of a drag queen. Her style is very different; for example, she’ll go to public places and offend people. She’ll ask them why don’t you want to take me home and they’ll get scandalised and she’ll take videos. It’s a very funny and outrageous drag. She’s sort of the oldest. Maya is one of the oldest queens; she’s been doing it for three years. I think all of these queens had started off before, in private, but it became a big deal last year — I think it was Kitty Su which was the impetus for it. They were the ones who did open up a new, you know…

They were the first mainstream club.

A. Yeah, they were the first mainstream club who took it seriously and invited drag queens from abroad. That’s when they realised there’s a huge drag culture in India, and they want to celebrate it, and local queens too. In fact, I was the first person to debut in Delhi, in Kitty Su, as a drag queen.

Oh, wow! That’s quite an honour to hold.

A. It really is. It feels great. It feels great to be in the first generation of drag queens after it’s become popular. I’m not the original drag queen but first generation.

Art, Advocacy and Academics

Q. You’ve worked and still do work as a human rights lawyer. You also talk about advocacy through art. I wanted to ask about how these two parts of your life intersect — when do they help each other and when do they come in conflict with each other?

A. Honestly, I think they’ve been more in conflict with each other, than the other way around (chuckles). My experience with the academic world has been different from what one might expect. They take to this culture very… differently. They have their own set of values. They exist in a completely different space. Drag tends to live, right now, through fashion and design, and in those spaces. Advocacy lives in rights and activists and academic circles. They’re very separated, but they’re beginning to meet now. You find activists visiting the nightclubs and the fashion industry talking more about rights and that discourse. These worlds are meeting but for me, personally, it’ll be great to mix it together because the main kind of advocacy I like to do is on gender, sexuality, and LGBT rights. Until now I’ve done various things: I’ve worked on environmental matters, land rights and matters so it’s been diverse but what I enjoyed working on most was women’s rights and LGBT rights and in that context, this makes sense. I know I’ll be able to talk about feminist theory and talk about various things in these spaces and it just needs to be simple and relatable. It needs to connect with feelings because activists tend to talk in lofty terms and it’s not relatable to the regular gay person. This, I think, would make that connection.

It’s important because it’s coming from experience. To have people from a culture represent that culture.

A. Yes, as a gay person and as a person who has studied something about feminism, it matters. My ideas are influenced by what I’ve studied. All these interesting books by feminist authors. It is interesting at the time, but then it becomes about how you put them into practice — the way you choose songs, build community. They’re the biggest lessons for me.

Q. How open are you about being a drag queen? For example, when you go to work does it become a point of conflict, do people know about it?

A. The only time I’ve not told people is when there’s been a power dynamic between them and me, and my interests are immediately threatened. I hadn’t told my boss because she, well, anyway didn’t like me, and I couldn’t tell her. I knew she wouldn’t let me stay in the office and if I didn’t work there, I couldn’t do drag so I had to think of the bigger picture.

With my parents, I didn’t tell them initially because I knew they would make life difficult for me. But it just happened, it came out, and after that, I decided not to lie because it gets exhausting to maintain a double life. Even though you know that they’re going to mind that your name is in the newspaper I’ll be like “Mom, can you please get me the paper, my name’s written and I want to see it” because I can’t lie about it, it’s just too much. And she’ll mind, she’ll make a scene and I’m like “it’s fine”. I’m pretty open, I’ve told my friends and the whole world knows. I mean, there is no such thing as a secret drag queen. You have to be completely out there. And now the office people know. I’m sure my boss knows.

Q. It’s great that you can be open about it now — there’s just so many ways for us to be inhibited and something like this is so important to you on a personal level — to get away from and break down expectations but it also helps others. Have you had interactions with people who’ve come up to you and said they’ve felt better, in whatever way, just even slightly more comfortable with themselves?

A. This was the main reason I enjoy this art-form — it connects with people. There are many who are much more visibly queer than I am. Apart from this, I really pass, like, I’m taken more seriously wherever I go, say with shop owners. If I go with someone else, to the same place, they won’t be taken seriously simply because they might be more feminine in their manners or more visibly queer. So, I realise through this, those people are telling me you look great, you’re awesome, you’re rocking it. But the point is they feel inspired by this, they feel it gives them permission to do it. Personally, it’s not easy because the minute you do this you give up those privileges, people take you less seriously. Everyone at the guest house I’m staying at currently keep looking at my nails — you know, little things in the way people treat you. If you act a certain way they’ll run and give you service and if you put on nail polish they don’t. It’s weird. I don’t even know what women must feel like.

Costumes and Design

Q. Talking about clothing — how did you learn to design your costumes?

A. It’s all self-taught. I got the material, stitched it together. It was messy but it worked. I used to do arts and crafts as a kid, and use those books with little cut-outs to make your own little windmill or whatever. So, I think my aptitude for working with my hands came from when I was very little. I never really got a chance to apply it because all I was doing was legal stuff — writing, writing, writing. It was very boring and this was fun.

Q. What about the design? Do you sketch out ideas beforehand or make it up along the way? What’s the process of visualisation?

