Rasika Dugal on The Miniaturist of Junagadh, Naseeruddin Shah and love for period films

Actress Rasika Dugal ’s short film, The Miniaturist of Junagadh, has been lauded by many for its “gentle quality” despite being set in a violent time of Indian history. The Kaushal Oza directorial that also stars Naseeruddin Shah is set in 1947 and focuses on the unravelling of a secret about a miniature collection that a family is determined to keep. “A lot of people said that it’s talking about a very violent time, but it’s such a gentle film. And I think that’s a very tough thing to achieve as a director. I think Kaushal has done that beautifully. I am very proud of the way he has made the film. It has a gentle quality which I kind of miss in many films that I watch today,” says Dugal. She feels that this is an important film for the times that we are living in right now. “Our society is very polarised. People from different sides of an argument need to have conversations with each other. This film is about people finding a human connection which is beyond their own identity,” says the actress.

One of the reasons why she was excited to work on the short was because of its director, who is known for making the award-winning film Afterglow. “Kaushal was my junior at Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. I knew that our sensibilities are aligned. I had worked with him many years ago at the film institute when he was making his final year project. I was keen to collaborate with him again,” she says. She was also looking forward to collaborating with Shah. “He had taught me in the film institute. Much of what I know of acting today is because of some very fundamental things that he had taught us. So I was very excited to share screen space with him,” she says. But on set, it was more about collaborating rather than teaching. “One of the things that Naseer sahab teaches and he practices what he preaches… is that you never give your co-actor an instruction. You receive whatever the co-actor has to give you. Therefore, he wasn’t teaching me anything on set. He was responding to me with the respect that he’d give to any co-actor which is the beauty of somebody like him who has so much humility and devotion for the craft even though he has been in the industry for so many years,” says Dugal. Apart from this film, she has featured in projects like Qissa , Manto and A Suitable Boy that were set in post-partition India. She feels that the 1940s and 1950s are the times that she has begun to understand more and more. “I have read a lot of literature and seen a lot of films too. I think it’s the pace of life at that time which I feel at home with. I feel a misfit in today’s time when everything is so fast-paced amd things change so often,” she says. In fact, she would like to play novelist, essayist and poet Amrita Pritam on-screen someday. “I am very fond of her poetry. She beautifully wrote about love and conflict. I think she lived very fearlessly. She made very independent choices at a time when society might not have been very appreciative of the way she lived. I am very fond of her work and her personality,” she says. As of now, she has no project that has got anything to do with a different era. She will be returning for the second season of the International Emmy Award-winning series Delhi Crime . She also has Adhura, Spike and Lord Curzon Ki Haveli in her kitty. “We recently wrapped up the shooting of Lord Curzon Ki Haveli. It is not set in another period even though it sounds like that. It’s a drama,” she shares. She still has a little bit of shoot left for her first horror show Adhura. “In the first few days of the shoot in Ooty, I realised that I could not read the script after 5 pm. Usually, I do my lines before I sleep or fall asleep while doing them so that I am prepared for the next day, but I realised that I had to find another way to work on this because for the first few days, I couldn’t sleep. As it is hill stations are spooky, on top of that we were shooting for a horror show! The script is very well written,” she tells Firstpost. Dugal will also be back as the bold Beena Tripathi for the third season of Mirzapur . “I will soon start shooting for Mirzapur 3. There is a lot of excitement associated with that. I love playing Beena Tripathi in Mirzapur. It’s one of my favourite parts,” she says.

Natalia Ningthoujam is a Manipur-based journalist. She knows how to smoothly switch from being a fan to a writer whenever needed. She tweets at @nattynick.

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