Sharmila Tagore’s husband Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi was the stay-at-home parent, recalls daughter Soha: ‘She was the breadwinner, Abba was home’ | Bollywood News

Sharmila Tagore was the actor who seemingly had a perfect life even back in the 1970s. She got married at 24 to Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, had three children – Saif Ali Khan, Saba Ali Khan and Soha Ali Khan, and continued to work as a leading actor in the movies till the mid-1980s. The idea of the perfect work-life balance has become a part of the mainstream conversation in the last few years but Sharmila tried to attain it at a time when female actors were often expected to take a break from the movies after they tied the knot. In Sharmila’s case, she was the “breadwinner”, despite her husband being a cricketer and coming from a royal family, and she enjoyed her work immensely.
In a chat with Instant Bollywood, Soha Ali Khan shared that her mother Sharmila Tagore wasn’t always present at home, but her father Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi would be the stay-at-home parent. “When I was born, my mother was still working and she loved her work, and she was very ambitious and she enjoyed working. Even today, she enjoys working so she made time for her work and she made time for her family but that also meant that she was not present for a lot of things with us at home. And it never bothered us,” she said.
Soha insed that her mother’s absence did not create any kind of “misgivings” among the children, in fact, she found it to be “very normal”. “It’s not like I have any kind of misgiving. It was very normal. And my visual was that when we were young, our father was at home and mom would sometimes be at work, and sometimes she would be with us. But the breadwinner was my mother,” she shared.
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In an earlier chat with The Hollywood Reporter India, Soha Ali Khan had shared that when Saif Ali Khan was younger, Sharmila Tagore sometimes wouldn’t see him for weeks and this upset young Saif. “Sometimes, my mother didn’t see my brother for weeks. And then, she would rush home to do bedtime with him and he would be like, ‘I don’t need you. I don’t want you right now’ because he was also upset. So he is fine with the didi and then you are like, ‘What did I rush home for?’” she shared.
Sharmila also spoke about the same at an event organised YFLO where she shared that she was “absent” from Saif’s life for the first six years. “When I had Saif, I was very busy. I was working two shifts a day and for the first six years of his life, I was really absent. I did whatever I had to do. I went for the parent teachers meeting, attended his plays but I don’t think I was a full-time mom. My husband was there, but I wasn’t. Then when I became a mother, I became an overzealous mother. I wanted to feed him, bathe him and everything. That was the other side of the pendulum. I made a few makes, honestly,” she said.