Neena Gupta is coming of age on the internet 

Neena Gupta, the critically acclaimed actor, is bad at pretending. 

Onscreen, she disappears into women of every ilk, but IRL, she’s finding it difficult to crack the role of a poised elder celebrity—sage with her words and emotions, beatific with self-possession from a lifetime’s experience in the public eye. And she has really tried. 

When we meet via a glitchy video call on a Tuesday morning in February, she tells me she’s been training herself to stop commenting on people’s weight-gain and under-eye bags because, as she recently discovered, they don’t like that. “Honesty is not a very good policy. I learnt this lesson very late in life,” she says. “Be honest with yourself; outside honesty, there is no need.” She forgot all about her new mantra again the other day, when she walked onto the set and immediately told the cameraman his lighting was terrible. “Who am I to say this? He won’t like this, na?” She waves about a little, “I still have to work on this.”

Gupta has a day off from shooting for the sequel to the 2022 crime thriller Vadh in Mumbai, and at 10am she’s already been up for three and a half hours. She’s got in a yoga session, a visit to her daughter Masaba and granddaughter Matara next door, finished breakfast, and will soon catch a flight to Goa to check on her home there, right after we’re done.

She is polite but not exactly her effusive Instagram self. “Physically, I’m a little down,” she explains. She’s sick of the dust everywhere in the city, and the night shoots… they have been gruelling. That tracks—right now Mumbai is a hellscape of construction, dug-up roads and blocked traffic, and its pervasive dusty-brownness infiltrates the mind. But I think it’s something more that is holding off Gupta. She’s a bit wary of me, or of anybody tasked with translating her to the world. How well-meaning can a person really be if they must tell your story in a way that benefits them? 

Honesty is not a very good policy. I learnt this lesson very late in life. Be honest with yourself; outside honesty, there is no need.”

An NSD graduate, Gupta’s early filmography is a laundry list of striking supporting roles in name-brand international and arthouse productions, Bollywood films and television (the Oscar-winning Gandhi, 1982; Shyam Benegal’s satire on prostitution, Mandi, 1983; the cult classic Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, 1983; one of the first soaps on Indian TV, Khandaan, 1985). She wrote, directed and starred in the adultery-themed TV drama Saans (1998), which ran for more than 150 episodes, and was a National Award winner when it was cool (Woh Chokri, 1994). Yet the thing this actor with an MPhil in Sanskrit was most known for, even just a few years ago, was having had Masaba out of wedlock with married West Indies cricketer Viv Richards. The press has not given Neena Gupta reason to bare her heart. 

“I was portrayed as something totally different earlier. What was put in newspapers and magazines—most of it, they told me, was ‘made on the table’. Mere baare mein aise stories likha jiske sir-pair bhi nahi (they wrote stories about me that had no basis),” she says.

This time around, though, Gupta has an ally who helps her control the message. She has Instagram. “It started with me wanting to tell people I’m not like what they write. I wanted to show who I am,” she says.

Most of the slicker squares on her feed are professional commitments. The unvarnished ones—with shakier camerawork, long pauses, and inconsistent lighting—are all her. In her trademark Hindi, and habitual no-makeup-no-really-no-makeup look, she spills on the things that niggle (being called ‘Hindi-medium’ as a pejorative) and amuse her (people constantly telling her to think positive). Plus, her cooking experiments, love for staying home, sweet, supportive collab posts with her daughter, and cheeky fit checks—with which she enjoys baiting trolls. “Log sochte hai ki iss umar mein apni taange dikhati hai. Jo likhte hai woh jalte hai ki unki aisi tange nahi hai. (People think, how can she show her legs at this age. Those who comment like that are jealous that they don’t have legs like mine.)”

Gupta says that despite her social media manager’s best efforts, her Instagram strategy is to post only when she has something to say. “Main isliye post nahi karti hoon ki mere followers bade (I don’t post to increase my followers). If from my heart I feel I must say this, only then.” Coming from any other celeb, this would be the cue to eye-roll. From Neena Gupta, it feels like fact. And her million-plus followers are proof she’s getting it right, even if inadvertently.