A. Yes, I have to sketch. When I’m doing reveals, I need to sketch out how it’ll look both ways. I need to foresee because then I’ll stitch it and realise that something’s showing wrong. You need to plan it out. I have a little booklet where I draw these two-way costumes. The one thing I didn’t do by drawing — just made it straight out of my mind — was this dress made of blue, plastic trash bags. It was a full-on gown.

(Here’s a link to her plastic dress reveal.)

What it had was a paper cage and plastic bags stuck on it. It took me a whole day to make. I did it last year sometime, in my early days. It’s great for reveals. Plastic is such a beautiful material, it moves so nicely. It’s also reusable. I can tear the top off and make another one.

The Commericial Side

Q. What’s the industry side of drag like? You had mentioned during the talk that professionally, you can be paid lakhs for shows. Has a culture for the professional side of things been demarcated — for example, do those in the industry consider XYZ particular things as sell-out-ish and ABC particular things more true to drag? Do people accept each other’s way of going about it, is there competition? Basically, how has this professional side to drag affected drag itself?

A. In general, the only place I know where there’s been an extension of the professional side to an extent where it might be competitive and such is the US. There’s a culture of making drag queens compete on TV. Typical reality TV shows. So, those competitions drive skill. It makes queens pull out really classy looks, top-notch art, being quick and adaptable. That excellence comes in because of shows like that. Drag, in a sense though, has always been competitive. It started as a poor person’s art-form because it’s been in small clubs, it’s very taboo, always underground. It’s only now because of the show it’s become so mainstream. RuPaul gets Emmy awards and really is quite popular. The industry has come afterwards. The fashion industry, for example, has realised that there are very good makeup artists here, design people. In India, however, the industry side is still developing. It’s very, very new. Nothing has happened yet because we’re still pushing all the boundaries.

Yeah, now that you mention the fashion industry, I was thinking about the film industry where there’s a need for those skills.

A. Yeah, there’s serious application in those places. This is theatrical makeup. In places like makeup academies, they teach this as theatre makeup. I’ve learnt it entirely from YouTube, along with my fellow drag queens. We’re all self-taught. And I can teach others now, like contouring, for example, is my strong point, but I want to learn even more professionally. It’s a lot of fun though to just experiment.

My mom does something called image consultancy and they have these finishing schools but the application is so different. This is taboo. You can’t use the greens and blues there. You need to blend and make it subtle. I’ve had people tell me to make it a little softer to look more feminine. What they don’t get is that I’m not trying to do that, this is creating beyond reality — a fantasy.

Pushing Boundaries, or Being Yourself

Q. (from a fan of Kushboo, sitting nearby) I don’t know how you do it. It’s so tough to even push boundaries within my gender, you’re pushing gender boundaries.

The weird thing is sometimes reality gets blurred. I don’t even know what I’m doing that’s pushing buttons. It’s all pretty simple.

Q. I hate when people judge others for being extra, for example. Like why would someone be against that? It’s fun.

A. I know! It’s the best things. But honestly, I’d remember a time, when I had these notions. You think fashion is flimsy and frivolous and why do you want to do it. Growing up as a guy my dressing was simple, sober — all muted. I had to unlearn these things. I had the benefit of people pushing that in my face asking like, “why are you being judgmental about it?” That’s what we need to do. Talk to people by doing it in front of them.

Drag Queens, Transgenders, Women and Media

Q. I wanted to ask about some issues in the drag community. You had mentioned, in the talk, about the transgender community feeling misrepresented. At the other end, it’s also people’s fault for not taking the time to understand the distinctions between being transgender and being a drag queen. In India, especially, it gets harder and harder for people to understand anything that’s a little deeper into queer culture. All of it is still quite alien to many. How do you maintain this fine line? What part do you feel is their responsibility, yours or anyone else’s in preventing the transgender community from feeling misrepresented?

A. That’s a very real, recent thing, in fact. I have felt this very personally. It’s been confusing for me. I get very frustrated with conventional, heteronormative society because I feel they should take that effort, move outside their comfort zone and limited knowledge to question their own understanding of things to not stick with that perspective. We do this from our point of view. On the other hand, I’ve attended events where the performances are slotted — so you’ll have a lesbian-themed play and you know, some gay performance and then you’ll have a drag performance, and a trans ‘giddha’ performance. You’ll see the attention is all on the drag queens — they’re the most glamorous. And we enjoy it but when the ‘hijra’ community comes on and perform, it’s given a little bit less (attention). And we’re still in the hall, in drag, so people are flocking around us and taking selfies while their show is happening. I felt that we’re totally stealing their thunder. It’s not a nice feeling, and they don’t like it either. I wouldn’t like it. I’ve seen it happen multiple times. Honestly, I don’t know how to navigate that.

It’s a grey area for me — it doesn’t belong to us. From our side, the responsibility is to not intrude on their space. In shows like that, we shouldn’t stay in the hall or maybe de-drag once the performance got over. At the end of the day, it’s a conversation. We hang out with them, talk to them. Initially, I don’t think they were accepting of us but they did as soon as we said we’re gay, then they felt we were like them. They didn’t even realise we’re gay; they thought we were straight men just caricaturing women.

