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Growing into a new role
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Barely thirty days into motherhood and Malavika is already a transformed person. She tells us the feminist in her has had its rough edges shorn off
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Photo : Bhagya prakash K.
opting out Malavika has made a conscious decision to stay away from stereotypical roles
Enough has been written about her career as an actress and the anomaly that her National Law School background presents to her image as a performer. But what has often escaped mention is Malavika Avinash’s intellect. For an industry which pride
s itself on its ability to deliver an unending list of “pretty young things”, bracketing the rebellious Malavika has always been a somewhat onerous task.
She is back again in public life after an eight-month hiatus, with her 30-day-old baby boy in her arms. Malavika’s first statements are more a confession of a new-found sobriety: “Suddenly the ‘so what’ facet of my personality has receded. My indifference for future consequences of my actions has been replaced with a realisation of the fact that somebody really special is so helplessly dependent on me.”
But as the conversation progresses it becomes apparent that the rebel in her has only made a transition from an unbridled, free-speaking radical to a focussed campaigner.
“The feminist in me has had its rough edges shorn off. A few years, maybe even a few months ago, I would have pounced on someone if I saw the slightest hint of sexism, an insensitive joke or statement would have me going ballistic. I am perhaps a little more tolerant now.”
Her political ambitions too are yet to be doused.
“I am surely not a radical communist. However, as a youngster who grew up in post-Emergency India, I am a socialist by default. For someone like me politics is a natural progression.”
Although a critic of the “world is getting smaller” theory, she confesses that she too has been subsumed by globalisation. She points to the mobile phone in her hands and the big car we are travelling in. “The smaller aspirations of life make way for the big dream. With globalisation of the American dream everything has to be big — big car, big house, big budget cinema…”
Going by that, art cinema too should have been a natural progression for her? “Where is the opportunity for good art cinema? Even Malyalam cinema, which used to be an option once, has deteriorated to the level of dancing around trees. One has to make a living,” she shrugs.
“Television is a very restrictive medium,” she complains. Clarifying quickly that she has not become cynical she says: “It is just that there are very few boxes to fit into, in fact only two — good and bad. That can be stifling.”
Revealing that, against all odds, she has managed to stay away from the tag of being a “saas bahu” actor she says: “I have consciously stayed away from roles where I am asked to play a jobless woman whose only occupation is sitting in the kitchen and plotting murder.”
She is not a great fan of commercial cinema either. She has tried being a production person too and was the programming head of a Kannada Television Channel.
But she does not have very fond memories from that experience.
“I thought programming would be a creatively challenging job. But it overflowed into administrative duties so often that I got tired of being a logistics person.”
This is a woman who has problems with being static and predictable.
When confronted about her constant obsession for something new she concedes with a sly grin: “It is not the system’s mistake. It is my mistake. I am a freedom freak and happier for it.”
SUDIPTO MONDAL
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