Making and Unmaking Men

My Mirror column:

In films as disparate as Rukh, Bareilly ki Barfi and A Death in the Gunj, games of masculinity are depressingly insistent on dividing men into winners and losers.

Rajkummar Rao in Bareilly ki Barfi

Adarsh Gourav in Rukh

A few months ago, watching Ashwini Iyer Tiwari’s Bareilly ki Barfi, I laughed along with the rest of the audience at the transformation of Rajkummar Rao’s character from a meek sari shop salesman to a rowdy, rude ‘rangbaaz’. Rao is a wonderfully talented actor, and there is much pleasure to be derived from watching the mousy, squeaky-voiced, easily bullied Pritam Vidrohi metamorphose, on the back of a few days’ ‘training’, into the sort of neighbourhood thug who might successfully bully the real Pritam. We watch, giggling, as the person we ‘know’ to be quaking internally acts out a certain kind of machismo — parking his motorcycle in the middle of a traffic filled road, ostensibly to buy himself a paan from a streetside shop, and then silencing a jeepful of outraged men with a mere wave of the hand.

The sequence is very funny, but it’s also an acute comment on what we respond to as manly behaviour. What is masculinity but the performance of it? Vidrohi's particular changeover involves a new haircut, a fashionable new jacket-clad look and a put-on Bachchan baritone. But it also depends on a change of body language, from a fluid, unspoken androgyny — one that made the old Vidrohi perfectly comfortable draping saris over himself for the benefit of prospective female clients — to a markedly masculine akad: a strutting display of the self, a performative occupying of space rather than an ability to adapt himself to it.

Worse than this, though, is the fact that the reconfigured Vidrohi is someone who doles out unprovoked rudeness to anyone who might potentially be classed as his inferior in the social hierarchy: women (who may or not be his fans), waiters, anyone really. The alpha male, it seems, is needlessly aggressive, always competing, always out for himself — and despite all this, the heroine’s parents think there couldn't be a better man to marry their daughter. Obnoxiousness, it seems, is proof of successful masculinity.

Watching Atanu Mukherjee's debut feature Rukh last week, I found myself thinking of how the film circles around the same theme: what constitutes masculinity? Rukh's taut performances do not compensate for a shallow plot and not-very-thickly drawn characters. The deliberate gravitas of its silences could not be more different from Bareilly ki Barfi’s crowd-pleasing chatty comedy. But uneven as Rukh is, there are moments when it gets something just right, such as the scene where a lanky young man entering the murky world of real estate tells his friend why a gun is needed. Keep it empty, he says with an air of throwaway confidence. “Koi agar mich-mich karne lage, usko bas dikhane ka [If anyone makes a fuss about something, just show the gun].” Again, performance is all.

The other thing that struck me was Rukh’s toggling between good men and bad, questioning easy definitions of strength and weakness. It doesn’t quite succeed, but Mukherjee’s script seems to want to ask the question of what being a man means, and one of the things it concerns itself with is the idea of running away. At one level, it does this through Kumud Mishra’s character, the ‘friend’ and business partner who abandons ship when his own selfish actions threaten to sink it. At another level, the film forces us to think about whether suicide is necessarily an act of cowardice.

At a more literal level is a startling playground scene in which the teenaged protagonist Dhruv (Adarsh Gourav) retaliates to an unprovoked push with violence. The playground is a microcosm of the world, and it is no coincidence that we so often hear parents — more often fathers, but sometimes mothers — speak of how they want their children to be able to “give it back” if attacked. The capacity to return violence with violence, in this reading, is the ultimate marker of courage. But is it courage, or cowardice? When Dhruv’s father (Manoj Bajpayee) berates him with “And then you ran away!”, it is impossible not to be moved by Dhruv’s answer: “I got scared.”

Vikrant Massey in A Death in the Gunj

Earlier this year, we had Konkona Sen Sharma’s A Death in the Gunj, with Vikrant Massey playing a sensitive 23-year-old who has just lost his father and can’t find the courage to tell his extended family that he has failed an important exam. The quiet, artistic Shutu draws insects and prefers the company of a much younger child to the older men around him. His confusion and anxiety is dismissed with a “He needs to toughen up and take care of his mother”. Tests of bravado emerge as the men’s chosen entertainment — with tragic results.

