Neena Gupta: Zesty Into Her Sixties

Neena Gupta, at the age of 62, after winning two National awards and essaying several memorable television and film roles – including the iconic Ketaki in Khandaan – had put this message out on Instagram, addressing her 11,000 followers: ““I live in mumbai and working am a good actor looking fr good parts to play.” She acknowledges in her enchantingly candid memoir, Sach Kahun Toh, that it was an impulsive decision. Quickly typed out, in a swirl of thoughts and feelings, the spelling and syntax may have betrayed her fluster.

Soon after hitting the “Post” button, she experienced pangs of remorse. With the post going viral, with friends and fans responding with affirmative reposts or ringing endorsements, her heart continued to palpitate. She was afraid that she might have embarrassed the one person whose opinion mattered to her deeply – her daughter Masaba. “I can’t believe you did this, Mom,” Neena imagined her saying.

But Neena need not have fretted. Her daughter, after all, bore her traits: plucky, high-spirited, with a bemused outlook on her own life. Masaba’s Instagram response was swift and heartfelt: “Just the other day I was telling someone…how I am never afraid/shy to ask for work. It’s obviously genetic. My mother put up this post on her Instagram today. I mean, my 62-year-old national award winning mother. She told me I must always work…no matter what…it keeps you from getting old…she told me they don’t write for women her age anymore…she complains she can’t do PR…”

Fortunately, not just for Neena, but for all middle-aged Indians who might be seeking new opportunities and second, third or fourth chances, the appeal worked. Soon the offers came flooding in. And not just for sidelined bit-characters but for lead roles. One of the big breaks that came her way was Badhaai Ho – about a middle-aged parent who gets pregnant, creating a comic furor inside the family. The film led to her first Filmfare Award for Best Actress: “Not supporting actress. BEST ACTRESS. I was so thrilled! It was the first time I truly started to wonder if my age wasn’t a drawback after all…”

That role, in turn, led to several other interesting ones, including ones in the web series  Panchayat and Vikas Khanna’s The Last Color. Showing the nation and the world, that however well-known and celebrated you may already be, you should never be shy about putting yourself out, or revealing your interest in new jobs or fresh opportunities.

But that’s not the only lesson one draws from Neena’s book, which recounts her emergence from a lower-middle-class Delhi family into the cut-throat and competitive jostles that undergird Mumbai’s film industry.

A Childhood Marked By Mysterious Vanishings

Growing up in Karol Bagh, Delhi in the 1960s, Neena and her brother contended with an everyday mystery. Their father vanished after dinner, and returned each morning, in time for breakfast. Despite being pointedly around for three meals in their home, his nightly absences were both inexplicable and emotionally charged. There was a tartness to their mother’s tight-lipped silences, to her resolute performing of wifely and motherly roles, even as she championed her daughter’s education and independence. Empathetic toward her parents’ foibles, Neena discloses that her Gujarati father had married another woman after Neena’s mother – entering into a family-endorsed arranged marriage after his unsanctioned love marriage.

Still, the family made the most of their single-storey home set in a 50-yard plot, with her mother squatting on the floor to cook; while they always had enough to eat, theirs wasn’t a place that held a kitchen counter or a dining table. Like other kids of that era, they savored small pleasures: tongues purpling with sweet-sour jamuns, feet scampering around kho-kho and lagori cries: “Those were simpler times and we learnt to make a little go a long way.”

Her mother was also a romantic in other ways. Highly educated for a woman of her cohort – with two Master’s degrees – she was galvanized by Gandhian ideals. And she tried to impart that sense of striving to her kids.

Her Scholarship in Sanskrit

When it came to college, Neena wished to attend Lady Shriram or Miranda House. She had the scores to make the cut. But afraid of her daughter being tainted by Western mores, her mother admitted her into the more conservative and proximal Janki Devi Mahavidyalaya: “It wasn’t considered posh and the crowd there was anything but ‘hoity toity’ as we used to say.”

Janki Devi bore the reputation of being a “bhenji” college. Sensitized to how such pejorative terms were colonial spillovers, and merely indicative that the crowd attending such colleges were more multilingual than those headed into the posher settings, Neena rightfully stands up for all her “fellow bhenjis”: “I know now how rich, vast and varied our influences are.” As sharp-tongued and as adept at witty comebacks as the pedigreed set, Neena says: “If someone corrects my English pronunciation, I ask them about their fluency in Indian languages.”

Discovering her passion for Sanskrit and theatre at college, Neena headed to Delhi University for an M.Phil in Sanskrit. She might have wished to attend the National School of Drama (NSD) straightaway, but her mother was wary of theatre as a professional pursuit. After enrolling in a doctoral program in Sanskrit, Neena could no longer disregard her overriding passion for drama. She dropped out of her Ph.D. to attend NSD.

