Sobhita Dhulipala On Poetic Licences She's Taking To Get Where She Wants To Be

After years of waiting in the wings, Sobhita Dhulipala is suddenly everywhere. Before her turn as an undercover spy on a rescue mission in the web series Bard Of Blood, she talks to GQ about the poetic licences she’s taking to get where she wants to be

The book of the month, as per Sobhita Dhulipala’s Instagram feed, is Franz Kafka’s Letters To Milena. When we meet in early July, she’s just picked up this collection of stunning love letters from the author best remembered for a story about a man metamorphosing into a cockroach. But what she’s really into right now is another early 20th-century luminary, Ezra Pound. “He’s so hot,” she says, in that way others would talk about, say, Idris Elba. “I’m still discovering his poetry, but I’ve figured out what space my poetry falls into: Imagism.”

Dhulipala is a prolific writer and reader of verse – she thinks Charles Bukowski’s work is like “blood under your tongue, you can’t not enjoy it,” and hints at a teenage obsession with Leonard Cohen – but she doesn’t advertise it all that often. Occasionally, you can catch a glimpse of this proclivity in her moody captions; but there are only two people in the whole world who’ve been allowed to read what she writes: Anurag Kashyap (who directed her debut, Raman Raghav 2.0) and, oddly, Film-maker Shekhar Kapur. “I remember, Anurag sir was like, ‘Fuck, I thought my movies were dark, what is this!’” she laughs. “That’s how we bonded.”

Sitting in Indigo Deli in suburban Mumbai, as the rain drums hard and soft on the plexiglass roof, Dhulipala daintily sips from her cup of coffee to punctuate (what is quickly turning out to be) a dramatic monologue. Or in modern parlance, a TED Talk. The subject line: Dhulipala’s eventful journey from smalltown Visakhapatnam to glamorous Mumbai, and a lifelong pursuit of cool.