By Ask any working actor today in the Hindi film industry, and chances are they’ll cite Shabana Azmi as an inspiration. Over a career of 160-plus films that began in 1974, not to mention a record five National Film Awards (India’s equivalent of the Oscars; the most won by any Indian actress), Azmi has demonstrated an extraordinary range that few have approached since.
Though she also worked in commercial Hindi films, Azmi primarily made her mark through the Parallel Cinema movement, a school of filmmaking that prioritized social realism. Without Azmi’s presence, the simmering class tensions of “Ankur,” the marital heartbreak and eventual resilience of “Arth,” or the shocking violence of “Nishant” would lose their main emotional anchor and their long-lasting resonance today. As she built her prolific film career, Azmi also performed onstage, including in “Tumhari, Amrita” (“Yours, Amrita”)—an Indian context adaptation, written by Javed Siddiqui, of A.R. Gurney’s play “Love Letters”—a play she performed for 21 years along with co-star Farooque Sheikh.
In addition to her Indian filmography, Azmi’s body of work includes collaborations with Deepa Mehta, Gurinder Chadha, Blake Edwards, Roland Joffe, John Schlesinger, and Ismail Merchant. Currently, she stars in “Batwara 1947,” a Hindi film directed by Rajkumar Santoshi and based on a play by Asghar Wajahat. Set during the upheaval of Partition, the film follows the Muslim Mirza family (a married couple, played by Sunny Deol and Preity Zinta), forced to leave India and resettle in Lahore, Pakistan. Although they are allotted a local house, they are startled to find it still occupied by an elderly Hindu woman (Azmi), who refuses to leave. Her refusal to depart triggers an emotional conflict both inside the home and in the community at large.
Azmi recently spoke with RogerEbert.com about life in film and theater, working with frequent collaborators, and feeling naked, literally and figuratively, at different moments in her career.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Parts of the interview have also been translated from Hindi to English.
There’s a scene in “Batwara 1947” that really intrigued me. Mai, your character, is being verbally assaulted and physically threatened by Javed Mirza, who has been radicalized by the violence he has witnessed during Partition. He promises to either evict Mai by force or kill her. Javed’s mother Hamida stands in shock, witnessing her son’s newfound vitriol, while Mai cowers in fear.
Immediately after he leaves, Mai turns to Hamida and says, in complete sincerity, “This is your son, isn’t it? Who was missing? I’m so glad he’s come home to you safely.” She’s able to possess two dissonant realities simultaneously: she’s terrified, and yet overjoyed for the safe return of a son who is vowing to kill her. Can you talk to me about your approach for that scene?
It’s very important that you pointed out that moment because nobody else has, and I do think it is a very important moment. For me, that moment expresses the strength of humanity. For me, when you are able to rise above your own terror and your fear, for something which is the very essence of who you actually are as a human being and the values that you bring to life. Now, with Mai, you see that all the time with her that there is just basically a humanity in her, that even when she’s frightened, when these people come, she basically changes within two minutes, as though the sun turned into shade. In one moment, she says, I’m not leaving from here. And then she says [to Hamida], there is wood [to make a] fire over there, and make sure that you speak to the rickshaw driver in the beginning; otherwise, they’ll take you for a ride. That’s what makes her very, very much like very many women that I knew of that age.
I assume that you were familiar with the play. Was there a discussion about maintaining the play’s beats within the script?
I saw the play a long time ago. So I just have memories of moments in it. But after that, when I was given the script, I stuck with it, and I didn’t try to find moments that were different from the play. I just went with the script that came to me. For me, the part that I had to struggle with is…I don’t know how to say that. I felt there is a goodness to her that I, as Shabana Azmi, don’t have, and that was a big struggle for me, because as a person, I am strong, strong-willed, and opinionated. In my heart, because I know women of that kind—who are just goodness embodied—it was very difficult for me to reach that, to climb over everything that Shabana Azmi is—[and] reach that moment of purity.
