Soni Razdan, who is the mother of Bollywood star Alia Bhatt and wife of director Mahesh Bhatt, has often been described by these labels. But before all these roles came to her life, Soni was an actor and made quite a name for herself with films like Saraansh and TV shows like Buniyaad. In a new interview, Soni shared that after she got married to Mahesh, she suddenly stopped getting acting opportunities.

In an interview with Zoom, Soni said, “I was already working when I got married. So that work continued, but then after that, nothing happened. Just zero. It’s like everything went away.” Soni and Mahesh got married in 1986 and by then, Soni believed that she had done enough work to prove her ability as an actor.

When she asked her husband why the work had disappeared, the answer was blunt. Bhatt told her that people in the industry had said to him directly: “Your wife needs to work? She’s married, isn’t she?” Soni wasn’t familiar with this school of thought where women were expected to leave their work afte marriage. “It was such an alien concept to me. I didn’t come from that thought process, that mind. In those days, a lot of people did,” she said.

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Soni connected her experience to a broader pattern that governed how female actors in Hindi cinema managed their personal lives for decades. She said the reason many female actors delayed marriage or avoided it entirely during the peak of their careers was precisely this: the industry treated marriage as a career-ending event for women.

“That’s exactly why actors paced themselves and did not get married earlier,” she said and added, “But me, I was in love. I had to get married.” She then commented on the male gaze that dominates films and said, “It was patriarchal. It was full patriarchy. It’s all about the male gaze and some skewed notion of what a desirable woman actually is. And why does she also have to be desirable in the first place? I get it. You’re in films. People are going to watch you for two and a half hours. You better have something to show, something that they would want to look at. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a relationship.”

Soni Razdan and Mahesh Bhatt tied the knot in 1986.

Soni said she always believed that living a full life was essential to being a good actor. Real experiences, whether heartbreak, pain or joy, were the foundation of authentic performance for her. Books could teach her about emotions, but feeling them firsthand was what allowed her to portray them convincingly on screen.

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Soni was not willing to sacrifice her personal life for a career that had no guarantees. Her decision was straightforward: she would live her life and figure out her career alongside it. She eventually managed to find a balance between the two, but she admitted the process came with significant struggle and years of being overlooked by an industry that had decided married women did not belong on screen.

Soni is currently a part of Netflix’s latest release, Shaque: Trust No One.