These films all point to the fact that violence is the externalising of unprocessed fear. The more we applaud aggression in men, and discourage them from expressing hurt or grief or vulnerability, the more likely it is to spill over as violence, towards others and more rarely, towards themselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Oct 2017.

Speaking of Sex

My Mirror column:

For the women in Lipstick Under My Burkha, words are a necessary weapon on the quest for desire – but they can also wound.

Sometimes a film can start a conversation. Lipstick Under My Burkha, about which I wrote in these pages last week, definitely has. I suggested in the previous column that what makes Lipstick stand out in the long history of Hindi cinema is that it allows us to see women as erotic beings, with their eroticism shorn of the necessary veneer of long-term romantic love. Certainly writer-director Alankrita Shrivastava and her co-writers Gazal Dhaliwal and Suhani Kanwar have crafted a film in which women have more of a relationship with sex than our female characters have ever been allowed to.

But thankfully, unlike a particular sort of feminist girl-gang movie recently emerging from India with English titles – think of Pan Nalin’s infuriatingly flimsy Angry Indian Goddesses (2015), or Leena Yadav’s overly-choreographed rural drama Parched (2016) – the women in Lipstick experience sex in a variety of registers. Repression and bawdiness, set up as polar opposites, are not the only modes of being sexual.

Yes, the film uses the unabashed excesses of Hindi erotica to unbutton our tightly-laced selves, as well as casually dropping references to husbands getting excited by a ‘Brazilian’. But there is a tendency to imagine that women who speak freely – of sex, or anything else – are necessarily empowered. Lipstick, I was overjoyed to find, recognizes the range of possibilities that exist in the gulf between silence and staging.

The woman whom we see suffering through the worst sort of sex with her husband, Konkona Sensharma’s Shirin, is also the one who most needs to produce the pretense that all is well. The brave front she puts up is a recurring theme in the film. Early on, a woman to whom Shirin is selling a pest-control gun turns it towards her husband’s portrait, asking if it will work on this sort of pest. Shirin smiles a secret smile and says her ‘pest’ stays in control – even without a gun. We have not yet met her husband, so we – like the customer – are taken in.

Later, after the film has let us view the humiliations of her marital bed, we hear her produce another bit of light-hearted repartee, this time to explain to her gynaecologist why she keeps getting pregnant. “We get so caught up in the moment that it’s hard to stop and make him wear a condom...,” she says, looking at us rather than the doctor. This time, neither the doctor nor we are fooled.

That depiction of her husband as being swayed by desire offers, in fact, a sinister contrast to the brutally mechanical way in which we see him use her body. It is cold comfort that Shirin is also the only character who speaks – if only once, and fearfully – of sex as pain. “Jalan ho rahi hai,” she says as her husband enters her without the slightest kiss or caress, or even an affectionate word. And yet to hear her say those words is shocking, because it brings into a Hindi film soundscape a female body’s response to forced sex – not couched in the dramatically over-determined register of rape, violation, or even fear, but as physical pain made ordinary.

The emotional impact of that recurring physical hurt, on the other hand, is not something even Shirin can summon up words for. We see her, in the aftermath of the worst such scene, stuffing her mouth in silent anger – a cake she baked hoping to sweet-talk her husband into giving her ‘permission’ to work is now merely something to help her swallow her own tears.

The film’s feistiest character, Leela, is someone to whom words come easily, whether it is in wooing potential clients for a new business idea, or seducing her photographer lover. She is the opposite of years of Hindi-movie coyness when she appears in her lover’s room and says with beguiling candour: “Sex toh kar le.” And yet all the power of that openness is easily turned against her, as soon as the man decides to demean the woman’s desire by calling it ‘merely’ physical.

The Rehana segment, otherwise weakened by its excessive cool-girl stereotypes and its overly obvious dialoguebaazi (“jeans ka haq, jeene ka haq”), has one wonderful scene in which sexual tension is created with words. She is drinking with a flirtatious senior (Shashank Tiwari) when he gestures casually in her direction and asks, “Virgin?” Rehana freezes – and only relaxes when he indicates it is only her alcoholic virginity he was inquiring about.

Perhaps the film’s most challenging narrative is that of Usha, who uses two kinds of verbal covers – the words of a fictional character called Rosie, and the anonymity provided by the telephone – to carry on an increasingly torrid affair with a younger man. Words are what enable the 55-year-old widow to articulate a long-dormant, long-frustrated erotic self – but the man seduced by her “sexnuma awaaz” is quick to turn against her when he realizes who she ‘really’ is.

