How does it feel to inspire someone to walk out of a bad marriage? Rupali Ganguly takes a deep breath, soaking in the responsibility that sits on her shoulders, as she continues to drive Indian women to reclaim their space in the sun, every week night at 10 pm.

One of Indian television’s biggest stars currently, Ganguly, who some reports claimed commands a Rs. 3 lakh per day fee, says that the daily soap life doesn’t give her the time to even realise the enormous presence she holds among viewers. It’s 14 hours straight of shooting on set, returning to her home only to sleep. “On most days, I can’t find the time to check social media. It was when I had women visit the set, and hug me, breaking down, that I realised how popular the show had become,” Ganguly, 45.

We are in her room at Set No. 17 at Goregaon’s Film City, where she spends more than half the day, every day, playing Anupamaa Shah, now Joshi. The saree is yellow, the blouse pink, in her characteristic contrasting style. The hair is done up in a braid that she brings to the front over her right shoulder, giving it a symbolic tug each time she makes a win of some sort.

Ganguly is sipping on Thumbs Up, while a stray nuzzles up to her. He is one of the several she has informally adopted around the set. It’s lunch time and she has a few minutes off before she’s back to being the servile homemaker who finds the strength to live life on her own terms when her masochistic husband marries another woman.

Minutes before, she was sharing a laugh with her prickly former husband, Vanraj Shah, played by Sudhanshu Pandey, as the two took pictures for an online teaser. They are hardly the enemies they must play on screen. And it’s this simple reality that viewers, she says, taken in by the power of entertainment, tend to forget. For them, she is Anupamaa, the woman they can’t be, but secretly hope to emulate—the one who finds love after she is abandoned; the one who returns to her passion for dancing, and turns entrepreneur.

“I was in Gujarat, acting in a play when they [the show’s creators] called me. I was a last minute casting choice. They asked me to send a video test, and overnight, I was in,” she recalls. The show’s top boss, veteran producer Rajan Shahi, last directed her in 1999 for her first television stint, Dil Hai ki Manta Nahin.

Ganguly isn’t a stranger to fandom. Her last hit show, the comedy Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, catapulted her and much of the cast, including Ratna Pathak Shah, Satish Shah and Sumeet Raghavan, to stardom. After Parvarrish–Kuchh Khattee Kuchh Meethi in 2011, she took a seven-year-long break. Until 2020, when this role landed in her lap. “I told Ashwin [husband Ashwin K Verma], this is a good character. He asked me, ‘So, do you play the hero’s mother’. I said, ‘no, I am the protagonist, and she is as old as me, 42’. In the years before that, I got offered to play women younger than me or way older. Here, I would play my age. My husband thought I hadn’t got my due as an actor, and said he’d take care of the house.”

Verma seemed to have had the right hunch. In fact, Ganguly says that Shahi wasn’t sure if the idea would work and had planned to give it three months. “I was chubby when the show launched, and wanted to lose weight before we shot, but he said, ‘there’s no time!’”

The show that began to air at the start of the lockdown is now a top ranker. The Broadcast Audience Research Council India, which releases TRPs every week, placed Anupamaa at the top with a TRP of 3.5 as recently as last week (the closest second was Ghum Hai Kisikey Pyaar Meiin). It was the week when Anupamaa decided she would marry her college friend Anuj Kapadia, played by Gaaurav Khanna. It was also the week she uttered the now iconic monologue on marriage. “Yeh dadi ab shaadi karegi!” It’s no wonder that the show is set to make its way to the OTT platforms with a prequel titled Anupama-Namaste America, where the early life of its protagonist will play out.

Ask Ganguly if she is anything like her character and she says, “The only thing we have in common is our love for loving everyone. For me, like her, it doesn’t take much to be nice to someone, but it means a lot for the other person.” That her character is an under-the-radar feminist was always the point of the show. “It’s not about waving a flag. It’s about changing how people think. It’s about asking them to think in the first place. It’s also the story of every household in some way. All of us know an Anupamaa somewhere,” she says trying to put her finger on the reason for its humungous popularity.

The scriptwriters are clear that they will put Bharatiya sanskar front and centre in every episode, but Anupamaa’s new avatar allows her to be progressive in thought. The show tackles gender stereotypes using its only daily soap language, with Anupamaa always clad in cotton sarees, her nemesis, Kavya in Western wear. ‘Will you wear tracks to the office?’ she asks Kavya in one scene. “It’s [the debate] not about the clothes. That’s not being modern. It’s about how you think and react,” she says alluding to a scene where her daughter-in-law says despite her plain Jane lifestyle, Anupamaa is the only one in the house to have told her that the decision to have a child can only be the mother’s.

“My nani was Muslim and she married a Marathi man. She embraced his culture. We grew up seeing this. My father was a feminist. He never distinguished between my brother and I. He encouraged us to think and set our own standards for morals. I am married to someone who is looking after the home and my six-year-old son. He doesn’t need my money, he wants me to enjoy the recognition. And then there is a man like Rajan, who created Anupamaa. I am surrounded by the right people.”

Does she then have any say in how her character behaves? Can she, on a given day, not agree with what the writers have planned for Anupamaa to say or do? “No. The actor never knows the character the way the writers do; they bring in the twists. I don’t interfere,” she says. During the monologue that she performed last week, stretching over 32 pages, she says they granted her the freedom to do it as she deemed fit.

She is called in for the next shot. We return to what she said at the start of the interview, about her responsibility towards the audience. “It’s huge. The messages I get... women have walked out of bad marriages, they tell me [after watching the show]; they realise their self-worth, and want to be independent. It gives me hope that somehow I may be touching lives. I was at Vaishno Devi recently, and even though there was a film star next to me who had also arrived for darshan, people were crowding up to me—not Rupali, Anupamaa.”