Swara Bhaskar: I got Tanu Weds Manu because two other actors rejected it
Actor Swara Bhaskar is as outspoken about her politics as she is determined to make it big in Bollywood.
There's something oddly wholesome about interviewing a star in the allegedly seditious surrounds of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus. Not only is the experience a heady mix of the two great Indian pastimes- Bollywood and politics-it also reiterates refreshingly that the proponents of the Hindi film industry are more than a swell blow dry and PR-driven sound bytes.
Nothing quite demolishes a Bollywood-related stereotype like Nil Battey Sannata actor Swara Bhaskar, 28, feet up on a garden chair outside her home in JNU (her mother is a professor on campus), in all her spunky, expletive-spouting glory. "I'm a typical Delhi girl. Professional parents, nuclear family. My father was in the navy. I've spent my whole life in government accommodation and it's been lovely," says Bhaskar, describing younger self as both "bratty" and "f****** precocious". Her rosy childhood was a result of a liberal and democratic upbringing, thanks to her parents who she says were fairly conventional in most ways, but very modern in their thinking. Growing up, Bhaskar's mother, Ira Bhaskar, then a professor at Gargi College in Delhi University, went to New York University to complete her PhD.
"When I grew up, I realised what an amazing thing my parents did. It was such a big deal for my mom, a middle class woman, to decide to leave her children and husband to go and do her PhD for three years. And my dad, who is even more middle class, a traditional South Indian, to let his wife do that." Bhaskar's mother, aside from imparting an unconscious lesson in feminism and helping her prepare for her role in Nil Battey Sannata, also inspired much of her formative reading. "We (her brother and she) grew up on Enid Blyton like all bloody Indian children did," she says. "I was an avid reader as a child. I am losing that habit now as my brain congeals into cabbage from wearing too many heels and too much foundation." She isn't just saying that. Bhaskar had read A Suitable Boy and Sunlight On A Broken Column by the time she was 15. If you're a literature graduate like she is, you'd know that this is a remarkable feat; she had read Sons and Lovers by the time she was in Class 8. "My mom instilled a deep condescension in me for Mills & Boon," she adds.
Her parents, along with her teachers at Miranda House and her peers in JNU, are also responsible for her (very open) political learnings and leanings. "I used to listen to my parents discussing politics. I have this vivid memory of being very young and the Babri Masjid had just collapsed, and they were outraged!" Bhaskar says up until then, she did not even know "what a Muslim was". As she pursued her bachelor of arts, she was taught that fence sitting was not an option and silence meant complicity. "They (her professors) would sometimes be a little absurd too. A teacher once said that cellphones are instruments of patriarchal surveillance and I was like whaaaaaat?" she laughs. But this too, the Listen... Amaya actor claims, shapes one's critical thinking.
At JNU, when she did her masters in sociology, Bhaskar dated a fellow student whose father a worker in a steel factory and earned a paltry Rs 4,000 per month. "He had two brothers. Because the JNU fees was Rs 800, these boys could study and one of them, a PhD is now pursuing post doctoral research in England. My ex would often say that if he hadn't gone to JNU, he would be sitting at a kirana shop in in village," she says. "Politics should come from human stories," she says. "I don't get when people say politics is so dirty. Just because they don't understand it, they talk s***." Of late, Bhaskar has been very vocal about her stand on the controversy surrounding JNU wherein many of the students have been charged with sedition for an allegedly anti-national protest event held on February 9.
"As a JNU alumna, I couldn't help but get involved because I was so shocked at how it was panning out. I thought, f*** this s***, I'm going to say something." This led to the inevitable- Bhaskar wrote a biting letter to Umar Khalid (one of the students charged and arrested) and was branded anti-national almost instantly. "I was born in this country and it's as much mine as everyone else's. I have no reason to prove my patriotism to anybody. I'm as mainstream Indian as it gets; I'm not even a subaltern identity," she says. But her outspokenness earned her more than the unsavoury twitter troll; Bhaskar says that there were reports how she among a host of other people may have lost the national award for being critical of the present government. It was then that Bhaskar decided to "calm the f*** down" and contoured her twitter and facebook feed with more promotions and less politics.
