Why can’t Gauri Sawant play Gauri Sawant?

Don’t get me wrong. I love Sushmita Sen as a person. As an actor, she is grossly underused. Hence, when she bags a challenging role, I dance in aisles, barefeet.

When I heard she was playing the celebrated transgender Gauri Sawant, and that too in a film directed by the Marathi auteur Ravi Jadhav, I was over the moon.

But hang on. Sen and Jadhav? Chanel and Khadi? Streep and Kashyap? Exciting possibilities of a combustive collaboration are there. But Sushmita is way too sophisticated a person to occupy the rugged terrain. She did a hardcore whore in Kalpana Lajmi’s Chingaari. The film and her performance were summarily rejected.

With due respects, Sushmita is not a transformative actor. Her own personality is her biggest asset. She is who she is. A string empowered diva who cannot be demystified by splashes of realism. Playing a transgender is not about supporting the cause. Sushmita is a strong advocate of LGBTQ rights. But that doesn’t qualify her to play a transgender.

In Abhishek Kapoor’s blow-dried but engaging Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, it was Vani Kapoor playing a transgender woman. Nothing in her attitude, personality or performance suggested a binary ambiguity. She played the transgender woman ramrod straight .

That formula for authenticity (why can’t the LGBTQ community be normalized on screen?) won’t work in Taali. It’s one thing to tamper with authenticity in a fictional film. But a bio-pic is quite another. I am surprised a director of Ravi Jadhav’s scrupulosity fell for the invasive glam quotient in his ambit of authenticity.

Sure, I understand more people will watch Gauri Sawant’s story with Sushmita Sen playing the role. And the more people watch it, the further her campaign for the LGBTQ community would go.

But I still say Gauri Sawant should play Gauri Sawant. No one else can. No one else should. Those who have seen her touch-of-care advertisement for Vicks know what a visibly articulate woman Gauri is. The ad shows Gauri taking her adopted daughter to boarding school, with the daughter telling us what makes her foster mom so special.

After Gauri says a jokey bye to her daughter, she turns away and we see the smile dissolve into a tearful grimace on Gauri’s face.

Sorry, Sushmita won’t be able to do that. Sure, she is an adoptive mother. But she knows nothing about the struggle that the real Gauri Sawant has faced.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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