The Role That Changed My Life: Sanjana Sanghi recalls how Rockstar made her realise she wanted to be an actor

Sanjana Sanghi is only 27 but still, has been around in Bollywood for over a dozen years. The actress found her break as a child artiste but back then, the teenage Sanjana was not even sure if she wanted to act. Now a lead actress, Sanjana talks about how that chance role in Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar changed her life and eventually led to the other transformative role for her – of KiziE Basu in Dil Bechara.

When asked which was the one role that changed her life, Sanjana says, “That is an impossible question to answer for me. In India, being an actor and being a star are always so closely knit. Rockstar made me realise I can act. And Dil Bechara kind of turned me into a household name overnight. I felt like I have been on the journey with the audiences.”

However, when asked to really choose between the two, Sanjana does go with Rockstar. In the Imtiaz Ali film, the then 13-year-old Sanjana played Mandy, the younger sister of Nargis Fakhri’s character Heer. Recalling the experience, Sanjana says, “When you are 13, you don’t know very much about anything. I think that helped me because I didn’t think this is Imtiaz Ali or Ranbir Kapoor and that I was on a film set. I was flowing and I felt I was at home. That camera didn’t intimidate me. You hear stories that people freeze in front of the camera and people get starstruck. None of these things were happening with me.”

Yet, after Rockstar, Sanjana did only a handful of films in supporting roles before pausing her career to pursue higher studies. Sanjana says that Imtiaz Ali had cautioned her mother that she would try to leave acting for academia but her mother did not let that happen. “I think at the end of the first schedule in Srinagar, Imtiaz actually told my mom, ‘she is such a nerd that she will keep going deeper into academia but don’t let her leave acting because there is something there’. Then my mum took it upon herself that while I was leading a regular school and college life, any audition call or opportunity that came our way, my parents never stopped me,” says Sanjana.

Eventually, seven years after her debut, a 20-year-old Sanjana was cast in her first lead role in Dil Bechara. Mukesh Chhabra, who had discovered her as the casting director for Rockstar, was making his directorial debut with the film. The film released on OTT in 2020, months after the untimely death of lead actor Sushant Singh Rajput. Its success transformed Sanjana from a child artiste to an overnight star. She says, “I still don’t think I realise the number of people who have watched Dil Bechara and have been affected by it. Whether it’s at the passport office or at an airport, they don’t just know me but they remember my character’s name too. That can take you many films sometimes. So the two films have done very different things for me.”

Sanjana has since worked in two more films as a lead actress – the action thriller Rashtra Kavach Om and the coming-of-age journey film Dhak Dhak. The latter, which released last week, has received rave reviews with praise for Sanjana’s performance.