You once said that your preferred method for working is to start in the middle, because you haven’t yet inherited the world of the character. Have there been times, either during rehearsals for a play or on the set of a film, that you found your way to a character very quickly?
There are very different ways in which I inhabit the world of a character, and there is no method to it. It sort of dictates itself. Sometimes I feel I open the window and then shut it. Sometimes I just peer from behind the glass door. Sometimes I jump straight into the living room. I don’t know what propels me to do either of those, to make either of those choices. But if I were to say broadly, for instance: when I did “Mandi,” I went “Boom!” right there. I was there in the center space, as compared to “Khandar,” which I was filming simultaneously. “Khandar” I did almost immediately after that, and there I was, looking through parted windows, looking gingerly, not knowing at what point I could enter, and that process in itself becomes a way of inhabiting the world of that character.
That’s why I find acting so fascinating. Because it allows you to imagine through your work that you love, it allows you to inhabit the world of characters you would never have known, and gives you the opportunity to live the life of that character at the same time as you give that character the life that you, as a person, have lived.
Shabana Azmi (l) and Farooque Sheikh (r) performing “Tumhari, Amrita.”
You and the late, great Farooque Sheikh performed “Tumhari, Amrita” for 21 years. The director, Feroz Abbas Khan, famously told you both that “You must not learn your lines,” which feels like such a counterintuitive directive. What did you both discover about yourself and Amrita over the course of playing her for so long?
I have to give credit to Javed Siddiqui, who wrote her so beautifully. She’s such a beautifully written part. In fact, she’s my favorite person that I have ever played. She’s full of faults; she’s angry, she’s petulant, she’s lovely, she’s generous, she’s warm, she’s mad, and she’s so many things. But listen, it was a huge challenge to have your director tell you, don’t learn your lines. The first thing that you ever learn is to learn your lines, and then forget about them. So that at the time of the performance, the lines don’t get in the way of the emotion. That’s the whole point of knowing the lines. So you don’t have to struggle with the lines. You’re only dealing with the emotion at that time.
And here was a director who was saying, “No, I don’t want you to fake reading the letter. You are actually reading the letter, and if you don’t actually read it, you will fake it, and it won’t come.” So the penny dropped here, and then I realized that, all right, this is a discipline that requires me to unlearn everything I’ve learned before that. Of course, if you were doing it for 21 years, it’d be impossible that you wouldn’t know bits. But I didn’t know right up till the end what followed what each time, and so that gave an aliveness, if there is such a term, to [the performance] because the audience is a very important third character of “Tumhari, Amrita.” With every breath that they take, with every little giggle that they [give], something changes in the two characters because after all, you’re just sitting on two chairs and reading. And the interesting thing is that A.R. Gurney challenged [us] and said, “It is not a radio play. I promise you, you will have a theatrical experience. It will not be. I have written it so,” and you had to honor that because that was his vision. When people saw “Tumhari, Amrita,” they said that it didn’t sound like a radio play. You experienced the whole lives of these characters over the years you played them.
So sometimes, depending on where I was coming from and what was happening, I played her more vulnerably. Sometimes she was more defiantly played. I didn’t have a fixed way of playing her, and I never decided I would. Also, what is challenging in a live performance is learning to anticipate the audience’s reactions. So you brace yourself: all right, I’m going to take this pause now, and they are all going to burst out laughing. Woe betide you if you start depending on that, because I promise you, you will let yourself down the minute you are there expecting: now comes the laughter. You will be shocked because nobody will react at that particular moment. That is what makes it so fascinating. You cannot take it for granted, and the minute you become overconfident, you’ve lost it. The minute you become cheeky, you’ve done three good shows, three nights one after the other, and the fourth night you say, “I know it all.” You will do the very worst thing that you can ever do. It has happened so unerringly that whenever we’ve tried to feel smug, it hasn’t worked, so it keeps your humility.
