Kani Kusruti: Star and Strides

WHEN KANI KUSRUTI walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in May, for Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix winning All We Imagine as Light, in many ways it was a homecoming. Kusruti has not only studied theatre in France, at the L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris (now in Avignon), but also worked with the experimental theatre company, Footsbarn. “I had no money as a student. It was one of the hardest times of my life. But it was also an amazing learning experience. I felt if I could survive there I could survive anywhere,” she says.

Paris is like her second home. “I know the streets so well, and once I started with Footsbarn and started earning, France was more enjoyable,” she adds.

In between, she came back to Kerala in 2009 to do a few movies, such as the anthology Kerala Cafe in 2009, but returned to Paris with Footsbarn in 2011. She dropped all the films she was planning to do, until she finally came back to Kerala for good, with the idea of offering everything she had learnt back to her country and its people.

She did a few movies for money, she says quite calmly, not all, but over the years has built an impressive body of work, not the least of which is All We Imagine as Light. “It was amazing to collaborate with Payal who has so much empathy and understanding for the entire crew,” she says.

Kusruti is one of a new wave of female actors who are slipping in and out of industries with ease. Much like Parvathy Thiruvothu, Nimisha Sajayan, and Darshana Rajendran, she is in a Hindi web series one moment, a Malayalam web series next, and in a Tamil film another moment. In the last three years alone, audiences have seen her play the strict Kaveri, an IAS officer on deputation to Bihar’s first woman chief minister (played by Huma Qureshi) in three seasons of Maharani on SonyLIV. She has been the tough, no nonsense enforcement officer, Dina, in Richie Mehta’s powerful web series Poacher; the Kalaripayattu-trained girlfriend in Abhishek Chaubey’s Killer Soup; and as the mother who develops conflicting emotions for her daughter’s boyfriend in Shuchi Talati’s Girls will be Girls which won the Audience Award in the World Cinema Dramatic category at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024.

Kusruti’s unusual career has a lot to do with her special childhood in Thiruvananthapuram. Brought up by writer, activist and photographer Maitreya Maitreyan and community medicine specialist doctor Jayashree AK, she changed her surname to Kusruti (meaning mischief) just before her Class 10 board exams. She says she hadn’t noticed earlier that she was brought up differently from her classmates but realised slowly that her parents gave her freedom but also responsibility. “I was brought up with a lot of love and care. My parents gave me a mind and conscience. I know how to take responsibility for my own actions and I do think deeply about what is right or wrong, I was always transparent with them. I never lied to them about anything unlike my friends whom I noticed often hid the truth from their parents. My parents and I grew up together. I love my childhood so much I want to relive it, I cherish the relationship I have with them and the love they have given me,” she says.

“I have no style as such. I don’t follow any fashion, I wear whatever I feel that day,” says Kani Kusruti, actor

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IT’S A LOVE she found with one-time partner and forever friend Anand Gandhi, storyteller and founder of Memesys Culture Lab, Goa. “We connected through Facebook. He came for the Kochi Biennale and we understood there was a lot of art and culture we had in common. We realised though we had had different life journeys, the travel had brought us to the same point in how we viewed things,” she says. She was also part of the group of filmmakers and storytell­ers who live and work together in Goa. “The difference of opinion is great. I love it when we disagree. We grow exponentially when we have a peer group like Anand, Shreya Dudheria, Khushboo Ranka, Vinay Shukla, and Zain Memon,” she says.

Kusruti has developed an unusual style of working, which includes a mix of influences, from the physical theatre she learnt at theatre school in Paris, evident in her comic character in Memesys Lab’s OK Computer (2021), to the more serious, internalised character of Prabha, a woman who has been abandoned by her husband, in All We Imagine as Light.

Qureshi, who has worked with her in Maharani across three seasons, says Kusruti makes her process seem so easy and light. “Kani is lovely and I am so proud she is having such a stellar year. She brings so much grace to every part she plays. She is so unassuming about her process. She is one of those rare actors who doesn’t want close-ups. She gets shy about it, I think. She cares about the larger picture, not just her part in it. She carries her talent so lightly. It also helps that she is a total nut job and that we can talk and laugh for hours,” says Qureshi.

