Zeenat Aman, Vogue India’s new cover girl: Talks about herdebut on Instagram and pulls back the curtain on her

Zeenat Aman becomes the cover girl for Vogue India’s July-August issue. She talks about her career and fame, from which she took a lot of time to heal. – By Mahasweta Sarkar

Zeenat Aman, the woman who was branded as India’s first ‘sex symbol’, made her Instagram debut on February 11 with a series of photographs that she described as celebrating the female gaze. This took the internet by storm and people called in a ‘comeback’. However, the 71-year-old veteran has something different to say, in her interview with Vogue India, as she made the cover star of the magazine’s July-August issue.
She started sharing her experience saying, “My fame is amorphous beast. It has taken me 50 years to bring it to heel.” She goes on to pull back the curtain on her life and pen her own story in her own unique way, that everyone loves.

With people saying Zeenat is making a comeback, she said to Vogue, “People say I hid from it for three decades, but that is not entirely true. Its gaze wandered when my priorities shifted… I was aching for something of my own. A family, really.”

Zeenat Aman’s career

Aman was crowned the winner of both the Femina Miss India pageant and the Miss Asia Pacific International pageant in 1970. Her breakthrough film was Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971), for which she won the Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award and the BFJA Award for Best Actress.
Aman became a leading actress in Bollywood in the 70s with prominent roles in Ajanabee (1974), Warrant (1975), Dharam Veer (1977), Chhailla Babu (1977), Hum Kisise Kum Naheen (1977), The Great Gambler (1979) and others.

Later life

Zeenat became involved with her family post her 70s fame. She told Vogue India, “The birth of my sons in 1986 and 1989 gifted me all this and more. As I contended with their diapers and bibs, the prolonged illness and death of their father, then later school scrapes and college romances, work offers dwindled and I was happy for it.”