The Multiverse Of Ananya Panday

AT THE TURN OF 2019, the year in which Ananya Panday made a near loathsome debut with Student of the Year 2 her appearance on an actor’s roundtable instead, caught the climate of attention. In that catastrophic interview, next to her peers mind you, Panday claimed her career had already surpassed a certain pinnacle by appearing on Koffee with Karan. To which the outsider, the combative Sidhant Chaturvedi replied by saying the words that’d attach themselves to the actress like a rash – “Jahaan humare khwaab khatam hote hain wahaan se inki struggle shuru hoti hai.” In retrospect, Panday didn’t say anything that someone of her privilege wouldn’t. But it incriminated her as the emblem of all that’s wrong with the current generation; entitled and disengaged from reality in a manner synonymous with apathy. That is until Panday took the ‘nepo baby’ syndrome, the veneer of privilege and turned it into a self-examination of the generation she had been thrust into identifying with.

Panday made her first quantum leap with the unglamorous portrayal of a guileless young sister who becomes the victim of an illicit love affair in Gehraiyaan. She wasn’t the leading lady, but she may have shone the brightest in a film with staggering tonal contradictions. Amidst the confusion, she emerged as the surest thing about the project. Gehraiyaan landed on streaming because of a pandemic-choked pipeline. For good reason, it felt like dare I say the words, a ‘streaming film’. Set amidst the urban, woke milieu of upwardly mobile Mumbai it hinted at Panday’s sweet spot – youthful, raw, broody and existential. The milieu that her mainstream strugglers Liger and Dream Girl 2 struggled to provide.

In Netflix’s Kho Gaye Hum Kahan (2023), possibly Hindi cinema’s first thorough analysis of the Instagram generation Panday plays a career-focussed ‘genZer’ who can’t help but use the sieve of social media to filter her relationship. She stalks her boyfriend, traces his online footprint and doesn’t rest unless she has found him, exactly where she suspects him to be. It’s like watching the trust in a relationship unravel, one nervy, restless Instagram scroll at a time. Panday is pitch-perfect as the chirpy but also morally rooted axis of the three friends navigating the choppy waters of modern dating and identity. Ironically, her wit and moral clarity suffer in the face of social media projection. On one Tinder date, she dismisses a bratty investment banker while uploading a sly picture of his hand with the caption ‘Date Night’. It’s a snapshot, literally and metaphorically, of the generation that we see everywhere but struggle to make sense of.

In 2024 Panday doubled down on the voice she was once accused of being; of a generation so disconnected from the world, the mere act of crossing a vocational border, amounts to enlightenment. As Bae, in Amazon Prime’s Call Me Bae, for example, Panday offers an upgrade of the riotous Pooh from Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Ghum. As the dim-witted but self-conscious woman who accidentally arrives at the definition of womanhood and feminism. In the process, Panday takes on casual sexism, social judgement, toxic bosses and the one line that continues to divide offices across the country – loyalty to your work. That last one is a tantalising battle of boundaries with an equally terrific Vir Das. Call Me Bae is a breezy survey of what the collision of the upper one percent with the rest of the world looks like, through the eyes of its most vocal and maybe rogue version yet.

To that entertaining, if not exactly enchanting study of benevolent privilege, Panday added the sizeable sample of the Vikramaditya Motwane-directed CTRL. In the screen-life film, she plays Nella, the beating pulse of a world enacted through AI agents, surveillance devices, prompts and notifications. Its largely dry, techno-charged canvas is brought to life by the fragile-but-ultimately-stubborn inner child of a woman who has lived her life on the screen. Grown up in the public eye, so to speak. This infatuation with the mobile screen, its powers of magnification began in 2023 and culminated in the spiral of an intriguing dystopian odyssey that climaxes with the surrender. “Take control of my life and happiness”, Nella tells her AI assistant. From that casual barb on an acting roundtable to unpeeling the crux of its pointed tip, Panday has used her scars to sharpen the knife. Rather than hide, she has played everything she has been accused of being — and more.

Among her peers, Panday’s calibre, her prowess is still debatable. But on the smaller screen of streaming, where ideas must be fleshed out and stories cautiously shaped rather than inflated by puffs of masculinity her craft, silliness, and even her tonal inelegance seem to have found both an audience and purpose. To a large chunk of maybe even the world’s population, her work now stands as a sort of testimony to a generational reckoning. A reckoning defined by screen times, outrage, trolls, toxins and trials of trust, fact and community. Lest they admit it, the young ones are obsessed with being online, living in the eye of the camera and projecting, if not practising, this sense of luxurious detachment. The kind of detachment that Panday, for no fault of hers, has been born into. She hasn’t exactly roared through the ceiling of doubt and criticism that has followed but she has courageously offered herself to become the apparatus, as opposed to the high-profile victim. It’s a rare act of subverting your own reputation and it makes Panday authentic if not audacious.