The name is Shabana

Shoma A. Chatterji

If her rare appearances on the large screen make you think Shabana Azmi has retired from films, think again. She is very much present as herself, as a social activist and as an actress par excellence. Her forthcoming film The Black Prince, an international production, is releasing soon. She has excelled herself both as singer and as actress in Aparna Sen’s latest film Sonata in which she plays Dolon Sen, Bengali HoD of a leading bank. And she is in Nandita Das’ Manto based on the life of the famous Urdu creative writer, who migrated to Pakistan after Independence.

“In Hollywood filmmaker Kavi Raz’ The Black Prince, I play Rani Jindan, wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, a feisty historical figure who wrested her son, Duleep Singh, from Queen Victoria and exhorted him to come to India and reclaim the Sikh empire. She was the youngest wife of the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, and the mother of the last Maharaja, Duleep Singh. She was known for her beauty, energy and strength of purpose. I won the Best Actress Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival for my performance but I have yet to see the period drama. It was a struggle speaking Punjabi, and ironically now, they want to dub my lines in Hindi,” she says laughingly. 

“The biopic, which has been filmed widely across Britain and India, has tried to carefully capture the tragic, yet fascinating, true story and legacy of Maharaja Duleep Singh, providing a visual narrative of one of India’s most noble kings, and his fragile relationship with Queen Victoria, who was godmother to his children,” she elaborates. Special care was taken for the designing of her costume to portray the role of Rani Jindan because firstly, it is a ‘period’ film and secondly, the character she plays is a queen and royalty demands very elaborate and heavy costumes.

“In Nandita Das’ Manto, I have been chosen to portray Jaddanbai, the actress Nargis’ mother who was not only a great singer-musician in her time but also turned out to be among the first women producer-directors in Indian cinema. I am both excited and nervous about this particular role,” she sums up.

One of the most outstanding Indian actors who dominated parallel cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, Shabana Azmi was born to Urdu progressive poet and lyricist Kaifi Azmi and theatre actress Shaukat Azmi. Shabana has acted in films by virtually all of India’s most famous art-house directors like Shyam Benegal, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Aparna Sen, Muzaffar Ali, Goutam Ghose and others, as well as in commercial and middle-of-the-road Hindi films, where she has essayed several strong female characters and won perhaps the largest number of National Awards for the Best Actress.

“I have five releases this year which include two American productions — of these one is Signature Move by Jennifer Reeder. My other films are Aparna Sen’s Sonata, Piyush Panjwani’s Idgah and Manika Sharma’s The Wishing Tree. In Idgah, based on a story by Munshi Premchand, I play a mother who obsessively looks through her binoculars for a prospective groom for her daughter,” she adds.

Shaban has even given voice to her own songs in both Sonata and Manto in two different languages. She had sung before in Mahesh Dattani’s Morning Raga (2004). Both late Pandit Ravi Shankar and composer Shankar Mahadevan were deeply impressed with her singing. Pandit Ravi Shankar even called her up to tell her that he could not believe that she had never trained in Carnatic music.