Shabana Azmi has five National Awards for acting, and the most revealing thing she ever did was sit down in a demolished slum and refuse food
In 1986 a slum in Bombay was demolished and the residents were not given the alternative land they were entitled to.
Five members of a housing rights group called Nivara Hakk announced they would go on hunger strike. Shabana Azmi, who by then had won the National Film Award for Best Actress three times, said she would join them and did. It lasted five days, and at the end of it the government handed over the land.
Almost nobody from the film industry came near it. Shashi Kapoor did, visited her at the site and took the matter to the chief minister, which is a fact worth putting in writing somewhere.
The papers picked it up within a day. Her mother was horrified and rang her father, who was away in Patna, to ask him to talk some sense into their daughter.
Kaifi Azmi sent a telegram back. “Best of Luck, Comrade!”
There was no argument, no attempt to protect her career and no anxiety about what it would look like. There was a telegram, four words long, from a father to a daughter who had done exactly what he would have done. That is the shortest available explanation of where Shabana Azmi comes from, and it saves a great deal of speculation about why a successful actress would do something so obviously bad for business.
Red Flat Hall
Until she was nine, home was a Communist Party of India commune in Bombay.
Eight families lived in it. Each had one room. Between all of them there was one bathroom and one lavatory. Her father was an Urdu poet and a party man, her mother was a stage actress with IPTA, and the household ran on assumptions that were unusual anywhere in India in the 1950s.
Most of the women had jobs. Childcare was not assumed to be theirs alone. When her mother was touring with Prithvi Theatre her father looked after the children, and he ran her lines with her as often as she needed, on the understanding that making that possible was the family’s work.
She read psychology at St. Xavier’s in Bombay, trained at the film institute in Pune, and then Shyam Benegal cast her in Ankur.
It came out in 1974 and she won the National Film Award for Best Actress for it. For her first film. She won it again for Arth, then Khandhar, then Paar, then Godmother in 1999.
Ankur is about a landowner’s son and a servant woman, and it is a film about caste and power rather than a film with those things in the background. Benegal made it for very little money. Five is the record and it still stands. Nobody else has done it, and the films it was won for are not a run of one kind of part.
She worked the commercial industry at the same time, on purpose.
The parallel cinema that made her reputation did not pay well and could not have sustained a career on its own. So she took mainstream films alongside it, which kept her bankable enough that the serious films kept getting made with her in them. She has appeared in something over a hundred and twenty.
It meant she was in Amar Akbar Anthony and in Khandhar within a few years of each other, and treated both as work rather than treating one as slumming. This is usually described as versatility. It was closer to a funding model.
The argument underneath
She was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1997 and served until 2003, and is careful to point out that nominated is not the same as elected.
That distinction matters to her, and she makes it unprompted. The Padma Shri came in 1988 and the Padma Bhushan in 2012. She has spent decades on the Mijwan Welfare Society, the organisation her father set up in his village in Uttar Pradesh, which now runs a school and a chikankari workshop.
Her own position on all of it is that an actor cannot treat the work as “a nine-to-five job”, play people fighting injustice on camera and then decline to ask why the injustice is there. The five days without food in 1986 are that sentence, carried out.
If you think you have remembered everything about this topic take this QUIZ
Results
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#1. Shabana Azmi holds the unique record for winning the National Film Award for Best Actress how many times?
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#2. Which film marked Shabana Azmi’s debut, where she played a married servant and won her first National Award?
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#3. Who was Shabana Azmi’s father, a celebrated Urdu poet and communist?
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#4. Which controversial 1996 film starred Shabana Azmi as one of the first mainstream actors to portray a lesbian relationship on screen?
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#5. Shabana Azmi actively works with the “Mijwan Welfare Society,” an NGO founded by her father to empower:
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#6. In 1986, Shabana Azmi went on a hunger strike to demand rights for which group of people?
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#7. For which film did Shabana Azmi famously shave her head, although the production was halted and later reshot with a different cast?
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#8. Shabana Azmi is married to which famous lyricist and screenwriter?
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Finish
How many National Awards has Shabana Azmi won?
Shabana Azmi has won the National Film Award for Best Actress five times, which is a record in Indian cinema. She won for Ankur, Arth, Khandhar, Paar, and Godmother.
Who is Shabana Azmi’s husband?
She is married to the renowned lyricist and screenwriter Javed Akhtar. They got married on December 9, 1984.
It is an NGO founded by her father, Kaifi Azmi, in the village of Mijwan, Azamgarh. Shabana Azmi currently runs it, focusing on empowering rural women through education and employment.
Which was Shabana Azmi’s first movie?
Her debut film was Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (1974). Her performance in this film won her the first National Award.
Is Shabana Azmi related to Farhan Akhtar?
Yes, she is Farhan Akhtar’s stepmother. Farhan is the son of Javed Akhtar and his first wife, Honey Irani.
Sources & References
Asia Society, interview with Shabana Azmi — her own account of Nivara Hakk and the 1986 hunger strike.
Cinemaazi — her upbringing, her training and her filmography across parallel and commercial cinema.
Directorate of Film Festivals, Government of India — her five National Film Awards for Best Actress.
Rajya Sabha, Government of India — her nomination to the House in 1997 and her term to 2003.
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