Arts
Shabana Azmi
Fundamentalists' Lightning Rod
Shabana Azmi has built successful careers both in mainstream and parallel art cinema in India. Daughter of the idealist poet Kaifi Azmi, whose political passions made the family live in a communist commune and colored the fabric of her life just a shade of red, and a fiery mother, the actress Shaukat Azmi, she says: “I’m very predictable when it comes to activism. As the daughter of Kaifi and Shaukat Azmi, I will say it as it is, and speak up when I see injustice of any kind.” Recipient of the International Gandhi Peace Prize (an honor bestowed on Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu) and winner of five national awards, Azmi talks about her life, films (“it’s all neurotic business be it Hollywood or elsewhere!”) and the fatwa on her head in an exclusive interview with Little India’s Kavita Chhibber.
Satyajit Ray said as a dramatic actress you had no peer. Well actually my acting career started and didn’t quite take off at the age of three! I was enacting the nursery rhyme “Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle/ the cow went over the Moon.” I was playing the cow. Alas. instead of going over the moon I fell on the moon, who was another three-year-old girl. She got up and gave me a tight slap. I slapped her in return and the curtains had to be brought down hastily! Ankur, your very first film, netted you a national award. Director Shyam Benegal told me you were his fourth choice after Waheeda Rehman, Sharada, and Aparna Sen. What memories do you have of the film? This was also the first time I had gone into a real village. The village women would laugh at seeing me struggle with the grindstone and how to grind things the right way. They became friends and guides though they never stopped saying, “What’s the use being so educated when you don’t know how to handle a grindstone and a pestle!” I think the scene that stands out in my mind is when my husband comes home, to find me pregnant. He doesn’t know it’s from another man and seeing his innocence and joy I burst into tears. Somehow I just froze and couldn’t emote. Instead of saying, “Don’t worry, it will be okay, you’ll do fine,” which probably would have made me more tense, Shyam just asked the sets be made ready, made me sit down and started talking quietly about this woman he had met after the Bangladesh famine who had lost everything and was looking around anxiously for her lost daughter. The poignance of that story just made an impact, I found myself relaxing and a sudden moisture and sensitivity to the story coursed through me. Shyam saw the tears in my eyes and said, “She is ready now. Take her before the camera.” That went on to become the most memorable scene in the film. Which brings me to Smita Patil and constant comparisons between the two of you. Benegal said “Smita had an instinct that worked for her. She was a very intuitive actress and she never consciously worked on her part. Shabana is a very thinking person so she works out her roles… as a dramatic actress of course Shabana has no peers.”
Mandi, a black comedy about a group of prostitutes, had you play Rukmini Bai the Madam of the brothel. You were pretty young then, You actually visited three different types of brothels in three different cities-Bombay, Delhi and Hyderabad. I also found that most women were pretty comfortable with their lifestyle. In fact some of them said, “When you talk of rehabilitating us what do you mean by that? We don’t want to wash utensils at Rs 150 a month.” Again for Lekh Tandon’s Doosri Dulhan I talked to about 10-12 streetwalkers about their lives. When you research these kinds of stories, you also become accountable to these people. You can’t just extract their experiences from them and walk away. I learnt so much during preparation for both films. After they were released, each time my car crossed Juhu beach, these street walkers would come running saying “Shabana didi, Shabana didi.” People must be wondering at the company I was keeping!
Fire was a movie that evoked a lot of criticism. Many lesbians felt that to portray two women who were disenchanted with their marriage turn to a sexual and emotional relationship was wrong. That homosexuality is a biological thing and not brought about by dysfunctional relationships. You shaved off your head and then the next thing we knew you were out of Water, as was Nandita Das. I heard rumors that you didn’t want to do it anymore. That is not true. I very much wanted to do it, but the distributors said they would not touch the film if it had Deepa, Nandita and me together. In fact when Deepa wrote me an email explaining her predicament and wanting me to be released from the film, I wrote her back saying I understood and that for me it was more important that the film get made. And then I added, “No ! I’m lying! I really want to do the part really, really badly and I challenge you to find a better actress. You’ll never find a better actress than me to do this part!” She laughed when she read that. But today I’m really glad that it is receiving so much acclaim though I really wished I had been part of the film. I think after the Fire controversy the Deepa-Nandita-Shabana trio together literally became too hot to handle. I have always been struck by the fact that in spite of being an exotically beautiful woman, your looks never came in the way of your acting, like they did the case of Hema Malini and now Aishwarya Rai, who have been considered mediocre actresses and all looks in spite of having done some good work. You have been a strong political and social activist. You have had a fatwa on your head for locking horns with Imam Bukhari. A certain section of Hindus have accused your husband Javed Akhtar and you for not being warmer toward Hindus even though you call yourselves secular Muslims. And yet you are fearless. Would it have been better to have a party backing instead of being a lone woman crusader against so many causes. I think the resource base for activism is life itself, so when you involve yourself in social issues you enrich yourself as a person and deepen your understanding of life. This in turn enriches the characters I play, giving depth and complexities to them, which I may not have had if I had not been an activist. While not having a party backing can be a disadvantage, it also frees me to speak the whole truth. If I had a party behind me then there would have been a danger for my truth to become selective truth. Of course, fortunately being an actress gives me visibility people do hear me out in spite of not having a party to back me up. Javed and I have been the favorite targets for both Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists for a long time now. The fact remains that the fight is not between Hindus and Muslims, it’s between ideologies of extremism and ideologies of tolerance and moderation. When secular liberals start establishing their credibility and occupying center stage then the extremists on both sides start attacking them. When I spoke about the hijab, Imam Bukhari instantly said who is she to comment? She is not even a Muslim. She has no right to speak about the hijab. When he said all Indian Muslims should join the jihad in Afghanistan and I said to him on live TV that I would arrange for him to be dropped to Kandahar, his problem will be solved and so will ours, he said, “I don’t listen to a nachne gane wali tawaif (I don’t listen to a singing dancing nautch girl).” The TV bleeped out the tawaif part, but what was most interesting was that I received a huge amount of mail from Muslims saying thank you for standing up to him, he is not our leader. And I’m being accused of being a Hindu beater? There are no two ways about it. You have to oppose fundamentalism of all hues. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a majority or minority, they are mirror images of each other. I’m glad that Javed’s organizations Muslims for Secular Democracy and Citizens for Justice and Peace are doing a lot of good work in that direction. One of the issues closest to your heart has been the fate of slum dwellers. So what will it take for an Indian film win at the Oscars? If you were to change anything about your life what would it be? |