Rasika Dugal on perception, patriarchy, and the roles women are finally claiming

When you’re not personally acquainted with a celebrity, you try to assemble a perception of them from fragments. Rasika Dugal, to me, was that actor—gentle, soft-spoken, and perhaps restrained—until I watched her as Beena Tripathi in Mirzapur (2018): fierce, bold, calculating, and unpredictable. What became clear wasn’t that I had misread her, but that there was much more to her than I had perceived. “It is a joy to play characters whose minds you don’t understand at the first glance—who feel, on the first reading, like this is not me. That’s where an actor’s work begins,” shares Dugal, giving all my perceptions a whole new dimension right at the beginning of our chat.

From her moral grit in Delhi Crime (2019), the smouldering interiority of Beena Tripathi in Mirzapur, to the emotional complexity of Out of Love (2019)—it isn’t just her love, but sheer admiration for cinema that gives her this appetite for the unfamiliar, and she is far from being done yet. Being selective is her way of making space for more women-led stories in the future, which she believes is a work in progress. “I have mixed feelings about this. It is very encouraging that stellar roles are being written for middle-aged women. The cherry on the cake is that women in these lead parts don’t resemble men—there is an attempt to explore femininity and to understand the inner life of a woman, not just in relationship to a man or as a mother,” she adds. And yet, we work and operate in a patriarchal world, she instantly reminds us. “Yes, a sexist joke is no longer a laugh-out-loud joke (and thank God for that), but people still have trouble accepting women in authority. So the victories can feel like aberrations and not the norm,” reflects Dugal.

Right before the conversation could turn intense, she laughs it off by referencing a “superbly hilarious” interview of Meryl Streep, making a similar argument, stating, “women still speak men, but men don’t speak women”—something that seconds the actor’s thoughts.

Defying the conventional mould of a Bollywood actor, the 41-year-old today is quite an icon of authenticity. She cushions herself from the noise simply by resisting the pressure to conform to the unspoken shelf life and societal expectations attached to actresses in mainstream cinema. “I guess I defy some and I accept some,” she admits. “In today’s very visual world, everyone—whether in the public eye or not—is unfortunately burdened by how they ‘should’ look. And for older women, where everything is ‘age-defying’, I really want someone to come up with a product that is ‘age-accepting’. Wouldn’t it be fun to have an age-accepting night cream, for a change?” she asks with a laugh.

Compelled by her clarity, I couldn’t help but ask her if she could dismantle one invisible rule about how women are written on screen. Dugal gave me not one, but several. “That they are morally upright, that they are the custodians of compassion, and that motherhood means everything to them. That being caregivers comes naturally to them.” There is something radical in how calmly she puts it. “I think women are often burdened by all of this because these are roles we have always expected them to play and wanted them to be flagbearers of. A patriarchal society finds it comfortable to see women like this. How often do you see a reluctant mother on screen?” she asks. “This is something that men don’t want to know about women, and women can’t accept about themselves without shame,” she asserts.

Once again, we circle back to perceptions, and how easily they harden into expectation. Dugal firmly denies losing herself in trying to build one. “Your natural way of being will lend itself to a certain kind of perception about you—which will sometimes work in your favour and sometimes not. My job probably is to learn to accept that it’s not in my control,” she shares.

Acceptance and expectations also often seep into the way one thinks about ambition. When asked what her generation needs to unlearn, especially in relation to work and success, the actor shares: “The idea that rest and recovery is a sign of laziness. I often struggle with taking time off. It’s a tough one to crack, especially for freelancers.”

It is her disarming honesty, wit, and her advice to her younger self—“I would have told myself to have more fun than I did”—that offered me a glimpse of a grounded yet quietly resolute persona, one that added far more nuance to the adjectives I had once assigned to her. And yes, I did end up watching that Meryl Streep video after our chat. As it turns out, we may still be “speaking men,” but with conversations like these, we are inching closer to a shift.

Photographer: Abhishek Gaikwad; Hair And Make-Up: Pooja Chaurasia
Photographer: Nirvair Singh Rai; Hair Artist: Pinky Kashid; Make-Up Artist: Gargi Karmakar; Assistant Stylists: Michelle Lobo & Ashi Singh

This article first appeared in the March 2026 issue of Harper's Bazaar India 

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