Anushka Sharma is a feminist icon. On her b'day, here's a look at how she championed women's stories onscreen

When Anushka Sharma was a kid, she would often organise free libraries and events in her colony. Once, the young Sharma even started a beauty parlour business. Back then, she offered her services for free and although she didn’t expect many to turn up, people proved her wrong and did show up to avail her services.

It is this enterprising spirit of the actress that makes her markedly different from her contemporaries even today. From her dream debut in ‘Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi’ in 2008 opposite Shah Rukh Khan in a Yash Raj Films production to her upcoming venture – ‘Chakda Xpress’ under her own film banner, Clean Slate Filmz – Sharma has deliberately travelled off the beaten road.

In her 14 years of career, Sharma has had several victory laps at the box office (‘Sultan’ and ‘PK’) and her career trajectory has been punctuated by some very big duds (remember ‘Zero’ and ‘Bombay Velvet’?) too, but through it all, the actress seems to have been working towards something bigger and more important than mere box office success.

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The ‘Phillauri’ star has actively tried to tell women’s stories, and portray such characters onscreen that changes the perception of the audience about females and their place in the society. As Sharma rings in her 34th birthday, here’s a look at why the actress is a true trailblazer and a feminist storyteller like no other.

While no one can fault Sharma for lack of sincerity, the actress did not have a meaty role to prove her mettle until ‘Band Baaja Baraat’ arrived in 2010. As Shruti Kakkar, Sharma was the embodiment of female ambitions and enterprising spirit (not very different from her own) that resonated (and continues to do so) with many young Indian middle class women who wanted to make their own way in life.

In the years that followed Sharma did bring several women characters to life – some beautifully written ones like Mamta, the docile housewife who eventually turned into a fashion designer in ‘Sui Dhaaga’ and Meera, an urban executive who witnessed an honour killing and found the courage to fight the goons in the gory, stark and nerve-wrecking ‘NH10’.
In ‘Phillauri’, Sharma was the female poet who wrote under a pseudonym in a pre-Independent India. In ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’ Sharma played the role of a Discovery Channel film-maker.

Sharma’s female characters rarely had big feminist spiels to deliver, or carefully curated moments in which they took on the world or talked about women’s issues. Neither were they always depicted as the epitome of goodness (remember ‘Pari’?) but they were and continue to be the representations of real women onscreen – they are women with jobs and ambitions, and more importantly, they are women with agency.

Even when she was doled out half-baked characters by big banner films like ‘Ae Dil Hai Mushkil’ in which the makers didn’t even bother to give her a surname, let alone a profession, Sharma added silent grace to the sassy Alizeh. She brought a sense of self-awareness and integrity to the character, which other actresses in her place would have perhaps missed.

In a 2021 interview to Filmfare, Sharma had opened up about her very conscious choice of characters. The actress had said, “I think I have been conscious enough to select roles and films that I felt could contribute towards changing the portrayal of women on screen. It took a lot of self-belief for me to do this as an actor and then as a producer because I was somehow swimming against the tide and challenging the notion of how women were so far portrayed on screen.”

While as an actress she chose not to be an ‘accessory’ in any of her later films (like many of her contemporaries), when she turned producer with Clean Slate Filmz (that she co-owns with her brother, Karnesh Ssharma) she truly pushed the envelope and veered towards feminist storytelling.

In ‘NH10’, she offered the viewers a cathartic healing when she took on the goons with such blunt and brute force that we have only seen leading men display on screen until then. With this film, Sharma turned a producer – a very young one at that — at the peak of her career and over the years, even in the productions she didn’t feature, Sharma did not stop telling feminist tales.

Her production ‘Bulbbul’ was a feminist revenge fantasy, that ‘cancelled’ all men. This film subverted the patriarchal tropes, and gave you a witch for a protagonist who killed men who sexually harassed, or dishonoured women. Sharma’s production house’s latest offering ‘Mai’ also offered the same feminist gaze.

Sharma’s choice of stories and films are testimony to the fact that the actress is deeply committed to telling female stories, but so far she has never veered towards the preachy or ‘women’s issue based’ zone. However, the stories she backed over the years are so strong and imbued with the essence of feminism that they automatically sparked conversations about equality, self-respect and empowerment.