Alia, the spy next door
Bollywood actress Alia Bhatt talks to tabloid! about playing an undercover agent caught in an unusual situation in the thriller ‘Raazi’, out today in the UAE
The spy genre has traditionally featured male leads. But director Meghna Gulzar turns that norm on its head and brings us Raazi, her 1970-set period spy thriller, with Alia Bhatt playing a Kashmiri Muslim undercover agent married to a Pakistani army officer to ferret information for India.
“Someone recently asked if I played a typical James Bond kind of spy in Raazi.
The answer is no. But a young girl can still kick [butt] without physically going into the action-hero space,” said Bhatt in a phone interview with tabloid!. In other words, she’s no femme-fatale like Charlie’s Angels.
Based on Harinder S. Sikka’s debut novel Calling Sehmat, Bhatt portrays a young woman who, in Bhatt’s words, is stuck in an “unusual time involved in an unusual activity” in this fictionalised account.
“But it’s not like she doesn’t have a choice. She makes that choice to go to Pakistan, give up her life and fight for her country at a time it was tense between India and our neighbouring country Pakistan… It’s a true story and that’s what makes it incredible,” she added.
Sehmat was responsible for saving the naval might of India in the 1970s through her intelligence gathering. While the film may evoke patriotic fervour in Indians, it never turns jingoistic — a point that director Gulzar and her team including actor Vicky Kaushal, who plays Sehmat’s on-screen Pakistani husband, swears on.
“Absolutely no. In no way have we bashed Pakistan in this film. That’s not the point of the film. The point we are trying to make is that sometimes you have to make sacrifices for your country… There is a line in the trailer that goes
‘Watan ke aage kuch nahi’ [No one can stand in front of my nation], but ‘watan’ is not Hindustan or Pakistan here,” said Bhatt.
If there’s one filmmaker in Bollywood who has earned a reputation as a responsible director, it’s Gulzar, who has given us hardhitting procedural films such as
Talvar — a clinical account of the real-life murder of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar and how her parents were accused of orchestrating the crime. The director exercised restraint and never resorted to sensationalism, was the verdict about the well-received film. “We are not here for rabble rousing. Apart from being a story about a spy who decides to do it for her country, the film also has to do with human emotions and humanity as a whole,” Gulzar said, adding that the intent of the film was always to remain noble.
“The whole film plays out on a reality and therefore all the characters — Alia and Kaushal — are treading a very fine line. As we know the world is not black and white and the film is not black and white either. There are areas of greys which need to be dealt with responsibly,” Gulzar added. Apart from its espionage elements, Raazi also delves into the cross-cultural relationship between Sehmat and her Pakistani husband.
“A lot has been communicated in the silences with Iqbal [Kaushal]. It’s unfortunate that she’s a wife and a spy and because of that it becomes difficult to draw a line. Even though she’s a spy, there’s a softness to their relationship that could be heartbreaking,” Bhatt said. Kaushal, who impressed us in the caste-driven drama Masaan, says that the couple spoke