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A Role She Was Born To
It's in real life, not the movies, where SHABANA AZMI plays her biggest part—as a crusader against injustice
By MEENAKSHI GANGULY

Her passion is incontrovertible. Her ego can easily tend toward excessive. Her talent keeps her famous, and her pulchritude made her that way.

But the measure of Shabana Azmi's humanity is none of those things. It is her willingness to say, simply, what others are frightened of saying. "The trouble," says Azmi, "is that I can never keep quiet." That volubility has indeed caused her problems, but it's also made the 51-year-old Indian actress an outspoken secular hero espousing tolerance in a state riven by religious conflict.

The daughter of one of the country's best-known Urdu-language poets, Azmi took up acting almost three decades ago. Bankable in Bollywood, she tired of formulaic fare and is one of the few marquee actresses willing to risk reputation to take adventurous roles in experimental films. Her portrayal of a lonely woman who falls in love with her sister-in-law in Deepa Mehta's 1998 film Fire sparked threats of a ban by censors and violent protests by fundamentalists enraged at the depiction of lesbianism in middle-class India.

But it's not her movie roles that have made her a hero for modern India. She has consistently—and loudly—railed against real-world injustice. Early in her career, she took up the cause of slum dwellers in Bombay—where she lives—who had been ruthlessly evicted by municipal authorities. Since 1993, appalled by the then bloody riots between Muslims and Hindus, Azmi, a Muslim, has become a forceful critic of communalism and a tireless crusader to end religious extremism.

Azmi does not just fight for her co-religionists. In fact, her greatest battle has been against fundamentalist Islamic leaders. Post-Sept. 11, Azmi was among the first in the country to publicly criticize militant Islam. When the imam of Jama Masjid, India's largest mosque, said Indian Muslims should join the jihad in Afghanistan, Azmi urged him to go—alone. Her outburst encouraged other Muslim moderates to step forward and counsel tolerance.

Azmi's activism has angered both Hindu and Muslim radicals as well as a variety of vested interests. But she doesn't care. "I am a daughter, a wife, a mother, a woman, an actress, an Indian and a Muslim," she says. "Each of those identities is important to me." And she doesn't intend to let anyone forget it.

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