Zoya Akhtar’s story in the short films’ anthology Bombay Talkies (2013) is about a little boy from a middle class Mumbai home who wants to become Sheela from the song “Sheela ji jawaani” when he grows up. This ambition is hard enough to comprehend, much less find empathy from a father who otherwise detests his son’s lack of interest in all things ‘manly’. One night the little boy cosmically connects with Katrina Kaif (the actual “Sheela”) through an interview of hers on a television show. Lightning strikes, Kaif drops a precious secret – her life’s lesson into the little boy’s head: “Sometimes in order to achieve what you want, you have to hide, nurture and protect your dream. If you let others know about it, they may not get it, or they may just laugh, or pull you down,” she says. After this Eureka moment, the kid fully transforms himself next morning onwards, bubbling with energy and an idea that the way to achieve his outlandish target is to be smart while secretly following his ultimate fantasy. He plays foot(ball), keeps his dad happy, never losing sight of his eventual goal.
Akhtar has directed Kaif before, in possibly her best performance yet, in the coming-of-age rom-com Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011). Talking about why she cast Kaif as a real-life fairy in the short film, she said she needed somebody who had genuinely lived an unlikely dream: “You can’t just take any actress and ask her: How did you make it? She knew absolutely no one when she came to Bombay. She didn’t even know a word of Hindi. I can’t think of anyone who has taken this kind of a jump. ”
Couple of years ago Salman Khan while he was still dating Kaif (or he wasn’t, who knows), told me, “One day Katrina was watching something on TV and she frantically called asking me to check out this guy: ‘There’s this new kid who wants to be you. Just look at him. Poor thing he’ll never make it’. She was watching Maine Pyar Kiya (Salman’s first major release, of 1989).” It’s usually hard to tell when Salman is serious. He goes off on a tangent when asked any question during interviews. We were anyway talking about his movie Andaz Apna Apna (1994), which is now considered one of the greatest cult comedies but had opened to an indifferent response in theatres, and he went, “We were watching that film a few years ago. It was really funny because Katrina was watching it too and she was watching it just like that. Everyone around was laughing and she had just started learning Hindi, I remember, she just wouldn’t laugh. She didn’t understand it.”
Until two years before she came to India and made her screen debut with Kaizad Gustad’s Boom (2003), Kaif hadn’t seen an Indian movie, let alone a Hindi film. This is not so hard to imagine, she said. Growing up in different parts of the world, she never came in contact with Indian Diaspora communities, “How would I know about Bollywood?” She was born in Hong Kong. She’s lived for the most part in China and Japan, moving home to wherever her mother’s short assignments as a charity worker would take her: parts of East Europe, Switzerland, Belgium, Hawaii….
While in London in 2001, she went to a theatre with her mom to watch Santosh Sivan’s Asoka. It was a rare Indian film at the time to get a mainstream theatrical release in the UK, playing at regular multiplexes rather than ones mainly devoted to non-resident South Asians. This is how Kaif first learned the name Shah Rukh Khan and connected with Bollywood.
Cut to 2005, only four years later, I am in a crummy by lane of Patna surveying the only cubicle at a fertilizer company’s tiny sales office. The terminal lights up with the afternoon glow of Kaif Kaif in the wallpaper. In that Patna room, couple of centuries away from Piccadilly Circus, she is already the loved, local Bollywood heroine. How does this happen? “A lot of people do one film and they become the next big thing, a star, and they carry on. Every day, I’ve got a little more,” Kaif said. Okay, no, seriously, how does someone still quite suddenly, coming out of nowhere, and with no initial access, become a top Hindi movie star in Mumbai? This is the only question, as if posed with a primer in mind, that I asked Kaif when we met on a Friday afternoon at her Bandra apartment.
“I am driven, in a healthy, positive way, have always been,” she said, making light of the improbability of her success, adding that once she had found a foot in the door, there was merely a job to be done, a lot of work was coming her way, and she had to concentrate on delivering.
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“It is just her focus,” Zoya had reasoned. “And she is a foreigner!” She is half-British by origin. In the early years of Indian cinema, that would be a calling card for women to enter films in Bombay when it was considered taboo for Hindu and Muslim women from ‘respectable’ homes to perform in public.
“There was also a belief that exposure to the camera lens would impair one’s health, which was strong enough to keep women altogether away from cinema in the first few years,” writes film historian ST Bhaskaran in the journal Cinema Vision. The first Indian heroine, female star of Raja Harishchandra (1913), was a young boy called Anna Salunke (who played the queen, Taramati).
