What Shabana Told Shahana

Shabana Azmi once told her, “Figure out who you are as an actor, then stick around and wait. Your day will come.” It’s been the guiding force in actor Shahana Goswami’s career. After 17 years in the film industry, she has learnt to say enough nos, to make the right yeses. Initially typecast as the working-class woman with roles such as Debbie in Rock On! (2008), she is now in a position where she can be a posh girl in a series (Fatima Warsi, Bombay Begums’ ambitious banker in 2021) and mall cleaner in a big screen movie (Pratima in Nandita Das’ Zwigato). Soon to be seen in the role of a slinky mistress in Anu Menon’s forthcoming murder mystery, Neeyat, she says, “It’s so funny now that people who saw me in Zwigato thought I was playing a working-class woman for the first time.” That’s the power of resilience which allows for reinvention. Goswami says she tried hard for a brief period to play the Bollywood glamour game, hiring a PR, stylist and hair and makeup artist. “I would be concerned about landing up for a meeting in a Santro and asking for what I thought I was worth. I tried doing two or three bigger films where I had decorative parts. Not anymore,” she says. Now when she uses Uber for meetings, or does an Instagram QnA in her nightie with no make-up, she is praised for being real and authentic. “I am me. Only that can be my USP,” she says, adding that she is now rewarded for the very things she was criticised for. The actor who lived in Paris for five years between 2012 and 2017 is grateful to be accepted by the industry. “I am not a trained actor so I depend on lived experience. I have lived my life fully, emotionally, and taken journeys that have exposed me to human frailties and human dichotomies. It has helped me to create versions of myself, with layered and nuanced performances,” she says. Coming up after Neeyat is Kanu Behl’s film Despatch with Manoj Bajpayee and an anthology directed by Rima Das. No chance that she will get bored of herself very soon.

Another Life on OTT

When Laal Singh Chaddha was released on Netflix after its abysmal run at the box office last year, Mona Singh says she was flooded with messages about how good she was, especially in the dying scene. Perhaps mindful of the boycott call, not many had gone to theatres to watch the Aamir Khan film. Like many in the film industry, she knows it’s the best of times for actors such as her, but also the worst of times for the industry. “Audiences want more now. They don’t want the damsel in distress and the hero saving her. Nor do they want films where, as they say, you can leave your brains at home. They want something worth their while and spend. The industry needs courage and to take a leap of faith to do better,” she says. Now, on SonyLIV’s new show about sexual assault and mental health, Kafas, she plays a mother who wants to live her own ambitions through her son, and is quite ready to sacrifice his childhood for the lifestyle his earnings bring. Singh says she is delighted to be playing a character with such a moral dilemma. The actor, who first earned fame in 2003 as TV’s Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin in the Indian adaptation of the Colombian drama Yo soy Betty, la fea, from which the American series Ugly Betty was adapted, has by and large played good girls, so a character with shades of grey was most welcome, she says.

Scene and Heard

Thirty-one years after her debut in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, Sarita Choudhury is having the time of her life on screen, playing Seema Patel on the second season of And Just Like That, a spinoff of the hugely popular late ’90s show, Sex and The City. She plays a rich real estate broker in New York, wears fabulous gold lame dresses, decides to go to the Met Gala in a second, has a fabulous time in bed with a seductive French man (played by Emily in Paris’ delicious William Abadie) and endlessly talks sex with Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker). Seema is having the time of her life, and the audience loves it. With her fabulous town car and her expense account, she represents a new kind of Indian, comfortable in her skin and at ease with her heritage. It helps that at 57 she looks as good as when she was in her twenties.

BollywoodcinemaMona SinghSarita ChoudhuryShahana Goswami