For Shahana Goswami, her latest show, Four Years Later, is more than just a return to the screen. It’s a poignant mirror to her evolution as an actor. Coming off the heels of the internationally acclaimed Santosh, a searing narrative exploring caste and police brutality, the 39-year-old actor finds herself playing a romantic lead, perhaps for the first time in her two-decade-long career.
“I laugh because it’s taken me this long,” she says, referring to her character Sri Devi in Four Years Later, now streaming on Lionsgate Play. “But it’s also refreshing and liberating to explore love on screen as a grown woman.”
Directed by Ayan Mukerji, the series tells the story of Sri Devi, a woman navigating the shifting sands of selfhood and companionship post-marriage. Portraying her on-screen husband is Akshay Ajit Singh, but what sets the show apart, Shahana says, is its layered, non-clichéd portrayal of a relationship in flux.
“The beauty and the tragedy of modern romance is that it’s not about a lack of love, it’s the difficulty of syncing two evolving individuals. The mismatch of timing, the chaos of life, that’s what causes the disconnection.”
What continues to draw her to cinema is its ability to embrace the quiet intimacy of human emotion. She recalls Santosh, directed by Sandhya Suri, where the titular character isn’t a damsel in distress but a strong, morally ambiguous woman navigating a broken system. Similarly, in Four Years Later, Sri Devi is a woman open to dating apps, arranged marriage, and finding herself anew, sometimes all at once.
“She prioritises love and marriage, yes, but also realises there’s more to her life. That realisation comes not from crisis but from introspection. That’s what makes her journey real.”
Shahana has never shied away from playing complex, assertive women, characters who live, breathe, falter, and fight. Whether it was Debbie Mascarenhas, the resilient wife in Rock On!!, or Muneera in Firaaq, or Amina in Midnight’s Children, her filmography reads like a testament to women with agency.
More recently, she played an ambitious corporate executive in Bombay Begums, the manipulative Meenakshi in A Suitable Boy, and a stoic woman constable stepping into her deceased husband’s role in Santosh, each role peeling back different layers of the female experience.
What’s changed, she says, is that these so-called “niche” stories are now gaining mainstream traction. “Mainstream means something very different today,” Shahana reflects. “Thanks to OTT platforms, stories once considered too specific or subtle are now reaching not just India, but audiences around the world. There’s space now for nuanced female narratives and space to perform them.”
Despite this evolution, Shahana admits the journey has been anything but easy. The industry’s creative imagination, she says, is often paradoxically limited.
And yet, despite the fight against being pigeonholed, she has remained true to her craft, waiting for stories that do justice to her range.”Acting is not about choosing roles as much as choosing from what’s offered. You wait, you hope, and when the right one comes, you know it.”
While women are finding more dimensional stories, Shahana believes storytelling as a whole has evolved, for everyone. “Male characters have also grown. There’s more space now for fragility, emotional depth, and men navigating the effects of patriarchy. It’s no longer about just being the hero or the protector.”