Vidya Balan was at her candid best in a recent interview with Times of India. A few excerpts here:
On Legalising Prostitution :
The debate of legalization of prostitution has been going on for centuries. Having said that, none of those prostitutes are doing it out of choice. They are doing it out of lack of choice. Yes it is transactional, but I don’t think it is a fair deal. What comes to them is very, very miniscule. So, in that sense it is exploitative, but it is not either or. I don’t think one is a lesser evil than the other. It (prostitution) is more open so there is no pretense about it.
Finally, it is all about appropriating someone else’s space. Whether war or rape, it is all about appropriating another person’s space. The physical, bodily space that you occupy is your space. And even that gets invaded, someone’s mindspace.
On empowerment :
We can’t decide for ourselves what is empowerment. Empowerment is also relative. Coming from the background that I do, where I was brought up to believe that I am an individual first and nothing can hold me back if I wanted to do something, I look at things very differently from a girl who has had to stand up every time an elderly male in the family came in or who was told only your brother can go to school, you can’t or when she was made to eat after all the male members were finished, even if she was dying of hunger. So I can’t decide that she has to react the same way that I do.
On Begum Jaan and playing a ‘feminist brothel manager’ :
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Actually, someone who runs a brothel could very well be a feminist. We see the woman in the terms of a body, probably not even so much as a prostitute, but as the madame of a brothel, you understand that it is beyond the body. So you are not just defining the person in terms of the body anymore. It’s not just merely exploitative.
It’s set during the British partition. The movie juxtaposes the partition of the mind vs partition of the body. The head of the brothel is a very strong woman. She makes her own decisions and she can be anything she wants to.She says that my body is my space, you don’t have a right over it. Similarly, my house is my space, and you can’t run a line through it. So there are lots of semi-political undercurrents and gender politics.