With the second wave of Covid putting a stop to all activity, most of Bollywood lay low in May. Not Huma Qureshi, though. First up was promoting the Hollywood action thriller, Army of the Dead, in which she has a brief part as a desperate mother stuck in a zombie-infested Las Vegas. Thankfully, Qureshi is spared a gruesome death—a routine feature in director Zack Snyder’s films. She doesn’t seem peeved about her limited screen time, though. That’s because back in India, she has the spotlight to herself in SonyLIV’s political drama Maharani. Qureshi plays the titular character, the wife of Bihar’s chief minister, forced to fill the seat of political power. In the time not spent shooting, Qureshi has been raising funds for the ‘Save the Children’ initiative, which will be directed towards setting up a 100-bed medical facility in Delhi to help the underprivileged battle Covid. For the 34-year-old, her social outreach work off-camera is as significant as the work she does on camera.
“Last year has been eventful, and yet it feels like nothing happened,” says Qureshi. “Being forced to spend time with ourselves has allowed us to evaluate what is going on around and inside us.” Born and raised in Delhi, Qureshi says the chaos of the second wave left her feeling anxious. “It almost felt criminal to not do anything.”
The actress has always been driven. Daughter of a kebab shop owner, Qureshi, much to the dismay of her parents, chose acting over pursuing studies abroad and working towards a “respectable, intelligent profession”. She left a cushy life in the capital to struggle in Mumbai. Her younger brother, Saqib, soon followed. “I felt like I let them down in a way,” Qureshi had told INDIA TODAY in an earlier interview. “I wanted to prove to them that acting was a good choice.”
Her gamble paid off. She debuted with Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), a six-hour, two-part crime drama, in which she was one of 200 actors, but also among those who stood out. Then came D-Day (2013), in which she was the sole female agent in a cast that included Irrfan and Rishi Kapoor, and Dedh Ishqiya (2014), where she held her own among performers like Naseeruddin Shah, Madhuri Dixit-Nene and Arshad Warsi.
In a career spanning a decade, Qureshi has not been in any rush to amass credits, and refuses to conform to Bollywood’s preconceived notions of what a heroine should look like. “I am not a part of the race,” she says. “I don’t feel the pressure to fit in.” Instead, Qureshi has a more pragmatic approach to her work which has its roots in theatre—she began her acting career on stage as part of theatre person N.K. Sharma’s Act One group. “I want to be inspired to go to work,” she says. “Why should I travel to a set far away, be on some crazy diet, remember lines and put myself out there for public scrutiny if it’s not moving me in some way?” That’s not to say she isn’t hungry for leading roles. “I am a true-blue Qureshi in that I want my plate full,” she says. “I want to shine. I want to feel that I have grown as a performer.”
OTT is enabling her to do so. In her streaming debut, Netflix series Leila (2019), she stood out as an aggrieved mother trying to find her daughter in a divisive and dystopian India. Adapted from Prayaag Akbar’s book of the same name, the series drew flak from right-wing groups that took offence to its alleged ‘Hinduphobia’. Despite an open ending in season one, there’s no news of a follow-up. Qureshi isn’t keen to comment either. “You’ll get me in trouble,” she says. Qureshi suspects that Maharani, like Leila, will stir conversation, but will likely irk supporters of patriarchy rather than politicians.
With Leila and Maharani, Qureshi shows that she has a predilection for essaying women who can handle those that try to oppress or undermine them with great fortitude. “Just because Rani doesn’t speak English, has not been outside her village and works in the field, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have an understanding of the world,” says Qureshi. “She is illiterate, but she is not an idiot.”
This feminist outlook has seeped into Qureshi’s first writing gig too—a modern fantasy fiction with a superheroine at its centre. Initially pitched as a TV series to be made abroad, Qureshi has now turned it into a book. “As an actor, you are at the mercy of bringing others’ words and ideas to life,” she says. “For the first time, I was like, ‘What do I really want to say?’.” Qureshi has found her voice. She is now waiting for the world to listen.
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