Obituary | Bewitching India

Sridevi died on February 24th

Bollywood’s Number One female superstar was 54

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THE media complained that Sridevi was such an enigma, so intensely reserved. She couldn’t deny it. She felt uncomfortable talking to reporters, and for years avoided promotions and parties for her films. When she left her make-up van for a shoot, an assistant holding her pallu out of the dust, her bouncers would shout: “No pictures when she walks!”, and so the lensmen would wait, in a tizzy, for the moment when she would pause and turn her perfect face to them. But still she preferred not to talk. In her heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s all questions about her plans, her sex appeal or her love interests were deflected with a coy “Ask Mummy”. For Mummy, in the traditional way, handled all her property and tax affairs, including the negotiations with besotted producers over how many lakh of rupees she would get for every film. At her first screen-call, at the age of four, she hid in her mother’s sari out of shyness. She seemed to go on hiding there for much of her career.

Yet she made 300 films, was Heroine Number One in Bollywood for two decades and won six Filmfare awards, India’s equivalent of the Oscars. In front of the camera she felt and was quite different, totally uninhibited. She could go from flirtatious to annoyed to rapturous in a matter of seconds, twitch her nose with disdain or slap a line of men across the face and, all the while, keep dancing. Her fans remembered every move from the climactic snake-dance scene in “Nagina” when, in deathly white, furious and venomous, she glided down a staircase to roll and gyrate in front of the evil snake-charmer, stinging his sidekicks with her hands and with the flash of her blue-lensed eyes. In “Himmatwala” her breakthrough film, she pranced so raunchily on a beach with her co-star, in a tight costume of pink and silver stripes, that she earned the nickname “Thunder Thighs”. And then there was that scene in “Mr India” in 1987—the film that also showed the whole country how good at comedy she was—when in a dimly lit cave she made love to the invisible man of the title, almost unbearably sensuous as she clung to rusty metalwork or writhed on piles of straw. She wore a plain blue chiffon sari, but it showed every curve, especially when drenched by water. If she looked so gloriously sexy in ordinary dress, could she help it?

That sari had been her idea, after she had rejected the over-the-top sequinned number designed for her. Her power lay in suggesting what every Indian woman in a simple sari with her hair loose could do, if only she had a man who loved her as Mr India did. Equally, her snake-shimmying inspired Egyptian belly-dancers and her likeness as Benazir, a fierce Pushtun character, was woven for years into carpets in Afghanistan.

If she did not respond to this adoration, it was because she felt her work should speak. And besides, she had never lived a normal life. She had been playing to camera, loving it even more than it loved her, since she was a child in Tamil Nadu in the south, starring in Tamil and Telugu films. For a while a teacher came on set, but then she did without schooling. Chatterers said her parents pushed her, though in fact they could not keep her away. At ten and a half she played her first romantic role, since the director had decided that she filled out her sari like a woman, and shortly after that she went to Bombay, breaking into the brashest of India’s film industries. Her father was her chaperone, and everything was done for her. She never shopped as a girl, and as a star she did not need to, happy to have her exquisite saris of south silk chosen by someone else.

Her lines, too, were said by other people when she first went to Bollywood, because she knew no Hindi; not a word. Little did they realise that she had spoken her own lines in Malayalam and Kannada films, other languages of the south, without knowing what they meant either. She memorised them phonetically, finding the right emotion somehow. When taking direction she would keep her face so blank that no one had any idea whether she had heard, so deeply was she thinking of the shot, the words and her role, whether a sparkling heroine-princess or (in “Sadma”, perhaps her finest piece of acting) a prostitute suffering from amnesia, or a breezy con-woman picking the pocket of a bartender to pay for bottles of beer.

Fights and firecrackers

On screen she triumphed over the worst—scheming stepmothers, lecherous men, evil god-men—that could be thrown at her. “No pain, no gain” was a lesson she had learned off-screen too, though she didn’t want to specify what the whole press knew anyway, that she’d pursued a married co-star without success and was married late, at 33, to Boney Kapoor, a producer who already had a wife. That had all settled down, and she had taken 15 years out to bring up her daughters. At home she led a quiet, very systematic life, until she re-emerged in 2012 to make “English Vinglish”, a comedy about a mother, mocked by her family for her bad English, who went secretly to classes and surprised them all. But then she had always sprung surprises, bewitching a billion people as the shy girl from Sivakasi who, like the town’s famous firecrackers, could go from silent doll to live wire in the split second it took for the cameras to roll.

This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "Bewitching India"

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