Often, the Indianism ‘filmi’ is used to mean the very opposite of class. Its shades of meaning include an artificiality, a certain amount of exaggeration, of façade. Class, to survive in this hurly-burly, must be of a very high order indeed. So, to help us define class, we went to someone who is very much a part of the film world, but has always been, quite simply, classy: Shabana Azmi, award-winning actor and activist
I can’t call myself classy, it’s for other people to say that. I can only say that this is what I have seen, this is what I have imbibed, and this is how I am. Class is intangible, almost indefinable. It is a summing up of the parts so that they become more than the whole. It has to do with dignity, subtlety, with a layered subtext where much more is expressed because it is hidden. It’s got very little to with wealth and money, and much more to do with an attitude that comes from being comfortable in your own skin.
All of us, in certain situations, want to put on our best self. But it’s when you’re not doing it for public consumption that counts. Like eating. When I’m by myself and nobody’s watching, do I gobble up my food? Do I eat it elegantly? Do I behave in the same way when there are people for whom I want to put my best foot forward?
My father was very classy. My husband is very classy. An unspoken aesthetic touches everything they did or do.
My parents have been the two most important anchors in my life; they taught by example. Both of them were public people with public personas, but they also had private personas not disconnected from the public ones.
My father was a member of the Communist Party. We grew up with eight families sharing one toilet. A 225-square-foot tenement was home. And yet my entire upbringing was peopled by intellectuals of the highest order: The biggest poets, writers, theatre people, some from film, the working class, all of that. The governor of Maharashtra would come in to meet my father, and a labourer without any chappals, and both would have access to the house. In retrospect—not then—for my brother Baba and I, money really wasn’t the most important thing; there were other values which were greater. And that formed the kind of people we are.
I watch my mother a lot—I think she is a very classy lady—and I see that she dresses for the sheer joy of her own satisfaction; not for anybody’s sake. The way she eats food, the way she orders food, the way she is—her very persona is that of an extremely classy person. There could be many others who have much more in terms of wealth who would not be able to do it.
And Javed has been a huge influence; we’ve been married now for 27 years. My mother says the UP mard is a different phenomenon altogether: Very high on propriety, on how you should behave with seniors, with adults, how certain words are not to be used with certain people, how any kind of crassness, even in humour, is not acceptable. In many, many ways, Javed is a lot like my father, because they have exactly the same kind of background.
I work in the slums, in the village. And I come across many, many women whom you would not define as classy in the sense that you would a Gayatri Devi. Yet there’s a core to them, where they are able to hold on to their dignity under great adversity. They’ve got class. It’s also got to do with strength, with your ability to negotiate life. It comes from your values, what you hold dear.
(This story appears in the 27 April, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)