In Defence of Freida Pinto

Just because she doesn’t fit into the Bollywood heroine mould doesn’t mean she does not deserve to be the next Bond girl.

Rohan Antao must be thrilled. Oh sorry, you have no idea who he is. Antao is the man best known as Freida Pinto’s former boyfriend. You may remember the wispy fellow who cried foul when he was dumped by the Slumdog Millionaire actress last year. But he’s got his back good and proper, because everybody hates Freida Pinto. Last week, when reports surfaced that the former Mumbai suburbanite was being considered as the next Bond girl, you could have cut the pique with a chainsaw.

Bombay Times ran a piece on the subject, with a snarky reference to Pinto as ‘the actress who went to the Oscars but never made it to Bollywood’, as though our indigenous industry is a prize loftier than the Oscar. On Twitter, Indians commented on the hashtag  #possibleIndianBondfilm with alarming vengeance. The kooks online said things that ranged from smart-alecky (‘with love from Dharavi’) to daft (‘she fits 4 servant maid characters’) to offensive (‘slumpussy’). What has Pinto done to earn such national condemnation?

Is it the fact that she’s not as pretty as the sex-bombs bred by Hindi films? Our image of an actress is so over-the-top that we can’t accept anyone finding anything interesting about a small, reed-thin, dusky woman like Pinto, who is more the archetype of a contemporary Indian girl than Shilpa Shetty will ever be. Actually, Pinto is fresh in a way Priyanka Chopra and Katrina Kaif cannot be anymore, because the bad pancake, overdrawn emotions, and gussied-up characterisations in our movies have a way of ageing leading ladies before their time. Pinto is far less careworn than say, an Aishwarya Rai, who, by the time she landed in Pink Panther, looked like a Christmas tree in summertime—extravagantly lit-up, but excruciatingly out of context.

Ever so often, the Indian media trips over itself on rumours that one of our own has become relevant in the West. But over the years, Bollywood stars we expected to sweep into Hollywood and take it over simply never did. By that measure, Pinto’s handlers have successfully maintained the mileage she gained from Slumdog. And perhaps that’s what irritates people here so much: the fact that others found gold in someone we rejected.

There’s also the faint hint of a class bias lurking in the heart of our indignation against Pinto. Unfortunately for the actress, in her first role she played a slumchild, and like the idiot who said Pinto is best playing a maid, we are reacting to her as though she herself is just an upstart slumdog millionaire.

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Manju Sara Rajan