A Bengalurean extrabraganza

Bengaluru girl Madhuri Braganza, recently seen with Mohanlal, speaks about her true calling and how she can take a punch

Audiences in Karnataka do not know her yet, but Madhuri Braganza, who kick-started her career in Malayalam, was happiest shooting Vikram Yoganand’s latest film, ‘Kushka’. She got to come back to her Bengaluru home every day and tell her parents what had happened on set.

Very much a Bengalurean, Madhuri’s first Kannada film was set to release this Friday. However, it had to be postponed by a week because of the Coronavirus scare.

But the actress is excited about her debut in the Kannada industry. Her work in Malayalam was rewarding; in one film, she played the wife of Mohanlal, one of the industry’s two biggest names.

“Lal sir taught me a lot about my posture and my anthropometry, and about which angles look better with which outfit. I think over the years, he has learnt how his body looks on camera. That was my biggest takeaway from acting with him in ‘Ittimani: Made in China’,” Madhuri says.

Her tryst with the Malayalam film industry happened right when she was doing her architecture course at the Ramaiah Institute of Technology in the city. She was invited as an extra (a “prop” according to her) on a Titan ad with Nitya Menen and Fahad Fazil, where she got to chat with both of them but was edited out of the final cut. The ad still proved fortuitous because her portfolio was passed from one agency to another, and she was soon in demand.

Her biggest hit to date is the 2018 film ‘Joseph’, where she played a love interest, whose death triggers the tragic decline of an astute cop.

After these few years in the Malayalam industry, Madhuri likes to say that she has mastered 70 per cent of the language. She showed off a couple of phrases, adding, “Anyhow, I know how to say ‘vishakunnu’ (I am hungry), which is ultimately what really matters.”

Most fluent in English, Madhuri is a jack of the big Southern languages. “I have too many people around me who speak Tamil, so I know it. I also know Kannada because when I was doing the architecture course, I had to speak to construction workers. Malayalam is a lot like Tamil, but it’s a lot harder. If you speak Malayalam, you can speak anything.”

And while the language barriers mean that she is an alien to dubbing, she proudly declares that that didn’t stop her from singing a Malayalam song in the upcoming film ‘Al Mallu’.

But then, she was a singer much before she was an actor. “I started singing in the church choir. I learnt all my chords there, and I am thankful for that. My father is a very religious person.”

Religion and music are the first things a first-time visitor notices at her home, decorated with Renaissance paintings and pictures of scenes from the Bible, interspersed with photos of The Beatles.

The other thing that strikes you is how many teenage boys there are in Braganza manor. Over the course of this interview, Madhuri introduced each one present there to this writer as her brother. By the third or fourth boy, I began to think she was using the word ‘brother’ quite loosely, but that was not it.

“We are a really big family. I have five brothers,” she said. “Own brothers,” she added.

“One great thing about having five brothers is that I can take a punch. The first 15 years of my life, I wanted a sister. But my mom kept having sons, so then I was like, ‘I am going to give up, I don’t think there are going to be any girls coming my way’,” she said.

“And my whole family sings. My mother wanted my brothers and me to be called The Braganza 6, like the The Jackson 5.”

Madhuri, however, says her true calling is the special education of differently-abled children, a passion that began in church and in which she earned a Masters degree from a British university.

“When I was really young, I saw this boy with Down Syndrome in church. I also saw a girl with some kind of mental disability. I had a magnetic attraction to them. And religion taught me to be inclusive,” she says.

Although young, well-meaning and barely a few films old, Madhuri has had her share of controversies. After the release of ‘Joseph’, in which she wore only sarees, she posted a picture in a bikini taken on a beach in Thailand during her vacation. Someone posted an angry comment under the photo asking her who had taught her that showing skin is beauty.
I asked her if it was a man or a woman. “A guy. Obviously,” Madhuri replied.

“Even my dad doesn’t talk to me that way. I sent him a message saying, ‘Thank you so much for your opinion. I will expose whatever I want’. If a man can pee in public, a woman is at least entitled to wear what she wants.”

But the issue didn’t stop there. Media outlets kept putting up the picture under sly headlines that called her “bold”. “They made it look like news just because they wanted views,” Madhuri says.

Worried, she called other actresses to find out if this was normal and they told her: “It’s going to get so much worse”.

As of now, Madhuri is just looking forward to her new releases.

Apart from ‘Kushka’, she has a Tamil film coming up. She is also in the talks for the Malayalam adaptation of the Hindi thriller ‘Badla’, where, if all goes as per plan, she will essay the role played by Tapsee Pannu. For the moment, her only concern seems to be whether Kannada moviegoers can pronounce her last name; Braganza can be a mouthful for some.