Kangana Ranaut and Alia Bhatt couldn’t be more different. But what’s common to them are the choices they make onscreen and the conviction that drives them. Karishma Upadhyay traces the cinematic journey of Bollywood’s reigning ladies whose first releases of the year have just hit theatres.
Kangana Ranaut’s journey from Manali to Mumbai is worthy of its own film. Her story has it all—rebelling against family, great loves and greater heartbreaks and, above all else, triumph against all odds. She came to Mumbai a little more than a decade ago with next to nothing. “I am a self-made person. Whatever I have today is because I had single-minded focus. I have always seen myself as a successful person. Today, the world sees what I see,” says the 30-year-old actress with her trademark honesty. In Rangoon, Kangana cracks the whip as the feisty Miss Julia, which has got her bouquets of praise.
At 23, Alia is Bollywood’s youngest A-list actress. It’s been just five years since her debut with the frothy Student of the Year, and her filmography is evidence that Alia is not afraid. In one calendar year, she has given Kapoor & Sons, Udta Punjab and Dear Zindagi. “I don’t ever want to do a film for the wrong reason. I don’t want to do a film because I have the time, need the money, or for a friend. The length of my role doesn’t drive my choices but by the film as a whole,” explains Alia, whose first release in 2017, Badrinath Ki Dulhania, hit theatres last week.
The one person with connections to both Kangana and Alia is Mahesh Bhatt. Alia’s father was also the producer of the Anurag Basu film that launched Kangana. “Both Alia and Kangana are very different people who come from very different worlds. Kangana’s journey from Gangster in 2006 to now has been phenomenal. She is incredibly talented and deserved all the accolades coming her way. As for Alia, she surprised me with the emotional depth she showed in Highway and Udta Punjab. I am happy to see her strike that balance between regular commercial fare and stories that take her out of her comfort zone,” says the director-producer.
Feisty, real, spontaneous, talented and untutored, Kangana and Alia truly have no contemporaries in the Hindi film industry.
Before Stardom
Kangana was just another little girl in Himachal Pradesh. A middle child, she grew up wanting to be famous. “Every time my parents got angry with me, I’d tell them ‘don’t scold me. I am going to be famous someday and you’d regret scolding me’,” she remembers with a laugh. Like most middle kids, Kangana got away with most things. This encouraged her to continue testing her boundaries. “If my brother got something, I made sure I got something bigger and better. You could find me wandering around in the night because my parents told me to be home by sunset. I was constantly in trouble but I wanted more.”
With Mahesh and Soni Razdan as parents, Alia grew up in the heart of Bollywood. She distinctly remembers the moment when she decided what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. “I was a part of the school choir and we were rehearsing on stage.” At some point, the teacher in-charge told the choir to ‘follow Alia and sing like her’. “That’s when it clicked. I loved that everyone was looking at me and that I was the reference point. I knew that I wanted to be the centre of attention,” the 23-year-old recalls with a laugh. She was still in kindergarten.
Alia’s ‘training’ started around the same time. Her mother enrolled her younger daughter in Shiamak Davar’s dance classes. “I was obsessed with dancing. I would go for every class. By the time I was eight, I was already in the advance classes.” When she wasn’t dancing, Alia would be making up stories ‘for no reason’.
Showbiz Calling
It was common knowledge within the industry that Mahesh and Soni’s youngest daughter had acting aspirations, and that’s how she was called to meet her future mentor Karan Johar. “I didn’t know what I was asked to meet Karan for, but I went. I was just about to join Class XII. I never thought I would be offered a lead role. I was three times my size,” Alia recalls with a laugh. “I auditioned with some 500 other girls. I made it to the top 10. That’s when Karan told his team to tell me to lose weight.”
Unlike Alia’s journey from one Mumbai suburb to another and one audition, Kangana had a lot of ground to cover. Kangana ran away from home at 17 to chase her dream. Her first stop was Delhi to pursue theatre with acting guru Arvind Gaur before bright lights of Mumbai beckoned. “I came to Mumbai as a model with `10,000. I lived with four girls in an apartment in Juhu.
Each of us had a mattress and a cupboard. Every day, I would wake up, go for auditions, get rejected and come back to that mattress.”