This isn’t to say there were no Indian female actors in the initial years. There were the likes of Gohar Jaan, Zubeida, minor actors like Lalita Pawar (then called Amboo), or Gulab, Bibbo, Jilloo, mostly drawn from among ‘nautch girls’. The audiences, newly addicted to a unique vaudeville entertainment, were more accustomed to seeing Anglo-Indians in female actor credits: Thelma Wallace, Dorothy Kingdom, Blanche Verni, Albertina, Miss Williams, Lilian Fox—they held no cultural prejudices against joining the film industry. Some, like Patience Cooper, became stars in their own right. Many others took on Hindu names to fit in. Marien Hill, top silent heroine in the South, went by the name Vilochana. Bombay Talkies’ Renee Smith, better known as Seeta Devi, was the star of Himanshu Rai’s crossover hits Light Of Asia and Shiraz (two rare Indian silent film prints that still survive, because they were Indo-German productions, so their reels remained preserved in Munich).
Imperial Film Company’s Ruby Meyers (Sulochana), silent cinema’s first sex symbol, was Eurasian of Jewish descent, though she was born in Pune. Her career took a hit when talkies came into the picture in the mid ‘30s. Her diction in Hindustani was no good. Birth of movies where actors also had to exchange dialogue didn’t entirely transform the multi-ethnic galaxy of female stars. One of the strongest draws among leading ladies in the ‘40s was Wadia Movietone’s stunt queen “Hunterwali” Fearless Nadia, a white blonde Australian, born Mary Evans. She would play realistic roles of a city bred Indian girl speaking in Hindi. The audience wouldn’t question. The black and white screen didn’t give the colour away.
For a more direct inspiration, Kaif needn’t have looked beyond Salman Khan’s home. Salman’s step-mother Helen Richardson, dancing sensation for about three decades starting from the ‘50s, is half-British, half-Burmese. Kaif is still close to Salman’s family, I could somewhat tell from the next visitor at her house after our interview got over. A distributor walked in with a gift, “Oh Salim uncle (Salman’s father) sent him over,” she said before greeting him.
As Bombay’s professionally run studio system collapsed during WWII, among other reasons due to cost of importing raw stock becoming prohibitively expensive, the film industry over generations gradually began to merge into a joint family of freelance producers and star-actors inter-connected by blood or personal friendships and marriage. The patriarchs of these families, while preferring their sons to take on leading roles, didn’t usually approve of their daughters or their wives (often former actors) to work in the movies. Lineage in films would get traced only between the father and the son.
This scheme greatly benefitted more and more women from outside the film industry to gain a relatively easier access than men into main roles. This isn’t so much the case anymore. Actors like Sonam Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor and Sonakshi Sinha are daughters of former leading men. The hero on the poster is still the main bait for driving audiences into theatres. Casting debutants as female leads has always been perceived as less of a risk. This explains why there are always far more heroines than heroes to talk about.
The Indian heroine that emerged after independence – Nargis, Nutan, Meena Kumari, Madhubala… –was usually demure, almost divine in her characterisation on screen. She would come from Muslim or Hindu families, although in most cases from less affluent homes. The Jewish Florence Ezekiel (Nadira) would fill up the more tantalising slot of the smoking, dancing, sensual ‘vamp’. Despite over 500 films to her credit and a large following still, Anglo-Burmese Helen could never really make it as a heroine, she remained the cabaret queen in public imagination.
Kaif followed an equally conventional route to the top. Playing it safe, a lot of the characters she has portrayed in films, she admitted, had “closed mindsets: shy, quiet kindairls.” Though she doesn’t name these parts, it’s easy to tell what she is talking about, looking at most of her romances, where she plays a delicate damsel (Jab Tak Hai Jaan, Humko Deewana Kar Gaye), waiting for the hero to take her under his wings (Ajab Prem Ki Gazab Kahani), or show her the way (Namastey London). She would find it hard to empathise with many of her characters, given her own “headstrong personality,” she said. “I’ve led a much harder life. What’s wrong with this girl?” she would often ask herself even while performing those “traditional” roles. On the other hand she could slide down the pole, shake it up and let her hair down as a robustly sizzling ‘item girl’, a contemporary version of the ‘60s cabaret queen. The audience doesn’t see a contradiction between both anymore. She is a bona fide Bollywood leading lady.
Industry number-crunchers estimate she charges upwards of Rs. 4 crore for a film, making almost a third of that for an ‘item song’, and up to 70-90 per cent of the figure to endorse a product. She endorses over a dozen products. Recent buzz in ad circles suggest she’s bagged a deal worth Rs 10 crore with actor and still rumoured to be her boyfriend Ranbir Kapoor to advertise for a hair oil brand.
