Coming into her vanity van at Ellora Studios in Mumbai, actor Rasika Dugal looks a little pale. She is wearing a loose patient robe that makes her petite figure seem even smaller. Perhaps, it is the look for her character. Rasika has been shooting day and night for over a month, in Mumbai for one show and in Coonoor for another. But her greeting is enthusiastic. “Finally!” she gasps. Our meeting has taken time to materialise—weeks of coordination to find a day on which she could spare more time and talk at ease.
“There’s little more left,” she hesitatingly informs me as she freshens up and apologises for making me wait. “I will try to make it quick this time!” she tells me as she leaves the van and makes her way towards the set of Mirzapur season two, an Amazon Prime Video series. She returns almost an hour later, for what is supposedly her lunch break, almost two hours past the standard lunchtime. As she settles down with her humble lunch of one chapatti, some vegetables and dal, she requests the hair and make-up person to take a break and get back before her next shot.
When I remark that she has been too busy, she chuckles and responds, “Good problems.” Rasika says this is the first time she is shooting for two projects at the same time. “Usually, I finish one and then start another,” she says. “But, this time, it is almost happening simultaneously.” Her second project is a web original for a leading streaming platform. Tentatively titled Dr Kapoor and still unannounced, the project will have Rasika playing the title role—a first for her. “It has been hectic because I am in almost every frame of that show; it’s a new kind of rigour, new experience,” she says.
Last year, she was seen in a couple of interesting projects—director Nandita Das’s Manto was one of them. Rasika portrayed Safia, the writer’s wife, who according to her, was not mentioned prominently even in Manto’s collection of personal essays, Dastavej. While Rasika herself is a fan of Manto and was learning Urdu when she was offered the role, she relied on the director's research. “Nandita spent a lot of time with their daughters in Pakistan and then Safia’s sister Zakia,” says Rasika. “She got a lot of anecdotal stories from the family, very sweet stories. That was one of the beautiful things about the script. Even though I was familiar with Manto, the writer, this [story] was [told] through his family and Safia.”
Rasika's other roles include a small, but interesting, part in Zoya Akhtar’s short film in the anthology Lust Stories, a small part in Once Again, and the role of Beena Tripathi in Mirzapur. And she simultaneously worked on Made in heaven, Hamid, Delhi Crime and some other projects which are set to release in a few months.
According to her, an actor’s preparation for a role should always be a work in progress. “If you understand everything, then what will you discover during the shoot,” says Rasika. “The beauty of any performance, I feel, is the discovery rather than showing off things.” Rasika believes that acting should be the right mix of spontaneity and preparation. “The emotions we have in real life are spontaneous—no one tries to laugh or cry, it just happens,” she says. “Situations take you by surprise. It should be the same in acting.”
Growing up in Jamshedpur, in a business family, Rasika never had any inclination towards acting. “Forget acting, nobody around me had any inclination towards arts,” she says. “It was never in my worldview.” But education was important. She got into Lady Shri Ram College for her bachelor's degree and moved to Delhi. “My first interest in acting was triggered there when I was a part of the dramatics society [in college],” she says. But that did not mean that she would take up acting seriously, even though she enjoyed it immensely. She says the other seven members of the group were far better actors. “And I used to think that the competition outside is going to be bigger,” she says.
In 2003, she moved to Mumbai for her postgraduation in social communication media at Sophia College. The course had a paper on films. It was not about performance, but enough to draw her interest to the art. But it was not enough for her to take up acting as a profession. Instead, she started assisting Professor Rohini Pandey from Yale University and Professor Abhijeet Banerjee from MIT on a research paper for which she had to go to Lucknow. Five months later, she returned to Mumbai to work on a research paper on gender in public space. “After all this, I realised I do not have a future in this field because I needed some kind of a background in social science, which I did not [have],” says Rasika.
Stuck in a quandary, she started toying with the idea of continuing her studies. This was when the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) restarted its acting course after 26 years. She wrote the paper for the entrance, almost on a whim. She says she still do not know how she got through. There was no resistance from her family as FTII was a reputed institute. But nobody thought that she would make a career out of it.
Six months into the course, she knew that acting was her calling. But it was not very easy to find a footing. She was sharing an apartment with a direction student from National School of Drama and another from the editing course at FTII. “Everyone had a story of something that did not work out,” she says. The struggle did not seem overwhelming, says Rasika, because everyone was going through the same.
