Sanya Malhotra’s filmography is replete with nuanced portrayals of various shades of the modern Indian woman—one who is educated and refuses to let patriarchy throttle her voice. But the ‘modern woman’ of her movies is not loud, alcoholic, abuse-spouting, male-bashing stereotype that has today become a Bollywood staple. Be it Dangal, Pagglait, Meenakshi Sundareshwar, Kathal or her recently-released movie Mrs, she plays women who are rooted and relatable; their struggle, like that of most middle-class woman of today, is to find the fine balance between tradition and modernism; they reclaim adjectives like ‘strong’, ‘fearless’, and ‘bold’ from being gendered terms denoting male qualities; they refuse to fight ‘like men’, instead they fight like women and win.

In Mrs, a movie that dropped last month on Zee5, she plays Richa—a trained dancer and dance teacher who has recently got married. As she tries to cope with her new responsibilities, which mostly revolve around kitchen chores—kneading dough, scrubbing utensils, hand-grinding spices in mortar and pestle—her passion and dreams also start getting reshaped, crushed, and eventually they are scrubbed clean. The constant noise of cooking and grinding slowly becomes a metaphor for her grating life. The kitchen slowly starts to feel like a pressure cooker—the pressure keeps mounting but the vent weight on the tightly-shut lid refuses to go off, there is no escape. Until one day it bursts.  

Sanya, who has time and again proved her mettle as a capable actor and excels in the quieter moments, gives a nuanced performance as Richa. It seems being a trained dancer has helped her relate to Richa’s plight and feel her pain more intensely. Or maybe it is just her brilliance as an actor. We try to find out as we sit down for a candid chat. Excerpts: 

Did you watch the The Great Indian Kitchen before getting offered this film, it’s Hindi remake? How did you react to the film as an audience?  

It is an adaptation of The Great Indian Kitchen. I had watched it during the Lockdown and I remember not only being moved by it, but I was agitated, I was irritated at myself—how am I not aware of these things, they are such mundane things yet somehow, we don’t usually notice them. I was feeling so uncomfortable and trapped after watching it…there were too many emotions.

And what was your reaction to the food almost becoming a character in the film? 

When the movie starts, you enjoy watching the food, but by the time is ends, you feel icky about it—you realise that the kitchen is their jail. Also, the way they had shot it was very voyeuristic …it seems like you are there keeping an eye on her. Even in our film, the food plays a very crucial part. As the story progresses you see that the tasks are getting heavier and more difficult for Richa to handle alone. She is trapped inside that kitchen, her situation. In fact, while playing the character I started feeling the same way, it took away my appetite. 

How relatable is this character to you? 

It’s definitely something that I have seen very up close and personal. I’ve seen such women around me. I’ve seen my mother go through something like this. And it’s not just about one woman. It’s about women we see around us—my mother’s mother, my maasi, my friends who are married. Even me—I have also seen a few things in my life that I think helped me relate to this character, to build it, to make it more personal. 

Moreover. I understood her struggle, her thoughts, her feelings, and her conditioning as a woman. At the start of the film, Richa is very much a part of this patriarchal world. She is okay with what she’s doing. She’s also trying her best to impress her in-laws and her new family because somewhere, she has seen her mother do all of this. This is her conditioning as well. Eventually, after going through that whole process, she realises that maybe this whole societal thing is trapping her—keeping her from blooming, from having her own passions and dreams.

Being a dancer yourself, how does it feel to play a character who is made to give up her dream and passion as a dancer? 

Thankfully, my parents have always encouraged my sister and me to pursue our individual dreams. So, it is not something I have faced in real life. But I can imagine how horrible it must be to have your dream taken away from you—I think through that process; you eventually supress so many emotions that it makes you bitter. 

Is there any particular experience from your childhood that this movie brought back to mind? 

My mother wanted to become a fashion designer, but because of financial constraints and other factors, she never could. But she fulfilled that passion through us—she makes clothes for us. Ever since she has watched the movie, she’s been talking about her experiences.

She also recollected how when I was very young and she had cancer, she would still have to cook after returning home from her chemo sessions. People used to visit her to check on her and ask about her health but that, too, was stressful—because she was the one who had to cook for all the people coming to see her after her sessions or hospital visits. I was shocked. I felt so guilty.

We put so much pressure on women. We dehumanise them by reducing them to household chores. At the film screening, so many women came up to me and said, “My husband has never praised my food”. They were saying it like they didn’t even care anymore. But that’s the problem—they have suppressed their need to be appreciated. This is invisible labour. There are no days off for women who do this every day, and on top of that, we don’t even appreciate them.

We all saw these things growing up, but it was considered as ‘normal’. When was it that you first became aware of how problematic all this is? 

I think I realised this when I was in school. I used to feel horrible that my mother had to wake up early in the morning to make breakfast for us. By the time I was in 9th or 10th grade, I stopped waking her up and started cooking my own breakfast and lunch, or just ate at school. I’ve always been a very empathetic person. I feel too much when I see something wrong around me. 

As I’ve grown up, I’ve become more aware of how not only do we normalise this, but we romanticise it—” Maa ke haath ka khaana,” “Dil ka raasta pet se hokar jata hai”—these are things we grew up hearing. But to be honest, cooking is a life skill. Everyone should know how to cook for themselves—to nourish themselves, to take care of themselves.

After marriage, Richa sees her dream of becoming a dancer fade. You had also faced something which at that moment might have felt similar—to fulfil your dream to become a dancer, you had come all the way from Delhi to Mumbai to audition for a dance reality show, but didn’t get through. How did get your dream back on track? 

I was doubting my capabilities as a dancer while I was auditioning for that reality show. Also, I was being too harsh on myself—I was very young, and I was all alone in a new city. There was a lot of pressure on me to build a fake back story for the TRPs, which I could not do. Because I am inherently an honest person and I can’t bring myself to do things that don’t come naturally from within. So, it was just not working out for me. It seemed as if all doors were suddenly shutting. But that experience helped me with my next audition, it was an acting audition for Dangal. And I knew I can’t doubt my capabilities as an actor this time and I told myself not to be harsh on myself. In fact, while going through the process I had this solid confidence that I will be in the movie, that I will crack it. Sometimes it feels like if this door closes, we might not get a better opportunity, but maybe God has bigger plans.

Now, the most important question. I really want to know how did you become a part of Sunidhi Chauhan’s Aankh? It is a collab that dropped from nowhere and just blew our minds!  

Oh my God, I think everything in my life happens at the right time. I am lucky that way. I was shooting Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari, doing night shoots, when I got a message from my management group. I ignored it because I was exhausted. Later, I saw my manager had shared a song. I saw ‘Sunidhi Chauhan’ written on it. I called her up, like, “Oh my God, how did I miss this message?! Are they still making this music video? We have to be in it!” I didn’t even download the song. I just saw Sunidhi’s name and said, “Is she going to be in the music video?” My manager said yes. And I was like, “Oh my God, I love her!” I had to be a part of it.