You grew up with two legends for parents: an actress mother, Shaukat Azmi, and a poet father, Kaifi Azmi, and your home was regularly visited by luminaries from the worlds of theater, music, film, and literature, who attended your parents’ mushairas. I wondered whether early exposure to this recitation of language from so many different voices, from so many different backgrounds, may have affected how you later approached learning and delivering dialogue.
I would also wake every morning to see my father sitting with my mother and giving her the [dialogue] cues, because she would recite her lines and he would give her cues over tea. That was a ritual I saw every day. So the importance of words and sensitivity to words was something that, again, [happened] by a process of osmosis.
You’ve mentioned a love for Ingmar Bergman, and have cited Liv Ullman as an inspiration for your career. One of my favorite films of yours is “Tehzeeb,” which is inspired by Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata.” There are multiple layers to that film: you’re playing the part based on Ingrid Bergman’s role, and Urmila Matondkar plays the part originated by Liv Ullman. This was the first time you and Matondkar were reuniting onscreen since she debuted as your child in “Masoom.” What was shooting that film like?
It couldn’t have been more complicated and crazier than that. So what we decided was to get away from the enormity of it all and really dumb ourselves down. One of the things that we did constantly was “I hate Urmila Matondkar in real life, and I hate Dia Mirza in real life,” because I was constantly on a diet when I was playing that [part], and both these slim girls with perfect figures would eat batata vada in front of me and eat bhajiya every single day, and I would curse them. “You’re just the worst co-actors anybody can have. You have absolutely no empathy for the fact that I’m just eating steamed fish every day.” They would have the time of their lives, but they both continue to be very, very dear friends and part of a very small coterie of very dear friends that we have. So I always feel very fortunate that I tend to have relationships with my co-stars that go far beyond the film. Normally it’s a project, and then after that you don’t meet up. But fortunately, that’s not the case.
Did you observe a difference in Khalid Mohammed’s approach to technique or character on the set of “Tehzeeb” because of his background as a film critic?
I think I looked for it, even if it was not there. I think he was able to keep the critic away and focus on what he was trying to make. I don’t think it’d be fair if I said that his being a film critic hampered his being a director. I don’t think so.
When you look back at what you did in “Ankur,” your debut film, and for which you won a National Film Award, can you pinpoint the artistic decisions you made, or was it just a sort of alchemy with Anant Nag and Sadhu Meher?
For me, the physicality of it was what took away a lot of my attention. I had to wear the palla of the sari very short, which means it keeps falling down, and obviously you can’t pin it in a particular way. So you have to get used to that movement. I couldn’t sit on my haunches, and that for [director] Shyam Benegal was a no-no because most of my work [as Laxmi] was in the hut, in which I’m sitting on my haunches and cooking. He told me, “You’re not going to sit at the dining table with us and have lunch. You sit on the ground, in the corner, and you have your lunch there.” I did that diligently.
On about the fourth or fifth day, while we were shooting, a group of college-age boys came by the set and said, “Where is the heroine?” So I said, “She hasn’t come today.” They said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m the ayah.” They said, “Ah, okay, okay, come, come, let’s go.” Shyam was watching this from the corner of his eye, and he said, “Now you’ve earned your place. Now you can come and sit with us and have lunch because you convinced those people that you were actually sitting on your haunches and eating.”
That was the kind of discipline I had to [engage in], and the emotions took second place. [Even] the [harvesting] of the red chilies, there’s a certain rhythm to it, and the village women would laugh at me that I was an urban person, and I didn’t even know something as simple as that. It was the first time I’d ever entered a village. I was this St. Xavier’s College, English-speaking child who’d gone there, and for the first three days, Shyam said, “Just wear your costume and just walk in the village. Familiarize yourself with the contours of the village.” That did something to me because I made friends with the village women. As I walked, I talked to them, and that broke the barrier between [us and them]. It was like we became kind of a family.
