Born and brought up in Bombay to a middle class south Indian family, Vidya had a dream: to become an actress. But while other girls with that dream would want to be glamorous heroines, Vidya focused on the acting itself.
Each evening she would stare at the mirror and reenact Shabana Azmi’s dialogues from Arth. A particular favorite was the bit where Shabana tells Smita Patil to leave her man alone.
Good middle class south Indian families do not react with delight when their daughters tell them that they want to join Bollywood. So Vidya’s parents insisted that she went to St Xavier’s College and studied. She did her BA and then an MA in Sociology.
“My father said that I could always become an actress,” she recalls. “But I couldn’t go back to college later in life. So I had to first finish my education and then I could do what I wanted. At the time I was not pleased but now, I can’t thank him enough. My parents were absolutely right.”
The education explains why Vidya started off late. But nothing explains why things kept going wrong for so long.
In a male dominated industry, Vidya Balan has forced her entry in the top league with some stupendous performances in the last few months. She has redefined the structure of Indian entertainment industry though she has been subject to serious criticism by conservative section of the Indian society. Is it because The Dirty Picture has stormed the box office? Is it because she’s so good in the film? Or is it because she has flouted every rule in the Bollywood book and emerged a winner on her own terms?
The obvious point of reference is The Dirty Picture. For two months before the movie released, Vidya was everywhere. Never before in the history of Indian cinema has a star done so much publicity for a film. And The Dirty Picture was not even a big budget special effects extravaganza like say Ra.One. But Vidya appeared on every television show you could think of (and many that you would never have thought of) and in every print publication. So perhaps India is going crazy over Vidya Balan because she is so ubiquitous today, more omnipresent than even Anna Hazare.
Or it could be that they all think that Vidya is terrific in the movie (which she is)? Few actresses could have carried off that role with so much aplomb and managed to hold their own against an actor o the calibre of Naseeruddin Shah who gives one of his best ever performances. But if you ask me it’s none of these things. India has fallen in love with Vidya Balan all over again (and we’ve been here before after the release of Parineeta and once again after Lage Raho Munnabhai though it’s- never been quite so intense) not because of her current ubiquity or because of any individual film but because we have finally come to terms with who she is.
In an industry full of size zero figures, dancing bimbettes and self-consciously trendy bejeaned muppets, Vidya comes off as a breath of fresh air. Basically, it’s this simple: she is a real person.
Everything about her is real: the curves, the little roll of fat that she makes no attempt to hide, the clothes that she chooses herself, the roles that she agonises over before finally selecting one that suits her, the hard work she puts into each performance and then into the promotion, and most of all, the guts she demonstrates in finding her own path against the advice of nearly everybody in Bollywood.But the road to success was painful. She had faced tremendous failure, trying hands in Malyalum, Tamil film industry with sting of disastrous movies. Desperate to find some work at least, she agreed- to act in a Euphoria music video directed by Pradeep Sarkar. This time she was not replaced and the video was completed but there was a fight between labels and the release of the video was stalled.
So, after three years in the film industry, Vidya Balan had been replaced in twelve Malayalam movies, two Tamil films and had made one music video which had been caught up in a legal quagmire and not released. You tell me: wouldn’t you give up at this stage? Anybody else would. But Vidya wouldn’t. And she didn’t. When asked her about her state of mind during that phase. She says that it took every ounce of will power to keep from giving up.
She went everywhere for roles: on one occasion she walked from Nariman Point to Bandra, a considerable distance. At other times, she sat for hours at the Saibaba temple praying with tears running down her cheeks. (“I am a person with a lot of faith and I have conversations all the time but I am not so religious in the conventional, organised sense,” she says).
Then, slowly, her luck began to change. She was cast in a Bengali film and discovered that she was a Bengali at heart and learnt to speak the language fluently. (She even sings Bengali songs, one of which she sang on cam- era for me when I seemed somewhat dubious about her linguistic abilities). Pradeep Sarkar who had kept casting her in ad films and other music videos never lost faith. He had planned to make Parineeta for producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra and insisted that Vidya would make a perfect heroine.
A nervous wreck. Her career had stalled in two different film industries (Malayalam and Tamil) and her reputation for bringing bad luck to projects had spread far and wide. This was really a make or break situation for her. But oddly enough, she says, she was never nervous. She knew what was at stake. She knew it was her last chance. And she knew that the camera was her best friend. (“The camera is my confidante,”she says. “I speak directly to it.”).
So she gave it everything she had. And the rest is history. It hasn’t exactly been an uphill struggle since the massive success of Parineeta. Lage Raho Munnabhai gave her the stamp of commercial accept- ability and it would have been easy enough for her to have joined the Bollywood rat race since success seemed to come so easily and naturally to her. But after some strange films like Hey Baby and Kismet Konnection in which she tried to pretend to be what she is not a Bollywood bimbette Vidya decided that this was not part of her original dream.
“At some stage my sister and broth- er-in-law sat me down and asked me why I had become anactress,” she remembers.
Coming to the movie itself, it talks about the life of the heroine who, like Silk Smitha, became the ultimate symbol of sensuality and the ups and downs such a typecasting has in an exploitative industry like Indian cinema. Full of raunchy dance numbers, red-lip- stick and bold dresses, Vidya is definitely at the centre of all this limelight.
– Divakar Shetty