Menuka Pradhan

Confounding Expectations

Her mother tongue is Manipuri. Her father was in the Indian Army's Manipur Rifles, and while stationed in Manipur, he met and married a local woman and started a family. She was born in Manipur, and spent her childhood there, before returning to her father's village in Nawalparasi of the Nepali Madhesh. She learned to speak Nepali, and bloomed into her extrovert self. Perhaps the need to express herself to her peers in an entirely new language forced her into a habit of performance, of representing and reserving different aspects of herself. When she was in the 7th grade, a local television channel cast her in a television series. After all, she was a well known face: even as a child she had enjoyed performing at cultural shows, dancing with precocious talent. Like most people who go on to become performers, she had been performing at home - her parents loved Bollywood, and nearly everyday the family sat down to watch the latest Bollywood movie. After finishing her high school education, everything pointed towards Kathmandu: there was the bigger stage, there was the seat of glamour and the possibility of stardom. The television screen is too small for a grand ambition; and to be confined to a local television channel in Chitwan was unacceptable to her. Eight movies later, we know her as Menuka Pradhan. And, today her star is rising bright. Today, there is no looking back: the world of Nepali cinema is for her to conquer.

I had forgotten that I had seen her first in a thriller called Ek Din Ek Raat, directed by Dev Kumar Shrestha. Like most movies in that genre, it assembles a dysfunctional group of friends who then are murdered, one by one. Her latest outing on the silver screen, Zhigrana, directed by Pasang Lama, enjoyed a successful release recently, and also featured Pradhan as a member of a group of friends who go on a journey into unknown territory, and where the attractive young people are killed, one by one. Vigilante, directed by Dipendra K. Khanal, also had her run terrified in full 3D, before being killed off. Perhaps Menuka Pradhan  gets cast in such soles because she possesses the perfect blend of histrionics and vulnerability - the cockiness that makes a character perform the sort of indiscretion that upsets the balance in an unknown place and invites reprisal, and the vulnerability and beauty that makes the audience root for the character, for them to escape their forewarned grisly fate at the last minute. Or, perhaps she is just a good performer, with the grace and subtlety required to play a diverse range of emotions and characters.

Because, she has also shown us another side of her capabilities as an actor. In director Prachanda Man Shrestha's Visa Girl,

a work admired by industry insiders for its balanced handling of the myriad characters and for a lush visual aesthetic, Pradhan plays an inner-city Newar girl, secretly in love with the boy next door. He dabbles at being a musician; she is a talented songwriter. Pradhan plays this character with the restraint and charm of a girl on the cusp of realizing her womanhood; of insisting to be seen and noticed by the boy she loves and whom she waits patiently for as he grows out of his extended adolescence into becoming a man. There is a moment in the movie when, out of frustration, Pradhan's character draws a veil over her face, refusing to let her paramour see her face full of frustration. Perhaps another moment of perfect vulnerability and perfect strength hasn't been created in Nepali cinema, with just that simple gesture.

A director essentially shapes an actor's performance on the screen. The actor must meet and surpass the director's vision for the character, in service of the wider narrative. "The way he explained small details about the character was the best thing about working with Prachanda," Pradhan says. "Whatever performance you can see on the screen in Visa Girl owes to him." It is sweet of her to credit her director fully with her breakthrough role, but those who saw Visa Girl in the theater did take immediate notice of her potential. This was followed by a series of other roles that didn't require her to be killed - the tomboy in director Kumar Bhattarai's Utsav, a blink-and-miss appearance in Subarna Thapa's same-sex love story Sungava, and now, the most widely anticipated movie in recent Nepali cinema history - as a village belle in Pranab Joshi's already a viral hit movie, Resham Fililli.

There is a division of sorts in our industry between what is deemed the rural world and the urban - in terms of production, and in term of consumption. Since director Alok Nembang's Sano Sansar, movies have either been produced with a decidedly urban aesthetic, geared towards the 16 to 24 year old market of young men and women, or they have been decidedly of the rural stamp. This division isn't present just between the aesthetics for the movies - this division also exists among the pool of actors available to populate either kind of movies. Karma and Vinay Shrestha, who started with Sano Sansaar, perhaps used to most vividly typify the urban. Menuka Pradhan has been in at least two movies with Vinay Shrestha and Karma by now, and in three with Shrestha alone. Yet, she has also acted in the decidedly art-house Sungava, and will soon be seen in Rato Ghar, a movie by the decidedly mainstream writer-director Suraj Subba Nyalbo. In this way, like Reecha Sharma before her, Pradhan is bridging the gap between the extremities of the industry, while also creating her own presence.

