Purva wants to set an example with her lesbian act

New York, April 5 Purva Bedi, an Indian-American actress, wants to set an example for Indian actresses by playing a lesbian in Manan Katohora's 'When Kiran Met Karen'.

The role was earlier offered to Perizaad Zorabian but she turned it down as it was too unconventional. Purva, who has built her acting career in the US, does not attach the same stigma to the role.

'That's one of the reasons I really want to do the movie. You know that once the movie's made, everyone in India is going to watch it. I want to do this movie so that actresses there can start to play those parts and not be so scared,' Purva told afterellen.com in an interview.

Before Purva, Bollywood actresses Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das ventured into this zone with Deepa Mehta's 'Fire'. Both the director and the actresses were dogged by staunch criticism for breaking the norms. Later, Isha Koppiker and Amrita Arora tried it in 'Girlfriend' but the response was not too good either. Not only did the film bomb, both the actresses were slammed.

'When Kiran Met Karen' revolves around Purva's character, Rachna, who plays an actress called Kiran in the film.

'When you meet her, she is in an uber-heterosexual relationship,' she explained. 'But after she finds herself attracted to her co-star, a lesbian who plays a character named Karen, she begins to question her sexual orientation.'

In addition to dealing with the issue of infidelity and her sexuality, Purva has to grapple with her cultural background and the ways it intersects with these issues in the film.

'The other really huge thing for Rachna is, I think, expectations with being an Indian American woman. There's a lot of pressure from birth to get married and to fit into these roles, these responsibilities of, you know, getting married, being a good wife, being a good girl.'

Purva admits she has been lucky that her family is progressive enough to allow her to do a film like this.

'I was very lucky to be born into a family where my father's mother had been an actress and ran a theatre company for 30 years in India. And my mother, when she was a teenager, was an actress. She left it to pursue academia, but she was also a novelist and a poet.'

Purva was born in India, but her family moved to the US in the late 1970s. Perhaps taking a cue from the women in her family, Purva says that she has wanted to be an actress since she was five years old. She attended Williams College in Western Massachusetts, where she double majored in theatre and economics.

'I'm a good Indian girl, and so while I was passionate about theatre, I had to have a nice econ practical thing,' she said with a laugh.

(c) Indo-Asian News Service

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