One of the Bay Area’s Only Desi Drag Collectives Serves Bollywood Glam and Queer Joy

Saris over pants. Bangles on. Bickering like siblings. On a hot summer night in Oakland’s Chinatown, Raj Krishna and Jason Sharma spun around a small studio, rehearsing a Bollywood dance number.

“Hai, hai hai,” Krishna and Sharma sang together. 

“Move forward. You’re going to mess it up. I just know it,” Sharma said, lovingly dragging his friend’s moves. “You’re going to be forward, and I’m going to be backward.”

Sharma and Krishna are the co-founders of Masala Mahal, one of the only desi drag collectives in the country. Through their stage names Chai Auntea and Bindi Masala, they are taking the saris and songs their mothers and aunties danced to and making them openly queer.

At the center of what they’re doing is a question both keep circling back to: what does it mean to rework a culture that hasn’t always made space for them? For many queer performers, that feeling of exclusion is very real, even in the Bay Area.

Drag events in Oakland, Santa Cruz, Redwood City and Morgan Hill have drawn organized protests in recent years, part of a wider backlash against the queer community playing out across the country.

“I’m 100% terrified all the time,” Sharma said. “That’s why a lot of times I’ll get into [drag] face, and I’ll put my hood over — I’m just trying to get to my car.”

The number Sharma and Krishna were practicing comes from the 2002 Bollywood epic Devdas, about two women in love with the same man who find sisterhood in their unrequited feelings. 

In the film’s hit song, “Dola Re Dola,” the two women dance with wild abandon on a lavish set, adorned in gold, red and white, singing to each other. The choreography is dizzying and difficult. 

For Krishna, it’s a world he’s imagined: “It’s a queer person’s dream, this whole music video — especially a queer Desi person’s. We don’t have Moulin Rouge. We have ‘Dola Re Dola.’”

For their version, Krishna and Sharma keep some of the recognizable moves and rewrite the story and make it drag. 

“In the end we both kinda [make] out with each other instead of trying to go after the man,” Krishna said. “That itself is pushing the boundaries.”

Sharma grew up between Canada and California, mostly in the Bay Area, in a mixed household: his mother white, his dad Fijian Indian. 

He tried to tether himself to his Desi roots. As a teen, he was mesmerized by the glitz of Bollywood actresses and wanted to look like them, but he told himself it wasn’t possible. 

“I need to present myself in a certain way,” he said, recalling that time. “I can’t act like a girl, because that’s just what you’re taught growing up.”

He came out as a gay man, but it wasn’t until his mid-30s that he found the courage to perform in drag. His mom and sister were at his first show. His dad was not.

“He knew it, but you don’t really talk about it with him,” Sharma said. “You don’t bring it around him.”

Meanwhile, Krishna grew up in Singapore, surrounded by an Indian immigrant community and feeling hemmed in by it. He did drag alone, in secret, as Bambi. 

“I really wanted to be this deerlike thing — that was the fantasy in my head,” Krishna said. “When I went out, people were calling me Eva Longoria.”

Coming out to his parents was hard. 

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“‘There’s no future in being gay,'” Krishna recalled his mother telling him in Tamil. 

When Krishna moved to the U.S. in 2017, he started doing drag again, despite his parents’ wishes, as Bindi Masala. 

“When we say a film is masala, it means … it’s anything goes,” Krishna said. “So you know what you’re getting.”

In 2023, he met Sharma, who was already performing as Chai Auntea. Together they started Masala Mahal. 

“Mahal is a palace,” Sharma said. “We are queens, not peasants.”

The name was a rebellious response to feeling cast aside by their culture, even by some South Asian gay men. 

“Once you’re done as a drag queen and you get off stage, they just have the nastiest look on their faces,” Krishna said. “They look at me like an untouchable.”

They also felt shut out of mainstream drag. Desi drag, often rooted in South Asian cultural celebrations and in Bollywood, did not conform to what they were seeing in the clubs in the Bay Area. 

A South Asian drag scene has existed in the U.S. since the 1980s, but its events have been sporadic and mostly underground. Desi immigrants hosted intimate performances in living rooms, out of public view, because their brand of drag felt so unfamiliar to the West.

Sandip Roy was an editor of Trikone Magazine in its early years. Trikone is one of the first South Asian LGBTQ+ organizations in the world, and it started near San José.

Roy went to parties where friends honored their heritage in unconventional ways.

“Every year they would have this Karwa Chauth party, which is a festival that many Indians observe where a wife prays for the long life of the husband,” he said. 

It is a very patriarchal tradition, but drag queens in the Bay found comfort in it. Whether or not they had husbands, they dressed in their finest silk saris. 

Roy said the appeal was familiarity: “It was a culture that they had seen perhaps [with their] mothers and sisters and aunts. And in that sense, the drag that I would see was very culturally specific.”

Their South Asian parents, meanwhile, were trying to make sense of it all. 

“So you had somehow come to America, and you had become gay, was the idea parents had,” Roy said.

But doing drag wasn’t about assimilating into American gay culture. It was almost the opposite: Desi drag artists celebrate their home country’s rituals and traditions, in a way that could be read as too niche or too specific for the mainstream queer scene, and not polished the way RuPaul’s Drag Race has trained audiences to expect.

Roy said LGBTQ+ people of South Asian heritage are always being put into a box.

“Whether it was the box of the model minority or even the gay society was putting you [in], because when you went to a gay club you were the brown Indian person in the club and they expected you to behave in certain ways,” he said. “And so I think for some people drag became, at least for one night or one weekend, a way to get out of that box.”

Krishna sees the lack of a model as an opening. 

“There is really no blueprint for us as Desi queens to follow,” he said. “But that’s the beauty in the creation. You get to create your own narrative. When there’s no representation, you create your own.”

On show night, Sharma and Krishna are backstage at Public Works, a nightclub in San Francisco that hosts Dhoom, one of the few South Asian pride parties in the Bay Area. 

“What are you wearing?” Krishna asked Sharma about his bindi choice.

“I guess I’m wearing fuchsia since you won’t let me wear yellow,” Sharma said. “But should I go big? And when I say I’m gonna go really big, that’s when you throw in a dirty joke.”

“Like you always do …” Krishna said.

Sharma rehearsed steps while finishing his outfit. Krishna collected the props: a broom, a trash can, some dupattas. They headed downstairs where a crowd of around 150 people had gathered, and waited in the wings nervously. The host finally announced Masala Mahal, and they performed “Dola Re Dola,” the number they had spent weeks practicing.

They twirled, they threw the dupattas into the audience and, at one point, ran offstage to dance among the onlookers.

Everyone loved it. Atul Karmarkar said he felt represented: “People are dancing to music that you identify with. It’s very liberating.” 

Neha Upadhyaya can sense the community spirit: “Spaces like this really do celebrate us and make us feel like we have family.”

And Sumedh Naik put it simply: “Already drag is known to be bold. And I feel like with desi drag, it’s bold — on steroids.”

For Sharma, Masala Mahal is bold, but it isn’t only about the performance or the gag.

“There are so many desi people, and some of them are in the closet to their families,” he said. “They don’t want anybody to know that they’re LGBTQ+.”

Krishna hopes their work empowers queer Desis.

 “I hope we give other people strength to come out,” he said. “Come and see the queens, and then see yourself in them.”