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.
Working with the auteurs
Azmi’s 25-plus years of collaboration with Benegal, one of the most fruitful partnerships of Indian cinema between a director and actor—they worked on seven films, from Ankur (1974) to Hari Bhari (2000)—naturally occupied a major part of the conversation. Working with Benegal was about self-discovery, she said. “I look at it as an exercise of knowing myself. Benegal loved his actors, it was a relationship of trust. You always knew he would stop you if you made an ass of yourself. When we went to shoot in Yellareddyguda, [a village in then Andhra Pradesh] for Ankur, he made me walk around in a sari. I was a jeans-clad Bombay girl, he realised I could not sit down on my haunches, so my food began to be served on the floor. After a few days, I joined the others at the table.”
Satyajit Ray similarly harnessed Azmi’s talents in Shatranj ke Khilari (1977). Playing Khurshid, the neglected wife of an aristocrat obsessed with chess in the twilight of Wajid Ali Shah’s reign, Azmi said she followed Ray’s cues to play it with “part hurt, part sadness” but failed to convince him to cast her in another film. “I said, ‘I’ll work veryyyy hard.’ He said: ‘But you won’t look Bengali’.” That was no consideration for Mrinal Sen, pointed out Apara Sen as he cast her in some of his finest, from Khandhar (1983), Genesis (1986) to Ek Din Achanak (1989).
Sen also steered the conversation towards Azmi’s international projects, particularly John Schlesinger’s Madame Sousatzka (1988), in which she plays an Indian piano protégé’s mother—again a role offered to Sen first—to her work in the series Halo in which she plays a naval intelligence admiral. Azmi said she was pleased to be cast in a role with colour blindness. “Asian actors had been saying, ‘Why should we be represented only by our ethnicities?’” she remarked. Sen said she has seen what colour blindness looked like in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata: “The world weariness in Krishna’s eyes—it did not matter Krishna was White!”
Bombay cinema
Azmi has drawn lessons of life from cinema and pumped it back into her roles. In Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth (1982), the demanding role of being Pooja Malhotra, a woman whose husband leaves her for another and who tries to beg him back, drew out one of Azmi’s best and one of the most emotionally raw performances scenes on Indian film.
“Mahesh Bhatt (Arth’s director) called me for patchwork (in filmy lingo that means close-ups and continuity corrections) but handed me a new scene with his usual line: ‘Look, there’s no time for artificial conflict.’ Had I been ‘prepared’ it may have come out differently. You see, actors like to feel powerful and what I had to do in the telephone scene was humiliation. I had to beg…and you realise that there’s this person inside you who can do that… I went to my next shoot just crying, I couldn’t stop. An actor's resource base is life, I’ve seen many younger actors today trying to do a scene by imitating their favourite actor. Doesn’t work, you have to look within,” says Azmi.
Her mainstream work was a different hustle but Azmi spoke about it fondly, too. She was candid about being fitted into the Amitabh Bachchan-Vinod Khanna starrer Parvarish (1977) by director Manmohan Desai as “Vinod Khanna’s role needed a girlfriend” and of being ticked off by the dance master in scenes where she had to move her hips while swinging a gun over her head “next to Neetu (Singh) who was a superb dancer”. Unlike other actors of her generation who acted in arthouse cinema, she was not conflicted by her commercial cinema jobs. “I thought being a ‘star’ might help, it might help my other films,” she said.
In the decade she worked in Bollywood films such as Parvarish and Fakira (1976), it was also the decade of her best arthouse work in Nishant (1975), Junoon (1978), Susman (1978), Mandi (1983), all Benegal films.
On ‘Fire’
In the ’90s, Azmi took a different kind of plunge. In Deepa Mehta’s Fire, her role of Radha was in some ways Pooja redux, but scandalous. Two wives in a loveless marriage, Radha and Sita (Nandita Das) cleave together and fulfill their emotional and sexual longings and leave their husbands for a life together. Was she being ‘bold’, asked a member of the audience. Azmi said before she committed to it, she thought about it for a month being clear that “while some would be repelled by it, there would be others who would be moved by it”. “Whether it is the religious or the sexual other, you have to find out about the other, rather than shun (him or her),” she said.
No actor can, however, rise above a character or redeem a character without a good script or director, she said. On her recent work in Dabba Cartel (2025) or Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023), the silence was golden.
Craft, said the veteran, was underrated. “There’s nothing called spontaneity or spontaneous laughter. It’s all simulated, practised and you have to deliver as the camera rolls. As an actor you have to be totally immersed and also observing. When I weep over a dead body, I catch myself observing the mouth of the person playing dead….”
Towards the close of the conversation, Sen and Azmi also spoke about Sati (1989), the first film in which Azmi worked under Sen’s direction, of creative disagreements on certain scenes, which Azmi topped with asking, “When are you casting me in your next film?” to general laughter, and that did not look scripted at all.