Tillotama Shome played the sweet maid Alice in Monsoon Wedding with such aplomb that most of her outings in front of the camera (Shanghai, Tasher Desh) since have only been reminders of that. Qissa, which opened films of the Indian competition section, India Gold, at the Mumbai Film Festival today wiped off that for good.
“It’s been a cross to carry since Monsoon Wedding. While it was a great role and movie, I’ve moved on,” laughs Shome who packs in powerhouse performance carrying the film almost entirely on her rather frail shoulders.
Shome spoke to dna along with the Qissa team, including Tisca Chopra, Rasika Dugal, director Anup Singh, at an exclusive post-screening discussion.
In Qissa, she plays Kanwar Singh, born a girl but raised a boy by her father Umber Singh (Irrfan Khan). Forced to flee his village due to ethnic cleansing at the time of partition in 1947, Umber fights fate to build a new home for his family. But when he marries Kanwar to Neeli, a girl of lower caste, the family is faced with the truth of their identities; where individual ambition and destinies collide in a struggle with eternity.
“Anup has this unassuming way of leading you on a path to discovering things. So, when I asked him for some help on decoding what he wanted me to do with the role of a girl raised as a boy, he simply asked me to watch Dilip Kumar’s Aan and Tarana,” Shome remembers and adds, “I thought he wanted me to pick up the manly expressions and his demeanour but Anup kept reminding me not to forget I’m a woman despite my character’s circumstances.”
As she demonstrates how she picked up Dilip Kumar’s nuance of doing everything from rolling up a sleeve to straightening his collar in a very deliberate and conscious way, Chopra and Anup smile.
“Unassuming is the right word,” remarks Chopra, nudging Anup. “When I met him while he was casting he asked me, ‘What’s the toughest thing you are willing to do for the role?’ and I was quite unsure of where this was headed. I asked, ‘What do you have in mind?’ and was amazed at how, without even blinking, he simply said he wanted me to grow my hair, ie not thread my eyebrows or upper lip.”
Born in 1961 in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, Anup Singh grew up in a Sikh family of Punjabi origin.
Their forced displacement is one of the main sources of inspiration for Qissa, he admits. “I grew up listening to stories from my grandfather and other family elders, which would begin matter of fact but imagination would soon take over. It’s almost like they were clinging on not to the truth but what they hoped the truth would be,” says the filmmaker who struggled for 12 years to find funding for this Indo-German-Netherland co-production.
One of the tales Singh heard from was from an elderly relative whose daughter jumped into a well when their village was attacked. He told Singh that he still dreams of her in that well, looking skyward and waiting for her father to rescue her.
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