EVERGREEN SRIDEVI - A LEGEND BORN TO ACT| In Memoriam - Page 53

A term often used for performers and entertainers is "star power. Most of the time, it is a heady mix of talent, charisma, and the most important component, relatability. This last element is what truly binds an audience to a performer through the years. The star must be accessible to their adoring public, but only up to a point the rest must be shrouded in a mystique of their choosing. Sridevi, who died on Sunday, possessed such star power, that in the Seventies in Bollywood, it mattered to nobody that she did not speak a word of Hindi. They were in her thrall
anyway.

In her 35-year-long career in Indian cinema, Sridevi acted in 300 films an astounding body of work. She was known to be a consummate professional from her very first film at the age of four, and by the time she was 19, she was already a star in the south, where she acted in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada films she made them her own, belonged to them all. After her first Bollywood hit, Himmatwala (1983), the tabloids cruelly nicknamed her "Thunder Thighs, but that did not make Sridevi and her body type any less desirable to her Hindi-speaking audience.

There is a Sridevi-sized hole in the industry because there does not exist another actor, male or female, who can combine innocence with comedy, grace with fire, romance and dance, the way she could. She was the "hero in every film, she got the best lines; and so, she demanded a fair price, firmly making cracks in the glass ceiling in a way nobody else before her had done. In her second innings, Sridevi was showing us that she still had more tricks in her bag. Gone was the chirpy girl-woman of the Nineties, and in her two most recent outings, English Vinglish (2012) and last year's Mom, Sridevi made the most of silence in her portrayal of women her age; she played them with tenderness and steel in equal measure.

I first saw Sridevi at the mahurat of Chandni. It was the late 1980s and mahurats were still standard practice in Bollywood. A-list films were announced with fancy functions where a ceremonial shot was taken. We were at the poolside of Mumbai's Centaur hotel. Sridevi, a vision in a white sari, was on stage with co-stars Rishi Kapoor and Vinod Khanna. At one point, roses were showered on her like they are in the film. I remember her towering presence and her outsized stardom. She was glittering and seemed so much bigger than the heroes flanking her.

My mother Kamna Chandra had written the original story for Chandni. So I got to visit the sets and watch Yash Chopra work. I had little sense then of what an amazing opportunity this was. I was mostly interested in staring at Sridevi who had become the Chopra fantasy goddess resplendent in chiffons and white churidars. In some scenes, even the bangles were white. When the cameras were off, Sridevi said little. But when they were on, some sort of alchemy occurred and she was utterly transformed, becoming Chandni, a small-town girl whose fairy tale love story derails after her fiance is paralyzed in a helicopter crash.

In my mother's original story, Chandni marries Rishi Kapoor's character Rohit. They have a son. But post-crash Rohit becomes insecure. His family becomes abusive and finally Chandni walks out on her husband and young son. She finds a career and love again with Lalit, played by Vinod Khanna. The last scene had her son, now a teenager, coming with a bouquet of flowers to his mother's wedding because he understands her reasons for leaving and supports her quest for happiness.

Yashi ji loved the story but perhaps he felt it was too ahead of its times. And so after many discussions, the narrative became tamer Chandni and Rohit are engaged, not married and eventually they are reunited at the end. The film also became impossibly glossy and beautiful. It had a few loopholes in logic especially that bit where Rohit and Lalit meet abroad and sing a song about the woman each loves, not knowing that they are both singing about the same woman.

But Sridevi's luminous beauty and unforgettable performance propelled Chandni. Back then, you couldn't go to a wedding without hearing mere haathon mein nau nau choodiyan hain' blaring in the background. And white churidars became all the rage. The blockbuster success of Chandni rejuvenated Yash ji, who was reeling from a spate of flops through the 1980s. It enabled him to take the narrative risk of Lamhe, the complex relationship between a man, an older woman who dies and her daughter. Even Sridevi's astounding performance couldn't make audiences accept the love triangle. The flop broke Yash ji's heart but it didn't hobble Sridevi. She was unstoppable.

In magazine articles, Sridevi was often called the female Amitabh Bachchan'. It was the ultimate compliment for a Hindi film heroine. I remember meeting her again at a photo-shoot for Movie magazine. It was my first job as a film journalist. Once again, we were at the Centaur, shooting her and Aamir Khan together for the cover. I remember whispering something to my editor Dinesh Raheja about how a certain pose or angle would look better. She noticed our interaction. She asked exactly what was wanted and then proceeded to deliver. I was gobsmacked. This, I concluded, is what stardom looks like!

