The words she uttered 37 years ago appear to come and stay by her side as Shabana Azmi sits on a stage in Thiruvananthapuram and calmly says, “Artists have a voice. If they don’t use that for the betterment of society, then they are losing an important access that they have.” This is the same actor who had famously got on the stage of the International Film Festival of India in 1989 and read out a leaflet condemning the murder of theatre artist Safdar Hashmi by Congress workers.
The video of a poised and quietly stern Shabana, taking the floor all those years ago to protest the killing of a fellow artist, keeps surfacing every time an event of gross injustice is unremarked upon by prominent actors of the day. ‘Why do we not have voices like Shabana’s anymore’ is the question that oft accompanies the viral video.
Shabana, eloquent then and eloquent now, is clear about her stand, not taking the trouble to mask her criticism of glorified misogyny or item numbers in commercial films. Sharing her experience of working in a Rajesh Khanna film, she quotes a line from the movie to say how she had inadvertently allowed patriarchal portrayals until someone questioned her about it. “It was the beginning of a conscious realisation and I decided I wouldn’t be a part of cinema that showed women in a subservient role,” Shabana tells the audience at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters on February 1.
The actor, known for her marked presence in serious and parallel cinema, clocked more than half a decade of work when Ankur, her first film and the one that brought her first National Award, turned 50 in 2024. If she had not begun with Ankur – an offbeat masterpiece by Shyam Benegal – she might have slipped straight into mainstream cinema and would have had to compete with the talents of Zeenat Aman, Rekha, and Hema Malini, she says. Ankur let her have a parallel platform. But after a while, she conquered her inhibitions of “running around trees” and became equally involved in mainstream cinema.
After Ankur, she kept collecting National Awards for her subdued performances in Arth (1983), Khandhar (1984), Paar (1985), and years later, Godmother (1999). She created quite a storm with one of the earliest portrayals of a lesbian relationship in Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1998). She continues to be active in cinema, appearing recently in out-and-out commercial films like Karan Johar’s Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahaani (2023).
Shabana shares an anecdote of shooting a scene in the film with her long hair let loose and cooking a fish curry in the kitchen, wondering as she did, if the hair won’t go into the curry. But then she realised, she says with her trademark humour, “In a Karan Johar film, everything goes, just do it.”
Shabana says that acting in commercial cinema needs you to have a “willing suspension of disbelief”. Director Manmohan Desai, known for his blockbuster commercial successes, would tell her during her shots that “this is not your art film, don’t take such long pauses!”
But a lot has changed in the portrayal of women, she concurs, adding how in the old days, someone watching Indian cinema would think that all women wear yellow chiffon saris and dance all the time and have no profession. But now, they show working women. In Rocky Aur Rani, Alia Bhatt is employed and has her say.
Only, she finds it distasteful how ‘angry young men’ are portrayed as misogynistic. “In the films of Salim and Javed (Javed Akhtar, her husband and scriptwriter and lyricist), the angry young men were fighting the system. Today they are badtameez (ill-mannered) with the women and the women take it!”
Shabana calls it harassment when a male is shown chasing a woman even if she says no, and says that films should not glorify such themes, as they endanger the lives of young women expecting safety on the roads, while at the same time it “gives ideas” to the men watching those women. She is also upset by item numbers that “rob women of all autonomy and make them objects of the male gaze”.
She agrees that she and Javed may have creative differences sometimes, but it is great to have a partner working in the same field. She also shares an anecdote about a friend explaining their little disputes as coming from “you being Ankur and he being Sholay,” Sholay being the all-time biggest commercial success in Hindi cinema, written by Salim-Javed.
