Chhoti Si Baat Heroine Dies Of Lung Ailment
Avijit Ghosh & Bella Jaisinghani | TNN (THE TIMES OF INDIA; August 15, 2019)

In 1970s India, she typified the nice, neighbourhood middle-class girl whom shy guys would wait for wordlessly at the bus stop. Vidya Sinha, who played that girl to perfection in the middle-of-the-road classic Chhoti Si Baat (1976), passed away at Mumbai’s Criticare Hospital on Thursday. She was 71.

"Vidya Sinha died around 11.30 am. She was ailing with lung disease and recently also had heart trouble. She was not responding to treatment,” Dr Deepak Namjoshi, who treated her, said.

Chhoti Si Baat was the bigger hit but Vidya had already caught everyone’s eye earlier in the modestly successful Rajnigandha (1974), which was based on Hindi litterateur Manu Bhandari’s story, Yehi Sach Hai. Both films were directed by Basu Chatterjee, the master of miniature middle-class life.

The characters played by Vidya in these films had larger social echoes. In Rajnigandha, she was a student unable to choose between two lovers. In Chhoti Si Baat, she played a typist wooed by two suitors. Both these women were half-confined, half-free. Through them, Vidya seemed to be representing thousands of middle-class women in urban and small town India. She became their celluloid mirror, her life and pleasures a fulfilment of their fantasy. In times when Bombay heroines were synonymous with shimmery glamour and inviting pouts, Vidya was the divergent other: big, kohl-laced eyes, smart saris and a smile that reminded you of flowers in the morning sunlight. She was the real, attainable middle-class girl for thinking young men.

The hashtag, Vidya Sinha, was the top trend on Thursday evening. And it only underlined that she still retained a fond, if forgotten corner in many hearts even four and a half decades later.

To Vidya’s credit, she tried to break free of the “good girl” image. She even bashed up baddies in Chalu Mera Naam (1977). But it didn’t work. Neither did producer-director B R Chopra’s Karm (1977) where she was cast opposite Rajesh Khanna, then a superstar on a slippery slope.

The following year, Pati, Patni Aur Woh (1978) became a box-office smash, though actor Sanjeev Kumar walked away with the plaudits. Apart from Amol Palekar, the hero of both Rajnigandha and Chhoti Si Baat, she shared screen space with Kumar in other films such as Mukti (1977) and Tumhare Liye (1978). Vidya also acted in Raj N Sippy’s profitable thriller Inkaar (1978), which was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.

No image-conscious heroine would have played the avenging killer in Ramsay’s murder mystery, Saboot, or the female Fagin who exploits child beggars in Raj N Sippy’s Josh (1981), in a desi Oliver Twist kind of film.

“I still remember her final scene where she gets buried amid a barrage of coins, the very coins she would exploit the children for. We did not use visual effects, that scene was actually shot with heavy coins. We took precautions not to hurt her. But Vidya ji was very brave. She endured retakes without complaint,” recalled Sippy.

Another notable film in her resume is Tyaag Patra (1978), based on renowned Hindi writer Jainendra Kumar’s famous novel of the same name. Gulzar’s Kitaab (1977) was certainly more watched.

In a 2015 interview with rediff.com, Vidya had said that she grew up in central Bombay’s Matunga area. She was Miss Bombay in 1968 and started modelling which led to her being cast by Basu Chatterjee, her daughter Jahnavi told TOI.

In the rediff interview, Vidya regretted having said no to Raj Kapoor for the role eventually played by Zeenat Aman in Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

Her first husband, whom she had married before signing her first movie Raja Kaka, passed away in 1996. A second marriage ended in acrimonious divorce. In recent years, she found comfort in television work. What will endure longer is the girl with sparkling eyes of Rajnigandha and Chhoti Si Baat.