BEING LEGEND

A wife on fire. A madam who hustles. Waving a gun and being Vinod Khanna's girlfriend on screen....Shabana Azmi's 50-year-long journey in Indian cinema was commemorated with a conversation with actor-director Aparna Sen at the Habitat Film Festival this weekend.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

BETWEEN Shabana Azmi and Aparna Sen, there is Shyam Benegal, but not in the way you think. The connection is a story of lost opportunities, but the memories of it are friendly. Sen was one of the four actors in the reckoning to play Laxmi's role in Shyam Benegal's Ankur (1974); the role eventually went to Azmi—it was to be her debut film. The camaraderie was much in evidence at the programme this weekend to mark Azmi's 50 years in Indian cinema, part of the ongoing 17th Habitat Film Festival, and the two talked on stage before an audience in 'a conversation' that seemed to have begun from years ago, and continues.

"Shabana Azmi is an inspiration to all actors," Sen said by way of an introduction to open the conversation, with Azmi cutting in to say: "She never said that even once in the four films we did together!" while the audience guffawed. Sen and Azmi have shared the screen in Ek Din Achanak and Sonata; Aparna Sen's Picnic, Sati, 15 Park Avenue and Sonata has Azmi as the lead.

Sen said she had been "scared" to take up Benegal's offer to play a Hyderabadi servant girl who could speak a smattering of Telugu but added in mock seriousness that Benegal could have persuaded her. Azmi, unsurprisingly for an actor who passed out with a gold medal from the FTII, pulled off the role with no sign of first-film jitters.

She didn't speak Telugu, but she could and did speak Dakhini, a dialect of Urdu that borrows from Marathi. Azmi's Laxmi is a woman of touching vulnerability and pragmatism. She hums as she grinds spices and takes charge of the kitchen and sweeps the floors of Chhote Sarkar (played by Anant Nag); she is the housekeeper who sits at some distance from him, when in the solitude of village life he needs conversation; she also shares his bed when her husband briefly disappears without warning, but all with destitute eyes. They reflect back that she knows she will be discarded when he gets a high-caste wife.