Vidya Sinha
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A brief biography
Avijit Ghosh & Bella Jaisinghani, August 16, 2019: The Times of India
In 1970s India, she typified the nice, neighbourhood middle-class girl whom shy guys would wait for wordlessly at the bus stop. Vidya Sinha played that girl to perfection in the middle-of the-road classic “Chhoti Si Baat” (1976).
“Chhoti Si Baat” was the bigger hit but Vidya had already caught everyone’s eye earlier in the modestly successful “Rajnigandha” (1974), which was based on Hindi litterateur Manu Bhandari’s story, “Yehi Sach Hai”. Both films were directed by Basu Chatterji, the master of miniature middle-class life.
The characters played by Vidya in these films had larger social echoes. In “Rajnigandha”, she was a student unable to choose between two lovers. In “Chhoti Si Baat”, she played a typist wooed by two suitors. Both these women were half-confined, half-free. Through them, Vidya seemed to be representing thousands of middle-class women in urban and small-town India. She became their celluloid mirror, her life and pleasures a fulfilment of their fantasy. In times when Bombay heroines were synonymous with shimmery glamour and inviting pouts, Vidya was the divergent other: big, kohl-laced eyes, smart saris and a smile. She was the real, attainable middle-class girl for thinking young men.
The hashtag, Vidya Sinha, was the top trend on Thursday evening. And it only underlined that she still retained a fond, if forgotten corner in many hearts even four and a half decades later.
To Vidya’s credit, she tried to break free of the “good girl” image. She even bashed up baddies in “Chalu Mera Naam” (1977). But it didn’t work. Neither did producerdirector B R Chopra’s “Karm” (1977) where she was cast opposite Rajesh Khanna, then a superstar on a slippery slope.
No image-conscious heroine would have played the avenging killer in Ramsay’s murder mystery, “Saboot”, or the female Fagin who exploits child beggars in Raj N Sippy’s “Josh” (1981), in a desi Oliver Twist kind of film. In a 2015 interview with rediff.com, Vidya had said that she grew up in central Bombay’s Matunga area. She was Miss Bombay in 1968 and started modelling which led to her being cast by Basu Chatterji, her daughter Jahnavi told TOI. In recent years, she found comfort in television work. What will endure longer is the girl with sparkling eyes of “Rajnigandha” and “Chhoti Si Baat”.
