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, assuredly “progressive” 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.”
COMMENT