Ayush Tandon, the actor who played young Pi and grew up inside his father’s dream

Ayush Tandon

Photo: Frasersequeira / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 31, 1998 Mumbai, India
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Life of Pi, Bajirao Mastani, 7 Khoon Maaf

The scene Ayush Tandon is remembered for is a lesson in self-invention. In Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi, a schoolboy taunted by his classmates with a crude nickname walks up to the blackboard and rewrites himself, chalking digit after digit of an endless number until the room has no choice but to call him Pi. Tandon played that boy. Off screen, the authorship of his story was less tidy: he had been prepared for the camera by a father who wanted the career first.

Hatinder Tandon, a television actor, had come to Mumbai to make it as a performer. He trained his son in dance and acting and steered him into advertisements and reality shows. When Lee cast the boy, the father told the press that what he had been unable to achieve, his son was now achieving. “My father came here to become an actor. It was his dream,” Ayush said in the same interview. “Today, even my dream is to become an actor.” The word “even” carries the whole arrangement.

Born on 31 July 1998 to Hatinder and Asha Tandon, he was on national television before he reached double figures. He competed as a child in Boogie Woogie Kids Championship and, at ten, won the first season of Zee TV’s Chota Packet Bada Dhamaka, a contest that paired child singers with child dancers, alongside Vasundhara Raturi. The grand finale aired in January 2009.

His film debut came in Vishal Bhardwaj‘s 7 Khoon Maaf, as the young Arun in the black comedy built around Priyanka Chopra‘s Susanna and her seven husbands. It was a small part in a prestige production. Then came the agency call about an Ang Lee film. Tandon went through two or three rounds of auditions and, by his own account, started reading up on the director only after he was chosen; he had seen Hulk without knowing who made it.

In the finished film he plays Piscine Molitor Patel at eleven and twelve, between Gautam Belur’s five-year-old and Suraj Sharma’s shipwrecked teenager, with Irrfan Khan as the adult narrating the whole story. Tandon described his stretch with a child’s literalness: a school-going kid up to the age of 12, teased by his classmates until he shortened his name to Pi. The film opened at the International Film Festival of India in Goa in November 2012 and went on to win four Academy Awards, including Best Director for Lee.

The billing tells a harder story. The posters, the interviews and the awards season belonged to Sharma and to a tiger built largely by visual effects artists. Two years later, a Mumbai tabloid item about Tandon’s secondary school results, a solid 87 percent, still introduced him as “the cute little boy” from Lee’s film. Life of Pi gave him a credit few Indian child actors hold, and an identity that set faster than he could outgrow it. The familiar exits opened one by one: a music video, Labdiyaan, opposite Avneet Kaur for Times Music; supporting parts; college at Annasaheb Vartak College of Arts, Commerce and Science.

The most revealing of those parts was the darkest. In Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani he played Nana Saheb, the eldest son of Ranveer Singh’s Bajirao and Priyanka Chopra’s Kashibai, who comes home from his studies resenting his father’s second wife and, once Bajirao rides off to war, helps lock Mastani and her son away. Pi was a seeker. Nana Saheb is an heir who turns a family grievance into cruelty, and for an actor still sold as the sweet-faced kid it was the first role that asked an audience to turn against him.

Tandon has since tried the other side of the camera and the microphone. He made his directing debut with a documentary, (Dis)abled, in 2017. He then appeared in She, a three-minute short about the harassment women face on the street, backed by Farhan Akhtar’s MARD campaign, the filmmaker Feroz Abbas Khan and the Population Foundation of India, and released online in November 2018. In April 2019 he put out his first song as a singer, Guzre Jo Lamhe, with lyrics written and a video directed by his father. Even the solo project was a family production.

Streaming kept him working. He played Suhail in Neeraj Pandey’s espionage series Special Ops, led by Kay Kay Menon on Disney+ Hotstar in 2020, and Advait, a student, in the revival seasons of the youth drama Kaisi Yeh Yaariaan on Voot in 2022 and JioCinema in 2023. Chote Nawab, Kumud Chaudhary’s Lucknow-shot drama for Yoodlee Films, announced back in 2018 with Tandon cast as Imaan, finally reached cinemas on 23 February 2024.

No new project has been announced since. That leaves Ayush Tandon at twenty-eight with a filmography that opens on a four-Oscar film and has not yet handed him a lead. Whatever he signs next will show whether the dream his father passed down has become his own, the question his most famous character settled with a piece of chalk.

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Tags: actors, Life of Pi, Ang Lee, Priyanka Chopra, Suraj Sharma, Ayush Tandon

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