The one scene that I remember that I became completely dry is the scene where I wake up and I notice that Sadhu Maher has come back and I’m pregnant with his child. I could feel nothing, and so Shyam called for a break. We had lunch, and then he just started talking to me, not [asking] me why I had dried up, just talking to me about other things, and then talking to me about a woman that he had seen in a documentary on a Bengal famine, something about how vulnerable and helpless [she] looked. Suddenly, I just looked at him, and I said, “I’m ready.” [Cinematographer] Govind [Nihalani] was ready, because Shyam had told Govind that you have to be absolutely ready, and I went and boom. The dam broke, and it happened. Now, it could not have happened with a less sensitive director. He understood the block, and he worked it in a way that made me feel that if he had just said, “Oh, why are you doing this? Don’t worry, it’ll happen,” it would have made me even more nervous. So we had a different system. He was a psychologist in that kind of way.
I remember I was very upset with him in the scene in “Nishant” when [Sushila, my character] gets raped by those boys. [Shyam] was on top with the camera, and I was lying on the floor. And in those days, we didn’t have walkie-talkies. We didn’t have mics. You had to shout down orders, and from there he shouted at me, and he said, “Open your blouse! Open one more button of your blouse.” I felt so humiliated. I said, “He’s treating me like an object. He doesn’t even realize that I am here on a set, when there are so many people watching me.” I hated him; I hated the moment. After that, I broke down, ran out of the room, and wept and wept and wept.
Then that sweet Anant Nag came; he was sitting next to me, he was holding my hand and saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry this happened to you.” It was so sweet of him, and then he told Shyam that she was very upset that you said that. Then, of course, Shyam being Shyam, gave me a big hug and said, “I was very insensitive. I’m so, so sorry, Shabana. I’ll make sure nothing of that kind ever happens,” and it never happened in all the 40 years that I worked with him. You don’t know when you suddenly start to feel very exposed.
Shabana Azmi in “Batwara 1947.”
In fact, in “Batwara 1947,” there is that scene where you know the villain [rips my clothing] in the final act. I was lying on the street, and all the assistants went running to the monitor to see if the shot was okay, and not even one single girl assistant came up to me and tried to cover me up. Because I was lying like that, I could do precious little about it. I felt so humiliated and [it was so] horrible, my god! Then [executive producer] Amir [Khan] had come that day on the set, and I wept and howled, and then of course he called everybody. But in that moment, when I was feeling like that, when Sunny Deol came and just put that dupatta on me, I really felt he was my protector and my son. That moment is very, very, very strongly etched in my memory. So, being an actor and experiencing humiliation of this kind can be really tough. It can be very, very difficult.
I’m so sorry that happened to you. So, there are no intimacy coordinators in the Hindi film industry?
No, no, no. There weren’t. Now, I think, in intimate scenes, they’ve started doing that. Earlier, there was no such thing, but you know, this kind of sensitivity is only now being spoken about. Because otherwise, see, you were shooting 12 films at one time. Who had the time to think of anything, except that you just wore your makeup and said your lines and went away to the next? It was completely mad, the way we used to work.
In the West, intimacy coordinators are also a more recent creation. It’s not just for intimate scenes. It’s also for scenes of rape or assault, like the one you were in. It requires clearance from everyone in the scene: that this piece of your clothing will be ripped here, is that okay? But I don’t know what equivalent protections exist in the Hindi film industry.
I think we are learning on the job. But the fact that that was one of the rare days that Amir had come on the set, and he was so shocked to see me so vulnerable, and of course, then he called everybody, and then a big thing was made about it. It was just that I felt naked. I felt stripped. It was very, very, very difficult.
What you felt comes through very clearly in the scene.
And especially when [Mai] says, “Look what they’ve done!” Almost like a child, she says, “Look what they’ve done to my clothes!” But I remember similarly, I did a scene in “Arth” with Khulbhushan Kharbanda when I’m asked [his character] to give me one more chance, and I’m literally begging, and Mahesh Bhatt told me, “You’re not to cry.” Here I was, experiencing begging and humiliation, insulted, yet trying to keep my dignity. And of course, after the scene happened, I broke down and just wept for so long. Mahesh just said, leave her alone. She’ll get over it. After you worked for 50 years, you think that things should become mechanical. They can, but something triggers at some time, and some vulnerability of yours gets attached to that. I don’t think I can explain it in any way except that it happens sometimes, and it doesn’t happen sometimes.