A British national with no experience in acting or knowledge of Bollywood suddenly cracking open a lucrative labour market in the mid 2000s didn’t quite resolve recession in the West. It did offer a strange hope of sorts to women from various nationalities to take a shot at a success model in the Third World. None of the imports into Bollywood since Kaif have managed to upset the top order yet. They’ve certainly enlivened the demographics of a typical basement party in Juhu and Andheri.
Vikas Kumar, a dialogue coach, who’s worked on Vidya Balan’s Bhojpuri dialect for Ishqiya and Kalki Koechlin’s diction in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, said every other day he gets calls to help out South African, German, Brazilian models with Hindi so they can audition for Bollywood parts. Vikas is a full-time television actor. He is unable to keep up with the huge demand. As a side profession, he is setting up a full-fledged Hindi training school called ‘Strictly Speaking’ for similar aspirants.
So far, Vikas has tutored Yana Gupta (Czech, who married an Indian), Jacqueline Fernandes (Sri Lankan), Angela Johnson (half Icelandic). They have all appeared in Bollywood films, sold to audiences as Indian heroines. Director Imtiaz Ali cast Brazilian Giselle Monteiro in the role of a Punjabi girl from a village in Love Aaj Kal, following it up with the cross-pollinated Nargis Fakhri (half Czech, half Pakistani, wholly American) in a lead role as a Delhi University student alongside Ranbir in Rockstar.
Miss England runner up Amy Jackson debuted in Bollywood last year as a Malayali Christian opposite Prateik Babbar in Ek Deewana Tha: “Both my parents are from Liverpool…. An Indian director found me on Google… I hadn’t been to Asia, let alone India… I first did a film in Tamil, which sounds gibberish…. I’ve now taken up a flat in Mumbai, there’s (another) huge Bollywood film I am going to star in,” Jackson, 20, told the BBC recently. The interviewers looked flummoxed on the show.
Then there’s South African Playboy Playmateandice Boucher, who starred in a Rs 60 crore film Azaan, Brit pin-up Aruna Shields who debuted with the Vivek Oberoi starrer Prince, Brazilian Bruna Abdullah who was recently seen in the hit sex comedy Grand Masti, Swedish Elli Avram who’s a contestant in the latest season of Bigg Boss and has a film called Mickey Virus coming up… It’s hard to keep count. What connects most of these crossover starlets—with long dark hair, light skin that looks decidedly desi rather than Caucasian, and relatively petite features–is from a distance, in long shot, they could all pass off for maybe Monica Bellucci, definitely Katrina Kaif.
I see a white German blonde Claudia Ciesla morph over months into a slightly tanned, brunette version of herself on her Facebook profile pictures. Claudia featured in an ‘item song’ in Khiladi 786, an Akshay Kumar film. Vikas said he’d observed a lot of firang (white skinned) girls being easily made to look Indian with minor make-up: “And then they have the genetic advantage of height and slimness.”
This would hardly have been the prototype of the Bollywood heroine in the ‘80s right through till the mid ’90s when shorter, suppler Sridevi, Jaya Prada to Madhuri Dixit and Kajol ruled the silver screen. Late ‘90s onwards, leaner, taller models, a lot of them Miss India pageant winners, became more obvious recruits for Bollywood, starting with 5’10’’ Sushmita Sen (opposite a 5’7” Salman Khan) down to 5’9” Deepika Padukone and others now (several of whom stand taller than their leading men, even without their illegally high heels).
This gradually changing template of the Indian leading lady had a lot to do with audience’s exposure to foreign television, films and the Internet, argued Nonita Kalra, who as editor of Elle in 2002 had worked on Kaif’s first mainline photo-shoot for an Indian fashion magazine. Kaif was still a model then. Her entry into films, Kalra said, also coincided with an emerging consensus on the global image of beauty: “It was in 2003 that Newsweek had put Saira Mohan (Canadian model of Indian, French and Irish origin) on its cover as ‘The Perfect Face’. Kaif signified that same international look and heritage.” This transatlantic standardisation that has evidently had an impact on Bollywood also quite often makes it hard to tell one female actor from another on blurry advertising hoardings or fuzzy film poster when you’re slightly near-sighted. The figure and airbrushed look are roughly the same. In 2011, toy manufacturer Mattel modelled its Indian range of Barbie dolls on Kaif.
A more buxom female form with a proud girth, in saree or ghagra, modelled along the lines of Khajuraho sculptures, it could be argued, continue to whet Indian male fantasies, they aren’t passé yet. It’s still possible to sight leading ladies more open to dodging the gym in mainstream South Indian cinema (or their remakes in Bollywood)—actors like Kajal, Namitha, Nayanthara, Charmee…—or among Bhojpuri stars—Mona Lisa, Nagma, Rinku Ghosh etc—and inevitably in Mallu (Malayalam) semi-porn—Shakeela, Sharmili, Devika….
