Thousands of mourning fans have paid their respects to Sridevi, the Bollywood superstar who drowned accidentally in a Dubai hotel bath over the weekend.
Sridevi’s body was flown home in a private plane owned by Anil Ambani, a Mumbai industrialist and entertainment baron.
By Wednesday morning, people had begun lining up along a security fence outside the private club near Sridevi’s home where her body had been laid out. A string of Mercedes and Audis ferried family members, Bollywood stars and VIPs in through another gate, with squadrons of private guards ensuring things stayed under control.
While the family had requested that all media leave their cameras outside while viewing her body, some photographs emerged on news sites and showed Sridevi’s body dressed in a vibrant magenta and gold sari with a heavy gold necklace around her neck and a large red bindi, the decorative forehead marking many Indian women wear. The red bindi is traditionally a sign that the woman wearing it is married.
By late afternoon, her body, wrapped in an Indian flag, began its journey from the club to the crematorium where her funeral took place according to Hindu customs. The body was carried in a truck decorated with flowers and a giant poster of the actress.
Condolences have poured in since the death of the actress, who redefined the importance of the female lead in India’s largely male-dominated film industry.
Sridevi, who used only one name onscreen, began her film career as a child actress and went on to star in regional films in southern India before making her Bollywood debut in the late 1970s.
By the late 1980s she was a name to reckon with in mainstream Hindi-language films, and was able to command top billing and dominate screen space in a film industry in which the heroine’s role was largely relegated to a few songs and a handful of romantic scenes as the leading man’s love interest.
In 1997, she married Kapoor, and stepped away from cinema for years while she raised her two daughters.
Over the last few years, Sridevi had been grooming her daughter, Janhvi Kapoor, for her Bollywood film debut later this year.
