The first time someone called Masaba Gupta a n***** was when she was 12 years old. She went home and asked her father, West Indies cricketer Vivian Richards, what it meant and how she should respond. “He told me to slap that person and I did,” she says, recalling how that became the catalyst for a conversation between her parents about what they should and shouldn’t be telling their child to do. Decades earlier, Richards’ team hopelessly outclassed Tony Greig’s on the field after the then-England cricket captain said he would make the West Indians ‘grovel’.
“I have been surrounded by controversy since the day I was born,” Masaba, now 33, says in the hit Netflix docudrama Masaba, Masaba. She is referring to the fact that people still remember that mother Neena Gupta, an award-winning actor, gave birth to her as a single woman in 1989, and have always used that as their key reference point when talking about both women. The duo play fictionalised versions of themselves in the hit, two-season show which begins with Masaba’s divorce. In the air kissing, party line-towing celebrity world they inhabit, their feminist values — and the willingness to express these values freely — is refreshing.
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