Because we’re so used to seeing that. In so much of our media cross-dressing is just a joke.

Talking about the media’s representations of drag, referring to misinformation in articles by leading newspapers, Kushboo said, “Who owns and runs these newspapers?” All straight people who have never been in queer culture. You can be straight and be involved in queer culture and give a shit about it. These people are very new to it; they just want a scoop. They just want to capture a quick photo and story.

A lot of newspapers feel like they are from an outsider’s perspective for outsiders.

A. That’s exactly the way it is. Just yesterday I had a fight with a person who featured me on a major media publication and I liked the article but they misspelt my drag name, attributed a song to me that I’ve never performed, said that one of my drag sisters is my mother. They called her my sister and mother. You can’t really be both. The house doesn’t work like that. They put Lush Monsoon’s name and my photo. They just do these things and I pointed them out because this is far more problematic. And she responded by saying that calling it more problematic was a bit rich and she should never have pushed for it. I’m like do you not want me to tell you — just say thank you for covering me. They feel like they’re doing us a huge favour. They get paid for every scoop, they get attention. We get nothing — apart from the fame, which is good but that doesn’t mean anything goes.

You’ll have some queer journalists who’ll do a nice documentary on you, in a more sensitive way. And that’s great and it makes me feel like we need more queer people in these spaces.

Q. So, another area that might be tough to navigate is what drag says about female stereotypes. I’m sure you’ve heard about this point of view that claims drag to focus on particular parts of female stereotypes for glamour. Another question that arises is that does gay men taking part in drag perpetuate stereotypes about gay men always being feminine? Or is drag a response to the patriarchy? Mocking the patriarchal mindset of just being closed and saying no to everything?

A. That’s definitely a great way to say it… it’s the latter. It’s only celebratory. When I said that as drag queens we portray strong women, it’s not just one type of women, it’s vulnerable women and emotional women too. My drag is like that; I’m always doing sad, sappy numbers. I like it. For me, that’s strong. It matters to cry after your break-up, for example, because you have to deal with that emotion and move on. That’s what women are like and men don’t cry. That’s generalising but men, like my Dad, for example, have this thing. He said that the first time he cried was when I came out to him. This whole idea of not crying is weird.

I don’t think it’s harmful because we’re saying that we are like this. Celebrate it, talk about it, rub it in your face. When you own that, then you only want to talk about it. If it perpetuates stereotypes, then even better. A lot of gay men find comfort in (this).

Families and Boyfriends: Taboo Here, Taboo There

Talking about conservative families: My family’s not conservative, they’re liberal. But it’s not just conservative families that don’t accept; it’s actually a big taboo in non-conservative families. There’s a lot more at stake. If you’re in academic circles or professional circles, you worry about what people say. You care more about your queer child in some ways. A friend told me his family doesn’t care — they’re not that well-off and more traditional — but they’re much more relaxed. The social element is more complicated than that. It’s easier for me, from where I’m coming, but in a different way. It’s all very grey.

Talking about boyfriends: My friend says he saw the signs long ago in my ex. He was right wing but I don’t judge people for their politics, that’s just my thing. But there would be things like him being pro-Mens’ Rights sometimes, or he would have these little elements which were not good. People would question how he could be like that. The proof in the pudding was that the minute I became a drag queen he couldn’t deal with it. He said he’s not attracted to me if I’m also a drag queen. I know people who are friends with drag queens but they wouldn’t ever date one. So, anyway, that’s what he told me. I never once doubted that I would give this up, and he even asked me if I would stop drag, and I said no. The heartbreak is real, and it’s painful but it happened for a good reason. We would have lived together and not understood each other. It’s hard to not be appreciated by your partner. When I met him six years ago, I wasn’t doing drag. We’ve been together six years and long distance also. But you don’t know why people are with you in a relationship sometimes. I realised he liked me because I was very cis-acting. I was a lawyer, he was a doctor — so great combination. I didn’t see it then, but now he worries about where this is going to go, social acceptance, not cis-gendered, so, you don’t even know why people are with you sometimes. When you move out of that then you realise that they don’t like you. With family, you’re forced to stay. I made the mistake of coming out when I was still living with them. So, that was horrible. I messed up one year of boards because of that. There’s a lot of people who say that you should counsel your parents but I don’t think you can take on all the burden. Maybe you need to get someone for support, like an aunt on your side.

And finally, Kushboo’s favourite drag queen

Q. What’s your favourite drag performance? Or your favourite performer?

A. Alaska. She’s just incredible. She transports you. What I like the most is that she’s happy and comfortable with whatever she does. A complete ‘I-don’t-give-a-damn-attitude’. She’s been criticised sometimes for being tacky. She’s crazy though; she got peed on stage once. It’s part of the show, she’s brave. Her makeup is pretty straightforward. She did a plastic dress too which inspired me. She’s from RuPaul. I met her in drag, here only, in India.

Thank you for spending this time with us!

Kushboo, the first debutante of a mainstream drag show in Delhi, now stands as an inspiring figure in her own right. Do look out for her next show in a city near you!

The author is an Arts and Culture staff writer for the Edict.