Asha Parekh, Tanuja say studios had ‘horrible bathrooms’, they didn’t use them entire day: ‘We were shy to say…’

The two yesteryear stars also highlighted how there was a lack of sanitation facilities on a film set yet they couldn’t point it out, as they were taught not to talk about these things. Asha Parekh said, “We were shy to say that there are no bathrooms. Modern studios just had one bathroom for everybody and they were horrible. We would be sitting from morning to evening, not going to the bathroom.” Tanuja added that women today can at least complain about a lack of hygiene. “The kind of freedom that women have today to be able to discuss these toiletry functions, we couldn’t do that. In our time, that was the way we were taught to be that you don’t talk.”

The Caravan actor shared that even today the situation hasn’t changed entirely and “big studios still do not have proper toilets.” On this Aparna Purohit, head of India originals, Prime Video, narrated an incident from the times when she was working as an assistant director on a film.

She shared, “Once I was working as an assistant director on a film and the actress and I were the only women in the team. We were shooting in some remote village outside Allahabad and we couldn’t take our vanity vans there. It was a small film with a shoestring budget. When we reached there, I asked the production team, ‘Where will the actress change?” They said, ‘The fields are there and you can go anywhere, there’s nobody here’. But the neighbourhood village got to know about a film being shot and there were trucks loads of people who arrived. When the actress had to change they said we would call two men who would hold a saree and she can change behind that. We went like that for the whole day and then I put my foot down and told them, ‘Till you arrange a remote toilet and a place for her to change, we won’t come on the set.’ We were labelled belligerent, we were told we are a nuisance and this is why we don’t bring women for outdoors.”

On hearing the incident, both Tanuja and Asha were shocked and the latter affirmed, “Sanitation should be the priority everywhere.”

Asha and Tanuja also spoke about ageism in the film industry and how even today actors aged 50 are getting romance with women half their age and women like them are being offered roles of grandmothers.