But all this talk of the body is a way of exposing the innermost corners of our minds – and that can make us incredibly vulnerable.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 July 2017.

Those Who Dream In Daylight

My Mirror column:

Under the easy symbolism of burkhas, lipsticks and cigarettes, Lipstick Under My Burkha is a film that’s urgently needed, astutely told and deeply felt.

If you ask anyone who's grown up watching popular Hindi cinema, they would probably agree that its most important preoccupation is love. No matter what other themes a film might take up -- the decline of Indian family values or the reiteration of their longevity, urban crime, the crisis of corruption, relations between communities, war, sports, patriotism -- there is invariably a romantic relationship at the centre of the plot. Often more than one.

In a country in which arranged marriages remain very much the norm, romantic love is the fantasy for which real people go to the cinema. Love is our grand narrative of choice, even when the romance is not epic but everyday. And yet, these depictions of love -- invariably heterosexual, almost always battling social obstacles to get to the end-point of marriage -- are too coy to speak of physical desire. If the sexual self is allowed to exist, it must be folded into the romantic, and ideally subsumed by it. You can want love, but to want sex is taboo. This is true even for male protagonists, but it is most certainly true for women, who must remain objects of desire rather than desiring subjects.

Of course, things are changing, slowly but surely: in recent years, we have glimpsed desiring women on screen in the most male-centric narratives, like Anurag Kashyap’s DevD; in films seeking to radically alter our perspective on sex, like Margarita With a Straw or Haraamkhor or Anarkali of Aarah; or character-driven dramas with other social concerns, like Masaan. But Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha still feels astonishing.

Perhaps it is the fact that her women characters are, none of them, aiming for marriage as the happy-ever-after. If one is pre-marriage, another is post-marriage; one has a marriage that offers her only humiliation, and the last doesn't want the right marriage. The 55-year-old Usha (Ratna Pathak Shah) has long been husband-less and has no desire to be controlled by a man again. The teenage Rehana (Plabita Borthakur) wants a hundred things that she feels life behind a burkha can't give her -- and marriage isn't yet one of them. Shirin (Konkona Sensharma) already has a marriage, complete with three children and a sexually exploitative husband who refuses even to use contraception -- it is one she would quite happily do without. Even Leela (Aahana Kumra), on the verge of a marriage that would secure her family’s future, cannot make herself see in it the shape of her present.

Perhaps it is that these women do not circumscribe their desires by what is expected of them; they do not want what they are supposed to want. Or perhaps it is just the frankness with which Shrivastava's characters experience sex and sexuality -- even when they are not speaking of it. One of the useful devices Lipstick's script uses in this regard is to bookend the tales of these 'real’ women with the voice of a properly fictional one called Rosie, who lends her purple prose to each narrative in turn. While she remains trapped between the covers of a steamy Hindi paperback, the unexpurgated quality of Rosie's desires forces us to contend with our squeamishness.
We are so unused to women speaking of sex (or even being acknowledged as wanting it) that sexlessness is the norm -- except within the approved bounds of grihasthashram, when it is duty rather than pleasure. And so whether it is Leela’s ravenous lust for her scruffy photographer boyfriend (the gorgeous Vikrant Massey, last seen in A Death in the Gunj), or the long-celibate Usha's fierce attraction to a man much younger than herself, these are not just unsuitable boys but unsuitable desires. I found particularly moving Shrivastava's telling of Usha's tale: how the physical proximity of a physically fit male body mingles with the giddy excitement of being reminded that she needn't be Buaji to everyone -- the evocative power of merely using her name makes one realise how women are boxed into their relationships, literally losing themselves.

But as the film makes clear, in a country where a widowed old man is generous when he 'considers’ a 40-year-old as a second wife -- and where we have been brought up to giggle at the merest thought of a spinsterish Lalita Pawar believing herself wooed, even by a man of her own age -- what hope can we hold out for Buaji?

Rehana and Shirin's desires are less obviously couched as sexual -- freedom to dress as they please, drink, smoke, work, wander the world, and be treated as an equal. But the sex scenes between Shirin and her husband (Sushant Singh) are the film's most horrifying -- because that stifling experience, of being reduced to being a forced provider of sexual services, is likely the norm for more Indian wives than not.

