THE INNER VOICE OF SWARA BHASKER

There are many things that Swara Bhasker doesn’t get about the character she plays in Veere Di Wedding, Sakshi. Why would she wear a trench coat in September in Delhi? How can she be so reckless with her father’s credit card? Why is she so condescending to people who don’t share her elite status? But it was those incompatibilities that attracted Bhasker to the role. “My USP so far has been that my characters have remained below poverty line or belong to BIMARU states,” says Bhasker, best known for films like Nil Battey Sannata and

Anarkali of Aarah. “Sakshi is an uberrich spoilt brat. But she treats her friends like her family. She is endearing in a very twisted sort of way.”

At the April launch of the film’s trailer in Mumbai, Bhasker said it’s the hardest she has ever worked for a film. The junk food lover struggled with producer Rhea Kapoor’s demand for a “ripped” physique to compliment Sakshi’s sartorial sense. “I have tried 36 diets and done three different training programmes,” Bhasker says. “Short of cosmetic surgery and liposuction I have done everything else. It was horrible.” But it was also a challenge to get into the head of a character whose affluence is a personality trait. Bhasker and Sakshi may both be big city girls who speak and think in English, drink alcohol and date boyfriends, but that’s where the similarities end. “I think I have cracked the methodology to prepare for characters which are distinctly located in a particular linguistic, cultural and class context,” says Bhasker about her earlier work. “But who are these people who spend five lakhs on a bag? It [the film] has taken me outside of my comfort zone in terms of clothes, body and soul.”

With an ensemble cast of four women—Kareena Kapoor Khan, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja and Shikha Talsania play the other three leading roles—for Bhasker, the film stands out because of its light-hearted, candid tone. “It is about women dealing with adulthood in the most unapologetic manner possible,” says Bhasker. “They are not victims of anything except their own confusion. That there is no injustice, no gender violence and no issue is liberating. I feel if you took these four women out and put four men, it would still be the same story and you would not change the screenplay.”

Unapologetic is one way to describe Bhasker. At a time when actors are deleting past tweets attacking the UPA government for its fuel hike, Bhasker speaks her mind on Twitter and even in interviews. “I am political. I believe in being involved,” she says. “I don’t believe in anything called neutral. It is a more polite term for fencesitting and complicity.” Bhasker doesn’t expect her industry peers to be as opinionated as her when it comes to politics and national issues. But it’s in her nature as the daughter of Ira, a professor of cinema studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Chitrapu Uday, a retired navy officer and columnist. “I understand that safety is a concern for everyone and there’s a lot at stake,” says the actor who has a Master’s in sociology from JNU. “I don’t have much to lose.” That’s not strictly true, of course. Bollywood can bite back at outspoken women, and even Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan faced hostility early on.

So far, Bhasker doesn’t think speaking her mind has cost her any parts, and she says she tones things down when she has a film approaching its release date. “My producers shouldn’t suffer on my account,” she says. “It’s alright for me to stand up for what is right but it’s not my money on the line.”

Still, she’s ready to pay the price for her liberal outlook. It explains why she wrote an open letter criticising the jauhar sequence in Padmaavat though it meant offending people from the fraternity. She likes tweets that highlight the work that Aam Aadmi Party is doing and those that bash US president Donald Trump. And she takes on right-leaning trolls who berate her for holding a placard in support of the Kathua rape victim, standing by JNU students Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid or expressing shock over the killings of Dalits and minorities.

The vitriolic discourse won’t silence her. She’s too passionate about India’s future for that—even if her opinions sometimes cause her detractors to call her anti-national. “When you love something, you fight for it,” says Bhasker. “I love the country I was born in and my parents brought me up in very dearly. It is a country where you respected gods even if you didn’t believe in them because somebody did. I don’t know what this country is becoming. I know what that was and I think it was precious and it should be something to fight for.”

—Suhani Singh “I am political. But my producers shouldn’t suffer on my account”