Mandakini

She was born Yasmeen Joseph in Meerut, the daughter of a British father and a Himachali mother — an ordinary girl who, by every account, never dreamed of the movies. That she became a star at all was the decision of one man: Raj Kapoor, the greatest showman Indian cinema has known.

Reportedly just sixteen when Kapoor spotted her, she was handed something almost no newcomer ever gets — the lead in a prestige production by the RK banner itself. Kapoor gave her a new name for the screen, Mandakini, after one of the celestial names for the river Ganga. It was a name chosen for a role, and the role would define, and eventually consume, everything that followed.

Ram Teri Ganga Maili, released in August 1985, was Raj Kapoor's last directorial film and an enormous gamble. Mandakini played Ganga, a pure-hearted hill girl whose journey down from the mountains to the plains becomes an allegory for how India dirties everything it touches. Opposite her was Kapoor's own son, Rajiv Kapoor.

The film was the highest-grossing Indian release of the year and remains classified as an all-time blockbuster. But it is remembered as much for its controversy as its box office. Two sequences — a bathing scene in a translucent saree and a scene of Ganga breastfeeding her infant — were considered extraordinarily bold for their time and set off a storm of debate about censorship and 'obscenity' in Hindi film.

For Mandakini, the effect was instant and total. Overnight she was one of the most recognised faces in the country, and the performance earned her a Filmfare Best Actress nomination. She had arrived at the very top — with almost no ladder underneath her.

The late 1980s were her busiest years. She worked steadily in commercial Hindi cinema — the musical hit Dance Dance (1987) with Mithun Chakraborty, the action drama Commando (1988), and a role in N. Chandra's blockbuster Tezaab (1988), among others.

But she never found another part that reframed her the way Ganga had. The industry had met her as a sensation rather than as an actress it had watched grow, and the roles that came tended to trade on the image the debut had created rather than build past it.

In 1994, photographs surfaced of Mandakini watching a cricket match in Sharjah seated near Dawood Ibrahim — by then the most wanted man in India, named as the mastermind of the 1993 Bombay serial blasts that had killed hundreds the year before. The images went everywhere.

Rumours followed immediately, linking the actress romantically to the fugitive don. Mandakini has consistently and forcefully denied any relationship, and she was never charged with any wrongdoing — in time she was given a clean chit. But the association, true or not, was radioactive. In a climate still raw from the blasts, producers backed away, and the offers dried up.

It is one of the starkest what-happened-to-her stories in Hindi cinema: a career that survived every controversy a bold debut could throw at it, undone in the end not by anything she did on screen, but by a single frame of film taken in the stands of a cricket ground.

In 1990, before the scandal, she had married Dr. Kagyur T. Rinpoche Thakur, a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan medicine. As the film work fell away, that quieter world became her whole life. Her final release, Zordaar, came in 1996, and after it she simply stopped.

The reinvention was near-total. Mandakini became a teacher of Tibetan yoga, her husband ran a Tibetan herbal medicine centre, and the couple raised two children away from the cameras. The boldest star of her moment chose, in the end, one of Bollywood's most complete disappearances — trading the loudest fame of the 1980s for a life of stillness few of her old audience would recognise.