A new book looks at the troubled yet fascinating life of and her mental battles
he problem is that the industry has not yet understood the nature of my illness and what I went through,” Parveen Babi said in an interview to a magazine in 1980. The actress was talking about her mental breakdown. While reading Parveen Babi: A Life, Karishma Upadhyay’s empathetic account of the actor’s battle with schizophrenia, the weight of Sushant Singh Rajput’s death hangs heavy in the air. Where Rajput consulted at least four psychiatrists for his condition, Babi dismissed medical treatment. She lived with her fears and delusions right up till her death in January 2005. She was convinced that somebody—the CIA , CBI, KGB, Prince Charles and Amitabh Bachchan, among others—was out to kill her.
There is a treasure trove of information here about Babi, but the most revelatory bits are those of her college years in Ahmedabad. It was her first escape from a cloistered life in Junagadh where she grew up in a mansion, emotionally distant from her mother and overtly shy. The reconstruction of her teenage rebellion— flashes of possessiveness and anger—also offers what could be the first signs of her illness. But one can also see the emergence of an assured, driven woman who lived life on her own terms. Unlike the later chapters, which rely on magazine interviews by Babi and those of filmmakers and her devoted manager, Ved Sharma,
Tthese feature voices of her friends and at least one rival—Mallika Sarabhai. Upadhyay is aware that Babi’s thespian skills were not the strongest in an age which saw the likes of Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi and she offers little perspective on the characters she played. Instead, it is Babi’s enviable figure, her devil-may-care attitude (she was a chain smoker who also admitted to doping) and her open dalliances—with Danny Denzongpa, Kabir Bedi and Mahesh Bhatt, all of whom gave interviews for the book—that she chooses to focus on. Her mental health battles were attributed to her heartbreaks and obsession with Bachchan.
Observations of those who witnessed Babi at her most unstable reveal the ignorance around mental health issues and the stigma attached to it that pervaded our society in the 1980s (and still does). But, quoting from interviews, Upadhyay writes of the calm with which Babi faced questions from the media, which were only too happy to fill their pages with her woes, aggravating her anxiety about a relapse. Five years after her first breakdown in 1979, she walked away from the industry.
Thirty-six years later, with the death of Rajput, the media, now a bigger beast with the added weight of broadcast and internet, is once again feasting on a tragedy, with sensationalism trumping sensitivity. In Babi’s life, there are lessons to be learned.
PARVEEN BABI A Life
by Karishma Upadhyay `599; 320 pages
—Suhani Singh