Looking at her filmography during this period, one could still conclude that Hindi cinema never quite gave her the roles that plumbed the depth of her talent. Still, she went on to become the nation’s first pan- Indian female superstar, reigning over the country’s three biggest film industries-Kollywood (Tamil), Tollywood (Telugu), and Bollywood (Hindi)-before retiring in 1997. That she excelled in such circumstances constitutes a minor miracle.
Like Himmatwala, too many of these movies refused to take her seriously, rarely giving her the chance to dig beneath the surfaces of the women she portrayed. She climbed to the top of Bollywood in the ’80s and ’90s, perhaps popular Hindi cinema’s most artistically sterile period. She essayed a variety of roles with tender honesty in Tamil when she was just a teenager: a village belle who experiences heartbreak ( 16 Vayathinile, 1977), a lonely singer who loves a con man ( Johnny, 1980), a woman who suffers from amnesia ( Moondram Pirai, 1982).
By then she was already a force in South India, with the majority of her work in the languages of Tamil and Telugu. She was only 19 when she appeared in Himmatwala. Sridevi, who died in 2018 at 54, had been acting since she was 4, eschewing an education for a childhood spent on film sets. Can Dialectics Break Bricks? By Devika Girish
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