I haven’t come close to watching every Tanuja Chandra film, but I find her fascinating as a person and researching this post made me want to watch more of her films. Hopefully it made you feel the same way!

Tanuja Chandra is fascinating to me. She comes from a family of artists. Her mother wrote radio plays and occasionally helped with dialogues and scripts for film. Her brother Vikram Chandra won the Commonwealth prize for his first novel at age 35. Her sister Anupama Chopra got a scholarship to one of the best journalism schools in the world and went on to be the most powerful film scholar in India. Her brother-in-law Vidhu Vinod Chopra was nominated for an Oscar at age 27. And then there is Tanuja. She quietly got a film degree in America and then came back home to start a career. She directed TV serials and wrote scripts for hire and then started directing low budget thrillers and romances. She’s the forgotten sister. She has no major awards, no longruning international acclaim, no fame of her own (I can’t even find an age for her). She just makes movies and doesn’t talk about it.

Tanuja started directing TV back when Indian TV was being made in parking garages on the budget of a free lunch. It was easier to get a chance in TV than film. She got noticed and got a chance with Mahesh Bhatt, who liked young talent. He hired her to pep up his scripts a little help, flesh them out. He recommended her to Yash Raj, and she was able to contribute to Dil To Pagal Hai (one of 4 listed writers). And then Mahesh Bhatt gave her a chance to direct her own movie. Well, Mahesh and Pooja. They picked Tanuja to direct the script they had hired out on the idea they had picked up from an American film and massaged into something new in the classic Bhatt way. It was Pooja’s second film as a producer, the first one where she wasn’t also starring. A woman hired a woman to make a film starring a woman. And yes, it’s not the “classiest” movie or the fanciest plot, but it is good and strong and makes you happy to be a woman when you watch it.

Dushman was the film, starring Kajol, Ashutosh Rana, Sanjay Dutt, and Tanvi Azmi. Kajol plays a double role, twins. SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR THE PURPOSES OF DISCUSSION The peppy confident shorthaired twin is brutally rape and murdered shortly before her wedding. Quiet nice shy longhaired twin Kajol is left living in a house of grief, and then starts being stalked by her sister’s killer Ashutosh Rana. Which is when she bumps into (literally) injured soldier hero Sanjay Dutt. He is blind, but he teaches her self-defense and gives her the tools to protect herself and take revenge for her sister. Kajol falls in love with him, but he rejects her because he feels his blindness means he is not good enough for her. This is one of those plots that makes the heroine into the hero without making her into a man. The broad outlines of the plot are familiar, the death followed by vengeance with a side helping of a love story. But making the love story play out between a woman and the man who gives her the strength to defend herself, that is different. Making the people left behind in grief a mother and two sisters instead of a husband or a brother, that is different. And making our hero not someone who is fearless but someone who struggles and overcomes fear, that is different. That is what happens when you have a female director working with a female producer and featuring a female star. SPOILERS OVER

Dushman was a solid hit and Tanuja was offered another job by the Bhatt’s, this time a remake of Silence of the Lambs with Preity Zinta as the heroine and Akshay Kumar as Anthony Hopkins. Only, a very different character and role from the original, meaning he didn’t over-shadow the heroine, Sangharsh is Preity’s movie start to finish. Her performance was praised and the film did decent at the box office, not spectacular. And then Tanuja had her first flop, another Bhatt film, but this time they gave her a romance, a traditional “woman’s picture”. A beautiful troubled young woman, a fast talking reporter, lots of songs and drama, but it just didn’t work. It was too sweet, too magical, to romantic, that’s not what Tanuja does. She does raw and dark and a little bit violent.

In 2002, Tanuja made her 4th film with Pooja back as her producer, and found a way to bring that rawness and realness into a love story with Sur. Sur is a bit of an odd film, extremely popular soundtrack, no stars. It’s a story of music, a music teacher and his student who end up trapped in an unhealthy relationship. The hero is played by a singer Lucky Ali, the heroine by a TV actress who never really made another film. But it helped Tanuja find another way to work through the story of a heroine feeling lost and finding strength, instead of through violence (as in her first two movies) through music.