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At Elle, when Kalra saw the results of Kaif’s first photo-shoot, she said, “My breath was taken away.” She wanted to put her on the magazine cover but it was the model’s debut assignment, so she couldn’t take that editorial call. Kalra knew Kaif would get noticed in a big way when she eventually landed the Lakme contract the following year: “Iconic brands tend to do that. Aishwarya Rai was the Lakme girl before. When you think of Liril, even now, you recall Preity Zinta.”
Kaif was 18 when she came down to Mumbai for a couple of weeks in 2002. She had already started out as a freelance model in London. She did what she calls the usual “networking” in the ad world: getting in touch with model coordinators who book shows, fashion photographers for catalogue shoots, passing on her portfolio to agencies O&M, Lintas, being referred to editors at magazines Elle, L’Officiel…. She was only testing waters, she said: “Things start getting problematic when you have anything to lose. There is no fear when you have an ‘x’ amount of money, no support of family that you can fall back on, you need to earn ‘y’, and there is a modelling industry out there….” It was during these rounds that she heard about the film Boom. One of the lead actors, model Meghna Reddy, had walked out only a few days before the film’s shoot. Replacement was urgently required. Kaif auditioned and got the part.
Boom, in English, was possibly the most anticipated Indian movie of 2003. For months before its release, mainline newsprint had psyched up audiences with stunning images of the newly opened hotel Burj Al Arab in Dubai; Bo Derek stepping out of the ocean in an ode to her iconic moment from Blake Edward’s Ten; Amitabh Bachchan sporting silver Mohawk and green lenses; Zeenat Aman reprising the Dum Maro Dum song in a comeback role; and three supermodels in various states of undress: Padma Lakshmi (then Salman Rushdie’s girlfriend), Madhu Sapre (best remembered for controversially posing nude in a footwear ad in the mid ‘90s), and the newcomer Kaif.
As the film—a bizarre mash-up of the underworld meeting the world of underwear—finally opened in theatres in September, instantly panned by audiences and critics alike, dubbed as a new “benchmark in low”, almost all top names associated with it decided to disown it as well. Except Jackie Shroff of course who had starred in it and whose wife Ayesha had produced the film.
There were issues with financiers. On television, Bachchan asked for outstanding dues of the cast to be cleared; in magazine interviews he apologised for having played the male chauvinist Mafioso’s role; Rushdie lashed out at the director on behalf of his girlfriend, Shroff got into debt, had to sell off personal assets—it was a mess. Nobody remembered Kaif. Few would have watched the film outside of certain “unseen clips” with her and villain Gulshan Grover on YouTube that have garnered several million hits. Kaif told me she hadn’t seen the film still. She doesn’t remember her first shot to the camera either.
She continued her run in modelling thereafter, “travelling to small towns for shows, working 14 to 16 hours a day, shooting for three South Indian films (Malliswari, Allari Pidugu, Balram Vs Tharadas), that is 220 days of the year….”
She would also wake up early to get to her six-hour non-stop dance class by 7 am. She had begun her formal lessons in Bollywood alongside. While the base of the dance form she was learning was kathak, she essentially needed help in mastering stock expressions of the Hindi film heroine—“the ada,” as she put it: “A lot of people trivialise the role of dancing in the repertoire of a mainstream Indian actor. At the end of the day, barring few exceptions, let’s not be mistaken, we make musicals.”
Dharmesh Darshan–an old-time director-producer, whose brother Suneel was making a film called Barsaat—had put her on to a dance teacher called Guru Viru Krishna. She went to a fabric shop on Linking Road, picked up a salwar kameez and tied a dupatta around her waist. Every morning she would report to school not a minute later than 7, else she would not be allowed in. Her classmates were Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta and Sameera Reddy.
“We would be in this really tiny room, just about this small,” Kaif said, pointing to half the space between her door and the couch in an averagely sized drawing room of her sixth (top) floor apartment, which itself, though in a tony neighbourhood, looks rather underwhelming for the home of one of India’s best known Bollywood stars. The drawing room is partitioned by a small lounge space with a home-theatre system. The bedroom is by the entrance. The building in shades of cream and pink kisses the pavement of a perennially congested Waterfield Road in Bandra. Name-plate in the lobby suggests Raju Hirani – director of blockbusters 3 Idiots, Lage Raho Munnabhai – is on the first floor. This perhaps tells a lot more about Mumbai’s unreal real estate prices than the actor’s annual earnings, which of course could have gone further up given her dream run in 2012.
