Lone Star

A new biography attempts to combat the stigma that enshrouded Parveen Babi

30 November 2020
In her ten years in the industry, Babi projected a new, assuredly “progressive” image for women in popular Hindi cinema. But once talk of Babi’s mental illness began circulating in Mumbai, industry figures began to see her as a liability.
indian express archives
In her ten years in the industry, Babi projected a new, assuredly “progressive” image for women in popular Hindi cinema. But once talk of Babi’s mental illness began circulating in Mumbai, industry figures began to see her as a liability.
indian express archives

IN EARLY 1984, the actress Parveen Babi announced her retirement from Bollywood in blazingly public fashion: she wrote about it in a cover story for the Illustrated Weekly of India. Titled “The Confessions of Parveen Babi,” the essay was diaristic and occasionally disturbing in its honesty. “Have you ever wondered what it is like to function in life, distrusting everything and everybody?” the actress, then 34 years old, wrote. “Slowly, one by one, I lost trust in everybody and everything around me. We trust most of the things and people around us without questioning. We trust the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe.”

Diagnosed with schizophrenia in the late 1970s, Babi had experienced her latest breakdown just months before the article’s publication. She was nearing the end of a noteworthy career in Bollywood. In her ten years in the industry, Babi projected a new, assuredlyprogressive” image for women in popular Hindi cinema in films such as Majboor and Deewaar. Along with her contemporary Zeenat Aman, Babi introduced audiences to a bohemian heroine who drank and smoked, who wore bell bottoms and skirts with thigh-high gashes, who brandished her sexuality without apology. Babi scaled international heights too, gracing a 1976 cover of the European edition of Time magazine as the avatar of “Asia’s Frenetic Film Scene.”

But once talk of Babi’s mental illness began circulating in Mumbai, industry figures began to see her as a liability. Many were cruel about her condition. “I think Parveen Babi is a hoax,” the filmmaker Prakash Mehra, who directed her in the 1982 film Namak Halaal, told the magazine Stardust in June 1980. “Her illness is [a] hoax. She is a liar and a cheat.”

Mayukh Sen is a writer based in New York. He has won a James Beard Award for his food writing, and he teaches food journalism at New York University. His first book, on the immigrant women who shaped food in America, will be published in October 2021.

Keywords: mental health mental illness Parveen Babi Bollywood media coverage Film Industry film actor
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