[Instagram] started with me wanting to tell people I’m not like what they write. I wanted to show who I am.”

However, she doesn’t have the same restraint when it comes to scrolling the app. After all, social media is a tool for self-determination, but also for stalking. Through it, she keeps updated on the news—which she relays to her husband continuously, industry gossip and “kisne kitne crore kamaye (who made how many crores)”. “Sometimes I get very angry with myself when faaltu mein scroll karti hoon,” she admits. “One has to keep a balance, but it’s very difficult.” Celebrities, they’re just like us! 

Instagram, but really her own desperation with the way of things, also gave her her second chance at the career she always dreamed of. A post she made in 2017 about needing work—celebrity kryptonite—went viral, and brought her a breakthrough vehicle, the award-winning commercial hit Badhaai Ho (2018). She has since racked up a second filmography full of spiky, soulful performances, many of them featuring her in leading roles. You won’t find her brimming with sentimentality about it, though. Finding a career in her sixties, to match the talent she’s always known she had, has been bittersweet. 

“I’m getting main roles... I’m not just somebody’s bhabhi or saas or mother who is only asking, khana khaya beta, shaadi kar lo beti,” she says. Gupta has got range, evident in her fleshed-out female characters: a late-in-life expecting mom (Badhaai Ho), an abstinent widow (The Last Color, 2019), a pious wife with an ethical dilemma when her husband commits murder (Vadh, 2022), a lonely Punjabi senior given to low-level burglary for kicks (Mast Mein Rehne Ka, 2023), a hallucinating ex-obstetric Malayali nurse (1000 Babies) and even a Gujarati grandmother whose co-star is a dog (Ba, scheduled for release next month). “I won’t say it’s a lot of work. Not like the range older men—Anupam [Kher], Boman [Irani]—get. But older woman ka humaare society mein, what is the role? Very little, no? Yet even within that limit, I’m getting good work,” she says. 

As good as a bald, green witch? Last November, she brought to life a Gen Z spoof of the popular 2D animated meme of Ganji Chudail, for YouTube, much to the delight of the internet. The establishment’s rules might be constraining her, but it appears the young ones are casting her imaginatively and reverentially—in a way that does justice to her talent and  legend. And she’s leaning all the way forward herself. “Ganji Chudail was so much fun,” she says. “But I also fell sick after that.” 

I’m getting main roles... I’m not just somebody’s bhabhi or saas or mother who is only asking, khana khaya beta, shaadi kar lo beti.”  

Ever allergic to bullshit, Gupta is clear that age is not just a number; she’s blunt about the physical challenges it brings. “I am thinking about my body all the time. With age and the kind of work I’m doing, I have to be very careful,” says the 65-year-old. Her yoga practice, which she’s kept since she was a teen and enrolled by her mother in classes in their Karol Bagh colony, is coming of use here. “This is my instrument aur instrument ko ghiss ke rakhna padta hai (you have to keep your instrument polished).” 

What she will accept, no caveats, is that the opportunity to hone her craft, and therefore her confidence, has helped a great deal with her low self-esteem. She has said in several interviews that it’s been the real root of her worst instincts and most painful disappointments, both professional and in love. “I have more confidence in myself now. Agar mujhe log appreciate nahi karte, toh mujhe itna farak ab nahi padta—pehle bahaut padta tha (if people don’t appreciate me now, it doesn’t affect me—it used to, earlier),” she says. “Sab kaam se hi hai. Kaam bina you are nothing (Everything is because of work, without work you are nothing).”

This is an unpopular opinion in today’s timeline. Right now we’re all about being greater than our productivity, working to live instead of the other way around. And I don’t think she really believes it, either. Work is meaningful, sure, but she is full of “shauk” too—she loves fashion and jewellery, binging Turkish shows, singing and cooking and breathing deeply in her mountain home in Mukteshwar—and Masaba and Matara have her whole heart. Maybe it’s love that has got her down. 