Her last film, last Christmas, was Jab Tak Hai Jaan: a long drawn romance with Shah Rukh Khan, and director Yash Chopra’s swan song. She had started the year dancing to ‘Chikni Chameli’ for Agneepath, a sequel of sorts of her Shakira like ‘Sheela Ki Jawani’ item song from Tees Maar Khan in 2010. Agneepath’s promotions mostly focused on the dance track picturised on her. Both Jab Tak… and Agneepath got into the coveted ‘Rs 100 crore club’ of films that earn that much and more, from their audiences. It’s the ticket sales’ number that scares champagne corks in Bollywood. According to popular film trade site Koimoi.com, Agneepath collected Rs 123 crore and Jab Tak… Rs 120.65 crore. In between, her romantic thriller, Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger, opposite Salman Khan, where she played a more substantive part of an ISI agent in love with an Indian spy, became the second highest grossing Indian film, at Rs 198 crore. She finishes 2013 with the much awaited, massively budgeted Dhoom 3 opposite Aamir Khan, before she appears with Hrithik Roshan in an action adventure Bang Bang that she was going to shoot for in Thailand when we met.
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During the first two years of her career in films, Kaif would get home from work and cry every day, she told the audience at the Hindustan Times leadership summit last year. Though she didn’t quite specify why, she said “It was an overwhelming experience.” Her Guruji’s dance classes may be producing results now, they didn’t get her the lead role with Akshay Kumar and Bobby Deol in Darshan’s Barsaat (2005). Priyanka Chopra got that part. Producer Mukesh Bhatt cast her for a super-natural flick Saaya (2003). Within a couple of days, she was kicked out of the shoot and replaced (with Tara Sharma). Her Hindi apparently wasn’t good enough. Producer-director Subhash Ghai felt the same and chose not to consider her for a role.
Language, an important tool for an actor, has rarely been a barrier for leading ladies being cast in popular Indian films: Bhanurekha Ganesan (or Rekha), Shree Amma Yanger (better known as Sri Devi), Hema Malini Ramanujam Chakravarthy (Hema Malini in short), stars from the South, have had some of the longest innings in Bollywood, despite obvious discomfort with Hindi – at least in their early films in the case of Rekha, and forever for the other two. (Rekha in fact became pro enough to lend her voice to other actors, dubbing for Sridevi in Aakhri Raasta, late Smita Patil in Waaris, south Indians Soundarya and Jayasudha in Sooryavansham).
A lot of female leads have been dubbed by professionals in movies, despite their knowledge of Hindi. The filmmakers assumedly didn’t approve of the original voices, perhaps finding Rani Mukherjee’s as too harsh (for Ghulam), Ameesha Patel too squeaky (for Kaho Naa Pyar Hai), Bipasha Basu too hoarse (for Ajnabee, Raaz, Phir Hera Pheri). lmost all Bollywood heroines do stints in south Indian movies, using support of dubbing artistes–Aishwarya Rai similarly made her debut in Mani Rathnam’s Iruvar (1997).
One of the key tricks of the trade that Kaif can’t thank actor Jackie Shroff enough for is that he asked her to crack the Devnagari script. A lot of the times, he warned her, the dialogues get written on the set, and she would feel genuinely in control only if she was able to read them. After her dance class, Kaif would get on with Hindi tuitions in the afternoon, learning to read, write and speak it.
The couple of big budget Hindi films that she finally bagged kick off her career were Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya (2005)—David Dhawan’s version of the Walter Mathau starrer Cactus Flower—with Salman, who according to tabloids, was dating her by now. And Humko Deewana Kar Gaye (2006), an NRI (non-resident Indian) romance set in Canada, starring Akshay Kumar, who’s a big draw in the Punjabi outpost. The second film was labelled “flop”, which is defined in trade-speak as a movie that doesn’t recover its total cost, “average” meaning a film that does. Her first one was a moderate commercial success or what trade“in the plus”—a project that brings in profits.
A “hit” in traditional box-office dialect doubles its money in theatres, and from there on “super-hit” and “blockbuster”. Some of these definitions have been changing of late since long theatrical runs stopped being the only, or even the main, source of revenue for films. Television rights itself can often rake in about half a film’s cost. Earnings from theatres, given a wide release backed by a marketing blitzkrieg get concentrated on a film’s collections in the first week (or weekend) in theatres alone.
Earlier in 2005, Kaif had made her first outingn North Indian cinemas after Boom, in a cameo that reprised Diane Keaton’s role (Michael Corleone’s girlfriend) in Sarkar—Ram Gopal Varma’s version of Godfather—looking stunning in sepia tone. In all these films, she spoke through the generic voice of a professional artiste, ghosted by one Mona Ghosh, who’s now the go-to person for Angelina Jolie, Kirsten Dunst, Halle Berry, Carrie-Anne Moss etc in Hindi dubbed versions of Hollywood movies. Ghosh had also dubbed for Deepika Padukone in her debut Om Shanti Om (2007). More recently she played the voice of Nargis Fakhri in Rockstar (2011).
