Taali review: Sushmita Sen fits into the part, but series stays on the surface

‘Taali’ tells the story of Shreegauri Sawant, a transwoman who managed to pull off the impossible: get the Supreme Court of India to acknowledge the existence of people who have always lived on the margins, reviled by their birth parents, cast out from society, forced to beg for a living. It is a story of hope and inspiration, placing a transperson in the centre of the narrative, instead of using them as laughing stock, or victims to be pitied.

The web series, directed by Ravi Jadhav, and created by Kartk Nishandar and Arjun Baran, tries hard to infuse the six episodes with the same feelings, but it stays, for the most part, on the surface, never really digging deep into the characters we see on screen, including Shreegauri herself, played by Sushmita Sen.

Sen looks the part to a T, especially when Shreegauri starts coming into her own as a social worker and activist, fighting for the rights of others like her, sari-and-big-bindi in place, striding at the forefront of her flock. But you keep wishing that you could feel the pain and turmoil someone like her has lived with all her waking moments. The sequences where she bursts out in anger are overlaid with dialogues like: ‘jisne mera aisa make-up kara hai, ab main unka pack up karaoongi’, or words to that effect, come off more filmi than anything else.

The sections which detail Gauri’s early life as Pune schoolboy Ganesh (Krutika Rao) who is bullied by his classmates for being ‘girlish’ (I want to be a mother, he tells a teacher, and everyone scoffs), and misunderstood at home, have impact. The actor playing Ganesh is expressive, as he goes about trying to make his father, a policeman, understand him, and trying to keep his sanity intact as he is taken off to a doctor to be ‘fixed’. The running away to Mumbai, getting off at a crowded station, reaching a climatic point where Ganesh transitions to Gauri after a sex-change operation, and becoming comfortable in her own skin, is a tick-off-the-high-points-proceeding.

You can see, straight-up, the very real problem that the makers face. If they had taken a ‘real’ transperson, the series would have come off as a ‘documentary’ a format that puts off viewers used to drama. A bona fide star like Sen will get the eyeballs, even if they have to create short-cuts in the story-telling. Perhaps they may have been better off getting Sreegauri to tell her own story: remember that Vicks ad a few years back featuring her as the mother of an adopted daughter, which moved us to tears?

Taali cast: Sushmita Sen, Krutika Rao, Maya Rechal Mcmanus, Nandu Madhav
Taali director: Ravi Jadhav