It didn’t help that Kangana’s relationship with her family was fractured at the time. “My parents were very unhappy with my decision to move to Delhi and then to Mumbai. I thought my biggest enemies were my parents. I used to tell them that ‘you can’t let life decide for you. You have to make every moment count’. I thought they were holding me back. I had no support of any kind. If I had a bad day, I had no shoulder
to cry on.”
Lights, Camera, Action!
The first time Alia faced the camera was for Sangharsh, produced by her father. She played a young Preity Zinta. But Alia doesn’t “really remember much of the shoot”. “I only used to go to film sets for the food. I remember going to Goa when Mohit (Suri, cousin) was shooting Zeher and Pooja (Bhatt, step-sister) was shooting Holiday. I remember going to the Murder set where I saw Mallika Sherawat in a green saree,” she says.
Two days before she was supposed to start shooting for Student of the Year, the then 17-year-old had a panic attack. “What if I couldn’t do what I have always wanted to do” was the question she asked everyone around her. When she finally got on the set, Alia was like a deer caught in the headlights. “You don’t know how clueless I was. I didn’t know anything at all. I didn’t know there were different departments of filmmaking or what production design was. In my head, you just take a camera and start shooting. We started with shooting a song and I was like a fish out of sea and yet, I felt like I belong. It was strange but interesting.”
When Anurag Basu picked Kangana for Gangster, she understood the nuances of her character. “At the auditions, there were really glamorous girls with coloured contact lens, French manicure and perfect hair. I remember thinking, ‘don’t they understand the character?’ Why are they so made up? I had that kind of clarity at 17.” Maybe that gave her the edge over the other girls.
In Gangster, Kangana played Simran, an alcoholic bar dancer torn between her gangster boyfriend who is on the run and a bar singer. “They were looking for someone who was raw. The character’s circumstances are such that she didn’t care about her looks. Those days, I didn’t wear make-up; my hair was kind of wild. I must have looked the part.”
The Journey
Imtiaz Ali’s coming-of-age road movie Highway (2014) was Alia’s breakout moment. She played Veera Tripathi, a rich and sheltered bride-to-be who embarks on a journey both literal and figurative when she is kidnapped on the eve of her wedding. Alia displayed a balance of vulnerability and tenacity that take most actors their entire lives to achieve. This was her second release.
Before he cast Alia, Imtiaz was looking for an older actress to play Veera. Not having seen Student of the Year, he reacted instinctively when he met her. “She was very young but also very mature. She seemed like an old soul, someone with a huge emotional quotient. Like Veera, she seemed to live in a world of her own,” explains Imtiaz.
“When I signed Highway, I was hoping that I’d shock and surprise people. And I did,” says Alia. All the appreciation she got for Highway is still fresh in her mind. “Amitabh Bachchan sent me a hand-written note and flowers. Javed saab (Akhtar) and Shabanaji (Azmi) came to my house at 11 am after watching the first day, first show of Highway. It was overwhelming. When seniors of this stature take the time to watch your work and appreciate it, it’s a big deal.”
Alia followed Highway with the film adaption of Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller 2 States and Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, a frothy romcom. The only blip on Alia’s filmography is Vikas Bahl's 2015 film Shandaar that sank without a trace. She started last year with Kapoor & Sons as the manic pixie girl dealing with tragedy. The film might have belonged to its leading men Sidharth Malhotra and Fawad Khan, but Alia’s character provided the much-needed sunshine in the family drama.
In Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab, Alia blew everyone away as the nameless Bihari migrant in Punjab who gets mixed up with drug dealers. Her utterly real and gut-wrenching performance resulted in multiple acting awards. Dear Zindagi’s Kaira was untethered millennial looking for shaking off urban loneliness and finding
meaning to her life.
Kangana’s decade-long career has been a lot more chequered. Despite successful films such as Life in a… Metro or a National Award for Fashion, she remained an outsider trying to make it in Bollywood. Choices like No Problem, Double Dhamaal and Rascals didn’t help.
Directed by Vikas, Queen turned the tide for Kangana. As the ditched-at-the-mandap bride Rani, who takes off on her honeymoon alone, she was pitch-perfect. Vikas couldn’t think of anyone else to play Rani. “I knew she was perfect for the film. It took her just 30 minutes to sign on. I couldn’t have made the film if she hadn’t agreed. I wanted to surprise people with Kangana playing such meek and under confident character,” he says. The film earned her a second National Award in just seven years. With that one film, Kangana went from being on the fringes of Bollywood to be on top of the pile.
