Meet the Leading Lady of India’s Pulp Cinema

Circa 2011. Nandi Cinema, Mumbai, India.

The collective roar of guttural fans inside the non-airconditioned cinema hall competes with the jarring background music of the Bhojpuri film Ek Wada Pran Jaaie Par Vachan Na Jaaie (The Vow That Even if Life be Destroyed, the Promise Will be Kept). 

The joys of high-speed, unlimited internet haven’t yet set in. So, anything remotely stimulating on the big screen brings great joy to my friends and I. After all, we’re mechanical engineering students – the horniest of the lot, starved as we are for attention and validation at a time when being nerds was still not considered cool. Barely a minute’s walk from the iconic, heritage-grade structure of Bandra railway station, Nandi Cinema is the glowing nucleus of Indian pulp cinema. The single-screen theatre affords us a peek into a world that mainstream cinema halls and multiplexes don’t. Tickets cost less than three packets of biscuits. Regular patrons include construction workers, autorickshaw drivers, and owners of mobile recharge shops. The films are packed with action, gore, and sex – a lot of it in slo-mo. 

And there she is: Sapna Sappu. Larger than life. Owning the theatre with just a sigh. Dancing in a flowing stream. The golden girl of our collective fantasies. Every move and moan of hers on screen drives through us like a spade. 

Cut to a decade later and I have the chance to interview her. 

Sappu has starred in more than 300 pulp films across various languages, most of which aren’t even listed on her IMDb page. For her sheer breadth of work and versatility, she is hailed as the “Sridevi of sleazy films.” During the peak of her career in the 1990s and early 2000s, almost every film of hers ran houseful for weeks in theatres like Nandi. 

When I text her on WhatsApp, she is every bit the badass I expect her to be. Her WhatsApp bio in Hindi read: “Muje messages ya call mat karna 8PM ke baad, warna ghar mein ghus ke pitungi, kootungi, ye warning hai. Bohot emergency hai toh message karna, samje?”

It translates to: “If you call me after 8PM, I will enter your house and pummel you. This is a warning. Call me only if there’s an emergency, understand?” 

I understand, ma’am. 

Born Zarina Shaikh, Sapna Sappu grew up in the Nashik district of India’s Maharashtra state. Being part of the movies was never a dream she consciously harboured. But she loved to dance and act. Her parents let her fly, regardless of the fact that it was otherwise a conservative Muslim household. 

“When I was in the eleventh grade, I was part of a play in Nashik. This impressed a lot of Bombay [Mumbai’s former name] folks in the audience who were producers and studio executives. They gave me their cards and told me to visit Bombay and audition. I had less than Rs 500 ($6) in my pocket, but I took the first train to the city of dreams the next day,” she said.

Her meeting with Kanti Shah, one of the most successful directors of Indian pulp cinema, was accidental. She bumped into him after stepping out of an audition for a role of an anchor for a television show. It was almost love at first sight – the “love” of a director for an actor they sense infinite potential in. 

“He offered me a role in his film Gunda, opposite the legendary actor Mithun Chakraborty. I was surprised. I didn’t have to go through any struggles. Later, I got to star opposite the Gujarati superstar Naresh Kanojia. Amidst all this, I couldn’t sit for the twelfth-grade exams because the producers worked on tight deadlines and [we didn’t get] days off.” 

In the early 2000s, there were years when five to seven films starring her were consecutively released in a single year. She starred in almost all of Kanti Shah’s films — from Gunda (1998) to Angoor (2005). Anyone who was anybody in the pulp cinema world had to have worked with Sappu in some capacity. Even beyond Hindi pulp cinema, she was the sole crowd-puller in pulp films made in regional languages including Gujarati and Bhojpuri. 

For the longest time, Sappu stayed in rented accommodation in a small, shared flat in Versova, a hub of the television and movie industry in Mumbai. But she was barely home. She was constantly hopping between sets, often crashing there with her hair and makeup team because the studios were on the outskirts of the city and the daily grind of having to travel for more than four hours back and forth was too gruelling. 

Two studios in Mumbai had become home: Esel in Trombay and Chandivali Studio in Chandivali. She had to be efficient if she wanted to be prolific. There were times when she spent four nights at a stretch sleeping, living, and acting in those studios. “The costumes for the next three roles were kept inside my car. [I would switch] between one set with a particular makeup and then another makeup for a different film on the same set, the next day,” said Sappu. 