Shabana Azmi in “Masoom.”
“Arth” and “Masoom” are interesting taken together because they’re both about infidelity. But they reach very different conclusions. Your character in the latter, Indu, chooses to forgive her husband because there’s an illegitimate child who needs a home, while “Arth” prioritizes a woman’s interiority, and your character, Pooja, walks away from that marriage with her spine intact. How have your own impressions of the films changed over time, given that you are two very different people in both films?
I was. Pooja to me is the person that you see only because of [director] Mahesh Bhatt, because there was such a strong chemistry between Mahesh and me. It was like he knew exactly how to press my buttons. We were very good friends. There was no complete script. There was just a story idea, and we wrote the scenes as we went along. I remember that scene in which I make an ass of myself at the party scene, where I go and confront [Kavita, the mistress character played by Smita Patil]. And what happened is that Babu Ram Ishara—who’s a friend of ours and of Mahesh and everybody—he spoke to Smita and then came and told Mahesh and me that, “Smita is feeling very uncomfortable about the scene, and I agree with her. I think that a woman like Pooja wouldn’t fall to such depths. She wouldn’t do such a thing.” This confused the daylights out of me because we thought of Babu Ram Ishara as a very liberal person, and I was getting ready for this scene, and then this happened. Then Smita’s costume wasn’t ready, so that day we didn’t shoot. Imagine you’re prepared for a confrontation scene, and it doesn’t happen.
The next day you go at it again, and Kiran, Mahesh’s wife, comes on the set, and I tell her, “Kiran, Babu-da is saying Pooja wouldn’t behave like this.” Kiran said, “Pooja would lift a slipper and hit someone. What do they mean? Nothing of the sort. She’d pick up a slipper and hit someone.” Oh my God! That gave me so much moral courage, I can’t tell you! Because that’s coming from right within her, and that gave me the strength then to do that scene. It takes a lot to let yourself go [for a scene like that]. So there were so many moments that just killed me in “Arth.” But it was a film we believed in so strongly, especially the ending.
When the distributors saw the film, they said it’s a wonderful film, it’s a beautiful film, but this ending won’t work: An Indian woman is not forgiving her husband after he’s asking for forgiveness. This film will not run a day! Mahesh and I just dug our heels in and said, “We’ve made this film for this end, and come what may, we will not change the end.” Thanks to Kuljit Pal, the producer, who went along with us, the film was released and became not only a critical success, but also a big commercial success. That shows you how often distributors are not in tune with what the audiences are ready for. The audiences were ready 20 years ago. At the same time, I did a film called “Yeh Nazdeekiyan,” [which has a similar plot] and finally [the wronged wife] goes back to her husband, and we thought that was the safer film. That film didn’t work, and “Arth” did, so people were ready for that.
You mentioned “Nishant” before. It’s the very last line of that film that haunts me. The mob is nearly upon Vishwam (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sushila (you), as they gasp for breath on a hill, and Vishwam asks, “How did this happen?” And Sushila simply says, “Will knowing the answer make it easier to die?”
So Vijay Tendulkar.
And then the movie ends. I don’t know what sequence you shot that in, but did you feel that in your body? How was it to film that scene?
So draining. So draining. Just the simplicity of that line is so powerful because that’s what Vijay Tendulkar’s writing is. He can just cut to the chase. And I remember when it was shown at Cannes, too. People talked about that film nonstop, and they talked about the violence in it. Actually, the actual violence that you see in the film is so little compared to what Hindi cinema routinely does. But just the strength of having that violence seem almost like it’s just around the corner.
For Vishwam, the violence has only now caught up to him. But for Sushila, this is just the logical extreme of everything that’s happened in the film. And this brings me to your lengthy onscreen collaboration with Naseeruddin Shah. You’ve said that working with him was always a pleasure because if you look your co-star in the eye and they’re always telling you the truth, your job was halfway done. What did you learn from working with him?