Soaking Techniques at NSD

Winning a scholarship to the reputed institute, she reveled in the gorgeous campus but struggled with other issues. Accustomed only to Indian toilets till then, she grappled with the mechanics (and different contortions) required of Western toilets. She says NSD’s earlier director, Ebrahim Alkazi even demonstrated toilet use to students drawn from various strata.

The student troupe also visited Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, to perform with folk practitioners of Maach. At such events, students were compelled to do everything – sweeping the grounds, setting up chairs – becoming, as a result, accustomed to physical labor. At Ujjain, they also performed for inmates of a prison. Apparently, the prisoners had heard the sounds outside and requested a show. The prisoners’ applause would always imprint itself in Neena’s memory: “It was thick, loud and so powerful that it hit my very soul.”

In and Out of Stormy Relationships

Like her mother, Neena too has been a romantic. Quick to fall under the spell of different men, sometimes even permitting them to ride roughshod over her own feelings. Early in life, she impetuously tied the knot with a Bengali schoolmate, a relationship that was amicably terminated when the couple realized that they had incompatible life plans.

At NSD, she was in the thrall of someone called “Sachin” (she has changed names to protect people). Despite noting red flags, she continued to believe in him for much longer than she should have.

With the wisdom of age, she advises younger women to stand up for themselves, without permitting men to shatter their self-esteem.

Joining Strugglers in Mumbai

Garnering the role of Abhaben in David Attenborough’s Gandhi funded her travel to Mumbai. For a while after the Oscar-winning film, she struggled like many of the other aspiring actors who head to Mumbai. She hung about Prithvi Café, which was being run by India’s famous adman, Prahlad Kakkar. He once featured her in a Hawkins Pressure cooker ad, in which she danced to a jingle that went viral. Thrilled to be recognized by strangers, who repeated her dance steps at birthdays and other parties, she realized how fame could light up one’s being.

Yet she was barely making ends meet in the maximum city. She participated in one silent film with Aamir Khan, also a Prithvi regular then. She spent many mornings with Basu Da, hoping the well-known director would be moved by her constant presence to cast her in some role. Eventually, he featured her in a TV docuseries titled Anveshan.

In the series, Basu Da featured Neena Gupta and Javed Jaffrey to impart a message: that villages were kind, innocent, generous places, unlike depraved, dog-eat-dog cities.  To complete the shooting, they drove for hours without stopping for breakfast or meals, with Neena and the crew feeling utterly famished. Ironically, “innocent” villagers shrewdly demanded money in order to be featured, rebuking the idyllic notions that the series was trying to project.

Pigeonholed Into Side Roles

She later played the role of Lallu Ladki in Saath Saath, a choice she regretted for a long time. It was a bit role, with Neena playing a nerdy woman whose memorable line was “Main nah kehti ti?” Unfortunately, despite delivering the line with characteristic panache, she was typecast as a non-serious side character, with her talent for playing protagonist parts going unrecognized. At a party held to celebrate the film, Girish Karnad chided her for accepting the role. He warned her about being pigeonholed and she found, unfortunately, that was exactly how life played out.

After featuring in many more films, including the memorable Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, she received a miraculous call from Mr. Satyajit Ray – from the towering visionary himself. He wanted her to act in a short film being shot by his son, Mr. Sandeep Ray. At Calcutta, where Girish Karnad was also present, Neena Gupta developed food poisoning and was very embarrassed at having missed the first day of shooting because she ate something. She always remembered B.V. Karanth’s words: “Your body is your instrument. You cannot let it go. You cannot afford to let yourself get sick.”

She was then picked by Sridhar Ksheersagar to play Ketaki in Khandaan and overnight, she became famous all over India. She realized that Ketaki – a modern woman, willing to break barriers – was really mesmerizing the public. Viewers desperately wanted Ketaki to have a child, though the character was choosing not to. One fan, spotting Neena seated at the back of a car, rapped on the bonnet and said: “Madam, please have a child.” The Indian public could not distinguish between the character and actor.

Learning To Be “Besharam”

Once she met Sekhar Kapur and he said he would root for her to play a lead role in an upcoming film. Neena returned home, buzzing with excitement and waited and waited for the call that never came. Eventually, when she learned that another Bollywood actor had been cast in that role, she quizzed Sekhar later. He said he had been waiting for her to express interest. She realized that she had been expected to follow up. She warns rookies who are trying to break into the industry to be “besharam” – “I want the whole world to know that you won’t get anywhere if you aren’t besharam. That you need to push for what you want and not sit back and wait for offers to fall in your lap.”

References

Neena Gupta, Sach Kahun Toh: An Autobiography, Ebury Press, Penguin Random House India, 2021