Deepti Naval: ‘We have always co-existed despite Partition’ | Eye News,The Indian Express
Actor-artist Deepti Naval on her memoir A Country Called Childhood, the stories that made her childhood, living through war, and a life readying her for cinema
If you think you are about to read about “Ms Chamko” (Chashme Buddoor, 1981), then this is where we must part. “My whole persona has been given this one face: simple and sweet girl next door (an image from her early films that has stuck on), I needed people to know me for who I am,” says Deepti Naval, 70. She divides her time between New York, Mumbai and Himachal Pradesh’s Haripur studio, where stands her hatstand, her girlhood companion, and the gramophone her Badi Mummy (maternal grandma) lugged from Burma.
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Her father had adopted the surname Naval, meaning new, to avoid being just another Sharma. “There were so many in Amritsar,” says Naval, who has a knack for storytelling. That’s evinced by her recently released memoir, A Country Called Childhood (Aleph, Rs 999), which defies chronological memory-keeping. It trains the lens on her growing up years in Amritsar (1952-70), before she left for the US with her parents, only to return later to the Bombay film industry, but also takes the reader along into a past before her time. “I want the reader to see what I was like as a child, not by telling them about it, but letting them come into my world and see what was going on there, even inside my head what was going on. If you ask me to write about my memory after that time, about my films, et al, I don’t remember so much,” she says.
Acting first began as toddlers, while playing with her elder sister who’d say, “choonchi bann jaa”. Her grandfather had three boxes reserved for him in the theatres, where after work every day, he’d catch parts of films. Balraj Sahni would autograph her book. She had a Meena Kumari, Sadhana, Sharmila Tagore craze phase, and inspired by the latter’s Anupama (1966), she’d give up speaking for an entire season, much to her mother’s chagrin. Her and her mum’s cousins would have brief stints in the film industry. And had it not been for Gulzar, she’d have deprived the world a glimpse into her adventurous streak: how the draw of Kashmir, the setting for most films, made Naval run away from home at age 13, with Rs 15 on her. “I remember my childhood like cinematic visuals,” she says, “writing about them was a joyous journey but also cathartic.” Her parents, childhood friends, cousin, former tenant, those who fill up the pages of her book, passed away in the two decades of writing the memoir, which is as much about girlhood as a chapter of a country’s syncretic past. Edited excerpts:
Is there a willing forgetfulness towards cinema? I was hell-bent on acting and joining cinema. I knew this is my calling in life. I didn’t want to try. I wanted to give my life to it. But out of the 100-odd films I’ve done, I would like to forget 60 (laughs). When I came into the industry, I thought I’ll work for 10 years and then I’ll go back to writing and painting. I always saw myself as a writer, to grow old writing.
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