When film journalist Karishma Upadhyay was asked if she’d like to write the biography of Parveen Babi, she was intrigued. “I didn’t know much about her other than her work in Amar Akbar Anthony and Deewar, and her hit songs [like ‘Raat Baaqi Baat Baaqi’ and ‘Jawani Jan-E-Man’, both from Namak Halal ],” she says over the phone from Mumbai.
She was immediately drawn in by the air of mystery around the glamorous Hindi movie star of the 1970s-80s, who sizzled on screen with a cool confidence and was just as charming off screen. Who was the woman behind the myths and gossip? It was Babi’s long struggle with mental illness that fascinated Upadhyay the most. In her début book Parveen Babi: A Life , released last weekend, she traces the journey from Junagarh to Mumbai, via Ahmedabad and beyond to give readers a close-up version of the actress’ troubled life.
Busting the ‘addict’ myth
Upadhyay didn’t originally plan to write the book through the lens of Babi’s mental illness (diagnosed as schizophrenia). But once she started writing, she found clues to a quietly unravelling mind right from her student years in Ahmedabad. “It seemed there was a pattern in her behaviour even at the times when she seemed not ill. Whether it was possessiveness, or the need to be central in somebody’s life…these came from a childhood of craving attention and love,” she says.
What were the myths she wanted to unpack? “The threads I heard very often was that she was a drug addict, a drinker and led a promiscuous life, that led to the mental illness. So that became my mission — to put across that she wasn’t a drug addict. There were several other factors that could have led to her condition,” Upadhyay believes. “You remember her as a really good-looking woman on screen, but there was a very intelligent, learned side to her. She was a really good student, she enjoyed reading, writing and painting. It changed my perspective,” she adds. She refers to an eye-opening conversation with actor-director Amol Palekar that’s in the book where he recalls the time Babi had held forth on literature and theatre for hours at a chance meeting with Badal Sarkar, the legendary theatre personality.
Weaving together episodes of psychotic outbursts (such as Babi threatening to jump out of a moving car and strip or fearing other actors were trying to kill her while shooting a song) and moments of incredible creative efficiency (such as her photographic memory, her sponge-like mind that absorbed everything she observed, and a great work ethic), Upadhyay draws up an engrossing portrait. “The actresses today owe a lot to women like Babi and Zeenat Aman who brought small and significant shifts in the industry. Babi took on roles, such as the one in Deewar, that changed how actresses behaved and looked on screen and off it too,” says Upadhyay. As the gangster’s girlfriend in Yash Chopra’s iconic film, Babi unapologetically plays a character who smokes, drinks and gets pregnant. In the book, Upadhyay refers to a February 1974 interview by Stardust magazine: Parveen was happy to scotch rumours about being a divorcée (‘I’ve not been married, so how can I be a divorcée?’) and talk about everything from drug use (‘Yes, I’ve tried dope’) to pre-marital sex (‘All that talk about virgin brides is bull’) and her smoking habit.
A three-year journey
Despite Babi’s trailblazing record, what struck Upadhyay the most is a curious fact: she fled Mumbai twice, abandoning dozens of films midway, yet she returned each time to occupy the same spot in the industry. “I know what an unforgiving place the industry can be. She would have had the most incredible amount of love and goodwill for filmmakers to want to work with her even with the uncertainty of whether she would finish their films,” she says.
To get to the bottom of Babi’s mysterious life, it took Upadhyay three years instead of one and over 100 interviews with people from every phase of her life, including Babi’s college friends, co-actors, producers, her trusted manager, costume designer and friend Xerxes Bhathena, and former partners Danny Denzongpa, Mahesh Bhatt, Kabir Bedi, who have all been quite candid. Convincing people to speak to her about Babi took tremendous effort. The hardest part was tracing what happened to Babi after she quit films and left Mumbai in 1983 to settle in Houston, Texas for several years.
Perfect timing?
The timing of the book’s release is certainly uncanny. “I can’t wrap my head around it myself,” says the author, 43, who has been waiting for its release since January. The launch got pushed due to the pandemic. The book mirrors the raging debates on social media on mental health, stardom and outsiders in the industry following the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput. “Someone said to me after reading the book that it shows that no matter how much the industry may have changed since her time, our understanding of mental illness remains abysmal, the stigma is just as bad. My only hope is that even if people walk away with some understanding that this can happen to anybody and mental illness does not look like what we see in Hindi films, I would think the book is a success,” she concludes.
Parveen Babi: A Life, published by Hachette India is priced at ₹599 for the hardcover
