We Don’t Need To Get Vulgar About It

Do not call yourself a Bollywood fan if you haven’t seen Nora Fatehi dancing to the beats of Dilbar in Satyameva Jayate. Her dance moves have made everyone want to put on their dancing shoes. But did you know that Nora was initially asked to wear a “tiny” blouse for the track? The actress-dancer herself revealed this, sharing that she requested the team to create a new blouse because she did not want to “over-sexualize” herself. She said, “I remember they had to make a new blouse because the blouse they brought was too tiny, and I had to put my foot down. I said, ‘Guys, I cannot wear this. Don’t over-sexualise me. I get it, it is a sexy song. We are all inherently sexy, but we don’t need to get vulgar about it.’ Milap (Milap Zaveri, Satyameva Jayate’s producer) makes fun of me for this in several parties. It was also Ramadan, so I said, ‘Guys, chill. Can we please not do this?’ So they make fun of me,” during an interview at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne.

Nora Fatehi continued, “They had to reconstruct the whole blouse. I said, ‘I don’t mind showing the stomach, because it is about the aesthetics, but I cannot be showing too much cleavage. To a lot of people it looks over sexy, but for me it was something I was comfortable wearing compared to what they were going to give me.”

Nora Fatehi also expressed that she wanted the audience’s focus to be on her face and dance moves. She said, “It’s also so tough because when you work with filmmakers as a nobody, and I was a nobody at that time, they are like, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? I have to explain to them with love and make them understand, ‘Let’s not divert. The music is so good. The choreography is so good. Don’t ruin that because of a stupid blouse’. That’s what I told Milap, and he said, ‘Okay, I get it.’. I said, ‘Let them focus on my face, and dance moves. Let them not focus on the breasts.’ When I spoke to him like that, he was like, ‘Okay, I get it.’”

The actress also mentioned that she has a different body type, one that is not commonly seen in Bollywood. She added, “Today, when I do have the power to talk. I do tell my stylists, ‘This is too much.’ The way they dress Ananya (Panday), Sara (Ali Khan), or Janhvi (Kapoor), they cannot dress me the same way. My body is not the same. I have a lot of conflict where I do have to push this on stylists and directors because they will make certain clothes and be like, ‘Well, the others are wearing this.’ I am like, ‘I get that, but the others don’t look like me unfortunately when I wear it.’ So we have to think about that, and with my body type, because it’s not really familiar in Bollywood. Not a lot of girls have my body type. It’s tough for stylists and directors to understand where I am coming from, but once I push and they get it, they are like, ‘Okay, cool.’”

“Unfortunately, if I wear what they wore. It would just take away from the choreography and the beauty of the dance, the beauty of the presence and the song,” Nora Fatehi concluded. 

Nora Fatehi was last seen in Kunal Kemmu’s Madgaon Express.