Women in crime dramas are usually relegated to playing the arm candy or the mole but not in "Dabba Cartel".
In her latest outing, Shabana Azmi leads an ensemble cast of women playing home cooks who deliver drugs through their tiffin service -- a remarkably novel plot the veteran actor says focuses on a world "being investigated through the lens of women".
"Well, the nicest thing about 'Dabba Cartel' is when you see women in these kinds of situations, you always see them as appendages. They are either the mole or the arm candy or things like that. They don't occupy centre space. This is a world that's being investigated through the lens of how women find themselves in this situation and that will inevitably be different from men," Azmi told PTI in an interview.
The actor, who won a National Award for best actor for her role in the 1999 film "Godmother", one of the five in her storied career, said the show, created by Shibani Akhtar, looked at the world of crime in a different way.
In the Netflix show, Azmi's Sheila plays a typical Gujarati mother-in-law who is later revealed to be a woman who was associated with a major drug lord in the past.
Her character's back story is revealed gradually through seven episodes. According to Azmi, it was interesting to build a character whose power lies in her quiet assertiveness. "I found the layers in her challenging and I found that she is different from the Godmother that I played many years ago and which I also got the National Award. "They are two completely different roles and that's what I found interesting. Sheila is not all out there, she does it quietly and with assertiveness and that's what actors look for actually. (It's) not something that's all there because in acting, though you might not see the back story, the back story is very important for you to build." The series also features south stars Jyotika and Nimisha Sajayan as well as actors like Gajraj Rao, Anjali Anand, Sai Tamhankar, Jisshu Sengupta, Lillete Dubey and Sunil Grover. Azmi said it is about time films and shows reflect India's diverse pool of talent. "For so long, Asian actors have said, 'why should we only be cast in roles that are of a particular ethnicity?' So if we are fighting for that there, then surely in India, which is so multi-cultural, why shouldn't all aspects of you be represented?" Asked whether she is happy with the strides women have made in fiction, Azmi said it should have happened a long time ago.
"For far too long, women really have been invisible or they have been shown just to glamorise the place and to be the good looking girl and all that. Women are much more interesting than that. And I feel that space is definitely opening up and that's always for the good," she added.
Shibani Akhtar, who has created the show, said the story came together because she wanted to work with Azmi for the longest time. "I knew I wanted Shabana Azmi for an idea and then this became the idea. So it wasn't that I had the idea and then I knew that I wanted to work with her. My connection to Indian cinema when I was growing up in Australia at a very young age was the film 'Masoom' and it was a film I used to watch over and over again," Akhtar said.
She said she met Azmi, who is married to her father-in-law Javed Akhtar, during the screening of "Loins of Punjab Presents" and she found Azmi to be completely opposite of the image she carried from "Masoom".
"We were in the theatre watching 'Loins of Punjab Presents' and when she was watching her character, she was hooting and whistling... it was the complete opposite of the Shabana Azmi that I remembered and I thought, oh my goodness. So when I thought this was something that I wanted to do, I wanted to do something completely different. So I knew that I wanted to work with her before I knew that I wanted to do 'Dabba Cartel'."
Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Telegraph Online staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.
