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Purva Bedi, an Indian-American actress, wants to set an example for Indian actresses by playing a lesbian in Manan Katohora's "When Kiran Met Karen". The role was earlier offered to Perizaad Zorabian but she turned it down as it was too unconventional. Purva, who has built her acting career in the US, does not attach the same stigma to the role.
"That's one of the reasons I really want to do the movie. You know that once the movie's made, everyone in India is going to watch it. I want to do this movie so that actresses there can start to play those parts and not be so scared," Purva told afterellen.com in an interview.
Before Purva, Bollywood actresses Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das ventured into this zone with Deepa Mehta's "Fire". Both the director and the actresses were dogged by staunch criticism for breaking the norms. Later, Isha Koppiker and Amrita Arora tried it in "Girlfriend" but the response was not too good either. Not only did the film bomb, both the actresses were slammed.
"When Kiran Met Karen" revolves around Purva's character, Rachna, who plays an actress called Kiran in the film.
"When you meet her, she is in an ьber-heterosexual relationship," she explained. "But after she finds herself attracted to her co-star, a lesbian who plays a character named Karen, she begins to question her sexual orientation."
In addition to dealing with the issue of infidelity and her sexuality, Purva has to grapple with her cultural background and the ways it intersects with these issues in the film.
"The other really huge thing for Rachna is, I think, expectations with being an Indian American woman. There's a lot of pressure from birth to get married and to fit into these roles, these responsibilities of, you know, getting married, being a good wife, being a good girl."
Purva admits she has been lucky that her family is progressive enough to allow her to do a film like this.
"I was very lucky to be born into a family where my father's mother had been an actress and ran a theatre company for 30 years in India. And my mother, when she was a teenager, was an actress. She left it to pursue academia, but she was also a novelist and a poet."
Purva was born in India, but her family moved to the US in the late 1970s. Perhaps taking a cue from the women in her family, Purva says that she has wanted to be an actress since she was five years old. She attended Williams College in Western Massachusetts, where she double majored in theatre and economics.
"I'm a good Indian girl, and so while I was passionate about theatre, I had to have a nice econ practical thing," she said with a laugh.
After college, despite her interest in acting, she did not immediately pursue her dream.
"I don't think I had the courage to say 'I want to be an actor when I graduate'." Instead, she became a management consultant. "And then after a year I was like, okay, life is too short. I need to follow my heart. And then I started acting."
One of her first roles was a lead in the Indian-American film "American Desi", in which she played the perfect Indian-American college student.
Subsequent lead roles in other South Asian films, such as "Green Card Fever" (2003) and "Cosmopolitan" (2003) followed. Purva has also had roles on several prime time television shows, including guest-starring stints on "Strong Medicine" and "The Drew Carey Show".
Though she has played roles ranging from a medical student to a potential terrorist, playing Rachna will be the first time that Purva will be portraying a woman grappling with her sexual orientation.
"I'm at the beginning of a journey discovering who Rachna is," said Purva. "Part of my research is just figuring out how, for the character of Rachna, I can get into her shoes in the most personal way. It doesn't mean that I'm necessarily going to make out with lots of women."
But Purva freely recalled studying radical feminism in college and said, "If you're a fairly open-minded person, in life one explores other things."
The actress seems to almost relish the possibility that people will be forced to see a different side of her.
"In the Indian community, a lot of people know me from "American Desi", which was a romantic comedy set in a college campus where I play the perfect Indian girl," she said.
"And after the film, I remember my aunt called me up and was like, 'You played the perfect Indian daughter that everybody wants to bring home.' And so what I love about this movie is that it's just going to turn everything on its head. I remember thinking, 'Well, I'm not the perfect Indian girl. Maybe you all think that, but that's not me.' So this is just sort of like, I'm crossing to the dark side according to Indian standards."
Purva laughed a bit nervously and concluded, "I hope people still want to see my movies after this."
Indo-Asian News Service
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