Gupta, who married New Delhi-based chartered accountant Vivek Mehra in 2008, doesn’t just allude to there being very little love in her life—for that is not her way—she states it outright when we come around to the topic. Forlornly: “At my age, there is no love left in most places…” Fervently: “You may be a hundred years old, but you want to be desired, you want affection….” Furiously: “I feel so much lack of respect around me, especially in relationships. I can buy you a bag and something you like, but I don’t respect your thoughts, your person, your feelings….” 

She has made no bones about the fact that she’s been very unlucky in love. In her autobiography Sach Kahun Toh (out in 2021 on Penguin Random House), she details how the men she gave her heart to were callous with it—an unnamed love-of-her-life jilted her right before they were to marry (“to date, I don’t know why”). Richards—her dalliance with whom would define her public image and career for decades to come—froze her out for five years after she cancelled a rendezvous with him to sort out Masaba’s school admission.

When I ask what her red flags in a man would be, she laughs. “Iss umar mein koi bulata nahi toh mat jao ka sawal hi nahi aata (At this age no one calls you, so there is no question of ‘don’t go there’).” 

Gupta is famous for “living life on her own terms”—usually, shorthand for women who have strayed from the heavily signposted path of social respectability yet somehow lived to tell the tale—and she wants everyone to know that the label is hot garbage. If anything, hers is a story of having had to surrender control and agency again and again at pivotal turns in her life. “Kya hai, this whole sentence is all wrong—no one I have seen has ‘lived life on their own terms’. God will not give you everything. Woh thoda sa rakh leta hai apne paas (he keeps a little for himself),” she says. “What I have done is accepted and tried to enjoy what I have. What else can you do?”

No one I have seen has ‘lived life on their own terms’. God will not give you everything. Woh thoda sa rakh leta hai apne paas (he keeps a little for himself)... What I have done is accepted and tried to enjoy what I have. What else can you do?”

Sometimes, you can rage-post. She did a few weeks ago—in the comments section of a memorial post to a former news chief, who, she alleged, stole Masaba’s birth certificate from the hospital and leaked it, thus revealing the identity of her father and setting off a media feeding frenzy that left Gupta at her most vulnerable. “So no RIP,” she said in the now-deleted comment. 

I wonder how Masaba feels about her famous mom’s social media blunders. “Ya, ya,” I have deleted lots of things,” she laughs when I ask her about being trigger-happy on Instagram. “Masaba calls me—‘Mom, what’s wrong with you!’ Once I put up a screenshot of a picture I wanted to post, aur uske neeche woh saare aaye huey they (below it, all my tabs were visible). So I need to be careful.” One lesson I have learnt: never post when you’re angry.” She’s probably going to do it 11 more times.

Our time is up, but before we go I ask if she’s seen the ‘I met my younger self for coffee’ meme that’s been going around, posted earnestly by so many people born after 2000. Would she like to take a stab at it? “Never. I would never want to meet my younger self because she was so stupid. I don’t want to go there only.”

We’re all trying to be better than we are. Best selves, best lives, paper straws, protein goals and supporting local businesses no matter how terrible they are. As a person existing in this timeline, Gupta is not immune to it (refer all the above lessons she’s trying to learn), but she doesn’t rate relentlessly improving yourself as a project in and of itself. “Yeh sab cheezon ki zaroorat nahi hoti—[self-improvement] automatically starts happening when you become confident.” 

…and that puts you at peace, I say, like a well-programmed Instagram robot. “Peace toh nahi ho sakta. The feeling comes—I wish I was younger, I still think I’m better than her and her… aana bhi chahiye (it should come even),” she says. “Aata hai par jata hai (It comes but it goes).” She’ll keep attempting to age gracefully, but in the meantime Neena Gupta is ageing truthfully. And there is power in that.

Editorial Direction: Megha Mahindru, Ridhima Sapre. Photography: Sarang Gupta. Styling: Naheed Driver. Visual and Creative Direction: Jay Modi. Art and Creative Direction: Harry Iyer. Style Lead: Naheed Driver. Hair and Make-Up Artist: Mitesh Rajani. Hair and Make-Up Assistants: Rishita Hindocha. Production: By The Gram