Given the depressing realities with which Lipstick deals, I am glad to be able to report that it is not itself depressing. The right to pleasure is serious business --but what is serious can also be pleasurable. The film ends with one final nod to romantic fantasy, which I loved. We might have picked the wrong man to be our sapnon ka raajkumar, suggests Shrivastava, but isn't the dreaming what keeps us alive?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 July 2017.

This Dappled Light

My Mirror column:

Konkona Sen Sharma’s directorial debut eschews high drama for a gentle chiaroscuro of abandon and watchfulness.

The blue Ambassador that transports a Calcutta family into the semi-rural wilderness of 1970s McCluskieganj places Konkona Sen Sharma’s directorial debut in a longstanding tradition of Bengali holiday fictions. One of the earliest parts of India to be colonised and enter into capitalist time, Bengal’s employed white collar denizens treat the chhuti (vacation) with almost as much reverence as the chakri (office job).

So although the dialogue is mostly in English (a fact that fits Sen Sharma’s smoking-drinking-Auld-Lang-Syne-singing assemblage of Anglophone Calcuttans perfectly), A Death in the Gunj clearly draws on the particular historical relationship between the middle-class Bengali vacationer escaping the urban chaos of Calcutta and the unspoilt nearby hinterland of not-too-distant locations in Orissa and Bihar (now partly Jharkhand). Many of Satyajit Ray’s short stories – and several of Saradindu’s Byomkesh Bakshi ones – used journeys to these milieus to presage the unfurling of a mystery. Leaving the city for the jungle or some remote rural outpost, as is seen in so many of these stories, is a fictional trope that enables the emergence of suppressed selves.

Sen Sharma’s film, unlike in the above instances, makes her cinematic travellers a family group: complete with an eight-year-old child, a slightly slutty cousin and a poor relation who is a rather pretty boy. In a beautifully observed set of vignettes, we see how the dynamics of power, class, sex and age are at work within the family, often being set into motion by the arrival of non-familial male visitors – Ranvir Shorey’s belligerently charming Vikram, and Jim Sarbh’s mild-mannered Brian. 

Vikram, in particular, is the catalyst for many reactions. Kalki Koechlin’s Mimi amps up her sexiness in an ever-so-carelessly careful way around him, the older woman of the house (Tanuja) is somewhat flattered by his gift-giving, and even the married Bonnie (Tilottama Shome) can feel mildly slighted by his attention to Mimi. More crucially, though, Vikram embodies a certain masculine aggression: something to which Nandu (Gulshan Devaiah) responds by wanting to match up to him, to prove he’s just as fearless – while the gentler Shutu’s reaction is to retreat into his shell.

Shutu – played to perfection by Vikrant Massey – is the emotional centre of the film. He’s the poor sensitive cousin who spends much of his time with his notebook, sketching frogs and making private lists of words he likes beginning with ‘e’, when he is not hanging out with the actual child in the group, Tani. He is 23 and has just lost a father and failed an exam, but his vulnerability seems to work like some kind of taunt to the older men, who couch their bullying of him as some kind of initiation ritual that will force him to “toughen up”.

I recently watched another film about a troubled young man at the cusp of adulthood – the Marathi film Kaasav (Turtle), directed by Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar, which won a National Award for Best Feature last year. Kaasav’s plot, such as it is, feels much more contrived: a young man in bermuda shorts and a backpack tries to slit his wrists, is rescued, escapes from the hospital and coincidentally washes up at the doorstep of an older woman (Irawati Harshe) who is just in the process of recovering from her own experience of suicidal depression.

A painfully repetitive pattern of brattish behaviour on the part of the young man and selfless acceptance on the part of the older woman ensues, made somewhat watchable by the presence of a beautifully calming Konkan coastline and a rather sweet child who offers the innocence quotient. The film is wonderfully well-intentioned and finally leads us out of the impasse by making the protagonist recognise something of his own strength.

Unlike the sanitised, asexual matrix of pure humanity within which Kaasav operates, A Death in the Gunj offers a fleshed out universe of characters, none of whom are evil – yet we are forced to grapple with their darker sides. Along with the companionable lightness and warmth that the family offers, it can also force its less forceful members into preconceived slots, too quick to judge, too preoccupied to pay attention, neglecting to give them the space they might need to be – or become – themselves. 

