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Queen Harish Dances in Drag, Sandip Roy, special to The Chronicle, Tuesday July 22, 2008

“I like to copy the Bollywood actresses,” Queen Harish says with a chuckle. “But not the new kinds with the very short, short clothes.” She prefers the colorful, traditional full skirts of her native Rajasthan. After being featured in the musical documentary “When the Road Bends: Tales of a Gypsy Caravan,” Indian drag sensation Queen Harish has become quite the jet-setter. New York, London, Barcelona, Tokyo – “the dancing, whirling, desert drag queen,” as she calls herself, is everywhere, flying in for celebrity weddings, giant outdoor concerts and gay parties. “They were hot,” she says after performing at the packed Desilicious pride party in sweltering New York this year. “I have to make them more hot.”

Harish is also married and a dad. He goes to his local Hindu temple twice a day. And he says he’d never even heard the term “drag queen” until he came to the West.

In his hometown of Jaisalmer, a desert city in Rajasthan, men are known for their machismo and fierce, curling mustaches; the women veil their heads and wear armloads of bangles. As a boy, Harish loved to watch Bollywood films on TV, copy the actresses, choreograph their songs. “But I did it in my head,” he says with a giggle on the phone from San Diego. “The whole family was watching together. I wasn’t alone.”

Then his teacher chose him to play Lord Krishna for the school concert. “My teacher noticed I loved to dance, but knew I can’t perform as Harish. I was too shy,” he remembers. Playing the blue-skinned god, bedecked in jewelry, Harish realized that no one could recognize him. It freed him. “Even now if you know me as Queen Harish and Harish passes by, you won’t recognize me,” he says.

Friends suggested he should try women’s clothes because his features were “nice.” When he looked at himself in the mirror in full makeup, he was amazed. “Before that I didn’t know I am beautiful,” he says. “After I took off my makeup, I could still smell it all night. It was beautiful.”

But Harish was embarrassed about his dancing queen alter ego. He held down a daytime job with the telegraph office and only did private shows. His parents had died while he was still in his teens, leaving him with his two sisters. “I had to take care of many heavy things,” he says. He realized that dance could help support the family. “My hobby became my profession. God was behind me.”

The star attraction

Arnaud Azzouz was definitely behind him. The manager and director of the Musafir and Maharaja Gypsy dancer collective included Harish in the troupe and took him on shows abroad. He gave him the name Queen Harish. Soon Queen Harish’s acrobatic, fast-paced folk dances became the star attraction.

“It’s not just a change of clothing,” Jasmine Dellal, director of “When the Road Bends” which comes out on DVD next month, said by e-mail. “When Harish is on stage s/he totally becomes the dancer in the sequin dress. I remember one day our cameraman was flirting with Harish playfully, not realizing that ‘she’ had been a man just an hour earlier.” (Indian film director Basu Chatterjee once offered Harish the part of a Rajasthani woman in his film, not realizing he was a man.)

Dellal accompanied Harish to his hometown of Jaisalmer. She was surprised to find that in that conservative traditional corner of India, “they respected the fact that he is making his living this way. And he has a nice house to show for it.” When Harish was about to get married, he says his would-be in-laws “watched” him for six months. “They listened to my whole community,” he says. “It’s not like we just chat online and get married.”

But he still tries to keep his professional and private lives separate. His wife and he don’t go shopping for dresses together. “I have my own designer,” he chuckles.

“He is always flirting but very sweet,” says San Francisco composer and world musician Cheb i Sabbah, who just did a gig at the Getty Center in Los Angeles with Queen Harish. Sabbah says he knew of him but they had never met until Harish e-mailed him through MySpace. Queen Harish was coming to New Jersey to dance at a wedding and wanted to perform with Sabbah somewhere. “We spoke on the phone, but we had no time to rehearse until we went in for sound check,” Sabbah says. “But he just danced from the heart. And when he whirled on his knees, it was like ‘Wow.’ ”

Dellal isn’t surprised that Queen Harish turned a wedding invitation into a full-fledged U.S. tour. Harish, says Dellal, is the kind of enterprising person who can find Indian food within a short distance of any theater while on tour.

