From Rangeela to Pinjar, Urmila Matondkar’s effortless evolution on screen

While this version of Urmila created a low-key revolution in how women were portrayed on screen in the 90s, it did not really help Urmila’s case in becoming the star she could have been. In a recent interview with ETimes, Urmila spoke about how her ‘sex appeal’ was looked down upon, and seen as a separate entity from her overall performance. “How can the song, ‘Hai Rama’, happen without a person being a performer?” she asked.

Pondering on her interview, and rewatching Rangeela all these years later, I realised that not just the critics of the time, who Urmila said “didn’t write a decent word about” her and only praised her clothes and hair, but even the film itself doesn’t really acknowledge Urmila as a performer. Of course, Ram Gopal Varma deserves a lot of credit for portraying Urmila in an aesthetic way that was miles away from being cheap or vulgar but upon watching the film now, it seems like he too was quite enchanted by her physical beauty.

In Rangeela, Urmila’s Mili gets her break in movies in a film called Rangeela, and even within the film, all we hear about Mili is that she is a great dancer and looks drop-dead gorgeous. When she asks Kamal (played by Jackie Shroff) to review her work, he just says that she looks stunning. Her effortlessness was seen as ordinary, when in fact that was the performance she was probably aiming for.

Urmila Matondkar playing Puro in Pinjar.

Urmila’s career has had some stand-out gems like Bhoot, Kaun, Ek Haseena Thi – which were all highly praised at the time, but in my opinion, it was Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s Pinjar that brought out the best in her. Unlike Rangeela, the Urmila at work here looks like a much more nuanced artiste who works more with subtext, than with expositional dialogue. Set during the Partition, Urmila’s Puro is a woman who is kidnapped due to a family rivalry in the film, and that changes her life completely. Her family, fiance, religion is left behind, and she has to now accept her kidnapper, as her husband. The complexity of Puro’s choices, and how she has to navigate her life whilst also looking out for her loved ones, made her one of the best written female characters we have seen in contemporary Hindi cinema.

In the same interview, Urmila shared that she was attracted to Pinjar because it spoke about the “constant need for women to prove themselves” and how, despite the changing times, this was still valid for most women. The statement is applicable to Urmila’s career as well. She played a hauntingly memorable role in Kaun, was a heroine-turned-femme-fatale in Ek Haseena Thi, a girl-next-door in Satya, a possessed woman who could still give us nightmares in Bhoot, and also dabbled in some pretty mainstream roles like the ones in Judaai, Jaanam Samjha Karo, Dillagi and through it all, she was just constantly trying to “prove” herself, and the range she could pull off in a seemingly effortless way.

Lately, many of Urmila’s contemporaries have joined OTT platforms, and dare I say that Urmila is miles ahead of most of her contemporaries who were stuck in stereotypes in their heyday. Urmila was never the one to be boxed, and if she chooses to come back with a new film or show, we wonder what new territory she will explore next.