A woman who really wants to accompany a search party is left behind because she is perceived as too emotionally fraught to be taken – while a man who really does not want to go along is hijacked into the expedition. Sen Sharma’s film is full of moments like these, making us watch as people ignore each other’s needs, or worse, blithely use another person to fulfil their own. Watching it is an exercise in sensitive observation; its particular tragedies may unfold in the slow time of a long-ago vacation, but they could so easily be our own.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 June 2017.

Lady-Oriented Lipstick Dreams

My Mirror column on 5 Mar:

Making sense of the CBFC’s recent ruling is tough, but not impossible. Our columnist reaches a speculative conclusion.

In a letter to Prakash Jha Productions, dated January 25, the Censor Board of Film Certification (CBFC) refused to certify for exhibition a Hindi feature film called Lipstick Under My Burkha, directed by Alankrita Srivastava.

The reasons for 'Certificate Refused' to the film, as stated by the CBFC were as follows: “The film is lady oriended, their fantasy above life. There are contanious sexual scenes, abusive words, audio pornography and a bit sensitive touch about one section of society.”

Yes, that's it, folks. So take a minute. Let the words sink in.

And now, shall we attempt to extract the CBFC's intended meaning from its garbled prose? Let's assume “lady oriended” to be an uncle-ish (and misspelt) version of 'women-oriented', or 'female-oriented'. The Oxford Dictionaries site online explains 'femaleoriented' as “Biased toward, dominated by, or designed for women.”

It doesn't take a genius to tell you that we don't have too many cultural products like that, not in India. But funnily, until the CBFC clarified matters, I had been fooled into believing that Uncle-jis across the land were cool with lady-oriented stuff. Because (a) it vaguely gestures to the West that Bollywood (thus India) can be modern, too, and (b) d-uh, men don't actually watch stuff made by or for women (In fact, most women don't either). So 'women-oriented' = simultaneously useful and harmless.

But clearly, having actually watched Srivastava's film, the CBFC's members – both men and women – have come to the conclusion that a certain sort of women-orientedness is dangerous stuff. The clue to why they think so is the CBFC's four-word phrase after “lady-oriended”: “their fantasy above life”. I have only seen the trailer of Lipstick, but it seems to be about four women from different backgrounds giving their long-fettered sexual desires a chance to escape into the real world. (The original title was Lipstick Wale Sapne: literally, Lipstick Dreams.)

Mamta Kale, CBFC member, told the Times of India that Lipstick is absolutely not about women’s empowerment. “Being a woman, you can talk about your sexual rights but you have to keep one thing in mind as to how you are showing that issue. Can families go together to watch such a movie? No, they cannot," pronounced Kale.

Kale's remarks reminded me that the CBFC in 2016 allowed Leena Yadav's Parched through, with the minimal blurring of a breast (in an almost-love-scene between two women) and the removal of some verbal abuses. Parched was also very much about women's sexual desires – except (a) the women in the film lived in rural Rajasthan and were horribly oppressed by men, which means that it was undeniably 'about women’s empowerment', and (b) as I wrote in this column, Parched is a feminist fairy tale. The realization of women's desires in Yadav's film takes the shape of a fantasy: the three friends abandon their context, rather than succeed in reshaping it. Perhaps in so doing, their fantasy doesn't threaten to go “above life”?

Another film – also featuring a sexually desirous young woman – that was held up for a year by the CBFC's rejection is Shlok Sharma's Haraamkhor. There, the CBFC objected that it “shows the teachers in a bad light, which is unacceptable to the society.” Guneet Monga, the film's producer, told Hindustan Times in June 2016 that she “tried to reason that these things do happen.” and that “In fact, the film’s director was inspired by real life stories.” The implicit argument there: life above fantasy.

Monga's line didn't work, however. Maybe because the CBFC doesn't actually like real life: not when it doesn't agree with their fantasy of what the world is? Happily, Haraamkhor finally released earlier in 2017, after the Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) reversed the CBFC's decision. Sharma's film is a dark, radical portrait of a young woman who embarks on a sexual relationship with her tuition teacher. But here I want to draw your attention to what the FCAT actually said in its decision: it suggested the film could be used “for furthering a social message and warning the girls to be aware of their rights”. We might also note here [Spoiler alert] that Haraamkhor is a tragedy. Sharma's intentions become irrelevant here, because the film can then be read as follows: Girl is misguided; terrible things happen; let that be a lesson to you.

