I spoke to Sayani Gupta on the third day of the national lockdown. Our phone call had gotten delayed by more than an hour, and when we finally spoke, she was apologetic. She was busy, she says, organising grocery for her society’s security guard. Helping people around her is the need of the hour, she feels. As she says, “The working class is not ready for a complete lockdown.”
Personally, the lockdown has not affected her much. She is busy digitally promoting the second season of her web series, Four More Shots Please!, about the lives of four bold and liberated women in Mumbai. When she is not giving interviews, she is cooking, cleaning, washing bathrooms and doing dishes. Being someone who has often travelled alone and led a solitary life, she says she is having a good time “all by myself”, doing things she has been wanting to do for a long time, like painting and practising Hindustani music.
She is looking forward to the show, in which she plays a righteous, independent and fierce investigative journalist, Damini Rizvi Roy, who revolts when the news portal she runs changes tack and starts focusing on soft stories. Gupta says that it is her character’s political correctness that attracted her. “She is too passionate and cares about everyone,” she says. “Her OCD makes her adorable. At the same time, she is very complex.”
Interestingly, in her eight-year long career, Gupta has often chosen characters who are politically motivated, whether it was Gaura of Article 15, a lower-class woman fighting for her rights; Khanum of Margarita with a Straw, an activist who greatly influences Kalki Koechlin’s lead character; or Champa of Parched, a victim of marital rape who runs away from her husband.
One wonders whether there is a pattern here. “It is not conscious,” she says, adding, however, that she believes that one’s choices are an extension of one’s worldview. “At least that is how I choose my work,” she says. “Your personal politics should represent and reflect what you do. Especially as actors, filmmakers, creators and artistes, you need to be very clear. It is not just about party politics, but also about having an individual political belief system. I just get attracted to stuff that is closer to my own politics.”
An alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), she says she has always been aware of her politics. “Politics is huge in all forms of art,” she says. “You are constantly surrounded by things—the literature you read, the music you listen to, the paintings you admire…. I guess my make is like that and it shows in the work I do.”
Recently, she got a note from a girl whom she had met at an audition for a commercial in the earlier part of her career. Only when she arrived at the venue did she realise that the commercial was for a fairness product. Much to the chagrin of the casting agency, she backed out immediately. In the note, the girl expressed her admiration for Gupta for succeeding in life without compromising on her principles. “People have to do certain things for survival,” says Gupta. “Even if I am going to starve, I will not do anything that is misogynistic or problematic politically.”
It is not surprising then that the actor was at the forefront of the anti-CAA protests in the last few months. It was important for her to support a movement to uphold the secular fabric of the country. What she learned through it was to keep going and never give up. However, with the Covid-19 situation, it is difficult to predict what is going to happen to the protests. “We just have to wait and see,” she says. “People are going to lose a lot, in terms of relationships, financial stability.... We are heading into a really bad time and right now, we need to prepare ourselves emotionally for it.”