Renuka Shahane, the smile of Surabhi who became a director of difficult women

Renuka Shahane

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	October 7, 1966 Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Occupation	Actress and film director
Known for	Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!
Awards	Filmfare Marathi · Filmfare OTT

Indian viewers of a certain age can still summon one particular smile on demand. It belonged to the young woman who welcomed them, week after week, to Surabhi, Doordarshan’s magazine of crafts, music and curiosities, and it came back on the big screen as Pooja, the gentle elder sister of Madhuri Dixit in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!. Renuka Shahane has spent the second half of her career making work about women who do not smile on cue: a novelist who walks away from the script of motherhood, a housewife who dreams of serving her husband’s friends fritters made from her own brain. The question her career keeps asking is whether the face a country filed under wholesome can become the author of its discomfort.

The wholesome image was never the whole story at home. Her father, Vijay Kumar Shahane, was an officer in the Indian Navy; her mother, Shanta Gokhale, is a writer, translator and critic whose name carries weight in Marathi theatre. The marriage ended when Renuka was very young, and she has recalled that other children in the neighbourhood were told not to play with her because she came from a “broken family”. She and her brother Girish, now an art critic, grew up with their mother in Mumbai. She studied psychology at St. Xavier’s College and went on to a master’s degree in clinical psychology at the University of Mumbai, a training she has never fully put away.

Born on 7 October 1966 into a Marathi family, Shahane found her first wide audience on television. In the Doordarshan serial Circus, which ran from 1989, she played Maria, the love interest of a young actor named Shah Rukh Khan, who had not yet made a feature film. Then came Surabhi, created by Siddharth Kak, who co-presented it with her. The programme ran through the 1990s, first on Doordarshan and later on Star Plus, until 2001, and in the years when Doordarshan was the only channel most Indian homes received, its co-host became one of the most recognisable people on the air.

Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! arrived in 1994 and became, by the Guinness count, the highest-grossing Indian film of its time. Shahane’s Pooja, the bride whose wedding sets the plot in motion and whose death turns it, earned her a Filmfare nomination for best supporting actress. She has said that Rajkumar Barjatya, the producer and Sooraj’s father, warned her before she signed that the part would get her typecast as somebody’s sister or wife. He was right. Her range, meanwhile, was going elsewhere: a Telugu hit, Money, produced by Ram Gopal Varma; the Marathi drama Aboli, which won her the Filmfare Marathi award for best actress; strong-willed women in the television serials Imtihaan and Sailaab.

The turn towards directing began with her mother’s book. Shahane read Shanta Gokhale’s novel Rita Welingkar in 1993, decided it was a film and wrote the screenplay in the summer of 2007. Rita, released in 2009, cast Pallavi Joshi as a woman followed from the age of eight to forty, gave Jackie Shroff his first Marathi role, and kept for Shahane the part of Saraswati, the friend who watches. A Hindi debut took longer. Tribhanga, which Netflix released in January 2021, set Kajol, Tanvi Azmi and Mithila Palkar across three generations of one family, with a famous novelist at the top whose daughter grew up resenting her. Shahane said the idea came from meeting a woman who openly rejected her own mother, “unlike my relationship with mine”, and that she wanted to humanise the mother figure rather than judge her.

The reviews did not settle the matter in her favour. Some critics praised the direction as taut and the film as one of the most emotional Indian releases of its season. Film Companion called it a dim, dated spectacle with a 1990s television-serial aesthetic, which is an awkward charge to level at the person who helped define that television. The tension is real, and Shahane has not resolved it in public either. In interviews she has complained that producers still offer her what she calls purist roles, the decent wife and the sensible mother, while also conceding that being stereotyped has its advantages because it keeps the offers coming. The woman who wanted to break the frame has, at times, been paid well to stay inside it.

The most recent work suggests she has stopped choosing between the two. Loop Line, known in Marathi as Dhaavpatti, is an animated short she wrote, produced and directed about a middle-aged Mumbai housewife who escapes her husband’s chauvinism into fantasy. It screened at the New York Indian Film Festival in June 2025 and won best animation at Tasveer, the South Asian festival in Seattle. On screen she kept working as a character actress, in 3 Storeys and in Shashank Khaitan’s Govinda Naam Mera, before Prime Video’s Dupahiya gave her the role of Pushplata Yadav, a panchayat member trying to protect the crime-free record of the village of Dhadakpur. In December 2025 the Filmfare OTT Awards gave her best supporting actress in a comedy series for Dupahiya, and, as her husband Ashutosh Rana announced on Instagram, a second Filmfare trophy for directing Dhaavpatti.

The Marathi work has kept pace. In Uttar, released in Maharashtra cinemas in December 2025 and on ZEE5 in February 2026, she plays Uma, a radio host whose son, played by Abhinay Berde, is absorbed in building an artificial-intelligence project. In July 2026 the ZEE5 series Aga Aai Aaho Aai cast her as Janaki, the mother of Hruta Durgule’s newly married heroine, in a six-episode family series that pointedly refuses the usual war between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The second season of Dupahiya arrived on Prime Video on 1 October 2026, bringing Pushplata back to a village now unsettled by a mobile-phone tower.

Her first marriage, to the Marathi theatre writer and director Vijay Kenkare, was short-lived. In 2001 she married Rana; they have two sons, Shauryaman and Satyendra. She has described herself in a Marathi interview as a complete atheist, and Rana has said in public that he would like to act in a film she directs.

No such film has been announced. What the last few years have shown is a filmmaker drawing a line from Rita to the housewife of Loop Line and the mothers of Tribhanga, and an actress who now plays the sensible woman with the knowing timing of someone who has written her opposite. The smile is still there, and these days she decides what it means.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Dupahiya, Kajol, Renuka Shahane, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!

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