Vinta Nanda speaks with Divya Jagdale about Brownie, her first short film, and how grief, art and survival can transform an artist’s inner life into stories that connect us.

Actor, writer and director Divya Jagdale returns to the screen as a filmmaker with Brownie, a quietly powerful 16-minute short film about grief, compassion and the instinctive connections formed between people who have experienced loss. In a candid conversation in podcast ‘Be My Guest Today’, with Vinta Nanda, Jagdale reflects on her journey through theatre, television, cinema and writing, and on how art became a way of processing profound personal loss without allowing grief to define her. 

Brownie Began With A Conversation

It is strange how people can know each other for decades and still find themselves sitting down to have a formal conversation. Divya Jagdale and I go back many years, to a time when we worked together, hung around between shots, went for coffees and talked endlessly about everything and nothing. So beginning this conversation formally felt slightly absurd. Yet there we were, talking about Brownie, her 16-minute short film and her first work as a director.

I wanted to begin with the film because, despite its simplicity, Brownie is riveting. It reaches somewhere deep without insisting that it should. I asked Divya where the idea came from, how it developed and why she made it. The film, she told me, did not begin as a film at all. It began with a writing prompt about a coffee shop. "My personal thing is that when you ask me, I enjoy listening to conversations a lot," she said. She was fascinated by the conversations of young people in cafés, doing assignments, chatting and inhabiting their own worlds.

The scene came first. The film came later. "I had the scene with me, but what was the film?" she recalled asking herself. Eventually, while exploring other ideas, she decided to make something out of what she already had. "That's how I dug out the scene and the film actually fell together in hindsight. It was not like the film was already there on paper."

Finding Grief Inside A Young Boy

As she developed the story, Divya imagined a 15-year-old boy who had experienced serious tragedy but was not someone who would dramatize his pain. He would be intelligent, compassionate and observant. His experience of loss would have given him the ability to recognise something in other people that they might not themselves reveal. "What happens to them unconsciously is that they start connecting with loss, connecting with people's experiences of loss in a certain way," she explained. "It's like you can actually see through people."

That became the emotional centre of Brownie. The boy recognises something in the person sitting opposite him because his own experience has taught him to recognise grief elsewhere. Divya made an observation that stayed with me. She connected grief with happiness, suggesting that both can create a kind of emotional vibration through which people recognise one another. "Happiness also, if you are happy inside, you can connect with a lot of people in the similar vibration. And I think that is the vibration he is connecting with."

When Art Becomes Survival

There was inevitably a personal dimension to our discussion. Divya has experienced the devastating loss of her husband Shiv and her son Jahan in close succession, followed by the death of her father. Yet she is careful not to allow those losses to become the definition of her life. "I am processing it because I'm a human being. I am figuring things out as I inch forward, one day at a time," she said. "I'm fortunate that I have art with me. I'm so fortunate that I have it with me as a skill, as a tool."

That word — tool — is important. Art did not make the grief disappear. It gave her somewhere to put it. "When all these things were happening to me, I was lost, but I had the pen and paper with me to start writing and creating something. And that gave me a lot of solace."

What is especially interesting is that she did not initially think of Brownie as an act of processing grief. Writing the original scene had simply given her discipline and routine at a time when those around, her mother and aunts, were worried about how she was spending her days. "The scene had to be complete in itself. There was no grief in it. There was a sense of having achieved a routine by writing that scene, being within a routine." 

An Artist Who Was Never Really Unemployed

Divya's journey has moved through acting, writing and theatre. She has worked with some of the most distinctive theatre practitioners of her generation and has continued creating even when acting work was uncertain. "As an actor, you are always unemployed," she said, laughing. "You want to make a living out of your art, but it's not happening. So that struggle, that angst was always there."

But she never equated not being hired with not working. "If I'm free, I'm writing, and somebody may say I'm free, but that’s not true. I'm very engaged in creating my work."

