Renuka Shahane, the actress who played the role of Madhuri Dixit’s elder sister in the classic Hum Apke Hain Kaun, and is a popular face in Marathi films, recently revealed she got her periods at the age of 10. In a recent podcast on various stigma around periods, the actress revealed how getting early periods and bodily changes impacts one’s life later. She shared she still carries the feeling of keeping her body hidden due to the experiences she went through in her childhood.
In the podcast We Are Yuvaa, the veteran actress shared, “I got my periods when I was 10. Imagine, I am 58 today and I have lived most of my life with periods. I have enjoyed my childhood physiologically for a very little time. At such age, you have not developed that much in terms of brain to understand what is happening to your body. I was lucky because in my case, my mom drew a diagram to explain how this works. I was lucky because at my home, they used to discuss all this very openly. But, I couldn’t really understand what was happening and why. All I knew is this is not something bad or I am not suffering. I was assured of these things.”
She added, “Nobody in my school had periods, at least in my class. None of my friends had. So, I had to wait until they got their periods to share things. For them, it was three years later. For that period of time, I was feeling very lonely. You feel like you cannot speak about this to anyone. Luckily, I could speak about it to my mom. But, it does have some kind of impact on you psychologically also that you are also becoming bigger in ways that nobody is aware of. Nobody is talking about it in the school.”
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Renuka then recalled how lack of conversation around periods impacted her adulthood.
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“Because I could not have a conversation with any girl my age, the perception my body was growing was a matter of something that I had to hide and I think that is something carried forward with me. I have never been get over that feeling that my body has to be hidden. I am very conservative about the way I look at my body or the way I dress. This is something nobody thinks of but our childhood is the root for a lot of things that we carry on in our later life”, added the actress.
Inspired by her real life struggles around periods, the actress was the first celebrity to feature in an ad by a sanitary brand, where she promoted sanitary napkin going against the will of a lot of her near and dear ones.
In the same podcast, she revealed that she was grateful for taking up that project as it initiated various conversations around menstruation, educating people and creating awareness.
Talking about lack of awareness and conversation around the topic, the actress recalled an incident from her school time and said, “I remember once going on a school trip and a guy needed a band-aid. He randomly picked a sanitary pad and asked why is this band-aid so big? I felt embarrassed and guilty as if I was at fault or wronged someone.”
Renuka was last seen in the 2022 film Govinda Naam Mera starring Vicky Kaushal, Bhumi Pednekar, and Kiara Advani. She is yet to announce her upcoming projects.
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