Kiran Rao: The Gentle Subversive

LAAPATAA LADIES IS set in 2001, in Nirmal Pradesh, a time when mobile phones were pre­cious enough to be given as part of dowry, but not so prevalent that those who were lost could be located immediately. It’s a comic tale of two newly married young women who get lost, but conceals serious truths about women’s independence and male hegemony.

2001 was also the year that its director Kiran Rao and her former husband, the film’s co-producer Aamir Khan, met on the sets of the Oscar-nominated epic Lagaan. She was the fourth assistant director, he was its star and producer. The two went on to marry in 2005, and divorce in 2021, but continue to collaborate on movies with meaning, the latest being Laapataa Ladies.

The movie follows two young women of varying degrees of emancipation. Phool Kumari (Nitanshi Goel), who gets lost and finds a temporary home in a railway station, and Jaya (Pratibha Ranta), who gets swapped with Phool Kumari’s husband, and turns out to be unusually gifted. There is also a seem­ingly crooked police officer, played with relish by Ravi Kishan; a young man in love with his missing wife and displaying it by speaking in broken lovelorn English; and another not-so-young man in love with his dowry.

The movie, made on a budget of `5 core, has already made more than `6 crore in its first weekend. It’s the kind of film that grows by word of mouth. Says Rao, “The response has been very positive, so it’s extremely heartening for us. I have messages from people in different parts of the country and world, who say how much they enjoyed the film or were moved by it. Many of them say how people clap at the end. It’s so encourag­ing to hear that. It’s a small film so we expect that it will organically grow and reach its audience over the next few weeks.”

The film is based on a story ‘Two Brides’ by Biplab Goswami, who was first runner-up at the Cinestaan Storytellers’ Contest. In 2020, Sneha Desai was brought on to write the screenplay and dialogue, and Divyanidhi Sharma for additional dialogues and screenplay. “I didn’t have a hand in directly writing this but I directed the writing, if you know what I mean? I knew what I wanted to do with Biplab’s original script and so I was quite involved with the creative process,” says Rao.

Rao, 50, grew up in Kolkata, in the 1980s. “It was rather magical,” she says. “I come from a middle-class family so we didn’t get toys or new clothes very often but we got access to books through libraries. We had access to sports, through a club. We watched plays, we went to music concerts. There was a lot of emphasis on developing these aspects of ourselves at home. I learnt the piano, I learnt to play tennis, I learnt to swim. All in all, I had a happy childhood,” she says.

She went to school at Loreto House and La Martinière, Kolkata. With her parents deciding to move to Bangalore, she went to Sophia College for Women, Mumbai, to do her undergraduate degree in economics, and then to Delhi to do a postgraduate degree from Jamia Millia Islamia University in the mass communications department. “I was already at the ripe old age of 24 when I came to Mumbai to work,” she says. She had learnt to be independent, staying in a series of hostels and flats, managing her own finances, observ­ing, learning, and making friends.

She became part of a new wave of assistant direc­tors who brought a fresh organisational structure and a new narrative to the film industry. This wave in­cluded filmmaker Apoorva Lakhia, who was in many ways, their mentor, and a tough first as­sistant director on Lagaan. He famously once took off with the bus carrying the cast and crew to the location without the star, Aamir Khan, who was late.

Lakhia remembers interviewing Rao for the job. “She was fresh, straight out of college, but a quick learner.” Her colleague on the sets? Reema Kagti, also a director of note now. These young women, with their different world views and grasp of international cine­ma, were able to infuse a new perspec­tive into the Hindi movie industry in its sense and sensibility.

Rao went on to work as an assistant director in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001) and then as first assistant on Shaad Ali’s Saathiya (2002) and Ashutosh Gowar­iker’s Swades (2004). As producer Rao has worked in landmark films such as Delhi Belly (2011) and Dangal (2016). Laapataa Ladies is her second film as director. Her debut, Dhobi Ghat, a personal story about four intertwined lives in south Mumbai, won rave reviews when it released in 2011. Dhobi Ghat also had its confrontations, like Laapataa Ladies, silently unspooling with the relationship between Prateik who played Munna, a dhobi from the Musahar caste, and an NRI wanderer (singer Monica Dogra) who makes him the subject of her camera. Says Dogra, “Kiran is an artist’s artist. I feel so fortunate my career began under her watch. She encouraged my individual­ity, chose me for it. And I thank her for her vision, always.”

Rao doesn’t believe in planting gigantic signboards to guide the audience. She allows them to discover the intricacies of the film. Ostensibly, Laapataa Ladies is a story of two lost wives, but there is a deeper layer to it of ways in which women have forgot­ten themselves. There is a mother-in-law who has forgotten what she likes to eat, so conditioned is she to cook what the men in the house like. There is her mother-in-law who has forgotten how to laugh. There is the sister-in-law who has forgotten how to speak up for herself, so unsure is she of her footing in a home with an absent husband.

There are social mores that Rao knocks, with a gentle touch. Men who are afraid of women who show even a slight spark of independence and other men who treat their wives like chattel. Her heroes are women who buck the trend—Jaya, the mysteri­ous young woman with a phone; Manju Maai, the tea stall owner who lives on her own, having thrown out her alcoholic husband and parasitical son; and Phool Kumari, the comforter of the two lost ladies, who believes in love.

In some ways, says Rao, she was waiting for Laapataa Ladies to come along. “I was writing, producing, working on the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI) film festival, being a mum, but there was always a desire to get back on a film set and make another film. I suppose things happen when they’re meant to,” she says.

OVER TWO DECADES she says she has become quite accustomed to sharing Aamir’s limelight, receiving some of the halo from his limelight. “It doesn’t bother me,” she says “In fact, I am quite appreciative of how much people love me, I suppose because they also love Aamir so much.” She says she’s learnt so much from Aamir, “His immense patience and equanimity are qualities that I admire and emulate. One of the things he does (in tennis parlance) is never take his eyes off the ball, and I think I’ve learnt to do that.”

Rao’s power flows not only from her work in cinema, but also for the way she has chosen to live her life. She and Aamir are a model couple when it comes to conscious un­coupling, choosing to remain friends despite a very public divorce. By retaining a warm friendship with Aamir’s first wife Reena Dutta, she has fashioned a blended family where relationships are valued despite their formal demise. The wedding of Ira Khan, Aamir’s child by his first wife, was a splendid showcase of this generosity of spirit, with both ex-wives coming together.

Rao was also a forerunner in making her child’s birth by IVF public, having suffered a painful miscarriage. Kiran and Aamir’s child, Azad, was born in 2011.

She is quite the fashion icon as well and says she has got accustomed to being shot by the paparazzi. “The downside is I have to be careful about what I wear when I step out of the house. Otherwise, it’s quite lovely. I respect the attention and the love I get,” she says.

Rao has been an integral part of Aamir Khan Productions since they collaborated on Taare Zameen Par in 2007, but now she has started her company, Kindling Pictures, with actor-director Tanaji Dasgupta. They have been developing interesting projects, some over the last ten years. “There are two features and two web shows but who knows how long it will take to be greenlit but the plan is not to have such a long gap again between my movies,” she promises.

About that, as the song from Laapataa Ladies says, there is no “doubtwa”.

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