When I used to watch him, I realized he could calibrate his performance. I want to give 100% in every shot of mine. I want to please the director. Naseer has worked it out for himself, and he’s worked out that in this shot he needs to give only 70%, because then three scenes later, he’ll give 85%. It sounds all very calculated. It’s not like that. It’s almost instinctive, but there is a craft to it that he understands very, very well. But if you haven’t watched Naseer on stage, then you don’t know what kind of magic this actor has on stage. I can’t find any other words except to say I’ve never seen an actor breathe like him onstage. He could well be sitting in his drawing room. There is no tension whatsoever. He’s a brilliant, brilliant actor, and I’ve been very fortunate because we’ve played so many different roles together.
“Madame Souzatka.”
Speaking of collaborations, John Schlesinger directed you and Shirley MacLaine in “Madame Souzatka,” and watching that gave me the same pride as watching Om Puri and Helen Mirren in “The Hundred-Foot Journey,” because amazing things can happen when legends from different film industries work together. What was it like to work with the two of them?
Firstly, for a long time, Asians have been saying, why are we cast only for our ethnicity? Why can’t we move? Why can’t we have colorblind casting? So it’s really only as recently as “Halo,” when I played Admiral Paragonsky, that I did not have to change my accent. I didn’t have to change the color of my hair or eyes or whatever. So that is happening now.
But at that time, I remember I was the only Indian on the set, the only Asian on the set. So it was a very strange experience for me to be on that set, but Shirley MacLaine was lovely. She was so generous and so warm. We had some shots to do, and she wanted to go watch a play, so John took her close-ups. Then she came to me, and because they were my close-ups after that, and these were just silent close-ups, she said, “Shabana, I’m getting late. If I remove my wig and I give you your cues, would you mind?” I said, “Shirley. Such a thing does not happen in Hindi films. The actual actor never comes and gives you cues.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Some third assistant screams things. Nothing of that kind happens, and you’re being so considerate [by offering to just remove your wig].”
It was so generous and so wonderful, and she was so hardworking. She was so passionate. I remember the first couple of days I was staying at John Schlesinger’s house, and there would be Shirley MacLaine every day with her script, saying, “I’ve thought of yet another way that we can do this.” So for me, it was all very strange because this was Shirley MacLaine, and she was behaving like a newcomer. It was a completely different kind of experience,
The American actor Carrie Coon, who, like you, is a theater-trained actor, said her life isn’t lived on red carpets, and that she doesn’t define her life by box office numbers. She lives her life in rehearsal and in finding her character, exploring the beats of a scene with her co-actors, and trying to find the truth in any artistic endeavor she undertakes. Is that true for you? Is your life lived in the moments that we, the audience, don’t see?
Absolutely, absolutely. She couldn’t have said it better, and she couldn’t have literally echoed my thoughts. The red carpet and all that is such a small little part of this whole thing, honestly. Social media and this obsession with it is taking away from so many things and making everything so lightweight. We have to shut it out and say, this is what we are doing, and everything else has got absolutely nothing to do with my work over here. Uske bat bonus ya minus that is something completely separate. But this is what we need to concentrate on.
That’s not happening so much, unfortunately. Christopher Nolan said to me, “Hollywood is not interested in making films; they are making projects.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, don’t you see that it’s just big companies coming together and how they can make the maximum money and all that? It’s all speculative business. It’s not that you have a story that you’re dying to tell, and so you want to make it. And that seems to be happening the world over.” I only hope that it is a passing phase, because it would be very, very, very sad if the purity of telling a story is not the reason that you make a film.
It must remain that, because all the cinema that stays with you is because the filmmaker—whether it’s Satyajit Ray or whether it’s Ingmar Bergman or whether it’s Kurosawa—wanted to tell a story because we are all fascinated with stories, and I think that’s what we should keep our concentration on.
“Batwara 1947” is playing in theaters now.
