“Just Like a Woman”

This chapter demonstrates how the important text brings together key concepts that are essential to understand the construction of gender and social identity through theatrical performance. It summarizes a brief history of female impersonation in urban Indian theatre, largely based on the extensive research of Kathryn Hansen. The chapter examines how gender and identity constructions work through a "naturalization" of hierarchies and the ways in which this play questions gender hierarchies despite seemingly supporting them through its use of the female impersonator. It looks at the framing of the action of the play through different metatheatrical devices used by the playwright to call attention to the text as not only steeped in, but inseparable from, the overt theatricality it constantly refers to the reading of the text of Begum Barve. The social world of Begum Barve is a bleak one, heavily predicated on notions absorbed from popular culture for normative role models.