TMKOC creator Asit Kumar Modi recalls Disha Vakani's first audition for Dayaben's role: ‘When she played the part, we all just loved it'

Indian Express

23-04-2025

Tarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah has been successfully running for 17 years. However, the show's lead actress, Disha Vakani aka Dayaben, quit the show five years ago. Disha had taken maternity leave from the show in 2018, after which the actress never returned. In 2020, she had just made a brief appearance on the show, and that marked the last time Dayaben's character appeared on TMKOC. Now, in an exclusive conversation with SCREEN, Asit Modi recalled Disha Vakani's first audition as Dayaben.
He said, 'Disha Vakani is a very fine actor. So when we explained the character to her, our brief was that she is a very innocent lady who looks after her husband, her father-in-law, and her world revolves around her son. Whenever she gets shocked, her reaction is always 'Hey Ma, Mataji!', it's a very common reaction amongst people in Gujarat. During her audition, we were all sitting together, and when she played the part, we all just loved it. The reference to Dayaben calling Jethalal from the balcony comes from my mother. Whenever my father would go to work, he would forget something, and my mother would run behind him, calling him. We bought that innocence in her character; she doing garba was added later.'
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Asit Modi also shared how Dayaben's iconic Garba style came into being, 'During the first episode, we thought of adding garba in the episode when Bapuji snorted, his hip gets stiff, that is when we decided to try if we could use Garba to rectify his stiffness. That's how the craze for doing garba started. Daya Bhabhi's style of garba was her improvisation. While shooting, we all try to take what is written in the script to the next level.'
He also spoke about other actors and said, 'Initially, all the characters used to have lots of workshops because I wanted it to look like a real society. All the artistes were new, Dilip Joshi had some theater experience, and he has been very popular in Gujarati dramas. Due to the theater, he had good knowledge about improvisations. All others were quite new and had not done a show for such a long time, so during the casting, one criterion I had in mind was that they all needed to have that innocence.'
Talking about Dayaben's return on the show, Asit Modi assured that the character will be back soon. He in the process of finalizing the new Dayaben, however, he expressed his wish for Disha Vakani only to return to play the iconic character.