Dadi hasn’t aged!

Veteran Actor Sushma Seth was conferred with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) 2023 on March 29 for her contributed to every department of theatre.

Reviewing the performance of Sushma Seth as Katherine in Shakespeare’s  The Taming of the Shrew, theatre critic Walter Gardner wrote, “I have never seen an actress in India act with such abandon; she really kicked and bit her way through the part.”

Not much has changed since the 1960s. Give it to the magic of yoga or to her boundless spirit, Sushma continues to belie stereotypes. At 86, her memory is sharp and her demeanour sassy. Immaculately dressed, she invites us to the balcony of her beautiful home in New Friends Colony to have a photo shoot before twilight gets the better of her shining visage; she was conferred with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) 2023 on Wednesday evening. An excellent actor and director, Sushma has contributed to every department of theatre and worked to make the stage an equal space.

Sushma grew up in a progressive Delhi family where, as she puts it, men folk were mostly into sports and women gravitated towards the arts. Her uncle Maheshwar Dayal was an exception. An actor and a playwright, he wrote three plays for his niece as he saw something in her. “I had a flair for the difference even then. In one of the plays that I performed in front of Raj Kapoor, I played a nawab and in another, I played an old lady with a Haryanvi accent.”

As fate would have it, years later she played the role of a grandmother in  Hum Log whose dialogues too had a Haryanvi flavour. The iconic series is playing on a DTH platform these days. Sushma says  Dadi hasn’t aged. “When it was first aired, everybody said they had someone like her at home. I think it still holds true for the character who is a little aggressive, fun-loving, and contrary to the stereotypical grandmothers who were either too shrill or grovelling.”

Sushma recalls how she dressed up the character with her mother’s clothes and how she used to get a sackful of fan mail that she used to answer during breaks between scenes. “Women wanted Dadi to solve problems in their personal life. Some girls also showed up at the door. Once a girl beseeched me that she wanted to live with me because her in-laws had made her life hell. I had to make calls to her mother to sort out the situation.”

Sushma learnt the nuts and bolts of theatre at Briarcliff College and Carnegie Mellon in the US on scholarship. It gave her a head start but it created its own share of perceptions. Seth remembers when she was looking to find a footing, Joy Michael, with whom she founded the popular Yatrik theatre group, used to take English pronunciation classes for those appearing in the interview of the Indian Administrative Services.

“As she was in the family way, I filled in for her for a few months after I returned from the US. The centre was in Shankar Market where most theatre groups rehearsed. As luck would have it, Habib Tanvir’s group was mounting  Rustom Sohrab and an actor who was playing an important role had to give up the assignment at the eleventh hour. Somebody told Habib sahib that I was around. He sent someone just to check whether I spoke in  aata hai jaata hai kind of stilted English. And once he was convinced, I got to play the beautiful part of Gurdafini.”