From ‘Slumdog’ to shifting screens
Freida Pinto has been watching Indian screens change since her 2008 debut in Slumdog Millionaire. Nearly two decades later, at the launch of the 2027 Pirelli Calendar, she put a name to the shift: women on screen have moved from types to people.
Speaking to PTI at the launch, where she is one of nine Indian women photographed for the annual, Pinto said the change she values most is representation. Women are no longer confined to roles that are “duty-bound or puritanical,” she said, but can now be “the ones with their complexities and not perfect.”
“I’m more interested in the things that are not perfect. The things that are perfect are boring and are not relatable,” she added.
That distinction matters for an audience that keeps a memory of Hindi cinema as much as it follows its news. For decades, the industrial formula rewarded the sacrificing mother, the patient wife, the spotless heroine. Complexity was a risk. What Pinto is describing is a structural shift, not just a change of taste.
The 2027 Pirelli Calendar
The calendar, photographed between May and September, arrives as a two-pocket box set with 36 photographs: 18 by Sølve Sundsbø and 18 from a project by Raghu and Avani Rai. Sundsbø shot Pinto in a dark pink dress beneath a bougainvillea heavy with flowers.
Other Indian women in the calendar include:
- Aditi Rao Hydari
- Anoushka Shankar
- Rupi Kaur
- Lakshmi Menon
- Padma Lakshmi
Pinto said Sundsbø did not arrive with a fixed idea of what India or its women should look like. “He shot the way we felt comfortable in,” she said. “There was no real put-us-in-a-box kind of a situation that ever happened. It was very fluid and flowy.”
A creative explosion, not a box
Best known for Hollywood films such as Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Immortals and Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Pinto framed this as a generational moment. Young people in India are “so forthcoming with ideas and the desire for change,” she said.
“Ideas lead to a lot of creativity. And I hope we see a lot more of that. I hope it doesn’t get stunted. I hope it doesn’t get shunned or suppressed. I hope we just see it explode,” she said.
What’s next for Pinto
Pinto will next appear in Unaccustomed Earth, an eight-episode series based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2008 short-story collection, co-starring Siddharth. It streams on Netflix from December 17.
For Hindi cinema, the takeaway is simple. The benchmark for a heroine is no longer flawlessness; it is texture. That is the shift Pinto is naming, and it is worth recording.
Source: The Times of India
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