The first time Kaif spoke in Hindi on screen was in Vipul Shah’s Namastey London, another Akshay Kumar Punjabi Diaspora film. Her accent, which sounds more ‘globish’, leaning towards American than British, was still strong but this time adding authenticity to her character, who is born into an Indian family but has lived all her life in the West. NRI is a Bollywood sub-genre of its own. Her performance stood out in a fairly common role that all other actors had played with a thick desi twang in the past – think Kajol or even Shah Rukh Khan as born Londoners in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). With Akshay Kumar as a flag-bearing patriotic Indian in the melodramatic mould of Manoj Kumar from the ‘70s, Namastey London became a major mainstream success of 2007. This was Kaif’s first genuine hit and also the first time she said she had been noticed as an actor, the role was meaty enough, Akshay Kumar showed her a review in an afternoon tabloid that mentioned, “Watch this film for Kaif Kaif.”
A heroine in a hit mainstream Bollywood film becomes a safe accessory for a leading man, so far as subsequent producers/financiers are concerned. Unless she has fallen out with the star, since the hero more often than not takes the final casting call. Over the next five years, Kaif established herself as a marquee name. She stopped using voice support for the most part. Subhash Ghai was now happy to have her in his film with Salman (Yuvraaj – Rain Man in the garb of a Bollywood musical set in Salzburg, which tanked). Yashraj studios and director Kabir Khan approached her to take on a more challenging part in New York, a post 9/11 film that tackled racial profiling and terrorism in America. Kaif would play John Abraham’s love-interest in the movie. Abraham had supposedly supervised her exit from the sets of the flick Saaya. She didn’t want to step into a role opposite him now. Alluding to Abraham in an interview to NDTV, she said it was Salman who persuaded her to go by the merits of a script rather than who the co-star was; even if he had been mean to her in the beginning of her career.
Talking about some of the challenges she’s faced as an actor, Kaif told me she was once having trouble expressing affection on screen with a co-star she really didn’t like. She took acting advice from an “industry veteran” who said to her, “When you’re looking at him, treat him as a child, find one good thing about him, and express maternal love.”
New York (2009) was both critically acclaimed and a box-office success in multiplexes and metropolitan cities. As a solo lead, she followed this up playing an earthy Catholic irl in a run-of-the-mill romance with Ranbir Kapoor in Ajab Prem Ki Gazab Kahani. Ajab Prem… struck gold in small town theatres, bringing her probably closer to what she had wanted to be: “a Hindi film heroine that everyone would know in small villages: a ‘family film star’.”
Paying tribute to leading ladies in Bollywood at the Filmfare Awards this year, hosts Shah Rukh and Saif Ali Khan devoted skits to heroines from various decades. The’70s were represented by a Hema Malini clone dressed as ‘Basanti’ from Sholay, and as Zeenat Aman from the song ‘Kya Dekhte Ho’ in Qurbani. They took digs at Sridevi for the film Himmatwala from the ‘80s. As for the “young modern heroine”, the woman on stage in white shirt, hat tipped low and a tie hanging loose was clearly a parody on Kaif as ‘Sheela’ from the pop song.
Shah Rukh also called this “empowered woman” Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra…. “If you take them in your movie, their luck comes with it,” he said, reemphasising a thumb rule in box-office trade that the hero alone ensures a film’s multi-crore success, the heroine is at best a lucky mascot—Kareena, Kaif, Priyanka, newcomer—rotating between any of the reigning Khans (Salman, Shah Rukh, Aamir), Ajay Devgn, Akshay Kumar, Hrithik Roshan….
Kaif counters this theory pointing out a film like Yashraj studio’s Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2010) that scored in theatres, and where she shared screen space with Imran Khan: “I would get 50 per cent of the credit at least, because my co-actor didn’t have a huge body of successful work behind him yet. The same for New York, or Rajneeti.” The latter being Prakash Jha’s ensemble cast political drama, where she leaped furthest away from her comfort zone, playing an outsider to Indian politics who rises to the top through marriage and personal misfortune, a character vaguely based on Sonia Gandhi. Rajneeti was one of the biggest money-spinners of 2010.
Trade pundit Vinod Mirani says on any given year, only 10 per cent of films recover their costs in Bollywood. As per figures on Boxofficeindia.com, of the 18 films that Kaif has starred in the main role, 15 have turned out to be profitable for their investors (including lesser known films like Apne, De Dana Dan), deemed anywhere between “in the plus” and a “blockbuster” That’s a strike-rate of 83 per cent in close to 10 years, unrivalled among her current contemporaries. It’s something that escapes box-office analysis only because that is centred on the male lead alone.
