Tabu: A Woman of Substance

Paying tribute to the actress who has rarely played by the industry rules but has always managed to rise above the clutter

She turns 47 next month on November 4. This year, she's been seen in two films of the same genre - good old psychological thrillers that are rarely attempted in Bollywood today. Of them, Missing, opposite Manoj Bajpayee, was certainly not up to scratch and made short shrift of her calibre. Auspiciously, the lately-released Andhadhun, co-starring Ayushmann Khurrana, catches her in peak form. Every split second that she's on screen, she grabs the viewer's attention by the collar.

Truly, you can't take your eyes off Tabu, aka the Hyderabad-born Tabassum Fatima Hashmi, as she invests her performance with varying shades - from the guileless to the deceitful - in Sriram Raghavan's expertly-crafted nail biter of a movie.

It hasn't been a bed of flowers for Tabu, though. She's often been unjustly slotted as 'reclusive', since media interviews don't exactly excite her. Neither does she assent to scripts rightaway. If some wrong choices have been made, it's because she's sentimentally loyal to the filmmakers who gave her an acting-op when she was in the process of establishing herself in the star firmament.

For instance, if she fetched up in the eminently-forgettable comedy Aamdani Atthani Kharcha Rupaiya, it was because its director K Raghavendra Rao had earlier showcased her in a big-budget Telugu film. To date, she has acted in approximately 80 films - in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and English - a body of work, which despite occasional downers, has cemented her status as an actress who approaches acting with a spontaneous candour.
Among her best performances, I'd surely count Gulzar's Maachis and Madhur Bhandarkar's Chandni Bar, for which she bagged National Awards. Plus, there are Mahesh Manjrekar's Astitva, Priyadarshan's Virasat, Vishal Bharadwaj's Maqbool and Haider and now Raghavan's Andhadhun. 

For sure, she went against the Bollywood formula with Astitva, in which she portrayed an ageing housewife. For an artiste to play a character, above her real-life age, is considered not just risky but suicidal. That she's had no issues with incarnating what are termed 'senior' and 'non-glamorous' roles was amplified even by her two international projects, Mira Nair's The Namesake and Ang Lee's Life of Pi. Indeed, when she appeared on the cover of a glossy magazine lately, choreographer-director Farah Khan commented on social media, "Bollywood doesn't deserve you. You should go global."

Easier commented than done. Bollywood cinema - mainstream or not - has been ingrained in the actress ever since she was in her pre-teens. Coming from a family of professors and scholars of Hyderabad, she had moved to Mumbai with her mother when her parents separated. Her sister, Farah Naaz, had made an impact with a clutch of films, including Yash Chopra's Faasle, but didn't prove to be a stayer.

Meanwhile, Tabu would be a fixture at Janki Kutir in Juhu, where her aunt Shabana Azmi resided. On sighting her, Shekhar Kapur had raved that her face was as expressive as the legendary Nargis' - a rare compliment which indicated that a star was waiting to be born.

Subsequently, as a child actor, she was seen in Sagar Sarhadi's Bazaar and Dev Anand's Hum Naujawan. Her launch project Prem, produced by Boney Kapoor, was inordinately delayed, and tanked on the very day of its premiere.
Such setbacks are a thing of the distant past now. Bring them up in conversations with the actress, and, quite sportingly, she describes the phase as a learning curve.

Neither is there any acrimony over the fact that most heroes - including Shah Rukh, Salman and Aamir Khan - weren't ever paired with her in leading parts, since at five-feet-eight-and-a-half inches, she was taller than each one of them. Fortuitously, she was well-matched with Ajay Devgn, resulting in her first box-office hit Vijaypath, in which she danced up a storm for the song-and-dance sequence Ruk ruk ruk (incidentally, it has been remixed for the Kajol dramedy Helicopter Eeela).

From what I've seen of Tabu over the decades, she can be alternately introspective and outgoing. A terrific mimic and raconteur, she does need her me-time with books (of the literary kind, and not pulp fiction). An avid photographer, she's clicked street life for years, but insists she wouldn't like to share them beyond her friends-and-family circle.

She writes, and has said that maybe some day she would like to come up with a film script. Taking to direction is beyond her ken, however - "since it involves far too much responsibility", according to her.

The Oscar-winning auteur Ang Lee went on record to state that it was a privilege working with Tabu in Life of Pi. The iconic artist MF Husain, who cast her in Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities, dedicated several canvases to her.
If you ask me, the actress doesn't require any more awards, certificates of merit and paeans - all of which she has in plenty. And she has remained grounded, living with her mother for years in a neatly-appointed apartment in Andheri, where the late Sridevi used to be her neighbour.

By the way, if you ever ask her about love and marriage, her response is, "There we go again. I do believe in the institution of marriage. But finally, it's a matter of personal choice, isn't it? If marriage has to happen, it will."
wknd@khaleejtimes.com