Kusruti’s sensibility is also deeply shaped by her native state, Kerala, and the ideas her parents exposed her to. Footsbarn, for instance, first came into her life when her father took her to a workshop they were doing in Thiruvananthapuram with the Abhinaya Theatre Group. She was all of eight or ten. “I didn’t even know what I was getting into, but when I was 15, there was a theatre group, friends of my parents. They asked if I was interested in acting. My mother asked me to check it out. I went with a lot of hesitation, but I was excited by their way of working and the mix of comedy, slapstick and dance,” she says. It took a long time for her to start liking it. She went to a theatre school in Thrissur but dropped out and went to Paris as she wanted to learn physical theatre and puppetry.

“My parents gave me a mind and conscience. I know how to take responsibility for my own actions and I do think deeply about what is right or wrong,” says Kani Kusruti

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Years later, she travelled with Footsbarn all over Europe performing Shakespeare’s Tempest, from Portugal to England to Ireland to France, where her lines were in French.

She has often played women on the edge, either of an emotional breakdown, or caught up in trying to become some­thing else. Sometimes it can be a mix of both as in Biriyaani, her 2020 Malayalam movie, where she played Khadeeja, a divorced woman who is trying hard to find economic independence and sexual pleasure in a deeply conservative culture, a theme she had explored in the short, Counterfeit Kunkoo (2018), directed by Reema Sengupta. In Vazhakku (2022), she is a speech-challenged woman who is running away with her daughter from an abusive husband, whereas in Nishiddho (2022), she plays a Tamil midwife who lives a thoroughly independent life.

Her most iconic roles have been of women navigating their way through tough circumstances, not always knowing what to do, but trusting their instincts. For instance, in Killer Soup, as Kirtima, she is just another girl trying hard to make a life for herself, whereas in Girls will Be Girls, as Anila, her sexual awakening, as a young mother, tends to mirror that of her daughter’s. Kusruti has never shied away from showing pleasure onscreen, whether it is in Biriyaani or in Counterfeit Kunkoo. Says Santosh Sivan, who directed her in Urumi (2011), in the early phase of her career, and in the Telugu film Spyder (2017), she has the capacity of “always surprising you”.

Of late, especially after her appearances at Cannes, she has emerged as a made-in-Kerala style icon, being the muse of long-time friend Diya John who runs Salt Studio. From the watermelon clutch she carried on the red carpet to the striped sari she wore, Kusruti was quite the favourite of photographers. “I have no style as such. I don’t follow any fashion, I wear whatever I feel that day,” she says, sounding shocked at the idea of being dressed up. “It is just that Diya is a friend and I like to support independent designers.”

Her work has filmmakers wanting to collaborate with her. Says filmmaker Kamal KM, “I wanted to work with Kani in my diploma film at FTII. When Kani visited Pune, I narrated the script of Vadhakramam. At the end of the narration she started crying. It took a few moments for me to understand it was the story that made her cry. She told me that she can’t do the film. She wept and explained that she doesn’t want to act in films. I consoled her by saying that the story was so tragic that it was difficult for me as well. We have been friends since. Yes, later we laughed about it.” He adds that the director is relieved when the actor takes responsibility, both spiritual and physical, of a charac­ter in the given space of the scene. “Kani is such a gifted and sensitive person. We worked together in Pada (2022) and it was memorable. I am looking forward to the next one with her,” he adds.

She pours all her experiences into her work, of which she has plenty now. There is Ek Ruka Hua Faisla, a Hindi film, Madhuvidhu, a Malayalam web series, and another that she is shooting right now directed by Manu Ashokan. Then there is a Tamil film, a Malayalam film and a Hindi series. Will things change after Cannes? She is not so sure, and perhaps doesn’t really care. All she knows is she is trying to connect with everyone who has reached out to her, for work, or interviews, even as she is amid new projects. Unlike even minor actors, she doesn’t have a manager or publicist, answers her own calls, and responds dutifully to everyone.

She loves her solitude. “I crave it. I enjoy it when I am solitary but not lonely. But travel is something I am anxious about.” With places to go, it will be something she will get over soon enough.

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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