Mother Tongue
Sridevi speaks with a tremulous lilt, her tone carefully conveying a sense of displacement. Often, though, she needn’t speak at all. Her eyes, which one character poetically describes as “two drops of coffee on a cloud of milk,” make their own declarations.
THOUGH THE 1983 FILM HIMMATWALA MADE THE Indian actress Sridevi a star in Bollywood, she once claimed that she saw its success as a curse. “In Tamil films, they love to see me act naturally,” she lamented to the magazine India Today in 1987. “But in Hindi films all they want is a lot of glamour, richness, and masala. My bad luck was that my first big hit in Hindi films turned out to be a commercial one.” The exception came much later, with Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish (2012).
Sridevi, who died in 2018 at 54,. By then she was already a force in South India, with the majority of her work in the languages of Tamil and Telugu. She essayed a variety of roles with tender honesty in Tamil when she was just a teenager: a village belle who experiences heartbreak (, 1977), a lonely singer who loves a con man (, 1980), a woman who suffers from amnesia (, 1982).
