Beyond boundaries
The death of Sridevi reminded me that she was such a totem of diversity. She was equally fluent in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi, something probably no other Indian actor can and will ever claim to have accomplished. I see mainstream Indian and foreign media celebrating her endless charms in Chandni, Chaalbaaz, Himmatwala, Mr India, Lamhe, and so on. But I see two glaring omissions, a couple of scintillating Telugu movies, in the eloquent tributes. Without mentioning them, the rest of her filmography might not justify her top billing to a cinephile.
My prime exhibit is Ram Gopal Varma’s Kshana Kshanam, a golden hoot of a movie released in 1991. Sridevi revels as Satya, a private company employee caught in the throes of a robbery gone awry by the gang of Paresh Rawal, who gets help from Venkatesh (as Chandu). This is quite possibly the only Indian movie from the ‘90s I keep revisiting just to embrace the alchemy of Sridevi’s effortless acting as a super-scared woman on the lam, shacked up with a stranger in the jungle.
Cultural theorist Gilbert Adair speaks about “actemes” in literature, like Proust’s petite madeleine, Joseph K’s arrest one fine morning, Heathcliff and Cathy on the moors. “To simplify, an acteme is a single fragment of discourse that has come to drift through the reader’s mind as an extra-linguistic cloud of narrative,” Adair writes. For the lack of a better term, I shall transpose this concept to cinema and the immediate acteme that comes to my mind is Sridevi saying “devuda, devuda, devuda” (“devuda” is God in Telugu) when faced with a dire situation.
There’s an Italian saying on the lines of “I would rather be the mayor of my town square than be a nobody in a big city”. South Indian actors always seem to be abiding by this dictum, especially the ones from the Telugu industry. No actor from that industry could ever make the leap to Bollywood, even if they wanted to. Rajinikanth, Mohanlal and Kamal Haasan had a fair run in Hindi cinema but Chiranjeevi and Ram Charan failed miserably.
That’s all the more reason to gawk at the irresistible presence of Sridevi in Kshana Kshanam. The movie also has a memorable performance by Paresh Rawal as the cranky villain who would speak broken Telugu in his Hindi accent. The movie is replete with glorious, cinema-perfect moments when the villain finds it hard to walk on a rickety bridge and his henchman shows it’s no big deal, or when Sridevi thinks she can get out of a muddy ditch by herself without any support from a gentle stranger but falls back into it. I can forgive RGV for another dozen vacuous Sholay remakes just for giving Sridevi an amazing showcase for her next-level acting skills.
Sridevi’s goofy side can be seen in the 1990 release Jagadeka Veerudu Athiloka Sundari, a socio-fantasy drama directed by K Raghavendra Rao, where she’s a revelation as the daughter of Indra who accidentally gets dropped on earth and can return to heaven only with the help of a tour guide (Chiranjeevi). This movie is a stark reminder that Telugu cinema could churn out immensely watchable cinema without resorting to banana peel humour and formulaic stuff like stock comedy and mandatory fights and songs. The whole movie flows organically and laughs are evoked from genuine situations. The first time when Sridevi eats a brinjal or is forced to acquaint herself with the patois of earthfolk is marvellous stuff.
With the slight sensuous squeak in her voice, an unmistakable glint in her eyes and eyebrows that seem to be working out in a gym since forever, Sridevi was the quintessential diva of my formative years. She had the acting chops with the kind of foibles that make emoting in front of the camera a natural act.
It would be hard to point out when she started blooming as an actress but decent starting points would be K Balachander’s Aakali Rajyam and the ANR-starrer Premabhishekam.
Barring Isabelle Huppert, I can’t think of any other actor in the world who can stake claim to such a rich body of work under her belt. And that’s precisely why she shall be eternally missed.