Sometimes interviews can get quite stream of consciousness, with thoughts jumping from one disparate topic to another. A day before Gandhi’s 150th anniversary, and immediately after wrapping up a feature on Hindi filmmakers’ portrayal of the Mahatma, I launch into a conversation with Richa Chadha, only to have her point out that, coincidentally, her mother happens to be a professor of Gandhian studies at Delhi University and had interviewed two of his close associates for her PhD thesis.
Then, in a matter of a few minutes, the actor switches track, saying, “Dude, I am so excited Kalki [Koechlin] is pregnant.” Chadha has to rush after our rendezvous to work with a friend on a charity and that sets her off on an entirely different thought process. Every month she works on two to three different causes that resonate with her. “It takes up a lot of my time. Sometimes it feels like a separate job but I do it,” she says, adding, “I need to keep doing things that need to be done.” At times under the radar and often publicly on Instagram.
Of cats and hamsters
There are several such interesting facets to the 32-year-old that come to the fore over avocado toast, lime water and ginger ale at Bollywood’s favourite hangout in Juhu, Soho House. Like how she likes taking local trains, metros and rickshaws to keep herself grounded. Like her love for cats, who she regards as her family. She has two of them right now, Jugni Chadha and Kamli Chadha — Jugni, rescued from a breeder, was presented to her by boyfriend Ali Fazal on her birthday in 2017. “I didn’t want to call them by a name I didn’t grow up hearing. Like Whiskers.”
- “When I saw Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s Super Deluxe , I was blown by it. I hadn’t seen someone so comfortable taking shots from so far away — between two tankers, between two lanes. I liked it so much that I went back and saw Aaranya Kaandam .”
Soon I steer the conversation to her calling, acting, and how she’d always been interested in it. Chadha made a small but sparkling debut in Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! back in 2008 and has since carved her own unique space with films like Gangs of Wasseypur and Masaan . The most successful turn, which got her mass recognition, has been that of a tough-talking female don, Bholi Punjaban, in Fukrey and its sequel Fukrey Returns , her highest grossing film till date. Her latest, Section 375: Marzi Ya Zabardasti , has the audience divided on its stand on rape but is steady in the cinema halls weeks after its release. Meanwhile, Anubhav Sinha’s Abhi To Party Shuru Hui Hai , Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s Panga and Indrajit Lankesh’s Shakeela are coming up next.
Looking back from the relative comfort of the present, were the initial days in the industry full of struggle? “I am still struggling, I feel. The level of it changes but the struggle really doesn’t stop. First you have to struggle to audition, then to get the part, then to hold your own in it. You struggle for your release/promotions, how you are accepted... it is as if we are hamsters on a wheel. But acting is a profession in which you have the luxury to take six months off,” she says. How would she say her career is poised right now? “I actually don’t think about it. I used to worry a bit too much. Bad experiences have made me arrive at this space in my mind; I am not careless, I am carefree,” she says.
Jack of all trades
The Delhi (Jamuna Paar, to be precise) girl has been parked firmly in Mumbai since 2008. The student of Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and St Stephen’s College regards her academic stint at SCM Sophia (Social Communications Media) as the most intense, life-altering one. It fired her brain, made her aware of her potential. That was also the one year of her life when she, curiously, forgot all about acting. Instead, she became aware of things like privilege and how not to deny your own perspective in life. “When things are happening really fast, you can opt for being another person. But SCM kept me centred, made me not lose empathy.”
Ironically, empathy is the one quality she thinks an actor has to possess in good measure. “You can’t be a good actor if you are not a good person. Acting is probably the only profession where you are relying only on empathy. You better cry when I am crying on screen, otherwise I have flopped.”
- Chadha is in a relationship with her Fukrey co-star Ali Fazal, who, after sharpening his acting skills opposite Judi Dench in Victoria& Abdul , is now shooting for Kenneth Branagh’s star-studded Death on the Nile . The two are known for exchanging sweet nothings on Twitter.
