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Actor Swara Bhaskar in Chandigarh on Thursday. Express photo by Jasbir Malhi
The moment she heard she would have to play mother to a 15-year-old, actress Swara Bhaskar’s first instinct was to turn down the role. “I was prepared to say no because I was anxious about the age of the character, and that she was a mother to a teenager. But when I heard the script of Nil Battey Sannata, I knew I had to do it,” says Bhaskar.
In Chandigarh for a Punjabi film award ceremony, a hyper-energetic Bhaskar, between make-up, lunch and cleaning spree of her hotel room, talks about her challenging role in this unusually titled film.
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Directed by debutant filmmaker Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and penned by Nitesh Tiwari, who is directing Aamir Khan starrer Dangal, Nil Battey Sannata (a UP slang that means ‘good for nothing’) is an inspiring and endearing story of a poor single mother who comes up with an ingenious plan to convince her rebellious daughter to study. “It’s a film that resonates with family values, empowering one to dream and not let the past or present limit the future,” says Bhaskar.
After her 2013 indie film Listen…Amaya, this is Bhaskar’s second shot at a mother-daughter relationship, only this time, the roles are reversed. “In Listen Amaya, I played Deepti Naval’s daughter, and here Ria Shukla plays my little girl,” says Bhaskar for whom, the challenge was two-fold: to play an older woman, and that too a maid.
Playing a younger part is always easier, adds Bhaskar, for one has lived those moments. To understand her character, Chanda, Bhaskar did countless interviews with maids and conversations with her own mother on motherhood. “We were conscious of not presenting a caricature of a maid. That she has respect, dignity, a mind and philosophy of her own was paramount,” says Bhaskar whose sociology background makes her approach each character in an academic spirit, to understand its social context and background in order to give it more weight and definition.
There are positive take backs too. While Ranjhanaa’s Bindiya taught the cynic in her to love, Chanda, she says, removed her ‘actress’ anxeity of getting married, having kids and ageing. In her next, Anarkali Aarawali, Bhaskar’s got inside the world of orchestra performers, and plays a ‘nautch girl’. For someone who never knew about facials or make-up, Anarkali Aarawali will see Bhaskar all dolled up, her ‘badass, foul-mouthed character’ shimying on stage. But that’s Bhaskar — vocal, opinionated, reckless even.
Be it her explosive open letter during the JNU controversy, her progressive counter-culture collective online called the Swang Song, rejecting roles or her opinion on pay structure for actresses, Bhaskar rarely minces her words. “Equal pay will happen when we get equal roles and that will happen when scripts are written accordingly,” feels Bhaskar, who has been rejecting roles because she has ‘exhausted herself in the space of the friend of the leading lady’.
“I came to Mumbai to give my dream a shot. I auditioned my way up, and now am carrying a film on my shoulders,” says the actress, all set to explore more unchartered territories.
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