Since then, she’s helmed films that have made over `100 crore at the box-office, taken off to New York to study screenplay writing, and been very categorical about the kind of films she wants to make. “I want to only play central characters. I am offered films with superstars where I have a sidey character. I keep refusing those.” In an industry that’s ruled by the three Khans, it takes a special kind of confidence to refuse work with them. “There’s a lot of great female characters being written. I get a lot of books, short stories, real life instances... a lot of material. Why should I give those up to do a small role with a big hero? I want to work with actors who come on the set as actors and not stars. That’s how I approach my work.”
Against All Odds
On her debut appearance on the TV show Koffee with Karan, Kangana was her feisty self. “Karan, you’ve been the driving force of my life. If it wasn’t for all the rejection and mocking, I wouldn’t have made it,” she said to the director. Even as Karan tried to defend himself, Kangana added, “Of course, you’ve made fun of my English.” It’s no wonder that this episode went on to make headlines for a long time after it was telecast.
From the time that she started in the industry, Kangana was picked on for everything from her proficiency with English to her edgy dressing. “I was very raw when I came to Mumbai. Every picture I would see of theirs (other actresses), I’d want to look polished and well-groomed like them. I learnt to exercise, dress and speak well. But the people just kept making fun. There were negative stories being spread about how much I make per film. I am where I am today because I choose to look at the positive aspect of every situation. If I didn’t, I would have broken down years ago,” she says.
One of her biggest champions has been director Aanand L Rai, who has directed her in two of her biggest hits—Tanu Weds Manu and Tanu Weds Manu Returns. “Kangana is one of the strongest and bravest people I know. Her journey hasn’t been easy. It would be very easy for her to just give in and not stick to her convictions but she does. I am very proud of the person she’s become,” he says.
Kangana’s personal life has continued to make news. In the early years, her alleged troubled relationships with Aditya Pancholi and Adhyayan Suman made her Bollywood’s poster girl of distress. Many called her very public and ugly spat with Hrithik Roshan the ‘scandal of 2016’. While it was an emotionally difficult time for her, there was a silver lining. “I always thought I was on my own, an outsider. The outpouring of love and support from everyone in the industry took me by surprise. It was overwhelming.”
If Kangana found redemption on Koffee with Karan, it’s where Alia’s troubles started. Thanks to the faux pas on an episode in 2013, the actress spent most of 2014 as a meme and jokes like ‘Alia Bhatt is so dumb that she thought paani puri and sev puri are relatives of Amrish Puri’ refused to die out. The spunky actress cocked a snook at all the trolls by starring in an All India Bakchod video that makes fun of her intelligence. The video ‘documents’ the months after her Koffee with Karan when she enrols in a Dumb Belle Mental Gym that promises to take her from ‘Dolce & Gabbana to Smart like Shabana’. “I had no agenda for doing the video. You have to laugh at yourself. You can’t take yourself too seriously,” she explains.
Now and the Future
After three back-to-back releases last year, Alia’s only release for 2017 is Badrinath Ki Dulhania with Student of the Year alum Varun Dhawan. The actress describes the film as a ‘simple and beautiful love story’. “My character Vaidehi is quite interesting. She is a small-town girl who is very respectful of everyone. At the same time, she is well-educated and she knows her mind.” After the release of Badrinath Ki Dulhania, Alia will start work on her next with Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boys. “I can’t wait to work with Zoya. And, Ranveer! We have done a few commercials together but this is our first proper film together. I am really excited about teaming up with him.”
Kangana’s last—Vishal Bhardwaj’s epic love story Rangoon—might not have set the box office on fire but the actress’ outing as the feisty Miss Julia has got her accolades from all quarters. The actress has completed Hansal Mehta’s Simran and is gearing up for a role of lifetime playing Rani Lakshmi Bai. While contemporaries such as Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone and Sonam Kapoor might be looking to the West to spread their wings, Kangana has no such aspirations. “I’ve had offers but why could I want to leave my audience here? I would much rather work here,” she says matter-of-factly.