Cinema: Actress, Artist, and Maverick
Despite being shy and introverted, DEEPTI NAVAL was a gutsy nonconformist. In an era when Bollywood leading ladies played either second fiddle or simply eye candy, she was ahead of her times—a versatile actress who garnered substantial, memorable roles that made us laugh, cry, and think.
(Photo www.facebook.com/Iamdeeptinaval)
As Deepti Naval writes in her memoir A Country Called Childhood, at different times in her life, she contemplated becoming a shepherd, a nun, an actor, a model, a flight attendant, and a classical dancer. Fortunately for cinephiles, she chose a career in films—despite promising herself that she would never see a movie again in her life after watching Durgesh Nandini, the first film she ever watched when she was all of four years old.
For any follower of meaningful cinema of the 1980s, Naval’s amazing body of work is truly an inspiration. She made her debut in the Hindi film industry in 1978 with Shyam Benegal’s Junoon, a stirring film with a stellar star cast that included Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, and Naseeruddin Shah. She was then launched as the lead actress in director Vinod Pande’s film Ek Baar Phir, opposite Suresh Oberoi. But her big breakthrough came with Sai Paranjpye’s 1981 romantic comedy Chashme Baddoor. The movie was a roaring success and Deepti Naval aka Ms. Chamko became India’s sweetheart overnight!
[Right] Deepti Naval with Shabana Azmi in Junoon, her debut film.
Many acclaimed roles followed in runaway hits such as Angoor, Saath-Saath, Rang Birangi, Katha, and Kissi Se Na Kehna. Naval’s iconic pairing with the effortless actor, the late Farooq Shaikh, made for some of the most beloved romcoms of all times. These movies tugged at the heartstrings of millions of Indians with their simplicity and honesty. Her true-to-life portrayals of the characters of Sandhya Sabnis, Neha Ranjan, Tanu, Geetanjali Gupta, and Dr. Ramola Sharma were a breath of fresh air, and especially so, at a time when actresses were primarily meant to be eye-candy—either bursting into song and dance numbers at the drop of a hat or being melodramatic girlfriends, wives, and daughters.
Naval excelled not just in light-hearted comedies, but also in bold and thought-provoking dramas that were way ahead of their times. A self-professed introvert, she possessed a shy demeanor and quiet façade that belied the strength and intensity she brought to her characters in movies such as Ek Baar Phir, Kamala, Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho, Mirch Masala, Main Zinda Hoon, Didi, Leela, and Firaaq.
[Left] Naval’s iconic pairing with the late Farooq Shaikh made for some of the most beloved romcoms of all times.
More recently, we saw Naval in movies such as Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Lion, the Netflix show Made in Heaven, and her latest film Goldfish, in which she portrays, with great conviction, an aging woman afflicted with dementia. Naval made her directorial debut in 2010, with the film Do Paise ki Dhoop, Chaar Aane ki Baarish, which was also released on Netflix in 2019. The film won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2009 New York Indian Film Festival. She also wrote and directed a TV serial, Thoda Sa Aasmaan, and produced a travel show, The Path Less Traveled.
Such an amazing journey in cinema was possible only because this young Indian American from New York was gutsy enough to follow her true calling and move to Mumbai to pursue a career in Hindi films, knowing absolutely nothing about the industry.
[Right] In Gulzar’s Shakespearean comedy, Angoor.
And there’s more to Deepti Naval than being a versatile, and accomplished actor. She is also an extraordinary painter, a sensitive poet, and a writer par excellence. Her first selection of poems in Hindi, Lamha Lamha, was published in 1983. In 2004, she wrote about her battles with depression in a new collection of poems called Black Wind and Other Poems. Naval is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Mad Tibetan, published in 2011.
Here's my conversation with Deepti Naval on her book, her movies, and her life.
I was intrigued by the title of your book, A Country Called Childhood. How did you come up with this title? It seems very unlikely to equate a country with your childhood.
I think I just instinctively came up with the phrase in one of the passages that I was writing. It went like this: “These are the sights, smells, sounds from the country I once lived in…a country called childhood.” My editor immediately picked up on that and said that “this is what we’re going to call your book.” You know, your childhood and those first 18 years of your life, are the most influential years of your life. They are the basis of who you’re going to be later on in life. It’s the vastness of that childhood experience that shapes you—because it’s not just your experience, your memory, and what you went through, but also what was fed into you through world events and family history. In my case it was the Partition, World War II, the Indo-Pak war…and so many other stories that were happening around me and told to me by my mother that have contributed to who I am today.
[Left] In Jagmohan Mundhra’s Kamla, Naval plays a woman of the Bhil tribe who is sold in the flesh trade.
Your running away from home when you were 13 came as a surprise to me. For a self-proclaimed introvert, you were incredibly brave. Where do you think that spunk came from?
Introverts are dangerous people (smiles). You never know what’s cooking in their heads. As an adolescent, if I had blurted out everything, I would have probably been able to deal with my issues. But because things in my mind did not find an expression, my mind was all convoluted. I thought that I was born in this very wrong environment, in this walled city [of Amritsar], where the only focus was on books and study. The nuns [at school] were so strict. I mean what kind of life is this? So, I thought that Kashmir was the place to live. I was too gutsy for my years, and I just took the plunge and decided to run away.
Your grandma told you that girls from good families do not go anywhere near cinema. And yet you went into acting. Why?
It's interesting. My mom was an art lover. She was an artist at heart. She loved dance, music, and painting. She would've liked to participate in dance and drama and be a performing artist. But those things were looked down upon for women. I felt it was time to challenge those norms.
