Can Aish Make Her Mark in a Serious Role?
By Sumita M. Sheth

It appears that while filming for Mistress of Spices in Britain, Aishwarya Rai was approached for and accepted quite a groundbreaking new role. Provoked is to be based on the true-life story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia. Originally from India, Kiranjit was orphaned at 16 and then traveled to marry her husband in London where she then spent years suffering intense torture and abuse at his hands. In quite a reversal of roles, Kiranjit retaliated by throwing petrol on her husband ad then setting him on fire while he slept.

The murder was taken as unprovoked by the courts and Kiranjit was sentenced to life imprisonment. However as the Southall Black Sisters, the Asian women’s group working to protect Asian women in Britain, took-up her cause, Kiranjit was given a retrial and released after having served 3 years and 4 months.

The rumor mills have it that Rai was especially enraptured by the script because of her own experiences of abuse at the hands of her then boyfriend, Salman Khan.

	Kiranjit Case

Rai has the best intentions for taking this movie, hoping to bring the story to the whole world. Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters, with whom Kiranjit cowrote her autobiography, expressed great delight at the attention this is getting for the issue of domestic violence, “The story will reach India, Britain and America. It will crystallize an important segment of feminist history.”

With such a serious storyline, it is very important for Rai to give a very solid performance, as there will presumably be no dance or song number to add to her presence on screen. This is to be a glamourless role for Aishwarya, even more so than her role in the previous Raincoat. Speaking to people, the writer heard some wonder if this movie will prove to be as challenging to accept as Felicity Huffman of Desperate Housewives playing a man in Transamerica. Ok, so it is an extreme comparison but while this is a noble role for Rai to accept, is it perhaps too extreme an image shift? The box office will tell soon enough.

The filming of the movie has already started to attract false media reports. It seems a British article claimed that the film crew upset Sikhs while shooting at a Gurdwara. This annoyed Aish enough to draw vehement denials from her because she “never plays with religious sentiments”.

Aish’s co-stars in the movie will be Naveen Andrews of Bride and Prejudice, Lost and Buddha of Suburbia fame, as well as Nandita Das who previously played the victim in Bawander.

The movie is to be directed by Jagmohan Mundra who also directed Bawander, which dealt with the real story of a forthright village woman in India who was gang raped for being herself and the pursuant miscarriage of justice. This time though, there is a happier ending to the tale.