Star of the Indian slums

Shabana Azmi is one of India's biggest movie stars, but she is in Ireland this week to talk about politics. She tells Eileen Battersby about mixing art and social activism

India is a country of contradictions says Shabana Azmi, its most internationally famous cinema actress: "She manages to live in the 18th century and then, look around the corner and there's the 21st - that's India."

Azmi, who has appeared in more than 200 mainstream and alternative films, could also be considered contradictory. Here is a movie star who is also a committed social activist and is tomorrow participating in a panel discussion on Islamophobia: West and East at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.

Yesterday she and her husband, scriptwriter and Urdu poet Javed Akhtar, spoke at the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway. Today, they take part in a discussion at NUI Galway organised by Amnesty, the Irish Centre for Human Rights and NUI Galway's programme in Culture and Colonialism.

Amzi has unapologetically used her fame to publicise issues and campaigns on behalf of slum-dwellers and women. She has sat in the upper house of the Indian parliament for six years and, from a cinema festival platform, has denounced the murder of an arts activist. But not for a moment does she distance herself from the movie business.

"There is nothing I would rather do than act in the cinema," she says.

Nor does she, as so many actors are inclined to, consider film merely as a means of financing their first love, theatre. She is committed to cinema, "it was what I was trained to do, I studied acting at the film institute".

Her first role, that of a young peasant wife seduced and abandoned by the local landowner's bored son, in Shyam Benegal's directing debut, Ankur (The Seedling, 1974), impressed the great film-maker, Satyajit Ray, who hailed her as a gifted dramatic actress.

She had been cast for the part soon after graduating from college, where she had studied acting.

"I met this director who, within 10 minutes of meeting me, gave me parts in two films," Azmi says. "I told my parents I had met a fraud film-maker who had promised me all this. But I was wrong. Eighteen days later I was shooting Ankur. It was the first time in my life I stepped foot in a village."

Shabana Azmi has presence, and is obviously a veteran of many interviews. She is articulate, no-nonsense, poised without appearing affected, and seems to approach life with a world-weary irony tempered by determination. Her expression alternates from the serious to an open smile, with an occasional direct glance. She must be jet-lagged from the odyssey which brought her from Bombay, including a three-hour delay in London before landing late in Dublin, and she concedes she is tired. Although she plays with her thick black hair, styled into a short bob, there is nothing absent-minded about her replies.

JUST OVER 30 years separate the beautiful young girl in Ankur from the woman who nods curtly to me on arrival and leads the way to the table where she will pour the tea. She adjusts a long dark-red shawl draped over her casual clothes, announcing that she had been "nicely dressed" for the photographer. Wry, nuanced and as direct as a New York Jew, Azmi has a wonderful face; expressive, kindly, intimidatingly assured and capable of the eloquent exasperation that marks the finest of contemporary Indian fiction.

Born in 1952, she was raised in Bombay with her younger brother, the children of the leftist Urdu poet, Kaifi Azmi, and an actress mother. The household was every bit as bohemian as might be expected. "The talk was of theatre and poetry" and also of politics. Although Muslim, her father raised his children as atheists and believed that the arts should be used "as an instrument for social change". This is also the ethos of the Indian Peoples Theatre Association (Ipta), established in 1942, which has 10,000 members.

An urgent candour informs her every sentence: she is well used to stating her case and to pouncing should she spot an inaccuracy. She proves an unusual interviewee as she allows the reporter time to record her replies as she answers each question.

Conscious of the West's misreading of India "as a Third World country, mystical and spiritual despite famine and drought", her own view is that India is unique. "There are people living back to back in the 18th and 21st centuries, and India's people encapsulate all the contradictions that come from being a multi-lingual, multicultural, multi- religious society."

She refers to her recent trip to Davos in Switzerland, where she, along with actor Michael Douglas, received a Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum, and heard a great deal said about the economic rise of China and India.

Poverty remains central to the West's perception of India, which is still 70 per cent agricultural, yet she disputes the image of India as a depressed Third World country.

"The benefits of progress and development are yet to reach the poorest of the poor," she says. "But it is a country surging forward and well on its way to becoming a global power. India also has an advantage over China - 50 per cent of our population is under 25 years of age."

Her passion for India is obvious.

"I love my country," she says. "There is no place where I would rather live, no city that I would prefer to Bombay. Bombay is vibrant, chaotic, noisy, crowded, alive and cosmopolitan. It is like New York."

Not even the draw of Hollywood would make her leave.

SHE ADMITS TO having used her fame to help her causes.

"Celebrities in India have always been encouraged to lend their name to 'soft' issues, such as polio vaccine drives and eye donation, but the minute they get involved in something which has political ramifications, all hell breaks loose," she says.

There was nothing soft about her campaign for the rights of Bombay's slum-dwellers, when her contribution included an effective five-day hunger strike. Slums were demolished. Amzi pointed out the people needed somewhere to live, and the land was granted.

That hunger strike marked the start of her political work. Growing up, she had had no interest in politics.

"There was always talk of politics at home," she says. "My father was a member of the communist party. But I had no interest."

Having already spoken of the contradictory nature of India, Amzi is aware of her own contradictions.

"An actor is trained to play every part.You must become the character you are playing - and I do - but I can't do something I don't believe in," she says.

It was the public reaction to a role she played in 1983 which started her on the path to activism. In Arth (Meaning), she played an abandoned wife whose husband had left her for another woman. Instead of falling into despair, the character Amzi played acquires strength and survives.

"It was a cult movie," she says. "Women came to my house, not as fans but in sisterhood. In the movie, the husband comes back and my character asks him: 'If I had made the same mistake, would you have had me back?' He says no, and my character, the woman, walks out. It was unheard-of in India for a woman not to forgive her husband."

Arth broke new ground. According to Amzi, India now has the most active feminist movement in the world.

Later, during the making of Paar (The Crossing), in which a couple leave the country and move to the city in a futile search for work, she befriended a woman working on the set.

"As an actor, I often watch real people who resemble the characters I am playing. After a few days she [the friend] took me to her hut and I saw, in this shanty town outside Calcutta, poverty of a kind I had never before encountered," Amzi says.

She knew she could not return to Bombay and forget what she had seen.When the slums were about to be cleared, she began her hunger strike.

"These slums should be developed not demolished," she says. "Sixty per cent of the people in Bombay live in slums occupying only 13 per cent of the land. The people needed more land."

Though "my mother was worried" during the hunger strike, Amzi's father encouraged her, referring to his daughter as "comrade." Amzi made her point, and "the people got their land".

DR CHANDANA MATHUR, a lecturer in the anthropology department at NUI Maynooth, has co-ordinated this week's events in Galway. She first met Amzi when she was a student in New York.

"Here was this movie star, determined to change society," she says. "She listens and gets involved, and has irritated Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists equally."

Amzi's belief in India is convincing, even inspiring.

"Indian movies have no genre because they have everything: folklore, melodrama, song and dance," she says. "As an industry, it is twice as big as Hollywood. Between 800 and 1,000 movies are made each year. Film is our main art form. Indians are film buffs."

Her face brightens when she speaks about movies, but she always returns to the points she wants to make.

"I think in India it is very important to get more women into government," she says. "In 1952, there were only 4 per cent; now, with so many empowered women in the arts, in business, there is still only 8 per cent. This must improve."

While she respects her country's rich traditions, she knows tradition has a bad side. "There is too much violence, sectarian violence or communalism," she says. "The fundamentalists are each others' best friends."

The Islamophobia: West and East symposium takes place tomorrow at 6pm in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin