Feeling the Part: Babita Singh Reporting actor Nimisha Sajayan

In her 2021 breakout role in the Malayalam film, The Great Indian Kitchen, Nimisha Sajayan’s Sreedevi walks away briskly from the home that has tormented her after serving wastewater instead of tea. She doesn’t look back in anger or fear. Five years later, in Babita Singh Reporting, Sajayan’s character’s rage is intact. She has just become better at managing it. When her husband asks whether he can come home in four-five days, she replies that she will tell him after “four-five days”.

Few actors in India are as adept at channelling female fury as Sajayan. Her eyes blaze, her face flashes, and you can see her visibly swallowing it to keep the peace. It is an emotion Indian women are familiar with, and as Babita, a school teacher who is made a policewoman on compassionate grounds because her father died on duty, she embodies repressed rage. She is submissive to her corrupt boss; appeases her demanding husband who is busy congratulating himself for marrying outside his caste; and bends over backwards to please her passive-aggressive mother-in-law and tantrum-throwing pregnant sister-in- law. Then there is the not-so-small matter of her weight, which everyone wants her to lose. Except for her childhood friend, whose sudden death opens up something deep and wounded in her.

Haunted by their last meeting that never was, Babita digs deeper into her friend’s death and discovers nothing was as it seemed in his unfulfilled life. She never got to offer him the shoulder he desperately needed, but in death she wants him to get the dignified closure he deserved. Sajayan is enjoying the plaudits coming her way. “Babita is very special to me,” she says. “Baby (the character’s nick name) is such a beautifully written char acter...and all the nuances were already there in the script. As an actor my job was to understand her world and make sure I portrayed those emotions as authentically as possible. We see so many people go through what Baby goes through. Body shaming, especially. It has become so normalised that people often make comments without even realising how deeply they can affect someone. Baby never re ally reacts to those comments. She smiles, stays quiet and moves on, but internally those words are affecting her.”

What she really loved about her journey is that we slowly see her evolve. Baby starts responding to the things happening around her and, more importantly, finding her own voice. “I think that’s a very human journey because change doesn’t always happen overnight. Some times, you absorb things for years before you finally reach a point where you just say, enough,” says Sajayan, who gained 14kg to play the role, forcing herself to eat 8,000 calories a day.

Filmmaker Jeo Baby, who cast Sajayan in The Great Indian Kitchen, says she was the first person he had in mind: “Before even narrating the story to her, I saw Nimisha leading from the front, shouting slogans during a Citizenship Amendment Act protest. I saw an intense fire in her back then. Right at that moment, I decided, ‘This is my heroine’.”

“Nimisha loved the story after hearing it and fell in love with the film. Through out the shoot and even afterwards, she stood by us in every way,” he adds. Just seconds before taking a shot, she would be all fun, laughs, and energy, he adds, but the moment he said “action”, she transformed completely into the character—seeing that often brought tears to his eyes. She took the character he had written and envisioned in his mind to a level far beyond what he had imagined. When wrapping up the shoot and leaving, she said goodbye to everyone in tears. Nimisha is an actor he deeply longs to work with again.

For Sajayan, The Great Indian Kitchen was a turning point in her career. “It helped me reach a much wider audience. The film released directly on Prime Video and it reached people beyond Kerala. The kind of love and appreciation we received was honestly beyond anything I had imagined. After the film, I started getting offers from different languages. It gave me the opportunity to explore different industries and work with different kinds of filmmakers. ”It has taken her from Foot prints on Water (2023) in English, where she played Adil Hussain’s missing daughter, Meera, based in the UK to the Tamil film, Chithha (2023), where she played Siddharth’s steadfast love interest to the domestic help-turned-entrepreneur in the Hindi series, Dabba Cartel (2025). In each of these she has played women of action, who don’t wait for life to hand them lemons for lemonade, but use whatever they have at their disposal.

Sajayan, 29, always wanted to be an actor. Born into a Malayalam family in Mumbai to an engineer father, she studied at Carmel Convent. Ever since she was a child, acting was her dream. She started auditioning for Malayalam films, and that’s how she got her first film, Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum (2017). Her relationship with cinema evolved as she grew older. As a child she and her sister mostly watched Hindi films, while her parents loved Malayalam cinema so she was exposed to both in different ways. Once she went to college, to get a degree in mass communication from the KJ Somaiya College in Mumbai, she started discovering world cinema which was a completely different experience for her. “During Covid, I started exploring different genres, languages and film makers and slowly my understanding of cinema began to evolve,” she adds. So what is her method? “I feel every character and every story demands something different. For me, the most important thing is to be true to yourself and to the emotions of the character,” she says. “If you genuinely feel what the character is going through I think that honesty naturally comes through on screen. And when you are truthful to the emotion, the audience can feel it too and connect with the character.”

“I’ve been fortunate enough to get some really interesting characters and to work with some wonderful teams,” Sajayan adds. She’s been a dedicated forest officer in the multilingual Prime Video series Poacher (2024), one half of a couple sitting on dharna in the Zee5 Hindi anthology Lantrani (2024), and a troubled wife in the Tamil film DNA (2025). “What matters to me most is that my characters feel relatable and real. I really enjoy exploring human emotions, relationships and the dynamics between people. I’m drawn to stories that are rooted in everyday hu man experiences, the little things that people go through, feel and sometimes don’t even know how to express. I’m interested in exploring human things because that’s what allows an audience to see a little bit of themselves in a character,” she goes on.

Poacher was a big draw for her. It gave her the opportunity to work with some incredibly talented people, especially the filmmaker Richie Mehta whose work she had admired when the first season of Delhi Crime came out. “I had always hoped that someday I would get an opportunity to work with him. When I got a call from him I was genuinely thrilled,” she says. She is grateful for the love and appreciation Poacher received. “But more than the response it was the entire journey of making the series that made it so special for me. The people I worked with, what I learned along the way, and the experience of being part of such an important story are things I’ll always remember.”

Sajayan lives in Kochi but doesn’t think that really affects her work. She’s been working in Tamil films and most of her shoots are in Tamil Nadu, so she travels quite a bit for work. She is very comfortable with that. “At the same time I make sure I come back and spend time with my family whenever I can. I think it’s all about finding the right balance between your professional life and your personal life. It can get hectic but when you love what you do you find a way to make it work,” she says.

Her Malayalam fans are disappointed she is not doing more in that language. Film scholar SR Praveen says: “Right from her notable debut almost a decade ago in Thondimuth alum Driksakshiyum, Nimisha has displayed the ability to convincingly portray characters with depth. She has gravitated towards such roles which gave her space to perform. On the flip side, we rarely get to see her in more light-hearted or fun roles, which she surely can pull off. In recent years, we have seen less of her in Malayalam cinema as she has concentrated more up north. She has much left to do in Malayalam cinema.”

For now, Nimisha is content. “I’m currently working on a few Tamil films and a Hindi project. Some of my projects are lined up for release. I’m really excited about the stories and characters I’m getting to explore and I’m looking forward to sharing them with the audience,” she says.