For the first time in my career I seem to have a lot to do,” says actor Rasika Dugal, evidently in jest.
After several planned meet-ups that went nowhere, we catch up with the actor in the nick of time, just as she is about disappear under a pile of work.
The shoot for a 130-episode series for Star World, directed by Nikhil Advani and based on the Israeli TV show Prisoners of War (on which Homeland is also loosely based), will be keeping her terribly busy in the months to come. There’s also a TVF web series, Humorously Yours, round the corner and Nandita Das’s film Manto, in which she plays Manto’s wife Safiya (Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays the titular role).
That’s not all.
She is also currently hosting a TV show for Epic channel, Devlok with Devdutt Pattanaik , which she describes as a journey through various aspects and concepts of Indian mythology, epics and folklore. And then there’s an Indo-German film, Once Again , with Neeraj Kabi and Shefali Chhaya also waiting in the wings.
What had been preventing her from keeping so busy earlier, we ask as she sips on her aam panna tea.
“I wonder why,” she says, “I haven’t strategised anything. Perhaps the films I did weren’t as popular or didn’t get a good release. I have always felt the loss of not having a film with a good release.” There were also a few projects on the horizon that stayed put there, didn’t work out eventually.
The FTII graduate did small roles in a clutch of films (10 to be precise) to begin with, including No Smoking , Agyaat , and Anwar .
The breakthrough came with Santosh Sivan’s Tahaan .
But it was her performances in the Hindi version of the play Vagina Monologues, and Kshay (2011) and Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost (2013) that helped her get noticed.
A wide spectrum
If one were to use one word to describe her style, it would be fluid. As Chhaya (in Kshay ), a housewife inexplicably drawn to and obsessed with an unfinished Lakshmi sculpture as a possible cure-all for life’s problems and worries, Dugal was very effective portraying the inner workings and dissolution of her character with ease. She was luminous, the spot of sunshine, in Qissa, as Neeli, who encourages Kanwar (Tillotama Shome) to give up on a life of deceptions and face the reality.
Perhaps it’s all a matter of timing and chance then. Or perhaps, it’s her experimentation in content that’s increasing and the audience is more accepting of her kind of actors and roles.
But Dugal seems to have been caught unawares now that there is a deluge of good work. Her shoot for PoW got advanced by a month, preventing her from rehearsing, researching, working on and exploring the various aspects of the character. “But then TV is about building a character over the episodes rather than coming on the show prepared right at the start,” she says.
Dugal is impressed with the writing in her TVF comedy, which will have five episodes every season. “Somehow we always end up seeing women as downtrodden or as these angry feminists. We never see them as funny.”
The TVF show also gives her a shot at comedy, which she is looking froward to. “I was never seen as a comic actor when I came out of FTII.”
The performer in Dugal has a mind of her own and strong ideas about her craft and what it involves. The early days as an actor are about getting spontaneously involved rather than thinking about the film holistically, she feels. Gradually, as you get to learn at work, your own impulses come to fore. “It’s easier to give in to the director, but a challenge to have one’s own process as an actor and make it work, without getting scared of messing it up.” The pressure of always wanting to be good at everything has to be kept at bay.
The constant student
Acting is a constant learning process in other ways as well. Like what she learnt about Manto through the upcoming film: that he was a doting husband; that Safiya read his work first before it was published. “Ismat and Manto were a staple while studying in Lady Shri Ram College in DU [Delhi University], but it’s the first time I saw him as a family man.”
Dugal spent her college days at Delhi University. Later, when she studied Social Communications Media at the Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, it was all about activism, politics and ideology, and being hugely influenced by journalist P. Sainath. Another of Dugal’s favourite teachers from those days, writer Jerry Pinto, is a stronger force now, with fiction, cinema and theatre taking centre stage in her life.
One of her longest and most rewarding associations and learning experiences has been with Vagina Monologues . “I have journeyed with the content. The comfort level is such that I can do it any time, can play any of the roles,” she says. The concept was new when it started: about initiating conversations in women about sexuality. “But now the whole conversation on gender has changed. It needs to be tweaked and reassessed, but I don’t know how. I do keep improvising the opening piece though.”
For Dugal, theatre, TV, cinema is not three different media. It’s been all about working with different people and varied teams. She looks at commercial cinema as an interesting space, but also wonders if you can do good work in a bad film.
“Till now,” she says, “I have been spoilt by directors who have invested a lot in the script, the characters and the film.” She hopes the future has more of the same.