Menuka Pradhan's journey to this space wasn't straightforward. She did arrive in Kathmandu nearly like a cliché - she moved from her hometown Nawalparasi to pursue a career in acting, with no more than a few contacts in the acting circles. Right away, she acted in a music video for an Anju Panta song. But, after that, despite showing up at numerous auditions, she wasn't being cast in anything worthwhile. While auditioning for the movie Baghchal, the director Jagadish Thapa asked Pradhan had come to Kathmandu to become a heroine - Heroni banna aayeko?  No, Pradhan replied - I have come to become an actor. This tenacity and self-confidence endeared her to people in the industry. While auditioning for Ek Din Ek Raat, her co-star and also the casting director for the movie, Anup Baral, encouraged her to train for the theater.

Pradhan went on to act in a number of stage productions after joining the Actors' Studio in 2011. She appeared in Studio 7's production of Conference of Gods; Angels in America directed by Deborah Merula; the Actors' Studio production of Kafka, presented at Moksh; and as Rhea, the protagonist in A View from the Bridge; in Chekhov's Seagulls. The knowledge she gained from those busy years on the stage has helped her a lot now - to every character she brings the same meticulous preparation and imagination that made her time on the state so memorable. 

Menuka Pradhan then began her stint in the theater, staying away from the movies for a good few years. She trained at Baral's Actors' Studio, and appeared in many productions. She played a village dog in the Actors' Studio production of the poet and playwright Sarubhakta's Malami. Pradhan still thinks of this as her fondest role on the stage. As an actor learns to embody a character, to interpret the world through the movement of the body alone, the experience can be very liberating for the actor. Pradhan described the experience just so - that, to play the village dog lolling about while catastrophic events unfold int he background, was very liberating. This ability to fully commit to the character must have come handy for Pradhan when she played a pretty young thing unable to keep her hands off her boyfriend, in Zhingrana. In the uncensored version was perhaps the most frenetic sex scene. Was it difficult to shoot that?

    'No,' says Pradhan. Nikun Shrestha, who shares the scene with her, was apparently nervous before the shot. But, Pradhan asked that he adopt a 'take no prisoner' approach to the scene. Director Pasang Sherpa guided the duo through, but it was really the presence of the director of photography Shailendra Karki that assured Pradhan that all would be well. Remember the time when Nepali cinema had come under the thrall of the brief success of Chapali Height, and a slew of movies like ATM were set to assault us with their tacky aesthetics? Pradhan was worried that without the careful and graceful work of a director of photography like Karki, the work would come out vulgar. But she was happy with how the scene came out.

'I need to know all the details about the character and her back story. It helps me, but it can be irritating to others,' Pradhan says. She repeatedly quizzed Lama, the director of Zhigrana, about her character, her motivations, the choices she makes at any given time. At times, the director and others in the production team were annoyed at her insistence, but it helped her, it helped the movie. That is the sort of person Pradhan comes across as - exhaustively inquisitive, explosively full of energy, insisting upon a disarming sincerity towards her work. When she committed to the stage, she did it with a single-minded devotion, playing in as many stage productions as she could get her hands on, honing her craft so late in her performing career - but so early in her life. Everybody speaks well of her, everybody appreciates her work. That is no mean achievement in an industry where nobody is a permanent friend or a permanent foe.

Her affability has created some interesting opportunities for her. After he finished shooting Talakjung vs Tulke, director Nischal Basnet wanted to inject additional magic into his movie, repeating a formula that had worked well for him in Loot - an item song with a pretty ditty and a beautiful woman. Menuka Pradhan had hesitation first: she wasn't sure if she had it in her to do an item dance. But she auditioned anyway, dancing to a song from the movie Dhoom 3. When Basnet assured her that the song would be a tribute to the history of Nepali cinema, full of praise for the giants who have passed before. The song became a viral hit, and Pradhan danced beautifully in it.   

Menuka Pradhan has high hopes from Resham Fililli - produced by a long time co-actor Vinay Shrestha, and written and directed by the talented Pranab Joshi, who has proved himelf over and over again in the music video scene. Pradhan plays Sunita, a peripheral character, if the narrative thrust of the movie revolves around Shrestha and Kameshwor Chaurasiya. But, the trend will change, she says. 'Earlier, only men had access to the wider world, to the experiences that come out of living in the world outside the home. But now more and more women are seeing the world outside their homes. They have more and more interesting experiences - and stories need interesting characters with interesting experiences,' she says. As more young women have a wider range of worldly experiences, more such voices will find a place in literature and in cinema. Of course, until then, young women will have to keep confounding the expectations of the men who form the establishment everywhere - including the world of Nepali cinema.

Menuka Pradhan, whose maternal grandfather was a Hindu priest, and whose mother eloped to marry a Nepali Newar in the Indian Army, was born in her great aunt's home. In the days after her birth, the infant threw her feet and arms around a lot, prompting her great aunt to remark that she would grow up to become a dancer. Thence the name - Menuka, a celestial nymph, whose beauty would derail many a great fate across many a myth from South Asia of the Puranic times. It is no surprise then that the slow gyration of destiny has brought Menuka Pradhan to our hearts, to remain there and intrigue us with her talented performances. This is but the beginning of a shining and accomplished career, one hopes.