Remembering Vidya Sinha, the actor who made low-key performances, fluid body language, unaffected dialogue delivery and an ethnic wardrobe her calling card
Khalid Mohamed (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 16, 2019)

Her handloom saris were selected from the rows of discount-rate shops in Dadar and Girgaum. At most, she was allowed to apply kajal around her eyes. Make-up and lipstick were strictly forbidden. No bouffants or teased hair-styles please, either. She had to look and behave like the quintessential girl-next-door of a middle-class colony of the 1970s for Rajnigandha.

The parsimoniously-budgeted film—commuting between Delhi and Bombay—established her as a heroine who didn’t require an iota of glamour to score a surprise hit when it opened on September 13, 1974 for limited shows at the Akashwani auditorium at Churchgate in South Bombay.

To date, Vidya Sinha who passed away on Tuesday at 71, after a protracted illness, is called the ‘Rajnigandha’ girl.

This was her second film. She had already featured in Raja Kaka opposite Kiran Kumar, an actioner which had tumbled under the cracks. Ignoring her inauspicious debut, film society activist-cartoonist-turned-film director Basu Chatterjee didn’t audition her for the role of Deepa, a young woman who has to decide between her two suitors, a mousy white-collar worker of Delhi and a flamboyant ad guru of Bombay, portrayed by Amol Palekar and Dinesh Thakur respectively.

Incidentally, the to-die-for role of Deepa had been initially offered to Mallika Sarabhai, who had turned it down politely.

Vidya Sinha, the daughter of film producer Pratap A Rana, who had modelled for fabrics and consumer products, was recommended to Chatterjee who in his patented casual manner had said, “Why not?” Although the director went on to cast frontline heroines, ranging from Hema Malini and Jaya Bachchan to Neetu Singh and Tina Munim, he collaborated with Vidya time and again through Chhoti Si Baat, Tumhare Liye and Safed Jhooth, not to forget a cameo in Jeena Yahan, which the auteur has often cited as his best work.

Chatterjee at age 89 is bed-ridden and cannot remember things easily, states his filmmaker-daughter Rupali Guha. Speaking on his behalf, she points out, “Dad was never demonstrative or given to praising anyone. But he regarded Vidya as an actor he could depend on. Since she considered him a mentor, she immediately agreed to act in my TV serial Ishq Ka Rang Safed. I always found her to be an extrovert and she treated me like a baby who’d watch her with round eyes at the shoot of Rajnigandha.”

The Rajnigandha girl had acted in almost 20 films, and nine TV serials, kicking off with Kkavyanjali. She was last seen in the Salman Khan-starrer Bodyguard and in the serial Kulfi Kumarr Bajewala. The transition from status of the leading lady to the typical hand-wringing maa and next, grandma, wasn’t exactly smooth, perhaps because she had resettled in Australia for close to a decade.

Towards the end of 1986, roles reduced to a trickle. Her childood neighbourhood sweetheart, Venkateshwaran Iyer, whom she had married, passed away in 1996. Next, she moved to Sydney where after chatting online, she married Dr Netaji Bhimrao Salunkhe in 2001. Eight years later, she filed a complaint against him for physical and mental torture and divorced. The actor, with her daughter Jhanvi, then returned to start life again in an Andheri apartment.

Low-key performances, an infectious smile, fluid body language, an unaffected dialogue delivery and an ethnic wardrobe were her calling card. Besides the interpretation of a girl who’s charmed by the scent of tube-roses in Rajnigandha, her other impactful performances were evidenced in BR Chopra’s Pati Patni Aur Woh, Raj N Sippy’s Inkaar, and in Gulzar’s Kitaab and Meera.

Gulzar recalls, “Vidya and I enjoyed working with Uttam Kumar in Kitaab. That was a lovely journey which comes rushing back to me today. In Meera, the title role was Hema Malini’s of course, Vidya enacted her sister gracefully. She was a director’s actor, sincere to the script to the last letter and punctuation mark. She would be friendly on the sets with the assistants, spotboys and technicians. I wonder if that quality still exists today. We will always miss her unbridled joy for life. She had a doodhiya (milky) laughter. Whenever she laughed, you had to laugh with her.”

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.