More than twenty years later, I was still interviewing her for English Vinglish and more recently, Mom. She was still painfully shy. She answered questions in clipped, diplomatic sentences that offered little insight into how she pulled off all those magical performances. There was a wall that was impossible to penetrate.

We will never know how she did what she did. But Sridevi changed the narrative for women in Hindi cinema. She was a singular sensation.

Salute and adieu.

The 1975 movie Julie begins as a tribute to the overheated and fecund. Julie, played by a ripe and coy Lakshmi, is dying to sleep with her best friend's brother Shashi and eventually does. One night in her bed at home, she twists, writhes and moans Oh Shashi.' And from the darkness comes an annoyed and shrill What man!' from younger sister Irene. 12-year-old Sridevi making her Bollywood debut started as she meant to go along, constantly at odds with the boring and the boringly sincere.

Sridevi made us fall in love with the texture of artifice. Sequins, feathers, glitter. Masks. Transparent umbrellas. Wet saris. Snake dances and enormous headgear. Even her high, improbable voice was deliciously unstable, an auditory souffl and a constant joke about femininity. It wasn't accidental that Sridevi's roles so often involved double roles and subterfuge the twins Anju and Manju in Chaalbaaz, the mother and daughter roles of Lamhe and Khuda Gawah, the opening sequence as an Afghan man in Khuda Gawah, a whole costume store in Roop ki Rani Choron Ka Raja. So much so that the ostentatiously white and simple' clothes she wore in Chandni seem to wink their fancy dress quality disrupting the alpine Yash Chopra imagination.

The feminist potential of movies and female actors obviously lies beyond neatly emancipatory mein meri astitiv ko doondhni ja rahi hoon endings. Sridevi gave us, unlike any female actor I can think of, the emancipation of play. The dethroning of the serious, as Susan Sontag defined the nature of camp, existed in every sequin, every muscle of her incredibly mobile face, every flutter of those gol-gol eyes. For every girl schooling herself with teeth gritted to sundar-cum-susheel, Sridevi was jailbreak, a wobbly leap over the wall. You could teach Sridevi's Anju Bharatanatyam but she might just tandav away from both home and balma.

To me, her closest cinematic ancestor always seemed to be Shammi Kapoor, in his all dancing, all singing, many costume change glory. And much like my late uncle Modi wanted to grow up to be either Shammi Kapoor or Shammi Kapoor's driver, I wanted to grow up to be either Sridevi or one of Sridevi's costumes.

Years later when I saw Sridevi in Gauri Shinde's English Vinglish I was fascinated by the disappearance of the mobility, of her be-stilled face. She was playing a woman coincidentally called Shashi, a middle-aged woman newly in America and shocked that she was supposed to think less of herself because she didn't speak English. Back then I wondered if "English Vinglish is the dystopic sequel about the distorted afterlives of Anju, Manju and all the other girls we so admired in school.

In school, a smart friend told me that she had liked Tezaab so much because Anil Kapoor had done every crazy, violent thing he did in the movie for Madhuri Dixit. My school friend had been moved by the lung-filling idea of Madhuri inspiring so much sab kuch jala do in a man. But any sense of epic romance in Tezaab had passed me by. It hadn't occurred to me at all. My memory of Tezaab goes straight from the numerical Madhuri to the surprisingly effective Chunkey Pandey lullaby. But in the department of Filmi Women Who Change the Destiny of Filmi Men I was more struck by the final frames of Chaalbaaz,where Sunny Deol and Rajinikanth both look bedazzled by their respective versions of Sridevi. They looked grateful and uncertain about how they had gotten so lucky. As grateful and uncertain as we feel today.

In school I read Filmfare and Stardust and Cineblitz and Nana, magazines that said things that would raise the hair of anybody used to today's carefully processed celebrity pablum. In throwaway paragraphs they made homoerotic implications about Anil Kapoor and Jackie Shroff and moved on blithely to the next snippet garnered, they assured us, from behind a potted plant. One of those magazines wrote that Sridevi was inclined to wear revealing' clothes when she felt overweight and cover up when she was feeling thin. This was reported bitchily as if it was pathetic, but to my pre-teen self this promise of billowing fat seemed like a wonderful sleight of hand by someone who dressed like the magician's assistant but was actually the magician.

And that feeling is what I remembered when I watched English Vinglish and concluded back then that "like a feathered hat, like a sequined headdress, Sridevi was making her stillness work to tell us that we have no idea what's happening behind the blank faces of the sweet, trembling-voiced Shashis we think we know. Oh Shashi. What, man!