For someone with such a genre-agnostic filmography—Bengali arthouse cinema, disaster flick, half a dozen comedies—Soha Ali Khan had never attempted a horror. That box is now gratifyingly ticked in Chhorri 2, Vishal Furia’s feminist horror sequel streaming on Prime Video. The film, starring Nushrratt Bharuccha, returns to the sugarcane fields of the first film, introducing Ali Khan as the monstrous, unsettling Daasi Ma, the reverend mother of an underground patriarchal order.

“I was surprised when they approached me for the antagonist,” says Soha, who’s mostly played stately and upstanding citizens. Her husband, actor-director Kunal Keemu, wasn’t as surprised, Soha jokes. “He was like, I can totally see it…”

The Chhorii films operate within a now established sub-genre—the rural supernatural thriller with feminist underpinnings, a terrain mapped by Bulbbul, Kaali Khuhi and Furia’s own Marathi-language Lapachhapi, which he remade in Hindi. Building on themes from the first film, Chhorii 2 rails against female infanticide and child marriage in the Hindi heartland. “As a mother to a girl child, I was disturbed by the mindset and conditioning that Daasi Ma represents,” says Soha. “Of course, it is not something that only happens in far-off places. It happens close to home, amongst families of relative wealth and education.”

Soha Ali Khan as Daasi Ma in ‘Chhorii 2’
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Special Arrangement

Soha, a former banker, made her Hindi film debut in the 2004 romantic comedy Dil Maange More. However, as the daughter of Sharmila Tagore, her tryst with cinema began much earlier. In her memoir, The Perils of Being Moderately Famous, Soha writes lovingly about her 4-second cameo in the 1979 film Dooriya, starring her mother and Bengali cinema icon Uttam Kumar. Given that she was barely a year old at the time, wasn’t it the fastest star-kid launch in history?

“It’s true!” laughs Soha. “I was a little infant in my mother’s arms in a song. That was effectively my debut.”

Her actual debut, it turns out, was meant to be Amol Palekar’s Paheli. A remake of Mani Kaul’s Duvidha (1973), the film was initially called Ghost Ka Dost, and was meant to pair Soha with another newcomer.

“Amol ji wanted to launch me with another young actor. As a student of history, I was taken by the film’s Rajasthan setting and the beautiful costumes I was going to wear. I was so excited that I quit my job at Citigroup overnight and didn’t tell my parents.”

However, once superstar Shah Rukh Khan came on board, the film’s profile increased, and both Soha and her co-star were dropped by Palekar (Rani Mukerji eventually played the female lead in Paheli). “Amol ji called and told me Shah Rukh Khan is doing the role of the hero. I was like, “Oh that’s amazing!” I didn’t realise that he was slowly breaking it to me that I wasn’t playing the girl anymore, because it had gone somewhere else.”

Though she can laugh at it now, the experience left her disappointed. “It wasn’t the best place to be in,” recalls Soha. “I realised that, as a young actor, you shouldn’t quit your job unless you have signed a contract or received a signing amount.”

Soha appeared in several notable films of the aughts—Rang De Basanti, Khoya Khoya Chand, 99. It was an altogether thrilling time for Hindi commercial cinema, with banners like UTV Motion Pictures and its cooler subsidiary, UTV Spotboy, leading the change. Directors like Sudhir Mishra, Raj & DK and Tigmanshu Dhulia did their most essential work in that fertile period. By comparison, the Bollywood of today feels unmoored and homogenized, all sequels and angry historicals.

Soha, who took a break from feature films after 2018’s Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster 3, is cautiously optimistic about the future.

“While good stories are being rewarded, in theatres as well as on OTT, people are still hesitant to embrace originality. They are looking at what has worked and doing more of the same.” A correction, she adds, is certainly underway in the industry. “Actors are reworking how much money they are asking for. Scripts are being reworked. Speaking for myself, as a female actor in my 40s, I am positive about the quality of roles coming my way. I couldn’t say this, say, ten years ago.”