Decoding The Indomitable Dimple Kapadia

The Indomitable Dimple Kapadia

If her role in Disney+ Hotstar's Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo seems like a throwback to her tour de force, Rudaali, it's with good reason. Dimple Kapadia is in the middle of a long overdue career resurgence. Manik Sharma writes.

EACH time Dimple Kapadia appears in Disney+ Hotstar’s Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo, she reminds you of her exceptional turn in the Rajasthan-set Rudaali (1993), the unlikely fantastical adaptation of a short story by Mahasweta Devi. There are echoes of the same inked face, the kohl-eyed coldness, and eerie determination. In this series by director Homi Adajania, Kapadia seems to be re-treading old territory with renewed vigour and agency. In Rudaali, Kapadia acted as the widow who couldn’t bring herself to shed tears. In Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo, she is the matriarch helping windows find a new innings, with a shot at self-reliance — for the relatively high risk of dispensing with both reputation and life. Thirty years apart, a few things have changed, others haven’t.

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With Her Turn In Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo, Decoding Dimple Kapadia's New Innings

By Manik Sharma

...For those who grew up through the ‘90s, Rudaali was an obscure little film, made accessible and maybe even popular by the music that emerged from the collaboration between Gulzaar and Bhupen Hazarika. Had the Hindi film industry not been taken over by diaspora narratives and a post-globalisation thirst for opulence (as opposed to observation), Kapadia’s ‘second coming’ might/should have ushered in a resurgence of sorts. It did not happen.

In 2001, she played the divorced older love interest of the broody Sid (Akshay Khanna) in the epochal Dil Chahta Hai. A role that, though intrinsic to the conflicting social borders of the film, now seems written for her and her alone. The third coming — as good as it looked on paper — never quite materialised. Her fourth, however, looks to have finally steered Kapadia to a stage where she has, in a sense, always belonged.

Kapadia’s debut in Bobby (1976) as a late-teen heartthrob, caught the eye of Rajesh Khanna, at the time one of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars. An early, rushed marriage pulled Kapadia away from cinema; her hasty return unfortunately occurred in the chaotic, gaudy ‘80s. Unlike Rudaali, a significant proportion of this filmography is made up of bit-part roles, where romancing unglamorous heroes, or dancing to their tapping feet, had been normalised. Kapadia, however, was never fetishised for her appearance: those meaningful eyes and determined jawline possibly throwing off directors seeking to cast a “pretty face”.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Kapadia never fit the mould of the delicate, pixie-like woman that our heroes regularly rescued. It’s why in something as raw yet spirited as Nana Patekar’s Krantiveer, she is offered as the stubborn journalist. There is of course a metaphor here for Kapadia’s own career that, while sprawling, has been surprisingly resistant to the majoritarian influences of the day. She cannot be recalled for dance numbers, scandalous scenes, or romantic duets that ended with her slipping into the arms of boorish, over-sensualised men.

Lately, though, Kapadia has found the unassuming but sharp vehicle she’s perhaps yearned for over the years. Her incisive, immovable gaze has supplied to this modern age of storytelling, the kind of recalcitrance that can only really be built over time. Kapadia was a menacing, deceitful little thing in the controversial Tandav; the highlight of India’s expanding cinematic footprint with a cameo in a Christopher Nolan film (Tenet); the soul of Pathaan’s many jovial excesses; and now, the shadow that looms over every inch of sand in the fictional state of Rann Pradesh. In Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo, she attains that rare artistic feat of imposing herself on a story, its interiority, without obsessively registering her presence. She’s mysterious, broken, brave and also, a little crazy. How could she not be?

The ironies of Kapadia’s career are writ larger than the early stage naivety that almost thwarted a life in cinema. Her daughter is married to Akshay Kumar, an actor who has unsubtly thrown his enormous weight behind the socio-political designs of the majority. Rudaali and Rani Da (as Kapadia is known in Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo) speak for the other side. It’s a contradiction that possibly also emphasises the importance of expression, that streaming has only helped expand upon.

The idiosyncrasies of a rag-tag bunch of survivalists, banding together to create a drug empire, only to — expectedly — turn into monsters themselves, are well laid out as a form of gender-splitting antics. The men lose, by pretending to be winners. The women win, quite simply, by acting as though they accept the second position. Kapadia remains a resolutely complex figure, arched somewhere between longing for pride and the kind of control that makes you dizzy and dangerous. There is a streak of narcissism to her character, speaking to the grey area between protection as activism and self-conceit. This vagueness somewhat resembles Kapadia’s own career — widely listed, barely memorised, but bewitchingly resurgent. Some artists mime the times while some must wait for them to change. For Kapadia, they have.

Watch Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo.

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