Kaif said she closely followed the numbers game, Friday footfall figures, opening weekend collections of all films, “though not as much as before.” On the day of her film’s release, she anxiously awaits the 2 pm phone-call for summaries of all box-office analyses. Her personal assessment of movies is roughly guided by the same indicators: “If 80 per cent people love a character or actor, then it must be a good film. You can argue with critics, you can’t argue with the majority.” As to what makes a star, she said, “The audiences either relate to you or they don’t. It could be for any reason: honesty, screen presence, smile… It’s destiny,” a word she used quite often in the interview, to mean something that’s foretold, rather than luck, which comes your way.
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Growing up in different parts of a world unrelated to India let alone films, did she at any of these places have an inkling where destiny would finally land her, as a top-notch Bollywood heroine, I asked Kaif. “Yes,” she said. Where did she think of it, as a kid in Japan? “Not exactly. My ambition was a little vague in terms of achieving something big,” she said.
When she first moved to Mumbai, she found it to be “a magical world, an unattainable pure fantasy… Way out of reach.” She would walk around like “Alice in wonderland”. She had lived in Third World countries before, she said, and so the city’s poverty seemed normal to her. She had brought her sister along as well, who ran off in two weeks: “My sisters haven’t had the same upbringing. They settled down in London by the time they were 16. I’ve been used to waking up in a different country every other morning.”
In a more Indian setting, Kaif’s quasi nomadic upbringing connects her to a huge number of female actors in Bollywood: Priyanka Chopra, Anushka Sharma, Preity Zinta, Lara Dutta, Sushmita Sen, Chitrangada Singh, Gul Panag, Celina Jaitley, Neha Dhupia…. All of them coincidentally come from Army or Services backgrounds, with their parent’s job taking them to various towns or closed cantonments while growing up across India.
In an essay in his book Mother Pious Lady, author Santosh Desai branded this female phenomenon the “Freedom of Army Daughters”. The fact of being raised without the roots of a permanent home, away from neighbourly tongues and prying eyes, Desai argued, helped them grow up “not knowing too well what being a girl in India usually meant. The freedom to live in the present and to be who you are is perhaps the reason why army daughters constantly display the easy confidence of those who do not see the world as a place full of invisible constraints but one of frequent opportunity.”
Kaif said her early years of living in different places gave her an extremely adaptive personality: “I could just fit in anywhere.” Sitting in her couch in comfortable t-shirt and jeans, discussing the lead actor of the film Rust And Bone whom she particularly loved, taking jibes at her maid in Hindi, she comes across as a typically unintimidating, chatty sort of Bandra expat. The entertainment she consumes hardly matches her own body of work. I see a copy of Spielberg’s Lincoln lying in the coffee-table. She said her friends download for her most of the television shows she’s hooked on to: Games Of Thrones, Bones, The Killing…. This isn’t uncommon among many actors and filmmakers you meet in mainstream Bollywood who rarely let their personal tastes get in the way of a prevailing perception of what audiences want.
The first time Kaif met Salman, she was too new to the city to be able to tell a celebrity whose pictures appear in newspaper supplements from someone who was more popular. She knew he was famous but had never heard of him before. This is hard to believe, I told her. She said it took her a week to figure he was a major superstar. By the time Boom had released, they were already friends. They’ve done four films together (including David Dhawan’s mad-cap Partner, lifted from the Will Smith starrer Hitch). She’s been paired with Akshay Kumar five times (with hits Singh Is Kingh, Welcome, and the disaster Tees Maar Khan).
She said she picked up acting skills pretty much on the sets, patiently following her director’s instructions, doggedly rehearsing her material before the shot and observing her colleagues: “seeing Govinda’s improvisations; Salman’s brazenness in bringing out his own personality and making that something the audience connects to; Akshay’s professionalism and intense discipline in an industry that by its nature doesn’t encourage discipline, you just have to find it within yourself.”
There is a formula, Kaif admitted, and she has learnt and followed it. “This is the way it’s been done, so I must, but that’s not to say it should always be that way. I want to get a chance to do something different now,” she said. When she entered Bollywood, pretty much all the scripts offered to her were in the form of ‘screenplay narrations’, where the director would broadly tell her the story and outline what happens to her character: “Boy and girl fight, she goes off to London, he follows her, they make up, and this is the end.” It’s only lately that she has begun reading scripts, many of which don’t cater to only masses at large, multiplexes having made “niche films” possible and profitable. It’s something that interests her more.
