Kangana Ranaut: The unapologetic outsider in Bollywood
The actress’s outspokenness has proved to be her biggest asset and her Achilles heel in the film industry. How she makes use of her strengths remains to be seen
Opportunism is a gift if you are in politics or the movie business. On Sunday, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) offered actress Kangana Ranaut a Lok Sabha ticket to contest from her hometown Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, Ranaut was effusive in praising the party’s decision — not a far cry from her statement in November 2023, when she visited the Dwarkadhish temple in Gujarat, “Shri Krishna ki kripa rahi to ladenge (with Lord Krishna’s blessings, I will contest elections).
Speculations about her joining the BJP have been a constant buzz in the party’s candidate cauldron for a couple of years now. Often, Ranaut would oscillate on her desire to join politics swinging between “I could be a queen in politics too” and “I won’t be able to handle two careers.
In recent times, Ranaut’s career as a star received fatal blows with four big-budget, lavishly-mounted films — Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi (2019), Dhaka (2022), Tejas (2023) and Chandramukhi 2 (2023) — vanished from the box office without making much of a mark. That hasn’t stopped her from writing, producing and directing her forthcoming film, Emergency (tentatively scheduled to release in theatres in June 2024), a biopic of the former prime minister Indira Gandhi, who will be played by Ranaut herself. The actor, who turned 37 earlier this month, has the wherewithal and resources to portray the ruling party favourably.
Ranaut, if she wins — her opponents are yet to be announced — will walk into Parliament with the assurance of a candidate who has contributed to the party’s narrative. A good example of that is her recent praise for the prime minister for consecrating the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya and the hyperbolic claim that India was able to do this “after 600 years of struggle”.
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It wouldn't be incorrect to surmise that her explicit support of the ruling party has reached its logical end—in seven decades of India’s electoral democracy, flattery has gotten all manner of citizens, including crime lords and gangsters, into public and political roles across parties. But in choosing her, the party has also found a dissenting voice in an industry that often closes its doors to outsiders — certainly critical ones — not unlike herself.
Ranaut had immense chutzpah in anodyne Bollywood to speak out against nepotism and discrimination against outsiders. She sparked the debate when she said at a Koffee with Karan interview that if she were to cast for her biopic, she would cast Johar as the “Bollywood biggie” as he was “very snooty, and the flagbearer of nepotism”. The statement led to a troll tornado—Bollywood insiders defending their own and dismissing her as too opinionated for her own good, and outsiders spotting the making of a possible messiah for Mumbai’s film industry, effectively controlled by a few families in Juhu and Bandra. Ever since then, Ranaut decided to chisel her image of a rabble-rouser, a militant feminist and political aspirant over the years—-carefully constructing a pro-BJP, Bollywood outsider credo.
Her journey has also been one of the big choices. Her competition, she declared quite early on in her career, was the “Khans” (Shahrukh, Salman and other top male Bollywood stars). By the late 2000s, the actor took on roles of the unsure, volatile woman with a stilted accent, moll to gangsters and second fiddle to supermodels— in films like Gangster (2006), Woh Lamhe (2006) and Fashion (2008). It was as if Mumbai’s film industry needed an antidote to the hyper-feminine glamour dolls who reigned supreme at the time, and who could be different. They found it in Ranaut.
Without a doubt, the BJP now has a counterpunch to the likes of Mahua Mitra.
The beginning and the future
After a brief theatre stint in New Delhi, Ranaut arrived in Mumbai in the late 1990s, hoping to make it as an actor. The outsider’s grind before a breakthrough role, which typically lasts years for anybody unrelated to or unacquainted with Hindi film aristocracy, ended when Ranaut got her lead role in Anurag Basu’s Gangster. This girlfriend of a Mumbai gangster roamed the streets drunk and waited to be found. Opposite Emraan Hashmi, she was set to be the poster girl of Vishesh Films, the lucrative factory of sex-crime-horror films made by Mahesh, Mukesh and Vikram Bhatt—a lurid alternative to the big-budget gloss in Hindi cinema, and roles she played with awkward relish.
The turnaround role for Ranaut was in Milan Luthria’s Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai (2010). It was also a role soaked in seedy glamour, with her character Rehana, a starlet, in love with a gangster played by Ajay Devgn. Ranaut found an opportunity to project something of her own into the role—a simple girl lost in the trappings of apocryphal power. Her other breakout role was Queen (2013), a young woman jilted at the altar and decided to go for her honeymoon trip all by herself. It was a film that gave women a narrative of self-discovery and freedom at a time when the country was already roiled by protests over the rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapist nicknamed Nirbhaya by the media.
The last three years of Ranaut’s public life can be seen as various phases of a self-help project. Once spotted at fashion shows in Milan and Paris; neatly pleated saris are now her staples. She is known to go all out to fit in, to belong: Her fashion metamorphosis was intended. A speech doctor she took the help of to cure her Himachali accent did a good job: Ranaut’s diction and accent are now unconstrained and even kind of faux-Italian.
Over the years, Ranaut’s persona has been built around a kind of scripted wit—sophisticated humour, mostly landing like unapologetic invectives from a cocky Bollywood outsider.
Politics is a different beast. To win over the common man is trickier, and possibly a much less enjoyable game.
Sanjukta Sharma is a writer and critic based in Mumbai. The views expressed are personal.
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