Actor Deepti Naval traces her life beyond the movies in her new memoir

Deepti Naval is a multi-faceted personality — an actor, director, writer, painter and photographer. She has won critical acclaim for her portrayal of “sensitive and close-to-life characters” that delved into the changing roles of women in India.

Though Naval, 70, was born in Amritsar, Punjab, Northern India, she immigrated to the US in 1971, where she was educated at the City University of New York and received her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at Hunter College in Manhattan. She is the first American-Indian woman to join the Hindi film industry and made her debut in 1980 with Ek Baar Phir, for which she won her first Best Actor award, and has since appeared in over 90 films, including Chashme Buddoor, Katha, Rang Birangi, Saath Saath, Mirch Masala, Kamla, Andhi Gali, Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho!, and Firaaq.

wknd. spoke with Naval about A Country Called Childhood: A Memoir, which was published recently by Aleph Book Company.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

Would you agree that A Country Called Childhood: A Memoir is cinematic in its scope?

Yes. The book, my writing style, is visual, as you may have seen in my collection of short stories, The Mad Tibetan: Stories from Then and Now. And that’s the way I write. My book is, indeed, cinematic.

Why was your city of birth, Amritsar, called Ambershire in your formative years?

No, it wasn’t called Ambershire. We called it in jest. I went to Sacred Heart Convent in Amritsar, where we were taught by European nuns, and they were very strict. We were not allowed to speak in Punjabi or Hindi in school. So, we would jabber away in Punjabi. But once the nuns would be passing by, we’d quickly convert our Ambershir to Ambershire. So, it was like a joke. It was like taking a dig at this Anglicised version of Amritsar, which in Punjabi is called Ambershir. So, we made up its name in English and called it Ambershire.

Why is Burma or modern-day Myanmar central to your childhood? How is it connected to your family?

Burma is where my mother, Himadri Naval, or Winnie, was born and brought up. She studied there. They were a Punjabi family, and she went to the Jesus and Mary convent over there. She studied with British nuns as well and came to India in 1940. And right after that, during World War II, when the Japanese invaded Burma, that’s when all the Indian families, around half a million, fled. They crossed over to India by walking over undivided Assam, which included Manipur and Nagaland. Some people got away by steamer, and those who had money flew to India from Rangoon. But since my mother’s family were not so affluent and there were far too many members in her family, they couldn’t afford to come by flight. They came by steamer, even though the vessels had started being torpedoed in the Bay of Bengal by the Japanese. There was no choice left for Indians but to start walking over the Assam hills and reach India during those traumatic times. Burma features in my book a lot. It is important because as a child my mother always told me stories about her growing up years. My other friends knew the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata and they heard all these stories from their parents and grandparents. But I didn’t know anything about Ramayana or Mahabharata. My mythology was stories from Burma as told to me by my mother. That was the only mythology I knew. I was fed on those stories, and they were very dear to my heart. She would repeat those stories, and each time I would feel that I’m as if I’m listening to them for the first time. Burma is important because of my maternal grandmother (nani), who had insisted on carrying her gramophone with her from Mandalay to Amritsar. She said, ‘I can leave everything else behind, but I can’t leave my gramophone and my 100 records’. So, I wrote a short story about my nani, and how she carried that gramophone with her while walking from Burma to India. It’s an essay that I wrote at my university in New York, which is called Little Woman and the Gramophone. You can read the rest in my book.

Recount your trip to junta-ruled Myanmar in 2001 with your mother, Winnie.