20 Years Of Vidya Balan: The Gloriously Inconvenient Superstar

“I’m not here to please anyone. I’m here to do my job and walk away,” said Vidya Balan in a 2012 interview, when the industry was busy dissecting her weight, fashion, and filmography. Two decades since her Bollywood debut in Parineeta (2005), her career reads like a chronicle of Bollywood’s own evolution. She has been labelled a risk-taker, a herald of change, and at one point, “box-office bad luck.” The irony is delicious: the same actress who was once considered a bad omen, went on to headline some of Hindi cinema’s most powerful hits, like The Dirty Picture (2011) and Kahaani (2012)—films that put women front-and-centre, raking in box office numbers as well as critical acclaim. In an industry obsessed with assimilation, Balan built her legacy by being inconvenient. 

Her trajectory began, fittingly, in superstition. Prior to Parineeta, Vidya had already been written off in South Indian cinema when her Malayalam debut Chakram with Mohanlal got shelved. “I was given the ‘bad luck’ tag,” she recalled in earlier interviews. By the late 2000s, Balan was Bollywood’s favourite fashion punchline, condemned for repeating sarees. A producer even rummaged through her kundli and scoffed, “Does she even look like a heroine?”. It is amazing that an actress, who would one day redefine the saree on-screen, was once told she didn’t look the part.

Twenty years ago, Parineeta introduced Balan with Saif Ali Khan as her co-star. As Lalita, she carried herself with a grace that was at once timeless and disarmingly modern. The film approaches a landmark 8K re-release in the Indian theatres on August 29. The film’s period setting established her within the old-world restraint—a role that could effortlessly have sentenced her to a career pivoted towards ornamental roles. In retrospect, Parineeta stands as the perfect contradiction: a traditional debut for an actress destined never to play traditional.

And then came her role as Silk in The Dirty Picture (2011), which proved to be an explosion at the box office. Despite several warnings that the film wouldn't be good for her image, Balan seized the opportunity to showcase her range and trust her creative intuition. Balan weaponised her body into cinema’s loudest provocation—unapologetic, sexual, commanding, tragic. The National Award was inevitable, but the bigger victory was more cultural. The film addressed patriarchy, misogyny and the corrupt systems that operate fame—audiences saw a rare glimpse of a female protagonist in the film industry who needed neither rescue nor redemption. 

Even her association with the idea of stardom is quite contradictory. She refuses to cultivate the distance that most leading ladies keep from the audience, often speaking with startling honesty about rejection, health, and loneliness. Balan has spoken candidly about her struggles with PCOD, fluctuating weight, and an industry that has long punished women for existing outside its rigid beauty codes. Her honesty was liberating, yet not without its own fault lines. At one point, she suggested that PCOD and hormonal imbalance might stem from a rejection of the feminine. That notion subconsciously places blame on women, rather than interrogating the structural, gender and medical inequities that make them feel “less of a woman,” or worse, propagating personal biases onto the very medical conditions people endure. In asserting that her body “rejected the feminine”, she brings out systemic pressures—even if the statement flattens the richness of what “femininity” can mean. Despite everything, Balan has always been a self-proclaimed “shameless optimist” even with moments of doubt. Yet, she is an extremely private person when it comes to her personal life, refusing to reduce herself to a social-media brand and being vulnerable on her own terms. 

Balan relishes the act of pushing boundaries, while counting herself fortunate to be working in an industry notoriously hostile to outsiders. Her choice of work is also shaped by the state of mind she occupies at that given moment—an alchemy of instinct and reflection that steers her toward particular roles. Her filmography feels like a mirror of her own evolving psyche. Beyond acting, Balan’s forte as a trained dancer sharpens her command over expressions and physicality. Those glimpses of rigour and mastery reveal themselves strikingly in films like Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007), in which her Monjulika remains etched in cultural memory. 

Perhaps that’s her sharpest weapon—a career rich in contradictions. It is tempting to deify her as Bollywood’s feminist saviour. But she rejects sanctification. “I don’t think I was a game-changer, I don’t carry that baggage,” she has stated in her media interactions. However, the woman who embodied empowering roles such as Kahaani’s vengeful heroine Vidya Bagchi, Sherni’s (2021) sensitively-measured Vidya Vincent and Tumhari Sulu’s (2017) irrepressible housewife Sulochana, also took a seat on the CBFC—an archaic body well-known for muddying prudery with morality. How does a rebellious actress also sign up to support an institution known for its vicious censorship of cinema? Her tenure at the CBFC is marked by the ongoing crisis in Bollywood, where films addressing caste, gender, and violence frequently face cuts, bans, and shifting release dates, revealing the gatekeeping pressures of the incumbent regime on popular cinema. In such circumstances, her role in the body is questionable precisely because her own career was built on defiance, on showing audiences that cinema need not bow to gatekeepers.

Despite the problematic implications of caste pride, she remains quite vocal about her ‘Tam-Brahm’ identity, openly discussing her Palakkad-Iyer roots and the cultural milieu that shaped her, including rigorous classical dance training. Such public articulations starkly underscore the kind of censorship that anti-caste films like Phule and Dhadak 2 have been subjected to by the board. 

Balan’s public persona unfolds like a ledger of paradoxes. Two decades in, draped in the measured elegance of her sarees, she remains Bollywood’s most audacious triumph. She refuses to apologise for her body or dissolve into ornamental roles; she gravitates toward female-led narratives, where women propel the story forward, staking claims in terrains long monopolised by men. Yet, her active role in the throttling of films led by the CBFC is appalling. Nevertheless, in an industry governed by myth, conformity, and market arithmetic, Balan demonstrates that stardom is not inherited; it is claimed, in all its fraught contradictions.