She is taken for granted by her boorish husband (Adil Hussain) and her bratty daughter (Navika Kotia). Sridevi is Shashi Godbole, a diffident-but not weak-housewife in the state of Maharashtra, who runs a booming dessert business from her home.
Sridevi in English Vinglish (Courtesy of Hope Productions)
English Vinglish is an ideal introduction for those unacquainted with Sridevi’s talents, showcasing how different schools of acting from North and South Indian cinemas could converge in a single performance. Sridevi’s hiatus seemed to unlock an entirely different side of a performer whom Hindi cinema had misused. The film accents its central character, dimming any surrounding artifice. Shinde’s script for English Vinglish reportedly coaxed Sridevi out of her 15-year semi-retirement, giving her a role reminiscent of her South Indian, pre-Bollywood era. Looking at her filmography during this period, one could still conclude that Hindi cinema never quite gave her the roles that plumbed the depth of her talent. Still, she went on to become the nation’s first pan- Indian female superstar, reigning over the country’s three biggest film industries-Kollywood (Tamil), Tollywood (Telugu), and Bollywood (Hindi)-before retiring in 1997. That she excelled in such circumstances constitutes a minor miracle. Like Himmatwala, too many of these movies refused to take her seriously, rarely giving her the chance to dig beneath the surfaces of the women she portrayed. She climbed to the top of Bollywood in the ’80s and ’90s, perhaps popular Hindi cinema’s most artistically sterile period. She essayed a variety of roles with tender honesty in Tamil when she was just a teenager: a village belle who experiences heartbreak ( 16 Vayathinile, 1977), a lonely singer who loves a con man ( Johnny, 1980), a woman who suffers from amnesia ( Moondram Pirai, 1982).
By then she was already a force in South India, with the majority of her work in the languages of Tamil and Telugu. She was only 19 when she appeared in Himmatwala. Sridevi, who died in 2018 at 54, had been acting since she was 4, eschewing an education for a childhood spent on film sets. Can Dialectics Break Bricks? By Devika Girish
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