Mallika Sherawat

Mallika Sherawat

Mallika Sherawat, Bollywood turned Hollywood actress. View Slideshow >

By Catherine Wagley

The unpretentious provocateur that liberalized Bollywood talks about kisses, snakes, and social justice.

There were 17 kisses in Mallika Sherawat’s first film and because I am keenly aware of how provocative a number this is, especially for the Bollywood of 2002, I have spent my morning watching and re-watching these kisses on YouTube. My favorite takes place on wet sand and recalls Burt Lancaster’s and Deborah Kerr’s iconic beach embrace in From Here to Eternity: Sherawat and her Khwahish costar, Himangshu Malik, roll over each other and gently smooch as waves lap around them.

The fact that Sherawat made her Bollywood debut with kiss-heavy Khwahish, a love story that caused ripples despite its relatively tame romantic plot, means that she has not only been labeled a sensual siren but has also become something stranger: a spokesperson for brazenness in Bollywood. Interviewers ask her questions like, “People expect you to be sexy all the time; what are you really like?” or “Should Bollywood actresses be more comfortable with their sexuality?” But the brash, outspoken actress I’ve read about diverges from the frank, gentle one I’ve seen on screen, and as I prepare to interview her myself, I attempt to reconcile these different Sherawats in my mind. I decide that the Indian actress resembles the Angelina Jolie who appeared on The Actor’s Studio in 2005. Host James Lipton probed, in his typically clandestine way, “There’s an expression in French, ‘to rile up the bourgeoisie.’ Sometimes you are a provocateur?” Jolie leaned forward in earnest. “But I’m really not,” she said. “I mean, if you knew me in my life, I just speak very bluntly.” I believed her.

Sherawat, who has recently become bicoastal, now lives part-time in Los Angeles and part-time in Mumbai. She currently stays near Fairfax Village, and when I arrive at her building, I am directed past the pool to the business center, which turns out to be a miniature office space no bigger than a walk-in closet. I sit in a swivel chair and patiently wait for nearly 15 minutes, until our designated meeting time has come and gone. Eventually, I discover that Sherawat has been waiting too, sitting just outside the business center, perched on a sofa. She wears a dark jogging suit and sunglasses and her full-bodied brown hair hangs down. That excessive politeness has almost caused us to miss each other makes me laugh and, as it turns out, sets the tone for our whole encounter – she’s direct but charismatically deferential and I feel compelled to make as few assumptions as possible. There’s something about her demeanor that makes me want to be overtly diplomatic. She offers me a coffee before we go into a nearby conference room to talk.

Living in Hollywood, I have become accustomed to brushing past people that have flashed across my television screen just that morning or the evening before. Often, a weird feeling of familiarity hits me. But this doesn’t happen with Sherawat, perhaps because the cinematic lushness of the Bollywood clips I’ve recently watched seem far removed from the beige walls of this room, or perhaps because her down-to-earth geniality makes me feel like I’m just meeting up with a friend. In fact, once we’re settled, I feel anxious about having thoroughly researched her – friends don’t Google friends when they can ask face-to-face – and pretend I don’t know where she comes from.

“You grew up where?” I ask. “New Delhi?”

“I grew up north of Delhi,” she corrects me, “in a state called Haryana, which is very, very traditional. Very feudal. I grew up in an extremely regressive kind of a background where the role of a woman is to get married, reproduce, be in the kitchen, and live in servitude. That is the kind of environment I grew up in.” Haryana also has one of the world’s highest female infanticide rates. There are 1,000 men to every 800 women, and Sherawat’s vocal abhorrence of this phenomenon has caused almost as much of a stir as her 17 kisses; at one point, it prompted an assassination attempt. No other Bollywood actress has come from that region.

“When I was a kid,” Sherawat continues, “I was not that aware. But when I saw my mother, my cousins, my aunt, all of them give up all their dreams and just succumb to the fate of reproducing and being in the kitchen, I didn’t want to do that with my life.

“Every weekend all the cousins and the kids would get together and go to the theater and it was an event I would look forward to. It was a respite and I think my love affair with cinema began then,” Sherawat recalls in a self-confident, melodic voice that gradually crescendos whenever she’s excited. Since she speaks in complete, narrative paragraphs, I begin to feel like I’m interviewing a historian – or, more likely, an actress who has learned the script of her life by heart. “I would come home and ape in front of the mirror, acting out how the movie actress acted in the movie, try to copy her dance moves, and say the dialogue the way she said it.”

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