Sharmila Tagore insists Bollywood still has a long way to go when it comes to gender equality. “We live in a patriarchal society which reflects in our film industry. Although we had lengthy roles in our time, only the sacrificing heroines would go on to become popular,“ she points out. The National Award winning actress agrees that actresses are getting meatier roles today but argues that male dominance still trumps in the end, with the “male gaze“ influencing the way characters and stories shape up in the movies. She gives the example of Piku about a girl who looks after her father, a concept that wasn't there in her time. “The way Deepika Padukone's character presents herself is much better than we did. But the second half of the film sort of perpetrates patriarchal rules,“ notes the 69-year-old veteran.

Sharmila, who ruled in the 1960s-'70s, believes multiplexes have given a platform to new-age, experimental directors and lead to the rise of directors like Sujoy Ghosh, Shoojit Sircar and Dibakar Banerjee. Today, the film industry has become more systematic in the way it operates and handles its finances. “Everything is organised today, actors work in one film at a time while we used to do four-five films simultaneously and were unable to experiment. But our hearts were in the right place and everybody worked passionately. We had wonderful directors like Bimal Roy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Raj Kapoor,“ she adds.

She admits that it raised many eyebrows when in 1963 she joined the Hindi film industry, given her surname and the fact that she had started out with a Ray film, Apur Sansar. “Many wondered why I was joining Bombay films since they were looked down upon as mindless entertainment,“ she reminisces but adds that even while working in Mumbai, she continued to do Bengali films like Nayak, Aranyer Din Ratri: Days and Nights in the Forest. “My last Bengali film, Antaheen, released six years ago. I never intended to stop expressing myself in my own language,“ she concludes.