Bhaskar's love for the Capital stems from more than college student life; it was born out of the cultural exposure growing up in Lutyen's Delhi. Living an audible-audience-cheer away from Kamani Auditorium enabled her to experience and explore the arts as exhibited in the cultural capital. "Delhi has a wider variety of things which are representative of different parts of India." She did what all good children from such families do. "I learned classical dance from Leela Samson. Then I learned Carnatic music but I was terrible," she says. It wasn't her formal Bharatnatyam training or her informal tryst with activist JNU street theatre group IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association) and director NK Sharma's theatre group Act One that propelled her move to tinsel town. It was a little bit of the DD show Chitrahaar, a whole lot of auto rickshaws in Delhi.
"We used to travel in autos and see photographs of all these super stars on entire panels in the autos. That's my marker for success-to have my picture in a Delhi auto," she says. Bhaskar also believes that almost every Indian, given a chance, would be a Bollywood star. "Definitely. If they had a chance. If it didn't mean spitting away your education and gambling your life away." That's exactly what the stereotypically starry-eyed Bhaskar did. Bachelors in literature from DU and masters in sociology from JNU in tow, she moved to Mumbai to make acting a full-time career.
"I was an outsider. No back up like star children have, no one making calls on my behalf or an actor boyfriend. I wish someone would adopt me," she says, remembering how she took up a job as a copy editor with a magazine to supplement her job as a struggling actor. "I stayed in Goregaon and would take the local to VT everyday."
Her Mumbai experience was tempered by her personality as a self-proclaimed JNU brat. In an industry that rotates on an axis of appearances and networking abilities, the Tanu Weds Manu actor got a rude shock when her "phatti hui jeans, kurta, chappal, kajal and jhola" had the casting director at her first audition ask her if she was there to be an assistant director instead of an actor. Undeterred, she kept going, whether it meant telling lechy casting directors "main aapke saath sex nahi karoongi" as they danced around a casting couch request.
The story of how she got her first film, though, is fortunately one bereft of sleaze but big on luck. When her assistant director friend asked her to return a script he could not work on to the writer-director, she surreptitiously read it mid-delivery. A quick phone call and audition later, Bhaskar landed her first film Niyati, which is yet to be released. But Bhaskar believes she has been lucky. "My first film, nobody saw, Madholal Keep Walking. My first shooting film yet to be released, Niyati. I got Tanu Weds Manu because two other actors who were offered the role of Payal rejected it. I got Raanjhanna because the other actors rejected it or couldn't do it. So I'm like a fluke story basically," she jokes.
Bagging roles may have been a stroke of luck but Bhaskar's perseverance once she signs a part is immense. The depth of her research is remarkable and something that shines through in her performances, particularly in Nil Battey Sannata, where she plays Chanda, a part-time maid and full-time mother from Agra. The first level of research began as she observed how the domestic help in Agra went about their business. "I would go with maids to their work and walk back with them. I would eat with them, I did extensive interviews, chatting with them about all kinds of crap. Then I would listen to the interview, take notes of words they were using, and their accents." To prepare for the role of a mother, Bhaskar kept things closer home and just tried to understand her own mother's instincts (because Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari said "mothering her own cats" didn't count as research).
"It gave me the sense that a parent's love for a child is a very physical emotion; an emotion born in biology and they are very helpless in the face of it," she says. "It doesn't matter what an a****** your child is, you would never let go." Bhaskar researched for her next film Anarkali Arawali, where she plays a singer who sings lewd songs laden with innuendo, is equally impressive.
"I went to Arrah, city in Bihar, went and met those women, went to the market and saw a board that said Munni Orchestra Party and just went up there and introduced myself and started hanging out with them." Gruelling as it may be, Bhaskar is satisfied with the myriad roles and experiences the film industry has thrown her way. Whether it's basking in the glory of being on a set filled with scores of elephants and Salman Khan in Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, working with Farooq Sheikh and Deepti Naval in Listen... Amaya, making friends with Sonam Kapoor in Raanjhanna or busting her bottom in the sweltering Agra summer for Nil Battey Sannata, Bhaskar says it's been a wholesome experience.