Beena Tripathi enters every room a step behind her husband, the crime lord Kaleen Bhaiya, and somehow still seems to be the one who has already worked out how the conversation will end. She watches, she waits, and by the time anyone notices she has moved, the move has already paid off. With Mirzapur: The Movie now in theatres, set in the timeline of the very first season, Rasika Dugal returns to a woman she has spent years coming to understand, even as she insists there’s still more to uncover.
Rasika talks to Indulge about the ambition she once mistook for survival, the strange discomfort of stepping backwards into a character the audience already knows the future of, and why she thinks that particular brand of power says something deeper about how women learn to move through rooms they don‘t visibly control. Excerpts:
Beena has spent three seasons learning how to survive by reading the room better than everyone else. Has playing her changed the way you read people in your own life?
Not at all — though I wish it had. I really wish I had Beena’s skill; it would hold me in good stead in life. Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to bring that into my own life. She really knows who’s who, and I wish I did too.
Do you think Beena actually wants power, or has she simply become good at making the best of the circumstances she is trapped in?
I think it’s both, actually — that’s a very good question. It’s not just that she’s trying to survive; she’s genuinely in it. She’s as greedy for power and control over the gaddi as anybody else in Mirzapur, and I think that’s an interesting quality to have kept in the writing. She’s as flawed as everybody else in this story. It’s not as if she’s operating purely from a place of survival — maybe at times she’s only thinking about surviving, but she’s also ambitious. She wants power; she wants control. She says she wants it for her child, but really, it’s her own ambition. I love that this has been written in, because very often in writing we don’t explore this side of women — that they can be flawed, nurturing, ambitious, strategic and vulnerable, all at once. These are things we don’t write often enough for female characters, and I’m so glad Puneet has written her this way. And not just Beena — even Vasudha, the character Sheeba plays. She’s the one person in the family with a real hunger for money, for a better life. She’s drawn to the access to power that comes through Guddu and Bablu. That doesn’t necessarily make her a bad woman or a bad mother.
After playing Beena for so many years, is there anything about her that you understand now that you completely misunderstood when you first played her?
That’s tied to what I just said, actually. When I first started playing her, I thought she was just trying to survive. Now I understand that she has her own ambition too.
Did you ever have to consciously fight the audience’s expectations of the character while making the film?
Once a show has been loved as much as this one has, across three seasons, I think the hardest part for many of us was going back to playing who these characters were in season one — because the film is set in that timeline. You already know everything the character will go on to live through. How do you undo that in your head? I found that genuinely challenging as a performer. To answer your question directly — yes. While shooting the film, I felt something I don’t usually feel on a set: that this show has such a loyal fan base and so much love, and I hoped we’d bring the audience back, and then some. That was a strange thought for me as a performer, because I’d never had it before. Usually it’s simply about whether I can shoot the scene and do what I want to do with it.
What can cinema give Beena that three seasons of the series couldn’t?
That’s exactly what I was wondering before I read the script — what more could they possibly do with her? But Beena, as I said, has always carried a certain mystery, and that leaves a lot of room to explore. Why is Beena, Beena? What brought her to becoming the person she is? The film does a very good job of giving that some context. I think it’s nice to do this with characters who carry mystery — intrigue comes from that mix. If you reveal a little more, the audience becomes even more invested.
Beena has learnt to exercise power without ever looking like the person who has power. Do you think that’s why audiences find her so fascinating, particularly because women are still often expected to be either sympathetic or villainous?
Yes, I think there’s a mysteriousness to her that’s intriguing, and that’s probably what draws people in. The film gives some interesting context to that mysteriousness too, so I’m hoping audiences connect with her and carry her with them after the film. But coming back to what you said — the way she operates, pulling the strings without appearing to — that’s actually how a lot of women navigate a patriarchal society. They have to pretend they don’t have power so that it becomes more palatable to the people around them. That’s an added layer of work all of us end up doing. I’m sure most of us have experienced some version of it in our everyday lives — maybe not exactly the way Beena does it, but in smaller ways — trying to make our power, or our sense of control, more acceptable to the people around us. It’s completely unfair, but that’s how it is.
You’ve spent so much of your career playing women who are constantly observing other people. Who gets to observe Rasika?
I think it would be Mukul, my husband. We’ve been together a while, and he’s really the one who reminds me of things I forget. I tend to remember things a certain way — like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — I forget what I don’t want to remember. He’ll correct me; he’ll say, “No, that‘s not how you felt about this.” Memory is a fascinating thing to me, something I’ve taken seriously for a long time. I’m drawn to films that deal with it too — how you choose to remember and what you choose to remember.
You recently went back to FTII after 20 years. What did you miss about the Rasika who left FTII in 2006?
Probably the ability to make really random decisions without overthinking them. Many of the good decisions I made in life came from being able to take a chance without weighing it too much — that’s actually how my acting career began. I saw a newspaper article about FTII’s acting course. I’d never acted professionally before, only in college, and I thought, let me just apply and see what happens. I think that’s what I miss most, because as you get older, you start weighing your decisions far more carefully.
You’ve spoken about still auditioning even after establishing yourself. Is there something liberating about still having to prove yourself? Or does it sometimes get exhausting?
I don’t look at it as having to prove myself, so it isn‘t exhausting. I see it as fair — if someone asks me to audition, I’m happy to, because they want to see whether I can pull off that particular part, and that’s a fair thing to want. It doesn’t happen often these days, but there’s probably a gap between imagination and reality — they know me as an actor, they know the role, and they just want to see the two meet. I also learn something about them in the process; I get a sense of how they’re imagining the show or film and what they’re thinking about the part. That’s useful information. So when someone does ask — which is rare — I think of it as an exercise, not as needing to prove myself.
Do you think you’re harder on yourself than you were 10 years ago?
No, maybe not — I think I’m actually kinder to myself now, because I know what it takes. Earlier, it was just: Why isn’t this happening? Why can’t I do this? Let’s try to get more work. Let’s try to do the work better. I’ve been on this journey long enough to know how much effort it genuinely requires, and I think I do it better now — and I’m kinder to myself along the way.
What advice would you give to someone who is just starting in the industry?
Do it your own way, because that’s the only way that’s actually fun. There are a lot of templates people will hand you — telling you to look a certain way or to do certain kinds of roles and avoid others. What makes any artiste’s journey interesting is that it’s unique, so you should walk it in your own way.