The Girl Who Defeated Vidya Balan

The remarkable story of Usha Jadhav, the National Award-winning actress who fought prejudices to emerge a success

Saturday afternoon. The sun is burning bright. In a quiet lane in Goregaon, local boys are engrossed in a game of gully cricket. I am looking for the residential complex in which Usha Jadhav lives. A boy points his bat in the direction of a decrepit housing society. At the end of a leafy cul-de-sac, a cluster of scaly buildings appears into view. When I enquire of a few men hanging around the compound Usha Jadhav’s address, one of them repeats with pride, “Usha Jadhav, na? Take a left, and the second building. Her flat is on the ground floor.” It isn’t a flat, really. A room in a chawl would be a more accurate description.

In the small hall area, there is a low-lying bed, a few artefacts and a mirror. The clothes and towels hung out to dry on a string sway from time to time as the wind blows in through the window. This is the home that Jadhav, 30, shares with her parents. The home is as unremarkable as she is remarkable. At the 60th National Film Awards, Jadhav pipped top contenders like Vidya Balan, Priyanka Chopra and Sridevi to clinch the Best Actress award.

The yet-to-release Marathi film Dhag (Blaze) deals with the struggles of a lower-caste family that dares to dream of a better life for themselves. Jadhav plays Yashoda, whose husband runs the village crematorium. She is also the mother of a young boy. “This character had many shades. That’s the plus point,” Jadhav says, convinced that the extraordinary range of emotions she could display with this character must have influenced the jury’s decision to single her out for the honour.

“In the first half, you see Yashoda as a very angry woman. If you are unsatisfied with life, then you get angry—frustrated, actually. She is suffocated within, par bol bhi nahin sakti hain, kuch kar bhi nahin sakti hain (she can’t speak, can’t do anything about it; she is helpless). Then in the second half, everything changes. She is still very emotional and strong, but the circumstances have changed,” she says. Just like they have in real life. Since the announcement of the National Award, her life has changed, the first signs of which are visible in the neighbourhood. When her photos and interviews started appearing in Mumbai dailies, she got her first taste of fame. “At first, I didn’t believe it was me in the papers. But I am not going to say that I don’t enjoy the attention,” she says, unable to suppress a broad smile.

The Kolhapur-born Jadhav has spent many years in the wilderness, having undergone a harrowing phase of hardship and rejection before the spotlight turned on her. It’s the moment she has been waiting for since 2007, when she made her debut in a blink-and-miss role in Madhur Bhandarkar’s—“Madhur sir,” she says respectfully—Traffic Signal.

“I always dreamt of being an actress like Madhuri Dixit and Sridevi, but I didn’t have the courage to tell anyone in my family about it. How could I?” she asks. Her father, a school teacher, expected her to be an engineer or a doctor.

“Culturally, Kolhapur is a vibrant city,” she says, switching to Hindi. “Nice city, small and calm. But the moment you talk about getting into films, it can backfire.”

Such fears of her family’s reputation led Jadhav to take up an air-ticketing job in Pune. After three years, she left for Mumbai, where she worked five days of the week, and did rounds of auditions over the weekend. Six months of being in the city, she was offered the role of a gajra-seller in Traffic Signal without having auditioned for it.

Untrained and with no previous experience in front of a camera, Jadhav realised that acting came naturally to her, that it was a unique gift. “Nobody in Traffic Signal ever felt that it was my first time. I just went in and did my best,” she recounts. “You can say I was very much comfortable,” she says, rolling her ‘r’.

Even for Dhag, she says she didn’t have to prepare. “I used to go into my scene completely blank. I remember having discussions with the director (Shivaji Lotan Patil) and then I would go and perform. I never thought that I am going to get something big out of it. It wasn’t like ‘aaj toh parda phaad dungi’ (Today, I will scorch the screen).”

Through the filming, the only thing she was particular about was avoiding phone calls. “They distract you too much,” she says. “If I spoke to my family and suppose I fought with them, then I couldn’t perform. I cannot work that way. If I am disturbed or have a fight with someone, my mind will keep going back to those things and the shot will be ruined. I need my space to concentrate,” she says. Her performance in Dhag got her a pat on the back from many industry veterans, including director Sai Paranjpye who saw in her glimpses of Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil.

“Not in terms of looks,” she clarifies. “Calibre-wise, acting-wise.” She seems pleased with the comparisons with Smita Patil. “Like me, she was dusky, yet so beautiful. But I am sure she must have gone through her own share of struggle. Unko poochna chahiye thha na unhone kitne papad bele honge. Unko bhi easy toh nahin mila hoga (Somebody should have asked her about her struggle. She mustn’t have had it easy either).” Her other favourite actresses include Nutan—“she is a natural”—Rekha and Kajol. And Juhi Chawla: “Her comic timing is superb.”

She feels any woman can look the part so long as there are filmmakers willing to work on her look. “Here, we lack vision,” she says. “In Hollywood, acting is supreme. If the actress is not up to it, make-up experts can transform her into the character she is playing in a matter of a few hours. If you are blessed with the gift of acting, looks shouldn’t matter. But here [in India], everything is ulta (opposite), acting is secondary.”

The dusky complexion hasn’t worked for Jadhav, particularly on television. After Traffic Signal, she remembers receiving a TV soap offer. But when its makers saw her in person, they were a touch disappointed. “I was told bluntly, ‘We don’t need acting skills. Acting toh hum karva lenge (We can make you act). We need fair skin and light eyes.” In cinema, she faced another problem—the fear of getting typecast as a Marathi bai (maidservant). “I don’t want to take any names,” she says, “but I was offered the role of a bai in a big film that released this year. I knew the EP (executive producer) of the film through a television show we did once. I flatly refused. I have been turning down these roles since 2007. I feel like telling them, ‘Don’t treat us like that.’”

In a recent interview, she said she is here to break the mould, eager to turn her skin colour and background into an advantage. “Just as hailing from a backward nomadic tribe keeps me away from certain upper-class cliques in the industry, it also empowers me to do roles that urban-bred actors may not be able to tackle,” she told Mumbai Mirror, a newspaper.

For now, she is keeping her fingers crossed, hoping to attract the attention of avant-garde filmmakers like Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap. She pictures herself in gritty and realistic films, the sort they make. Apart from Marathi cinema, mainstream Bollywood, too, is part of her gameplan. “I can go watch a Salman Khan film, dance, whistle, clap and totally enjoy myself. Before I die, I want to work in a total masala film,” she chortles, “so that I don’t have any regrets on having missed out on any experience.”

However, an ideal opportunity would be one of working with Aamir Khan, not dancing with Salman Khan. “I love Salman, but Aamir has vision,” she says. “At heart, he is not a star. He is an actor. In every film, he slips into different get-ups. Nobody understands the value of looking different in every film better than him. That’s why he is up there, on top. Why don’t other people have vision like him?”

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Shaikh Ayaz

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