Lady-orientedness, then, can be allowed in one of two cases. One, if it seems like it’s telling women that desire (outside of love and marriage) really doesn't pay. Or two, if it makes sure to suggest that real life, as the CBFC knows it, won't really be altered by it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Mar 2017.

The Reluctant Diamond: Konkona Sen Sharma

A profile I did for Tehelka: 

Konkona Sen Sharma may be cast again and again as the small-town girl seeking the bright lights, but in real life she has been the one pushing stardom away.

Several people walking past Kolkata’s Little Russell Street at 3pm on a Thursday slowed down to look at the striking young woman standing outside the New Kenilworth Hotel. Partly because her maroon silk sari wasn’t quite midweek afternoon wear, but also because it took them a moment to recognise the face beneath the heavy ’70s makeup and bouffant hairdo as Konkona Sen Sharma, Indian cinema’s favourite girl-next-door.

Konkona herself, taking a short break from the shooting of her mother Aparna Sen’s new film Iti Mrinalini, was characteristically unselfconscious. She might have been more comfortable in her usual loose kurta and capris, but the greasepaint is part of her life now, and she takes its irritations with the same unfussy equanimity as she does the accolades that have come her way since 2001, when she debuted in the Bengali feature called Ek Je Achhe Kanya (The Girl). But she hasn’t always been this calm about the process of acting in a film. “When I started out, I’d work myself up about why I was wearing this, or saying that... I was embarrassed about the whole thing.” Today, some 25 films down, she’s unruffled. “If I have to do something, I do it. I’ve become more detached, which is a more constructive attitude to work.”

Konkona’s relationship with the film industry has always been ambivalent. Having grown up with a mother who was both an extremely popular actress and an acclaimed director, she never thought of the movies as glamorous. At close quarters, they seemed to involve hard work, long hours and a certain professional instability. But there was simultaneously a fascination with cinema: being captivated by the Moscow Film Festival at nine, playing “directing games” with her mother at 12. Konkona was four when she played a little boy in a Bengali film called Indira (1983) and nine when mother Aparna Sen cast her in Picnic (1989). “She was so natural,” Aparna remembers. “Shabana [Azmi] said, ‘If you think she’s going to be anything but an actress, you can think again.” At 15, she played a ‘teenage stepmother’ in Amodini (1994), directed by her grandfather Chidananda Dasgupta, film critic and longtime friend of Satyajit Ray. But the more her mother suggested she think about acting seriously, the more she resisted. “When Ma and all said I was a good actress, I didn’t think they were being objective. And anyway, I have a tendency not to do what people tell me to do,” she laughs.

It was only in college, while doing her BA in English, that she discovered that acting could be fun. “I did plays with ShakeSoc [the St. Stephen’s College Shakespeare Society] and enjoyed myself hugely.” Then came Subroto Sen’s offer to play the psychotic teenage protagonist in his Ek Je Achhe Kanya. “I did it as a lark, I never really thought about it getting released and having an impact on my life. I’ve never thought that far ahead – I still don’t,” confesses Konkona. She shot for the film in the summer vacations (“St. Stephen’s was very strict about attendance”) and went back to college in Delhi. Meanwhile, the film had “become a hit and all”, and family friend Rituparno Ghosh, who had been “threatening to make a film with me for a long time” decided to cast her in Titli (2002). “That was very much a home production, with Ritu mama directing, Ma acting. It felt more like a holiday,” remembers Konkona.

The turning point came with Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002), written and directed by her mother. Aparna decided she would like her to play the central character of a young Tamilian housewife whose prejudices are forced to battle her humanity during a communal riot. Konkona was reluctant (suggesting that her mother cast a “real South Indian” instead) but Aparna made it into a project for her. “She sent me off to Chennai as a research assistant of sorts, to translate some dialogues and find out about costumes.” Konkona returned from Chennai completely immersed in the milieu and the character, and ended up enjoying the shoot. But she still wasn’t sure this was it. “I kept thinking I had to get a proper job, I’d look at the classifieds…” she trails off. “Then I won the National Award [for Best Actress]. After that, it wasn’t so easy to shift. I was getting offered interesting films: Amu, Page Three. And I’d never had another burning ambition. I didn’t really know how to do anything else.”