Apart from SCM, her parents — Punjabi dad and Bihari mum, whose names she insists on keeping a secret — have been her other source of inspiration, their names inscribed as a tattoo on her right hand (which she hides from the press, most certainly from yours truly). Her father, who had been into organisational and behavioural psychology, is semi-retired now and recently did an RJ and then a vaastu course. “He does these cool, new things. That’s what I love about him,” she says.
So, for Chadha, too, there’s more to life than acting, more interests than just films. When she is not shooting, she dabbles in things like making miniatures, a table out of old suitcases, singing. She learnt to ride a bike recently. Earlier she went to Kazakhstan to explore a new form of dance. “It is tribal fusion belly dancing which is very eastern influenced, as also by Indian forms like Odissi,” she says. Next, she may also write a script. Is there anything you don’t do or haven’t done, I wonder. “Why are you sounding like my shaadi.com portfolio?” she shoots back.
NEW DELHI, INDIA - SEPTEMBER 13: Bollywood actress Richa Chadda poses during a profile shoot for HT City, on September 13, 2018 in New Delhi, India. (Photo by Raajessh Kashyap/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
Standing by her opinion
Chadha is intelligent, can’t help not speak her mind, and is a disruptive presence, but in her own nonchalant yet witty way. When the server asks us about allergies, she is quick to point out that she is allergic to idiots. “I am trying to be open-minded, but not for the sake of being woke,” she says. She feels the urgent need to not be judgemental and have a dialogue in the increasingly polarised world. “One needs to hear what people are saying than get caught in the grammar of it... It is not a healthy way to exist if people keep screaming into their own echo chambers.”
She is also open about taking criticism on the chin for her last successful, though problematic, venture, Section 375. Wasn’t it upsetting that the film should take a pro rape-accused stance than that of the survivor, specially in the light of the #MeToo movement? “The film was discussed first when the #MeToo movement hadn’t even broken out in Hollywood... I thought really long about it, and I felt even one contrarian point of view doesn’t make it an invalid point of view. I find the notion that women are inherently more noble than men sexist in itself,” she says.
She confesses, however, that she’d found the first version of the script problematic and was on her way out of the project when Ajay Bahl took over as the director. “We couldn’t change the structure, so we tried to make it more procedural,” she says. For her, the film is actually on the side of the law. “It questions patriarchy in the procedural everydayness of it, which is what draws you in.” But, I argue, that towards the end, with one stroke, the complexity that’s built up is diluted. “Well, that’s your opinion and I’m glad you have it,” she says.
Trying new things
Her forthcoming film, Shakeela , on the well-known star of adult films of the late 90s, is about the exploitation of a woman. Did she ever fear that in dealing with the issue of exploitation it might get exploitative itself? “That’s not the take of the film,” she says, “If it was [problematic] I wouldn’t be working in it.” According to her, it is about a young girl who is the breadwinner of the family, is pushed into the profession by her mother, and who earns tonnes of money only to lose it in ponzi schemes. “It’s about a woman in adult films who refused to sleep with a superstar and suffered for it,” she says. She hopes it will be dubbed in many languages and will have a pan-India appeal.
The film marked many firsts for her: working with a director who’s never worked in Hindi, learning Kannada on a non-Hindi speaking film set. As part of her research, she also met Shakeela a few times and found her an uncomplicated person, open to answering questions. But, Chadha confesses she didn’t read too much about her lest she got biased. As the conversation winds down, she moves from biases to how she wants to see her characters in the “grey zone rather than pure black and white”.
In a matter of days after our tête-à-tête, she is on her way to Wai for a short shoot schedule of a new film (that she can’t reveal anything about). Meanwhile, a book with Penguin is on the anvil, in which she is attempting to look at the long-term effects of colonialism. “It sounds academic, but it is not. It is observational. I see a connect between how we live and the immediate past, which is the last 100 years,” she says. “If someone is trying to make me fairer for a shoot, where does that complex come from?”
‘Renaissance woman’ — I wonder if that’s what she is, as I wait to hear what she intends attempting next.