Tanuja broke with the Bhatts for her next film and lost something in the transition. Her next movie, Film Star, was about another troubled female artist, an aging movie star who is inspired to take a different kind of role and ends up caught in the real life battle of the woman who she will be playing on screen. It’s a complicated concept, tying together the struggles of an aging actress with those of an abused woman fighting back. With this strange concept, odd cast (Mahima Chaudry and Priyanshu Chatterjee in the leading roles), and boundary breaking arguments (against spousal abuse), Tanuja really needed a producer who would believe in her and back her up. And she didn’t get that, her movie got left behind and forgotten. Her first film not to get a solid release and serious attention from the audience and critics.

It’s hard to come back from that. I don’t know why Tanuja stopped working for the Bhatts, it’s not that which matters, what matters is that a woman in the film industry is in a vulnerable position. Even after having a series of critical and/or commercial hits, Tanuja couldn’t find a producer to back her vision and believe in her. She was stuck, left to fall back on folks who killed her creation before it had a chance to be seen.

Maybe that’s why she went overseas for her next movie. Hope & A Little Sugar is an English language film shot in New York, about life in America after 9/11. It was produced by Americans, non-desi Americans, they had more faith in Tanuja then the men of her own country. America in general had more faith, the film premiered at the South Asian Film Festival in New York and went on to have a decent run overseas.

One thing Tanuja has never struggled with is getting big names and big talents to work with her. The stories are simply too good to resist. Kajol got to play a double role and an action hero in Dushman, Akshay got to be a traumatized prisoner in Sangharsh, Anupam Kher got to play an upright Sikh father struggling with life in post-9/11 America. And during the post-production work of Hope & a Little Sugar, she made a movie tailor made for her good friend Sushmita Sen, Zindaggi Rocks featuring real life single mother Sushmita playing a single mother and artist onscreen.

Tanuja worked on Hope & a Little Sugar and Zindaggi Rocks simultaneously, one aimed at the international film festival audience and the other hoping for a little notice and success in the Indian box office. Hope & a Little Sugar hit overseas, not a massive crossover hit but a decent film festival hit. Zindaggi Rocks flopped at home. And Tanuja stopped making moves for 9 years.

Between her first film Dushman in 1998 and Zindaggi Rocks in 2008, Tanuja made 7 films. That’s a pretty good rate for a working director. They weren’t all hits, but they were good enough and Tanuja was professional enough to be able to get her next projects going. She put together an interesting story, found a cast that was serious about doing the film, dug up funding from somewhere, and found distributors who were looking for some nice B level films to fill out the schedule. And then in 2008, everything changed. Suddenly a director who made fun musical popular films with strong female leads wasn’t what was hitting at the multiplexes and the festivals. It either had to be big and popular, or it had to be small and artistic, the middle-ground wasn’t any good any more.

Tanuja came back in 2016 with Qarib Qarib Singlle. In broad strokes this is a film that is similar to what she has done before. A strong female lead character, an interesting cast drawn in by the interesting script, a solid hand behind the camera, and a slightly unusual story to draw in the audience and keep the film moving. But Qarib Qarib is different in how it was presented, and how it was received. When Tanuja made Dushman, it wasn’t a small film released in multiplexes for a discerning audience. There weren’t multiplexes back then, and the audience wasn’t divided like that. Dushman was a straight up hit, it had songs and action and romance and all the rest. And I doubt most people were consciously aware that it had a female director or a female lead character. Qarib Qarib was different. The style of the film, the clothing the main character wears, all of these small ways indicated that it was for the “multiplex” audience, not the masses. That it was “female friendly” not male. Heck, there were the lead cast members too, Irrfan Khan and Parvathy are a very different pair of actors from Sanjay Dutt and Kajol.

I don’t know Tanuja in real life, I have no idea if she finds this new era of filmmaking freeing, or if she misses the days when she was making hit masala films. What I do know is that she succeeded in both eras, she is a female director who made hit movies back in the 90s before there were multiplexes, before there was streaming, before there was a focused attention on supporting female voices. She simply made good movies back then and she makes good movies now, and that is worthy of attention.

Here is what Tanuja herself says about her work:

I’m a pathological encourager of working women who are trying to make something of their lives. The onus of doing what you want to, lies on you. Even if the environment is not conducive toward fulfilling your desires, you must make a damn good attempt of doing it. So that those less privileged and those that cannot possibly flex their muscles might possibly have a shot at it someday, too. If you want to write a book, write it. If you want to make a movie, make it.

https://www.womensweb.in/2017/05/tanuja-chandra-writer-and-director-interview/