Shabana Azmi .
Mo
taking part in anti Hindu movies shows a great deal of
courage . By highlighting the faults of Hinduism and
ensuring their discussion and elimination- mistreatment of
women etc. she is doing what should be done in all free and
open societies .
Of course she should also criticize Muslim backwardness and
defend the visa for Rushdie but then she knows what the
Islamic fundamentalists are like , and she wants to live ..
Shabana azmi, a member of India's Parliament, greets her
visitors
wearing a teeka on her forehead - the traditional red dot
often worn
by married Hindu women. Except she is not Hindu and, as a
noted
actress, is hardly traditional. She is a Muslim who has
become a
leading voice against the rise of extreme ethnic and
nationalist
feelings in India.
In the past year, India's billion-faced profile in the
international arena has changed. A culture war over India's
identity
has come more into the open. Extremist squads have targeted
Christians, Muslims, and low-caste Hindus. A Hindu
nationalist
government tested nuclear weapons.
An atypical politician, Ms. Azmi is also a movie star who
eschews
the celebrity system of Bollywood, as Bombay's film industry
is known.
Instead, she takes roles that challenge ``attempts to force
our
identity as Indians into a fixed system of religion or
tradition,'' as
she puts it.
For Azmi, the watershed in her own political identity
came in 1992
when Hindu nationalists destroyed a mosque in Ayodhya,
setting off
riots around the country. ``It was shocking. For me,
identity was
always fluid. I was a woman, an Indian, an actress, a
Muslim, a
daughter, a wife, an activist. But in the new approach I was
forced to
be a Muslim. That is not the truth of India. We have a
composite
culture.''
Azmi, a kind of Meryl Streep of South Asia and a popular
icon here,
says such trends are a departure from the India she
envisioned as a
member of the nation-building generation of Jawaharlal
Nehru, India's
first prime minister. For that generation India was to be a
modern
state, where identity transcends race, religion, and ethnic
background.
``In what seems like a fast-growing intolerant world
order, the
only answer is pluralism,'' Azmi says in an interview. ``Say
what you
want. But thou shalt not kill, and thou shalt not destroy
property.
Any civilized society must live by universal rules.''
In the same way that Mohandas Gandhi used enlightenment
ideals
forged in the West to make his point to British colonizers
that they
ought to leave, so too, Azmi's tradition could be described
as a
mixture of Western and Indian idealism - played out in a
very Indian
way.
AS a politician, Azmi reflects a broad, educated
middle-class
Indian view that has remained largely silent during the past
year.
(She is one of the members of Parliament's upper house
nominated by
the president, and she is not a member of a political
party.) In
recent weeks the government led by Prime Minister Atal
Behari Vajpayee
has itself taken on a more moderate tone. The prime
minister's
statesman-like visit to Pakistan, long a nemesis, is an
appeal to a
centrist constituency that wants peace.
As an artist, however, Azmi has just emerged from the
middle of
India's hottest culture war - for her starring role in
``Fire,'' a
film by noted director Deepa Mehta that has been released
internationally. The picture, which provoked rock-throwing
gangs and
front-page headlines in December, goes far past artistic
statements
and into one of the most sensitive areas of Indian life:
relations
between the sexes.
In ``Fire,'' Azmi plays a dutiful wife who falls in love
with the
ignored wife of her husband's brother. As Azmi and others
point out,
the film is not about lesbianism per se; indeed it does not
contain
risqu visuals. It mainly deals with conditions between the
sexes in
India that can lead to a lack of intimacy between men and
women, and
between husbands and wives in a still very strong system of
arranged
marriages.
When ``Fire'' was released this fall, gangs from a
quasi-fascist
Hindu party, Shiv Sena, stormed theaters across the country
and
harassed moviegoers - forcing the federal government to
temporarily
close the film. It opened again last month.
This month, Azmi is making headlines over a new Hindi
film, ``The
Godmother.'' Azmi plays a woman from a rural village whose
husband is
killed by the local mafia - and in retaliation she becomes
the local
don. A love story leitmotif has the godmother's Hindu son
trying to
marry a Muslim girl. Everyone is against the marriage,
including the
godmother. But at film's end the godmother backs her son's
choice, and
the two families come together - a social message many
Indians are not
ready to accept.
Azmi's roles have always questioned the conventional. In
1974,
``The Seedling'' dealt with a young Indian woman's journey
from the
village to the modern city. But Azmi's character did not
simply adopt
the values of the pop-culture wave sweeping Indian urban
youth at the
time.
