ELLE.IN 97 JULY
Six stitches. There’s another, the result of a fall on the
road when she was eight. It cleaved her lip almost in
half and broke her tooth. Four stitches. When she was
12, she was dragged by a motorbike for 13 feet, which
got entangled in her skirt. It virtually crushed the left
side of her face, broke her left leg, and left countless
small scars all over her body. Sixty-four stitches on
her leg. It took her a year and half to learn to walk
properly again. When she was shooting Tanu Weds
Manu (2011), she came under the tyre of the rig she
was on, and injured her left foot in three different
places. Thirty-four stitches. And most recently on
the sets of Manikarnika: The Queen Of Jhansi (2019),
she was hit between the eyes by a half-kilo sword.
“An artery broke, my face was covered in blood and
my forehead was the size of a tennis ball,” she says,
laughing. Twenty stitches.
There are other psychological scars, wounds
inflicted by herself and by others. “When I started out,”
says the 32-year-old, “there weren’t many like me. I
came from a small town, I had curly hair, I was skinny,
I wasn’t able to express myself well in English, I was
feisty, I wanted to be paid as much as the men, and
I refused to toe the line. Now the spectrum of the
leading lady has stretched from Neena Gupta to Tabu,
but it wasn’t so then.” That was 2006, when she burst
on to the screen in Anurag Basu’s Gangster (2006),
setting the stage for a series of neurotic characters,
which reached a peak with Fashion (2008). “The best
quality about Kangana as an actor is that the deeper
and more human her character’s pain is, the better
she is at playing it. And that’s because she has seen
enough [pain] in her life to understand it,” says Basu.
And there were the mistakes she committed almost
knowingly. “When I was 16 or 17, I fell into very bad
company,” she says. “I was virtually under house arrest.
There was this particular moment when I looked
around me as if I was out of my body and wondered how
I had ended up in this shithole. How
did I make these choices that brought
me here?” She thanks her parents for
pushing her to study science, even
though she is a high school dropout.
That logical mind propelled her
towards reading Swami Vivekananda,
starting with the Vedanta. From the
ages of 18 to about 22, she subjected
herself to some harsh practices, eating
boiled food, wearing a particular kind
of clothing and doing pranayama.
Vivekananda became a guru, through
his teachings. She sought control over
her body and mind, becoming aware
of herself. “I’m immensely proud of
my internal journey,” she now says,
sitting in the airy living room of her
Khar apartment, filled with photos
of her family, acrylic posters of artist
Frida Kahlo, and framed quotations
of Swami Vivekananda.
She worked on her English, taking
tuition, developing her ability to
listen. She also carefully curated her
fashionista image. “I don’t judge people by how they
speak or how much they spend on their clothes, but I
realised there are people who do. If I have to survive,
sustain and someday become a voice of my own, it
was through them. There are so many worrisome
things about fashion, wasting so much fabric, being
bullied for repeating outfits. I feel a lesser being for
accepting them but I am aware of it. I know how to play
the game.”
Jobless for two years after Fashion, she began
life afresh with Queen (2013). That movie came at
a time, post-Nirbhaya, when women were ready for
an empowered heroine. It gave her the confidence to
take charge of her profession. But she isn’t ashamed
of the films she did in the run-up to Queen—the
ridiculous No Problem (2010), Rascals (2011)
and Double Dhamaal (2011). It helped her pay for
her sister Rangoli Chandel’s 57 facial surgeries after
an acid attack, as well as a two-month screenwriting
course in New York. Queen made her pretty much
the first choice for anyone who wanted to make a
strong woman-oriented film. There have been some
rough patches, but Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015)
and Manikarnika have kept her star power alive,
and allowed her to coast over one controversy after
another, whether it was the battle over writing credits
on Simran (2017) with Apurva Asrani, or the public
airing of details of her relationship that went awry.
“After Queen, I was flooded with offers for movies
with big male heroes, but I had tasted blood. I had seen
the love and appreciation, and now had the confidence
in being a brand of my own. That rubbed a lot of
people the wrong way. I used to get threatening calls
for refusing films. Then my own relationship wentKangana Ranaut is
counting her scars.
There is a scar right
next to her nose on the
left side of her face, the
result of trying to jump
like Shaktiman.
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