One of the most important lessons that she learnt at film school is never interfere in a co-actor’s work, irrespective of the hierarchy. “While working with Irrfan (in Qissa) and Nawaz (in Manto), there was never any kind of imposition of their style of working on me,” she says. “There was always a kind of acceptance of what I had to offer.”
The conversation with Rasika had no drama, rags to riches story, heightened emotional moments or controversies, yet it unfolded like an interesting story. It is hard to tell if it is her journey that is so fascinating, or her narrative, which is peppered with light moments, self-deprecating jokes, laughter and candidness.
The actor was not always so busy. It took a long time, almost a decade to reach where she is right now. There were times when she had little or no work—times when gruelling auditions led to nothing and times when she was offered small parts. She recalls playing a ‘mehndiwaali’ in Sharat Katariya’s debut film, 10ml Love—how she learnt the art of applying mehndi and going to the sets with her props, which included mehndi cones. As she laughed at her story, one could tell that she was aware of the fact that nobody else associated with that film took her role seriously. But she would not have done it in any other way.
In the early stages of her acting career, she was advised not to take up smaller parts. Apparently, it meant that she would eventually be slotted in a category tagged “supporting actors”. Being a shy and socially awkward person, her work was the only way to reach out to people. In retrospect, she finds that phase to be extremely hard. “I do not know if I can do that anymore—the constant work without knowing whether something would materialise,” she says. Now, with her work getting appreciation, she has become better at social gatherings. But not a pro. She still fumbles at times. “If the introduction is through work, I can still find my way out. Otherwise, not so much,” says Rasika.
And it was her work that led to more work. For instance, she met Nandita Das through her play, Bombay Talkies, in which she collaborated for her initiative, CinePlay. At that time, Qissa was being released and Rasika invited Nandita for a screening. Nandita told her that she would contact her for a role she had in mind. A year later, she was offered the part of Safia, without audition.
The training in acting at the film school, she says, is not the only thing that has changed the way she approaches her characters today. It is also a lot about the experiences that she has had in the past 10 years or so. “But what is good about the training experience is that I got a lot of time to understand what I was learning,” she says. “There was an environment of cinema around me. Everyone, [including] the directing or the editing students, was finding their way, discovering what they liked and what they did not. Those two years in that environment helped me.”
The Netflix series Delhi Crime, based on the 2003 Delhi rape case, had Rasika in a key role. She played Neeti, a new IPS recruit put on duty to be with the rape victim and her family in the hospital. She brought sensitivity and balance to the performance. One particular scene, where she stands up to patriarchy is particularly good.
Delhi Crime's director Richie Mehta told me during the release that he did not want an actor to just play the role. Instead, he wanted a collaborator. And both Shafali Shah (who played the officer leading the investigation) and Rasika fit that perfectly. According to Mehta, it was the least amount of direction that he ever had to give.
Engaging deeply with the characters is the most important aspect of her work. Like in the play, Bombay Talkies, she plays two characters—one of a child, and the other, a shy woman. She had two monologues with each part. And even if there were three shows in a day and she had to do it three times a day, she would remove her nail paint for one and put on for another. These are little things that people may or may not notice. But as an actor, it’s important for her. Otherwise, it doesn’t fit too well in the scheme of things, she believes.
This is one of the reasons why she initially turned down the offer to play the role of a Kashmiri woman in Hamid. “I am glad that I did it,” she says about the film that opened to rave reviews. “But I am also glad I considered not doing it. I think it is important to ask yourself [whether to play a part when you don’t understand the politics around it]. It turned out well, but, it does not mean that I should not ask the same question before doing a project,” she says. According to her, it is necessary to consider whether one can do justice to a part or not. “Are you an insider telling the story? Even if you are not, should you be a part of this story? These are imperative questions for an actor,” she says. The narrative of Hamid is a sensitive subject and Rasika feels that it would have been a disservice if she did not do justice to her role.
For someone who has struggled to get work as an actor for many years, it is good to be busy. Her acting skills, nuanced and thoughtful, is the major reason. But it also has to do with the new horizons that have opened up with the onset of the streaming platforms and various online mediums creating content. She is looking forward to everything that is to come. Besides the two series, she has Fox Star Studio’s Lootcase and a short film with Naseeruddin Shah, who she credits for shaping her craft as a teacher during her time at FTII. She also has an experimental film with Karan Gour, who had earlier directed her in Kshay. Looks like it is a season of opportunities for the actor. Maybe, its an answer to her decade-long prayers.
