From Madonna’s photoshoots to West End stardom: Mahatma Khandi’s flamboyant journey

Drag queen discusses Asian talent and his latest pantomime ‘Peter Pan’ at West End

• Sarwar Alam
• 01 November, 2024

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By: Sarwar Alam

FROM working on photoshoots with Madonna to performing at the West End, Mahatma Khandi’s life is as flamboyant and eventful as those of the drag queens he plays on stage.

He will be performing as a mermaid in a pantomime production of Peter Pan at the Phoenix Theatre in London over the Christmas period.

“Being in the West End, doing cabaret, it’s unfathomable,” Khandi told Eastern Eye. “Doing it at the Phoenix theatre, it’s kind of a weird full circle, because when I first moved to London, the first musical I saw was Blood Brothers at the Phoenix Theatre. So for my West End debut to be there is pretty cool.”

TuckShop – the UK’s only specialist production company devoted all things drag – have teamed up with Jack Maple Productions for their fourth all-drag pantomime, following the 2019 sell-out hit Cinderella, 2021’s Dick Whittington and last year’s Sleeping Beauty.

A stellar cast includes reigning Drag Race UK winner Ginger Johnson as Hook, and fellow Drag Race alumni Kitty ScottClaus, Cheryl Hole and Kate Butch as the Darling children, alongside Bailey J Mills as Tinkerbell, Yshee Black as Smee, Ophelia Love as villager No 4, and Richard Energy as Peter.

“I would have been happy to play any role to be part of this show – they could have asked me to clean the toilets and I would have been ecstatic,” says Khandi.

He has already started preparing for his character: “Looking at past mermaid characters in Peter Pan, the mermaid’s kind of rude, she does not like Wendy, she’s not a big fan of the kids, which I think is really funny. When it comes to drag, half the job is to be sassy.”

Khandi also has his own show, The Khandi Shop, which he describes as “your very own cabaret pick and mix”. It’s a place for disenfranchised performers, especially those from ethnic minority backgrounds who might not get the opportunities to perform at drag shows.

“The one thing that I have been fighting for most of my working career in drag is visibility, not just my mine, but anybody else’s that feels disenfranchised,” he explains.

“I was getting so frustrated that I was the only person of colour, let alone Asian, in a whole drag line-up. There’s loads of places where there’s a massively non-diverse cast and it really annoys [me].”

Alongside The Khandi Shop, he stars in shows for Bitten Peach – the UK’s first pan-Asian production company that has worked with over 70 performers of Asian descent spanning a variety of cabaret art forms on and offstage, including drag, burlesque, dance, comedy, music, spoken word and circus.

“We were just like, ‘wait a minute, if people are not going to book us, we’re just going to book a full Asian cast’,” says Khandi. “But my concern now is that people think, ‘oh, you want to see Asian stuff, go and see Bitten Peach’. That’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying there was no room for us. There was no visibility for us.

What we’re doing is showcasing the talent in our community.”

Khandi is of mixed Sri Lankan and Filipino heritage. He was born and brought up in Rome, Italy, and moved to the UK in his early teens.

From the age of nine or ten, he says, he knew he wanted a career in fashion. An early iteration of that was working in Urban Outfitters as it was the “cool one, different from all the other high street fashion stores”.

He was also doing courses in styling while working in retail.

“I worked in retail for over 10 years and until I became a manager. In the last few years (at Urban Outfitters) I decided I wanted to do styling and drag,” he says. “For the first year, I was literally doing both – working with incredible people and celebrities.”

Among the celebrities he worked with as a stylist’s assistant were Madonna and Nicki Minaj.

With Madonna, he worked under fashion designer Bea Åkerlund for a Vogue photo-shoot. “For the Vogue photo-shoot we got sent to Portugal. We stayed in this amazing hotel and I got to go to Madonna’s house there,” says Khandi.

He jokes that at the photo-shoot, when it came to the hierarchy, as the stylist’s assistant, he was “at the bottom of the totem pole”.

He did, however, get to have his moment with Madonna. “I was walking to the set and she walked past me and smiled at me – that was cool.”

A chance encounter in Soho with renowned stylist Mike Adler, who has worked with the likes of Elizabeth Hurley, Monica Belucci, Andie MacDowell and Natalie Dormer, saw Khandi join his styling team.

This led to working on photo-shoots and music videos around the globe with high-profile stars including Sophie EllisBaxter and Spice Girl Melanie C.

Drag, however, remained Khandi’s true calling, but carving out a full-time career doing it wasn’t an easy path to find, he reveals.

“Me and my best friends were like, all the styling shoots we love, all these looks we love to see on the runway or the idea of what we would do on a fashion shoot, that’s what we started to do on ourselves – we got excited about dressing up. To me, that’s drag, the art of dressing up,” he says.

“There weren’t that many jobs for drag queens. There wasn’t a point of view where we were in the zeitgeist.

“There was this competition called the Lip Sync 1000 at the Glory which is now called the Divine (a queer performance venue). A lot of people went to see the show, and the judges are other performers and producers.

“I did another competition called Missing the Pink, where the company would support you with choreography and dancers, and then you do like a big old number in a big old setting.”

The exposure led to Khandi getting to perform in shows at clubs and bars.

With the explosion of the reality TV competition series, RuPaul’s Drag Race, new opportunities opened up.

“We were at an after party after one of the Missing the Pink shows, and I met Ginger Johnson. I was still a baby drag queen at the time while she was an absolute icon,” says Khandi.

“Ginger asked if I could sing and I (lied) and replied, ‘yes, of course I can sing. How did you know?’” he laughs.

“That same year, she asked me to do the Missing the Pink Christmas panto which Ginger wrote.”

He went to work with Johnson in shows at the Garrick Theatre, the Pleasance Theatre and the Lyric Theatre.

Khandi hopes that the more people who can see him perform, it will help remove the stigma around queer people.

“The stigma is slowly getting removed because people are remembering that queer people have always been there. In Hindu traditions for example, trans people and queer are part of the mythology,” he says. “If people just open their eyes and stop judging each other, then they start to realise, ‘oh, wait, this is all good, and it’s fine’.