Farida Jalal feels that women in the Indian entertainment industry do not get as much varied roles as their male counterparts. She chats with Shrabasti Mallik about her limited work and the recent AIB Roast show
When Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge released in 1995, every girl in love wanted a mother like Farida Jalal, considerate of her daughter’s opinion. Up close and personal, she is sweet, gullible and very much the image that we have seen on television. She is as spontaneous as Jiya’s nani in Shararat and as humorous as her character in Dekh Bhai Dekh. She is now seen as dadi maa in Zee TV’s Satrangi Sasural. She plays a headstrong woman, who runs a company and holds a family of seven mothers and their son.
Farida has over five decades of acting experience but till today she craves for a character as challenging as the ones offered to her male counterparts. She feels that after a certain age, female actors are slotted in a specific category of playing a mother, sister, wife or a grandmother. “I have enjoyed the best of mother’s roles in my film career. Eventually we have been typecast into a boring sari clad image, where we have to say dialogues of the same kind.
My male counterparts, for instance, Paresh Rawal, Anupam Kher and Om Puri, are offered a good variety to play on screen. They get the roles of villains, lawyers, doctors and comedians. What do we getIJ I am dying to do these kinds of roles because these characters demand a certain kind of body language, a way of delivering dialogues and even the vocabulary is different. Female actors do not get these chances. It is very sad. We have so much to show to the people but we are not given the opportunity to explore our capabilities,” she said.
The 67-year-old actor feels that the quality of work has deteriorated on the small screen. Though she acknowledges that television has now come at par with the silver screen. “We did Dekh Bhai Dekh which nobody can touch even now, and there was also Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi. These were weekly shows and we had plenty of time to shoot them. Now the rush to complete a daily is enormous. We have an everyday target to meet. Our wings are clipped; we have to do several scenes within the set deadline.
It has now become a big burden on our heads. Every company should give the channels a bank of episodes before the telecast begins. For Satrangi Sasural we did a few but even then we are running short. The makers do not have time to sit and think about the quality of the work that is being produced,” she explained.
Jalal is not in favour of television serials that stretch forever and she is looking forward to the concept of finite series. “It will be beneficial to actors because it will be a breather for us,” she added.
She took a dig at the recent AIB knockout saying that she is embarrassed and humiliated by the way it attacked her. “I do not know why people are making such an issue out of it. The show was outright atrocious. This kind of content or behaviour is not part of our culture,” she said.
When Maratha Mandir decided to take down DDlJ, Jalal was one of those few people who tried to convince the authorities to continue the screening. She shared, “We have been talking about DDlJ for the last two months. The more I say about it, the less it is. It is really sad that Maratha Mandir took it down. There are people within the film fraternity and also among the public who feel it should not have been taken down. In my personal opinion it should have continued. It was Yashji’s wish, too.”