Shabana Azmi asked Ray for a second film, he said ‘but you don't look Bengali'

New Indian Express

21-05-2025

Sen said she had been 'scared' to take up Benegal's offer to play a Hyderabadi servant girl who could speak a smattering of Telugu but added in mock seriousness that Benegal could have persuaded her.
Azmi, unsurprisingly for an actor who passed out with a gold medal from the FTII, pulled off the role with no sign of first-film jitters. She didn't speak Telugu, but she could and did speak Dakhini, a dialect of Urdu that borrows from Marathi. Azmi's Laxmi is a woman of touching vulnerability and pragmatism. She hums as she grinds spices and takes charge of the kitchen and sweeps the floors of Chhote Sarkar (played by Anant Nag); she is the housekeeper who sits at some distance from him, when in the solitude of village life he needs conversation; she also shares his bed when her husband briefly disappears without warning, but all with destitute eyes. They reflect back that she knows she will be discarded when he gets a high-caste wife.
Working with the auteurs
Azmi's 25-plus years of collaboration with Benegal, one of the most fruitful partnerships of Indian cinema between a director and actor—they worked on seven films, from Ankur (1974) to Hari Bhari (2000)—naturally occupied a major part of the conversation. Working with Benegal was about self-discovery, she said. 'I look at it as an exercise of knowing myself. Benegal loved his actors, it was a relationship of trust. You always knew he would stop you if you made an ass of yourself. When we went to shoot in Yellareddyguda, [a village in then Andhra Pradesh] for Ankur, he made me walk around in a sari. I was a jeans-clad Bombay girl, he realised I could not sit down on my haunches, so my food began to be served on the floor. After a few days, I joined the others at the table.'