Mr. India (Scene to Scene) #2

This gay abandon also animates her famous Charlie Chaplin sequence in the film. Hailed as the greatest ever impersonation of Chaplin on Indian celluloid, Sridevi’s mime here is a master class in comedy. Javed Akhtar, whose prediction about the actress had come true, gushes:"When I handed Boney the script, I had told him that only Sridevi would do justice to this role. I had seen Himmatwala and I had been astounded that something massive had happened in Hindi cinema. If you have a talent like Sridevi, you would like to take full advantage of it. Perhaps with any other actress, we may not have conceived the Chaplin sequence but here was someone we knew who could pull it off. It was only a tribute to her incredible caliber."

And what calibre! Right from Chaplin’s wobbly walk to his fidgety cane, Sridevi absorbs every nuance of that comic wizard. She fumbles at the casino entrance and tickles the thug’s belly, dances like Chaplin and even spins like him. Shekhar Kapur takes us right inside the mechanics of a Sridevi performance: "It is the way she listens to you as you are directing her. Nodding her head. Never letting on whether she has understood or agreed with what you are saying. But the way her eyes are transfixed on you. As if searching deep inside you. For a meaning beyond words. Beyond language. But not much else. And then the camera runs on. And there is an electricity that permeates the set. You realize that Sri has transformed. That from deep inside you she has extracted everything she needed beyond your words. And turned the world around. Like the Charlie Chaplin scene in Mr. India. I just spoke to her about it. She merely shook her head. And looked deep into my eyes and then allowed the magic to flow and flow, while we watched in wonder and in awe."

But if Sridevi pays homage to her childhood icon, she also inserts her own loose-limbed gags throughout these acrobatics. Watch how she hums at the roulette wheel and squeals when she wins, how she picks her ear with a dart and makes her bowler hat pop. Sridevi becomes a Chaplin body double and yet keeps flashing her own soul. It is this fusion that makes this sequence a timeless reel of joy.

Never had the industry seen a female comic actor of such magnitude, someone who could act ridiculous with such fearlessness, who was nullifying the patriarchal tenet that women aren’t funny, declaring that it was perfectly okay to make loony faces or speak in that sing-song tone.

Interestingly, the Chaplin act had initially been just a short scene on paper. However, when the makers realized what Sridevi was capable of, they stretched it into a full-blown sequence. The industry was stunned again. It had discovered another phenomenal facet of Sridevi. Never had the industry seen a female comic actor of such magnitude, someone who could act ridiculous with such fearlessness, who was nullifying the patriarchal tenet that women aren’t funny, declaring that it was perfectly okay to make loony faces or speak in that sing-song tone. For the first time perhaps, a female icon was empowering every girl out there by assuring her that it was fine to be unladylike, fine to not take yourself so seriously. Playing the buffoon with such gravitas, Sridevi had become an actress in the purest sense of the word. The India Today review gushed: "She carried the role effortlessly, giving it a comic disbelief reminiscent of Roger Moore as James Bond."

As Chaplin, Sridevi reinforced her image as the heroine who could also play hero, a woman who could play a man like that girl child who had played Murugan, and the teen who had played Krishna. The plurality of her screen persona, almost embodying the Ardhanarishwara, was lapped up again by both straight and gay audience.

Javed Akhtar explains what set Sridevi apart from others: "In cinema, you remember only those artistes who bring a new sensibility. Sridevi was a unique mixture of great beauty and unconventional comedy. Usually pretty actresses refrained from acting funny in films thinking that their beautiful faces will look strange on-screen. But here was a girl who was so gorgeous and yet happily contorting her face and rolling her eyes without fear, who had the courage to play the clown, who also had a sensuality that created a new idiom for Hindi film dance. That is what raised Sridevi way above other actresses."

Vidya Balan endorses this: "For me there is nothing Sridevi can’t do. It was so refreshing to see an actress do a sequence like Chaplin with such unabashed joy. It is almost as if she is not aware of her body and her being. And despite the madness on-screen, you can see that she had precisely measured out just how far to go; it is never over the top. Even if Sridevi had packed up after Mr. India and not done another film, we would have still remembered her for the next five centuries."