Sappu doesn’t classify Hindi pulp cinema distinctly from mainstream Bollywood. From a dacoit bent on revenge to a desirous bhabhi, her prolific work encompasses pretty much all the possibilities of acting. “I have done over a dozen films with [Hindi cinema] stars like Dharmendra and Mithunji. If that’s not Bollywood, what wood is it?” 

She doesn’t remember ever saying no to any film or any role. “My Wikipedia and IMDb entries are terribly incomplete. More than a hundred of my films are not even listed. I’ve emailed them, but [there’s been] no response,” she said. 

It all seemed like a dream. Until it wasn’t. 

The recent docuseries Cinema Marte Dum Tak produced by VICE Studios, currently streaming on Prime Video, charts the rise and fall of Hindi pulp cinema through behind-the-scenes (BTS) shots of four filmmakers making films, interspersed with interviews of stalwarts like Sappu and other industry stakeholders. 

The series reveals that the downfall of the industry began when filmmakers started illegally inserting “bits” – sexually explicit scenes – after the film had been certified by the censor board.  Sappu was also accused of doing “bits,” of shooting for scenes that were not cleared by the board and therefore partaking in illegality.

The government took notice. Police raids of the theatres followed and most of them had to shut down. My Nandi Cinema in Bandra slowly shifted to screening only mainstream Bhojpuri films. There were calls to draft separate certification criteria for pulp cinema, but those were shot down by the government. For her part, Sappu vehemently denies ever doing those scenes. However, she has a grouse with filmmakers with a holier-than-thou attitude towards these “bits.” 

“If it was up to me, I’d whip them in the middle of the street with a belt for their hypocrisy. All these motherfuckers have done bits. I’ll abuse them because I know the truth,” she said. “Unlike these hypocrites, I’m proud of my career in these films. I still get texts from people who remember every single character from my films, even ones that I have forgotten. I have been the crush of millions. I will always be grateful for this industry.”

As far as her own participation in these “bits” is concerned, Sappu said there were certain dubious filmmakers who would, for instance, shoot a scene of her coming out of a lake in a semi-transparent top. In the final cut, they would superimpose her face over the body of another actor filmed doing the same scene in the nude, so the audience would assume that it was Sappu herself. 

“I was slim and those dummy actors they would merge my scenes with were often on the heavy side. Were people blind? Did no one notice this visual inconsistency? To this day, I have been defamed as a porn actor, even on Google. Has anyone squeezed my boobs like they showed in the films? No one has the guts,” she said. 

Sappu decided to take a break from the industry when she found love with a businessman, who was her fan. It all seemed to be a dream at the time – she could now choose to immerse herself in a world that was entirely her own, build a home, and have children. Overnight, she disconnected from everyone in the film industry and moved to his home in Vadodara, Gujarat. 

However, within a year of what seemed like a fairytale marriage, Sappu said that she discovered that her husband was cheating on her. To complicate matters further, she was pregnant at the time. 

“He wanted me to abort the child, even took me to abortion clinics. I would tell the doctors to Google my name and that if [they did] anything to my child, I’d call [them] out in the media. I was so heartbroken that I’d even tell my god Ganesha that if anything happened to my child, I would remove his temple from my house. Fortunately, my baby boy Tiger was born in 2015,” she said. 

In 2017, Sappu moved back to Mumbai from her husband’s place in Gujarat. This time, though, there were no roles awaiting her. There was barely any cash to even make rent. Sappu said that the desperation to put food on the table, pay rent and fund her son’s education made her make choices she isn’t proud of – but she had no one to bank on but herself.

“When I called my husband amid all of this and told him that I was sleeping with other men to make money, all he told me was to manage for a few more days. Those were his only words,” she said. 

No one came to her rescue. The image of her being a “sex siren” or being described as a “server crasher” and “internet generator” had seeped too deeply into the public consciousness. All the roads were closed before her. But she continued to work, refusing to give up. 

Today, 42-year-old Sappu is content with her life. She has no regrets. She knows in her heart that her son will always be proud of her — proud of a mother who did not abandon him and did everything in her power to give him the best life she could. In Tiger, she can already see the beginnings of a person who will make their place in the world on their own terms, much like she did in her own way. He’s already won gold medals at school for excellence in sports and academia, she proudly shares. 

She is currently in talks with various platforms to have her own app with short videos from her life, as well as ones of her singing and dancing. Today, she gets to call the shots, without shady filmmakers morphing her videos with porn. 

This time, she says, she won’t let the dream end. 

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