People think I know Pashto: Danish Husain
He’s a dastango and can speak chaste Urdu, but delivering dialogues in Pashto for his role as a oneeyed Taliban supremo in the web series Bard of Blood was anything but a cakewalk for actor Danish Husain.
“Acting is an interesting profession because you are constantly living characters which are not very close to home, and to bring out that character’s visibility is important,” says Danish, who has impressed people so much so that they really believe he knows Pashto.
There’s a back story to it. When Danish had landed on the show’s set, he asked the director if it made sense that the character spoke to a fellow Talibani in Urdu. “I said he should be talking in Pashto, and the director immediately saw a point in that. Then we got a dialogue coach. But we all initially thought Pashto would be in passing and not that there would be chunks and chunks of dialogues in Pashto. The scenes were translated in Pashto, which were then written in Devanagari,” narrates Danish.
But since he knew Urdu, he could read the way Pashto was written. “What I would not understand is the language... It was a tough job. The preparation time was drastically reduced, and we had to re-prepare in Pashto.
My advantage was that I have done Dastangoi where I perform reams and reams of pages in archaic Urdu. So I understand the complexity of language,” he says.
In his pursuit to seem like a natural Pashto speaker, Danish would sit down with the Pashto coach to understand the dialogues’ meaning to modulate it well. It worked. “People think I know Pashto. They are falling for it... and it gladdens my heart,” says the actor, who used to undergo two hours of make-up to look the part while shooting.
Interestingly, Danish wasn’t the first choice for the role. He had initially auditioned for the part eventually played by Rajit Kapur in the series. “Ribhu Dasgupta (the director) told me that the role they were auditioning me for was smaller role, and then they wanted to offer you a bigger role. I was like, ‘Which actor doesn’t want to hear that? Be my guest!’”