All of Revathi’s recent films— Amma Kanakku , Inji Iduppazhagi , Margarita with a Straw —are based on social themes. But she doesn’t want to be typecast as an actress who only does such films. “Directors are already a bit hesitant to approach me,” she says. “I think they’ve decided to come to me only with what they deem to be challenging roles.” Her upcoming animation film, Punyakoti , decidedly falls into this ‘challenging’ category. For one, it is her first animation film, and for another, she had to dub in Sanskrit.
“The bit of Sanskrit I learned in school wasn’t quite enough,” she laughs. That’s why director Ravi Shankar’s 13-year-old daughter, Sneha, was brought in to train her. “I found it incredible that she could speak such good Sanskrit, considering how the language is scarcely used in conversations. The very structure of the language posed problems. “The English sentence, ‘I want to leave’, when in Sanskrit, would read, ‘Leave, I want to’. I’d sit with her every day and learn intricacies like intonation and stress.” She had the lines transliterated in Hindi, and the meaning of each Sanskrit word written underneath.
Why go through all this trouble? “Because I loved the story that is based on the folk tale, The Cow and the Tiger ,” she says. “In the story, the cow makes good her promise of returning to the tiger after fulfilling her duty to her calf. The moral is about the importance of keeping your word.” Like her previous films, Punyakoti has a social angle too. “It talks about how humans are affecting the eco-system. I guess I do like my roles to have some meaning.”
Revathi has a three-year-old baby, and so, for the moment, she’s quite content with doing two or three films every year. “I wish I could do a film with director Bala though. I think he writes great characters.” She has already communicated her interest to him. Like the tiger in the folk tale, she hopes that Bala will make good on his promise.