``Shabana had a modern sentiment that was also Indian,
and that
opened up space for us,'' says longtime friend Tani
Bhargava. ``At the
time when the '60s generation was falling for the West hook,
line, and
sinker - with the promiscuity, hippies - Shabana rejected
that
mindless modernism. Instead she put the sari on center
stage, showing
us that being Indian didn't mean we had to be backward.''
Film critic Shubra Gupta of the Indian Express says
Azmi's studied
approach to acting gives her leverage no other female can
match. ``She
is one of the most thinking actresses in Indian film
today.... It is
one reason why she can demand that not all important roles
go to
men,'' Ms. Gupta says.
The daughter of one of India's foremost poets, Azmi comes
out of a
privileged Bombay background. Her parents chose not to leave
India for
Muslim Pakistan during partition in 1947; they considered
India home.
Azmi had a long relationship with director Shehkar Kapur,
whose film
``Elizabeth'' is nominated for several Oscars this year -
before
marrying her current husband, a poet and former
scriptwriter. Azmi is
also one of a new breed of South Asian jet-setters who is as
at home
in London as Delhi; she speaks regularly at places like
Harvard,
Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Even Azmi critics admit that she devotes as much if not
more time
to social causes in Parliament as to her art. She typically
works
12-hour days in a bungalow next to her home, around the
corner from
Sonia Gandhi's residence in Delhi's fashionable inner
circle. In the
1980s, in something called ``Operation Evacuation,'' Bombay
started to
round up thousands of street dwellers and encamp them
outside town.
Azmi and others formed a group to allow them to stay in the
city and
work - an urban housing group Azmi still heads.
``A test for any society, any democracy, is the question
of how it
treats its minorities,'' she says. ``We have to show in a
new way that
we can pass the test.''
Nusrat Rizvi
> I think this woman is a great lady . Being a Muslim and
>taking part in anti Hindu movies shows a great deal of
>courage . By highlighting the faults of Hinduism and
>ensuring their discussion and elimination- mistreatment of
>women etc. she is doing what should be done in all free and
>open societies .
> Of course she should also criticize Muslim backwardness and
>defend the visa for Rushdie but then she knows what the
>Islamic fundamentalists are like , and she wants to live ..
About 3 months ago I ran into this woman buying some trinkets
in Indian shop on Lex. Ave in NYC.
I really felt she was suffering from bulimia, one would think in a
land of emiciated people she had to be different from others, this
alas was not the case. She not much to look at either, but thats one
mans opinion.
Nusrat Rizvi
Srivatsan Seshadri
Nusrat Rizvi wrote:
> 10033...@compuserve.com (Mo) wrote:
>
> > I think this woman is a great lady . Being a Muslim and
> >taking part in anti Hindu movies shows a great deal of
> >courage . By highlighting the faults of Hinduism and
> >ensuring their discussion and elimination- mistreatment of
> >women etc. she is doing what should be done in all free and
> >open societies .
> > Of course she should also criticize Muslim backwardness and
> >defend the visa for Rushdie but then she knows what the
> >Islamic fundamentalists are like , and she wants to live ..
>
> About 3 months ago I ran into this woman buying some trinkets
> in Indian shop on Lex. Ave in NYC.
> I really felt she was suffering from bulimia, one would think in a
> land of emiciated people she had to be different from others, this
> alas was not the case. She not much to look at either, but thats one
> mans opinion.
I'm sorry, your point being...?
cheers
vatsan
> Nusrat Rizvi
Nusrat Rizvi
>Nusrat Rizvi wrote:
>> 10033...@compuserve.com (Mo) wrote:
>>
>> > I think this woman is a great lady . Being a Muslim and
>> >taking part in anti Hindu movies shows a great deal of
>> >courage . By highlighting the faults of Hinduism and
>> >ensuring their discussion and elimination- mistreatment of
>> >women etc. she is doing what should be done in all free and
>> >open societies .
>> > Of course she should also criticize Muslim backwardness and
>> >defend the visa for Rushdie but then she knows what the
>> >Islamic fundamentalists are like , and she wants to live ..
>>
>> About 3 months ago I ran into this woman buying some trinkets
>> in Indian shop on Lex. Ave in NYC.
>> I really felt she was suffering from bulimia, one would think in a
>> land of emiciated people she had to be different from others, this
>> alas was not the case. She not much to look at either, but thats one
>> mans opinion.
>I'm sorry, your point being...?
>cheers
>vatsan
I was just wondering if glamour or looks were in integral part of
being a heart throb in India. From Miss Shaban Azami's perspective, it
does not look necessarily so.
Nusrat Rizvi