Konkona is grateful to acting for having given her a sense of purpose, but she seems to constantly guard against it taking over her sense of self. “It can be mindnumbingly boring,” she points out. “You’re just a live prop: someone else gives you your lines, tells you what to do, lights your face.” But films clearly fascinate her – she was once accepted into an undergraduate film studies programme at New York University (“but I didn’t get a scholarship and it was too expensive”), and in 2005 she directed a short film about two Kolkata pickpockets, called Naamkoron. She dismisses a question about whether she wants to be a director. “That’s like saying I want to be a novelist, it doesn’t work like that. If it has to happen, it’ll happen.” If holding a megaphone and telling people what to do holds no appeal for her, nor does putting on makeup to strut for the camera. What she finds interesting is how acting changes one’s relationship with one’s body, with the self. “I’m not a public speaker, I can be very shy. But if I can hide behind a camera, or behind a character, I’m fine.”

Childhood friend Padmini Ray Murray remembers her as “a mopheaded shy little thing” but “with big brown curious eyes… and a remarkable innocence”. When told that Padmini’s heart surgeon father “removed the heart” in order to operate, the 11-year-old Koko apparently said, “But if he takes out their heart, can they still love people?” “She stayed a child for a long time,” says Padmini, who laughingly describes Koko as “a late bloomer” in the sex and romance department, with long childhood crushes that remained unvoiced for years. “She still retains a childlike quality, a sense of wonder. But alongside it is a certain wisdom.” Aparna remembers Koko at seven, complaining that a friend was constantly borrowing and dirtying her favourite socks. “Why don’t you just give the socks to her,” suggested Aparna. “But if I do that, she’ll know I’m angry,” said the teary Koko. “And are friends more important or socks?”

At 29, Konkona is still as certain that what’s most important to her are the people in her life. Her mother, of course, has been a shaping influence, often pushing her in productive directions she hadn’t quite figured out for herself. Her father, science writer and journalist Mukul Sharma, created a sparkling childhood full of games and guitars and car trips. Her sister, Kamalini (Dona), is eight years older and was a second mother figure, especially after Aparna and Mukul separated. Konkona was seven. “But I’d rather have happy parents who’re apart than unhappy ones who’re together.” She’s now great friends with both her father and her stepfather, Kalyan Ray, who’s an English professor in a US college.

“For me, life is really about shared experiences,” she says with disarming simplicity. It’s a strange combination: an absolute honesty that somehow manages to steer clear of intensity; an uncomplicated, childlike sweetness that’s never cloying. “Even if she’s playing an intense character, she’s never terribly in earnest. That gives her a lightness of touch,” says Aparna. “But there’s no titillation in her acting. She never plays to the gallery.” Unlike her image, Konkona is rarely serious. The Hindi films that have brought her most into the public eye – Page Three, Laga Chunari Mein Daag, Life in a Metro, Wake Up Sid – have consistently portrayed her as the sincere small-town girl in the big city. “People cast her in Plain Jane roles, but I think she can be extremely sexy,” says Subroto Sen, who directed her in Ek Je Achhe Kanya. “It is a bit boring to constantly play earnest characters,” says Konkona. “I’ve done other kinds: in Mixed Doubles, or Dosar, for example, but they’re rarely watched.” Konkona herself is clear that her most challenging roles are in her mother’s films: Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, 15 Park Avenue and now Iti Mrinalini, where she plays a 1970s and 80s Bengali actress. “Mrinalini’s manner cannot be as direct as mine today. It’s a challenge, because I’ve always had a resistance to playing characters who’re coy or helpless or docile: these emotions are alien to me.”

Konkona's forthrightness seems difficult to preserve in the Mumbai film world, where appearances must be kept up and occasional social games played. But she seems to have settled nicely into her new Mumbai life. She and boyfriend Ranvir Shorey — with whom she seems very much in love — have bought a flat in Goregaon. They spend their free time watching films they like, or hanging out with friends. “The only industry people I’m friends with are Sandhya Mridul and Tara Sharma [her Page Three co-stars] and Rajat Kapur, Vinay Pathak and gang,” she says. “Anyway, I don’t miss places that much. Wherever I live becomes Cal for me: I’m constantly telling people, ‘When you come to Cal’ while meaning Bombay!” It’s a vibe she carries with her wherever she goes – like her puchka spices from Kolkata’s Vivekananda Park and the Madhuban paan masala to which she’s “totally addicted” – quietly, gently, without the slightest fuss, but with an unmistakeable stubbornness.

Published in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 43, Dated October 31, 2009