THIRUVANANTHPAURAM: Eventually Shekhar Kapur used a body double for the Behmai rape scene in ‘Bandit Queen’. When it was time to do the scene, Seema Biswas was deeply conflicted. “The moment, as described in the script, was so disturbing that I could not sleep for three days,” Ms Biswas said during an In Conversation session organised as part of IFFK here on Monday. “But I knew that was precisely the way it should be filmed, it was so realistic, brutally honest,” she said. She had always been fascinated by realism in films, ever since she watched foreign classics at Pragathi Maidan during her theatre days in Delhi.
“Still, I was confused. I went to my teachers and discussed the issue. Finally, they told me to ask Shekhar himself,” Ms Biswas said. The filmmaker’s response was like light to her. Here is what Kapur told her: “I am showing the height of humiliation, it is the ugliest moment and I don’t want to film it in a beautiful manner. It should be like a woman suddenly mowed down by a speeding bus, people watching it should be so brutalised that they wouldn’t want to look at it again.”
But Ms Biswas, by her own admission, was not bold enough, and Kapur had to employ a body double. Still, Ms Biswas is the kind of actor who needs to feel the weight of the past, she develops a biography of her character before playing it. The script will have only snatches of the life of the character she has been called to play and she will painstakingly fill in the missing details. She identifies herself too much with her characters that she calls the stories she constructs “autobiographies”. Here there is the danger of the person getting mixed up with the character.
Even on Monday, over two decades removed from the Bandit Queen experience, Ms Biswas spoke as Phoolan Devi, in first person. “I had then felt this strong urge to kill my husband,” she said. The statement felt so fervently personal that one can for a moment forget that she was referring to Putti Lal, the monster of a man who had married Phoolan when she was only 11. When Shekhar Kapur called her to play Phoolan Devi, she wanted to meet the dreaded dacoit. “Then she was in jail and I was officially forbidden. When I protested, I was told that if all actors were to meet the real-life character what was Nirmaly Pandey going to do as Vikram Mallah was dead. At that point I made a vow to create a Phoolan Devi on screen more dreaded than the original,” she said. Phoolan Devi, after watching the film, was so scandalised that she took the makers to court.
