Happy Birthday Anushka Sharma: Actor And Producer Pushing For Nuanced Stories

Happy Birthday Anushka Sharma: As Anushka Sharma celebrates her birthday today, we acknowledge her prowess as a producer in a male-dominated industry with her production house Clean Slate Films. From women-centric to genre-defining, Sharma has greenlit many out of the box projects as a producer.

Actor Anushka Sharma made her debut in Bollywood with her movie Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi starring opposite Shah Rukh Khan. Anushka was also seen opposite Ranveer Singh and Aamir Khan in their movies and gradually became a popular face in mainstream cinema.

Sharma is known for her versatile roles and a few years ago she embarked on the journey to be a producer, initiating her production house Clean Slate Films along with her brother Karnesh Sharma and has been pushing several boundaries as a producer.

Anushka Sharma's Production House

Anushka ventured into the production line with her movie NH10 which revolved around a female character addressing the social issue of honour killing. The film made an attempt to change the way women have been portrayed in commercial movies being subjected to stereotypical traits and acting as a catalyst to a male hero's narrative with no individual role of her own. Anushka established this notion with her very first film NH10 by centring the plot entirely on a woman's narrative.

With her production house, Anushka seems to have been making conscious efforts to bring forward the stories of women who are determined and underrepresented and explore ideas that are seldom addressed in mainstream Bollywood.  Clean Slate Films produced three more films with Anushka in the lead role, Phillauri, Pari, and Bulbul along with web series Paatal Lok. 

Phillauri and Pari have a supernatural backdrop to them and explores the desires of a woman to be free, even though the woman belongs to a different generation but the aspiration to independence exists within all. The film  Pari tried to explore the angle of good versus evil and someone who is demonized can have human-like qualities. Bulbbul was an experiment to provide insight on witch folklore and how the association of transgressive women to witchcraft is a patriarchal notion.

The web series Paatal Lok takes a detour and presents a dark thriller that focussed on socio-economic evil, discrimination against transgender, and women's safety.

Anushka is one of the youngest producers in a male-dominated industry,  the projects produced by her are proof that she does maintain her continuous efforts to bring nuanced content to the audience.

Views expressed are the author's own