Aditi Rao Hydari: A Royal Act

From Padmaavat's Mehrunisa to the tragic Anarakali of Taj: Divided by Blood, the actor is combining her acting chops with her timeless beauty to a stunning effect. With two more period dramas coming up this year, we decode her regal charm on screen and off it

- Ananya Ghosh

One of the most poignant-yet-poetic scenes of ZEE5's magnum opus, Taj: Divided by Blood comes in the penultimate episode: A caged Anarkali is dancing under the frail beam of light coming from the sole window of her gloomy prison. She knows that her end is near, but it is her dance of freedom - freedom from her pain and years of suffering; that of her soul leaving its walled existence of her mortal body. Aditi Rao Hydari as Anarkali is a vision of beauty and elegance as she creates magic with her lithe moves. Her Anarkali, unlike the one made iconic by Madhubala in the 1960 classic, Mughal-E-Azam, isn't the glamorous and smiling courtesan, but a woman held captive since her early teens to be physically abused by a man double her age - at his whim. She is a teenage mother, whose child has been taken away from her, just as her own childhood has. She is stoic, defiant, vulnerable, broken, and scared. And Hydari fits the part to the T. Instead of Madhubala, the actor with her glassy, melancholia-laden eyes and fragile beauty, reminds one of another screen icon: the inimitable Meena Kumari, also known as the tragedy queen. In fact, Hydari's filmography might make her a worthy candidate for the moniker, some of her best moments on screen are as a broken woman holding on to the last remnants of resilience. But their lives could not have been more different.