Happy birthday, Sushmita Sen: The first Indian woman with public swag
A woman who made her choices, paid for them, but stuck to them.
Sushmita Sen blazed her way into our homes and hearts in 1994, becoming the first Indian woman to win the Miss Universe crown.
Twenty four years, and several beauty queens from India later, Sen remains special — and her 43rd birthday is a great day to celebrate the diva who won over the Universe and became a star, without once letting go of the woman she is.
Before terms like “woman of substance” and “living life on her own terms” became catchphrases of empowerment, Sen was making choices, whether with her movies, or her decision to adopt a child, that set her apart from other actors and women her age — and paying the price for them too.
As senior journalist Kaveree Bamzai once wrote in India Today, Sen is “a woman with both a sense of humour and a sensual face, not an easy combination in an industry where unvarnished sex appeal is a woman’s breast bet”.
Well, Sen never hedged her bets, and in a country that still sees women either as dumb dolls or sex objects, she has proved that a woman can be intelligent, witty, totally own her sensuality, run a business — and bring up two daughters, single-handedly.
The beauty pageant — the first step
In many ways, the 1994 beauty pageants, Miss India and Miss Universe, reflected the traits Sen would continue to embody later.
The 18-year-old Sen winning Miss Universe was not about one competition. It was about a nation that was gingerly discovering globalisation, suddenly finding a place at the international high table of glamour.
And that position for India was bagged by a dusky teenager dressed in clothes stitched by a local darji, who, along with her spirit and her smile, also had the smarts to effortlessly field all the questions thrown at her.
Even before that, during the Miss India round, a lot of contestants had dropped out when they heard Aishwarya Rai would be participating that year. Sathya Saran, who edited the magazine Femina then, wrote of that year’s competition: “At the contest though, no one really noticed Sush. She was just one of the many girls in the group. All the backstage hands had their favourites but Sushmita was not among them. She was a dark horse… No one knew her strength was her speech”.
The “thin, awkward, gauche” girl ended up tying for first position with the already-celebrated Aishwarya — whom apparently even the make-up artists were concentrating the most on — and finally won the competition, with her answer about the textile heritage of India.
"It all started with Gandhi," said the confident young girl.
At the international contest a few months later, Sen won the crown and many hearts with answers such as “The origin of a child is a mother, and is a woman. She shows a man what sharing, caring and loving is all about. That is the essence of a woman.”
In the Indian context, Sen redefined what glamour and sexuality meant. Here was a middle class girl, intelligent, articulate, and also celebrating her sexy body.
Bollywood
When Sen entered Bollywood, she was already a celebrity. People were awed by a title they didn’t fully understand.
She did not fit the conventional Bollywood definition of “heroine” — fair, pretty, coy, and definitely not taller than most heroes.
She didn’t ever try to.
Had she stuck to the prescribed route of sexy-damsel-so-often-in-distress, Sen might have been a bigger star. But as early as 2002, she was doing films like Filhaal, which dealt with surrogacy. I watched the movie in a theatre, and it has a sequence where Tabu and Sen are fencing for a competition. An elderly gent behind me remarked: “All this doesn’t work in India, yaar. This should have been a dance competition.”
Sen, thankfully, never listened to such sage advice.
When she did choose to be the sexy diva, she could out-diva anyone — Miss Chandni from Main Hoon Na is still the stuff of dreams and prayers. But she didn’t let her shine stay limited to that.
Even her item numbers — like ‘Mehboob Mere’, ‘Dilbar Dilbar’ — have agency and spunk. She is not a man’s fantasy, she is a woman reveling in her sexuality. And her power.
And beyond
Outside her career, too, Sen made the same brave choices. When she adopted her first daughter, Rene, in 2000, a woman that young was legally not allowed to be a single parent. She had to submit 26 documents and affidavits, and her father had to write off around half his property in the child’s name, for the court to be sure of her “intent” to adopt.
In 2003, she was not afraid to take the mighty Coca Cola to court when they suspended her contract after she complained of sexual harassment by an executive. Recently, the court ruled that she would not have to pay tax on the Rs 95 lakh compensation the company paid to her.
Her affair with Vikram Bhatt was much publicised and she was cast as “the homewrecker”, but Sen was unapologetic. Bhatt and Sen appeared in the Simi Garewal show together, where she said: “I wasn't going to wait to tell the world that I loved him just because he hadn’t gone through with his divorce yet.”
A few years later, she was spotted with a solitaire on her finger, and when this set off rumours about her purported engagement, she responded with: “I don’t need a man in my life to have diamonds. I can own them myself.”
When, in the entertainment industry’s catty tradition, she was asked about her “several affairs”, she said: “Most people don't fall in love ever. I've fallen in love quite a few times. So what if it didn’t last.”
Even recently, to speculations about her marriage with boyfriend Rohman Shawl, she responded with this:
In a country where playing safe is rewarded, where glamour or domesticity are binary choices for women, where no one expects a Bollywood star to have brains, Sen has shown it is possible to be everything one wants to be.
Happy birthday, Sushmita, may your tribe increase.