Can’t stay mad

“Not only that, he would steal my interns when I wasn’t looking, to help him collect the food,” she recalls. But she says it was impossible to be angry with him. He’d just run around backstage saying “No tension, no tension.”

Nowadays, Harish is busy launching his solo career. But he says he won’t forget his awkaat, where he came from. He makes sure the tailor who made him his first costumes still gets his business. Twice a year he walks to a temple 500 miles away to dance for free all night. “And when I dance, I am clean of heart and clean of body,” he says seriously.

But do men fall in love with his onstage courtesan persona?

“Come and watch the performance,” he says, instantly flirtatious. “That answer I will have to give face to face.”

Direct Link on The Chronicle

Dance like a man

Anushree Majumdar Posted: Sun Aug 29 2010, New Delhi:

A man who slips into the gait of a woman, a dancer in drag who is father of two. In the gallis of Jaisalmer and on a stage in Seoul, Harish Kumar turns into a diva that men desire. Where the lines blur, there begins the incredible double life of Queen Harish.

A silicon breast is a weapon of mass seduction. And two will help you find your target. Harish Kumar gently filled his bustier top with one each; he was close to the end of his routine. One that had begun an hour ago by sitting with his chrome make-up box, mixing powders and paints and applying colours on the canvas that is his face. Kryolan, MAC, Lakme — no expense spared to ensure that the hard lines of his nose and jaw were softened, made feminine. He squeezed into a heavy red-and-gold ghagra, slipped on Rajasthani bangles that went up till his shoulders, adjusted his wig and stepped into his Salvatore Ferragamo pumps. In the mirror, we saw a slim, taut-waisted woman, with heavy-lidded eyes and high breasts. Kumar was now Queen Harish and she was ready for the kill.

It was afternoon when we reached the Golden Fortress in Jaisalmer. Tourists stopped to stare at Kumar in her finery and take photographs. “I love you Queen, you’re gorgeous,” drawled a man from a window. As others gathered around, she flirted with them, teasing them about their wives and girlfriends.

We moved to a terrace to shoot Queen Harish while she danced. As she began to swirl, the sun caught the little stones on her ghagra, but her feet disappeared in a whirr. The crowd that had followed us cheered as she bent backwards, till you thought her spine would crack. A hint of cleavage, and a silence descended on the men.

At the end of her little performance, a man approached her for her mobile number — as always. But she had no time for chit-chat. Like the other Jaisalmer women briskly walking towards their houses to make lunch, Queen Harish had to return home as Kumar, a 30-year-old man, father of two and bread-winner of a household of seven. The spell was already beginning to fade.

“I’ll be home in a few hours. Grocery shopping tomorrow?” Kumar was on the phone with his elder sister, who lives with his wife and two sons. And there was ice-cream duty tonight which he needed to be home for. “In a few hours, I’ll be back at the same spot where Queen was flirting and stop for ice cream with my sons. And though they know that I was here a while ago, the store owner will have a routine conversation with Harish,” said Kumar. For a decade now, he has been comfortable with this dual life, has indeed celebrated it. “I have the best of both worlds,” he said.

Queen Harish is “world famous in Rajasthan”, and a little more than that. In 2007, he was featured in Gypsy Caravan, a documentary made by American Jasmine Dellal that won several awards at film festivals abroad. He has travelled extensively across the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea, with performances at the Bellydancing Championships in Seoul, Raqs Congree in Brussels, Desilicious in New York and at LA’s Getty Centre. Now, he takes the stage in a reality show on Colors called India’s Got Talent, the Indian franchise of the British show Got Talent.

Jaisalmer is not a small city because of its area, it’s small because everybody knows your nickname before they know your “good” name. Here, tourism is what brings the money and nearly everybody is a part of it. “When I started dancing in drag, over 10 years ago, it was not seen as something out of the ordinary. The shows were mainly for foreign tourists. What mattered was whether I was a good dancer or not,” said Kumar.

