No Pigeonholing, Please!
Verve|November 2016

Star Wars, a Broadway musical, a British soap opera and Shakespeare — Ayesha Dharker has played many roles; all while holding on to her Mumbai accent. She shares her journey in an animated chat with Amishi Parekh.

Amishi Parekh
No Pigeonholing, Please!

Midway through answering my very first question, Ayesha Dharker remarks, “The camera is a mythical beast, the face of a machine and the arms and legs of a human, caught in an eternal present and waiting to swallow your soul.” Effusively gracious to a fault, what makes her endearing is her refusal to hide her longstanding love affair with film and theatre. From talking about her first film in 1989 to her most recent role as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, it becomes abundantly clear that she lives and breathes to perform. “After all these years I still can’t walk past a building site smelling of fresh wood because it smells like a film set. Film and theatre are my work and my play,” she adds.

Dharker was a few years my senior at the South Mumbai girls’ school we both attended, known for its strong dramatic bent in those days. She was already something of a legend, having landed a lead role in her first film at the age of eight. “I was picked out of school to be in a French film about reincarnation (Manika, un vie plus tard). I guess I was hooked, filming in wonderful places I had only heard about, meeting actors and directors who took me seriously and being in a room with wonderful technicians and machines.”

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