This change of course in her career is difficult to ascertain at this point, though reports suggest she has been in talks with the relatively off-stream director Dibakar Bannerjee to star in his detective fiction based on the Bengali ‘Sherlock Holmes’ Byomkesh Bakshi. She has signed up with Abhishek Kapoor—whose last film Kai Po Che intimately recounted the Gujarat riots—besides teaming up again with Kabir Khan and Zoya Akhtar, both blockbuster filmmakers equally capable of making a statement through their films.
At 29, she is aware of the unpredictability of showbiz, where two huge hits by someone else and your own stardom can be put under question: “At any point in time, you just cannot stop needing to be at the forefront of the profession, being involved with good scripts, good filmmakers and good performances. Few years down the line, no matter how intelligent, hardworking and talented you are, there will come a time when things will change, they won’t be in your control anymore. How you deal with it is up to you.”
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Despite almost a decade under severe tabloid scrutiny and paparazzi spotlight, Kaif has managed to intensely guard her personal life. It’s remarkable that there is still such little known about her family—her years before the movies are a long blur. Producer Ayesha Shroff, who introduced her with Boom, supposedly ‘outted’ her non-Indian antecedents in Mumbai Mirror in 2009, revealinghat her last name was in fact Turcotte—which is what she goes by in her British passport.
Kaif was a surname Shroff had given her after Mohamed Kaif, popular cricketer at the time, she told the tabloid. Shroff refused to be interviewed for this story. As did director Kaizad Gustad, who according to Kaveree Bamzai’s profile of Kaif in India Today in 2011, would “drop dark hints about her past.” Gustad recently announced a film with Indo-Canadian porn-star Sunny Leone. If released, it would be his first film since Kaif’s debut Boom (in 2004, his movie Bombay Central was shelved because of an accidental death of an assistant director during the shoot).
Here’s roughly what is publicly known about Kaif then. That her British mother Susanna who raised her is a relief worker based in Chennai. Until recently she used to work for a mercy home for children in Madurai. I asked her if I could briefly interview her mom. Few days later she texted to say that her mom would rather not. She chooses not to talk about her father, who left the family when she was really young. She has mentioned in past interviews that he is of Kashmiri origin, and that his name is Mohamed Kaif, though this is hard to verify.
In her defence she said, “Just because I’ve chosen to be under spotlight doesn’t mean my whole family ought to face the public. It’s their right to ask and my right to answer with as little information as I desire.” When paparazzi shots of her holidaying with Ranbir Kapoor in Ibiza went viral after gossip mag Stardust ran it in July this year, she sent out a press note complaining against invasion of her privacy. Much like Salman, she rarely if ever issues clarifications to rumours and reports about her personal life in the press. This sets her apart from a lot of her contemporaries—Kareena Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Deepika Padukone etc—whose personal quotes on love, life, co-stars, and pot-shots in general have regularly lit up fanzines and tabloids.
Kaif’s close-guardedness in contrast spawns a series of celeb-spotting snaps and “hush hush” reports of her daily routine. On the day I write this story, August 27, Bombay Times found her partying at a Mumbai nightclub before she flew off to London to attend her sister’s wedding in London; alongside the same report in the same edition of the paper is a snippet on how she was in Sri Lanka with Ranbir.
In press interactions, she never shoots her mouth off, is almost bland in her repartees, forcing you to read between the lines. She said, “People who accuse me of being diplomatic don’t understand my history and my life that’s only made me least judgmental as a person. I have seen extreme and most unimaginable situations. These aren’t things I would discuss. That’s just between me and my world and my family involved.”
Kaif has seven siblings—six sisters and a brother. She said she was also financially responsible for her family. (One of her sisters Isabelle who trained in acting at New York’s Lee Strasberg is currently auditioning for roles for a film debut).
Kalra, the former Elle editor who met Kaif before she became a star, said what she liked about her is she rarely lets on what she’s thinking: “In a world of too much information, she came across as someone who doesn’t assume closeness, is polite, well-behaved. I never asked her anything personal because it’s easy to tell with her that it’s not in your place to.”
Including an hour long conversation for this story, I’ve so far interviewed her thrice, clocking in a talk-time longer than most Hindi movies. Yet the self-effacing two-dimensional picture that emerges is impenetrably a distant snapshot. Somehow the mystique around the unlikely, imported star, at least in the public mind endures, as she dreamily looks back: “A million people can use a million lines to describe me, one thing that won’t fit is that I didn’t imagine this life. Since I remember having a brain, I’ve always had an outrageous, outlandish imagination, fantasies, dreams, and that is all that I do to this date.”
This dreamy self-portrait tallies beautifully well with the magical fairy that she plays in a cameo role as herself in Zoya Akhtar’s short film.