[Right] In Bawandar, she plays the gritty Shobha Devi who takes on feudal lords charged with gang rape.
You clearly were a badass right from the beginning, but there is this public persona of you as the quiet and shy “Miss goody two-shoes.”
Yeah, that image of me is completely wrong! I had a lot of daring. I came to Mumbai all alone from America, without really knowing much about the film industry. My mother cautioned me that there are all kinds of people [in the film industry]. She wondered how I would look out for myself. But having lived and worked in Manhattan, I had cultivated the confidence. I told her, “The way you have raised us, we are quite capable of looking after ourselves.” I assured her that I was sharp enough to see unclean situations and skirt around it.
I have lived my life pretty honestly and never done anything surreptitiously. So, it irritates me that I have such a false image. I think initially it was because of the kind of roles I picked. Those roles had a very sweet presence on screen and people saw that character and believed that that’s who I was in real life too. But that kind of limits you in so many ways.
You are a trained kathak dancer, and in the book, you talk about your disappointment over not getting cast in the mainstream song-and-dance roles.
That had to do with the choice of cinema I opted to do. I didn’t realize that it would never give me the chance to sing and dance, which I love doing.
[Left]Naval portrays, with great conviction, an aging woman afflicted with dementia in Goldfish, her latest.
You write in the book that at the age of 11, you decided that you wanted to become an actor. Has your life turned out as you had imagined it at that time?
To quite an extent. But if you ask me whether I have reached the zenith of my capability, then I would say: no way! Actors are greedy people; they are never satisfied. They keep thinking that they need more diversified roles to play and that with time they can tackle roles better. That is an endless quest. But this is a great time to be an actor. Roles are being written for senior actors and for female actors, and I was lucky because right when I finished this book, the movie, Goldfish, came my way.
In Goldfish you play a very unconventional, strong-willed, and opinionated single Indian mother whose relationship with her daughter is extremely strained. Were you worried about how you would be perceived by the audience, knowing that the typical Bollywood Indian mother is exactly the opposite? She expected to be loving, kind, and sacrificial.
No, I wasn’t worried at all. In fact, I was grateful that I was getting something real to portray. There are conflicts like these happening in everybody’s life. Of course, I had a dream-like relationship with my own mom; so I had to really think through and understand the various shades of the character and I’m glad that I have been able to play her with total conviction. I believe that we are way past the Chasme Baddoor days when characters had to be black or white, and good or bad. Today, people are ready for all the nuances
and aberrations in life. It’s a very significant film in today’s time.
Like the character you portray in the film, your own mother also had dementia. How helpful was your experience as your mom’s caregiver in portraying the suffering of the character in the film?
I didn't feel the need to imitate my mother. I internalize the character in such a way that it just comes out of me. I may have observed a mannerism or so of my mother, like when she gets up in the night and goes touching everything in the house. However, the feeling of what I saw with my mother only came into my role in the last three scenes. Before that, I had to imagine the tension between the mother and the daughter on my own.
How was it working with Kalki Koechlin?
Kalki is a dream to work with, and she’s a brilliant actor. One of the reasons I said yes to this film is because I heard that she was playing my daughter. I trust her sensibility, and it is a mother-daughter story. So, I was happy to have the chance to work with an actor who I look up to among the younger crop.
[Right] Naval’s memoir, an evocative expression of her inner and outer life.
Any actors from the current crop that you would like to work with?
I have already worked with Kalki. Alia Bhatt’s very bright. I find the younger lot very skilled and disciplined. I would love to work with actors such as Vicky Kaushal, Ranveer Singh, and Ranbir Kapoor. They are all so bright.
Who are your favorite actors that you’ve worked with?
Naseeruddin Shah is one of my most favorite co-stars. I have also loved working with Sanjeev Kumar. I did Hum Paanch, Angoor, and Shrimaan Shrimathi with him. He was one of my favorite actors. It’s a pity that I came late into the industry, and I couldn’t work with an actor like Balraj Sahani. Meena Kumari was another favorite.
You have been such a natural in both—serious cinema as well as comedies. Is there one or the other that you particularly enjoy more?
Well, I don’t see those films as comedies. Though the genre of that cinema may have been comedy, I was never trying to be funny. I never looked at them as comedies when I signed them or when I was doing them. I was just doing my part very sincerely and the situation was comic, but I never got the chance to be funny. The comedy was part of the story. I mean there are people who are comic actors, and the way they perform, they make you laugh, people like Charlie Chaplin and Lucy in I Love Lucy. But I didn’t do anything consciously to make people laugh like that. It was the filmmaker who made them laugh.
Which one of your movies is very dear to you?
Ankahee, Main Zinda Hoon, Yeh Ishq Nahin Aasaan, Ek Baar Phir, and Panchvati. And now Goldfish is my alltime favorite. I also love The Boy with the Top Knot, and Memories in March. I love all the intense movies.
Any characters of yours that you cherish?
Definitely, Sandhya, of Katha, Sadhana of Goldfish, and Saadhavi of Panchvati.
[Left] Deepti Naval, the painter.
Where are you most at home? Amritsar, Mumbai, or New York?
It’s none of those places. I am most at home when I am on the move. I am an avid trekker and love cross-country safaris. That is the time when I am most grounded— when I am zipping across places. But when I return to any place with four walls, I feel confined. It’s the feeling of wanting to get somewhere that makes me feel great and at home.
Deepa Agarwal is part of a Peabody Award-winning team at CNN International where she is a Planning Producer and was formerly a full time Editorial Producer.
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