And if any performer wanted to have a future, they had to make sure they landed international tours. The first few shows that Kumar did were group tours with other Rajasthani artists. He rapidly networked and found himself invited to more shows. Over the past decade, he has built a repertoire of styles that range from Rajasthani folk and garba to belly-dancing and an improvised version of Bollywood dance. “It wasn’t easy to get a break in the West, but I found fellow belly dancers who sponsored workshops. With every workshop, I sharpened my technique,” he said. And with every tour, his confidence increased. “The English I learnt in school had to be brushed up. I learnt how to drop words like ‘totally’, ‘cool’, ‘fabulous’ and ‘sexy’ into my sentences. Oh and ‘awesome’, how can I forget awesome!” cried Kumar, smacking his forehead with a laugh.

His breakthrough act came last year when Kumar was asked by designers Lecoanet and Hemant to walk the ramp for a Wills India Fashion Week show. “Lecoanet warned me. He said that the audience would think I’m a hijra. But I didn’t care. Walking the ramp was like acting, it was a part,” he said. He wore a very feminine, pink off-shoulder dress with traditional Rajasthani bangles. “I had to practise walking in those shoes in the hotel corridor. I stayed up all night to get the walk right,” he said. And he did. Rohit Bal whistled and clapped from the front row and the media descended on him backstage. “The hoopla lasted three days and then I went back to dancing. But it was very flattering all the same,” he said.

As we walked through the lanes and bylanes leading to Kumar’s house, friends and acquaintances called out to him, greetings were exchanged, backs were playfully thumped. In his living room, his two sons, aged two and four years, darted in and his wife darted out, making arrangements for water and fruit. At home, Kumar is the father, the brother and the provider. His elder sister Rekha recalled how Harish dropped out of school and joined a dance troupe after their parents died. “I had a day job at the post office and at night I would dance in the troupe. I did that for a while till one day, for a sudden solo performance, I decided to dress in drag. The performance was a big success,” said Kumar. He discovered that as a “woman”, his talent as a dancer could be recognised; there was more scope for him as a performer and, yes, there was more money in it.

But for the 20-year-old, this new career demanded sacrifices. “He stopped meeting us or speaking to us,” said childhood friend and schoolmate Vinod Thanavil, who dropped by for a quick chat. “We knew why he had to perform like this. He had to provide for a family,” said Thanavil, who sometimes organises local shows for Queen Harish. “For us, he’s always been Harish, whose profession is separate from the man we know. And we’re always there to protect Queen Harish whose admirers keep growing every day,” he said.

His admirers are often pushy. “Men will always turn up backstage. Whether it is Jaisalmer or Japan, it doesn’t matter that under all those clothes I am a man,” said Kumar. He recalled how local politicians, actors and foreign tourists have, more than once, proposed to take things further. What did he do then? “Oh, I have several tricks. The one that usually works is where I tell them to wait for me while I go off to powder my nose. I get into the car with the rest of my team, switch my phone off and we’re off!” he said.

From the corner of the room, his sons watched their father. The y don’t know what Daddy does for a living but they are aware that he is away a lot. His wife hasn’t met Queen Harish and Kumar has no intentions of bringing work home. “How do you think my marriage has worked out?” he said with a chuckle. But Rekha admitted softly: “Someday I’d like to attend a show. We hear so much about them.”

His manager Arnaud Azzouz says Queen Harish is exceptional for many reasons. “He is not a product of the Indian/Bollywood entertainment industry. He is self-made and exported his talent to the West,” said Azzouz. The fact that he is a family man is an aspect of Harish’s life that Azzouz wishes to downplay, for business purposes. “Queen Harish is a diva,” he said. Surely a portrait of Kumar with groceries will kill that image.

Kumar, on the other hand, said he did not mind. “I want to be able to dance as Harish too. I love being Queen Harish: she’s naughty, wicked and full of spunk. But I would like to give Harish that opportunity,” he said.

Direct Link on Indian Express