That is something I deeply recognise. I told her that my own journey had often followed the same principle: when the opportunities one expects do not arrive, one creates with whatever is available. For me, that eventually became The Daily Eye. For Divya, it became theatre, writing, acting and now filmmaking.

Theatre, Minimalism And Trusting Actors

Divya's relationship with theatre is central to understanding her as a filmmaker. She has always been drawn to minimalism and to the power of an empty stage. "I think that is the power of an actor," she said. "He or she has no tools. All the tools have been taken away from you. It's just you, your mind and your body, with that there is some story that you have to communicate."

Her work with Sunil Shanbag was particularly formative. She also spoke about Ramu Ramanathan, Makrand Deshpande and Shiv Subramaniam (her late husband), who helped her shed what she calls the "aura around acting, the big words, the jargons" and arrive at her own sensibility.

That understanding shaped her direction of Brownie. Having experienced the vulnerability of being an actor, she wanted her performers to feel safe. "I want to treat actors the way I'd like to be treated myself as an actor," she said. "I wanted to make them so easy and so comfortable that the lines come out of their mind and body as if they just belong to them."

When The Artist Surrenders

There is a point in every creative process when the artist has to surrender. I have experienced it myself as a director: you begin by controlling the work, then gradually the work begins to tell you what it wants to become.

Divya understood immediately. "I didn't want to talk about my pain, my grief, but whatever comes out, comes out that way," she said. That surrender produced one of Brownie's most powerful images. A photograph of Divya and Shiv appears in the final frame. It was never intended as a symbolic statement. It happened because Divya a practical production problem led the team to use a photograph that happened to be available.

"It was like a jigsaw puzzle. Some things were happening, some things were not happening." Yet the image changes the emotional meaning of the film.

Coming Back Into The Light

When I watched Brownie, I felt that it marked a line between Divya's past and her future. I had seen her perform and direct theatre, but this film gave me a different feeling. I felt she was ready.

She wants acting roles that challenge her. "I want directors and producers to come to me, 'Divya ji, yeh role aapke liye hai.' And I want them to talk to me about that part. I want them to discuss to death that role."

When we spoke about the future, she said, "The sky is the limit," but immediately qualified it. She wants to work, but she no longer wants to fight endlessly for the right to do so. "I love the peace of mind that I have and my mind is not struggling anymore," she said. "I don't want to be damaged in any way coming out of any experience. I rather not do anything, but when I do something, I want to do it with my 100% and the give and take has to be smooth."

The Stories Are Everywhere

Divya lives between Indore (her paternal home) and Mumbai, and is already looking at theatre spaces in Indore, talking to local theatre people and developing new work. She is working on Ganit and Khud Ki Kahani, both rooted in the minimalism that has always attracted her.

But she is also discovering new characters around her. She spoke about overheard conversations, unfamiliar people and the need to observe without judgement. "At the end of the day, we are all human beings. We are navigating life through all the struggles that we go through. And so are these people, very different to those in Mumbai."

Her childhood, spent moving between cities because of her father's career, taught her to enter unfamiliar rooms and make connections quickly. What she once experienced as instability became an artistic instinct. "I used to hate it at that point, but I never really got the opportunity to settle into anything. But in hindsight, I know that I can walk into the room of strangers. Everybody will be a stranger, but I can connect with them well."

Grief Connects Us

Divya told me that sometimes she wants to talk to Shiv, and then something happens — a call comes, something moves, a door opens. "It's very personal, but these things happen," she said. She has learned not to overthink those moments.  

"For me, that is my lesson actually, because I'm such an overthinker that I can go to any limit and destroy something. So I'm learning to not overthink and believe that this is a communication. It does happen." We returned to the idea of surrender — to art, to love, to people and to the things we cannot control.

That, ultimately, is what Brownie has come to mean to me. It is not simply a film about grief. It is about recognition. It is about the way one person's loss can make them see another person's pain, and how that recognition can become a connection. 

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE: