Indian actress Shabana Azmi uses her celebrity to effect social change

Shabana Azmi isn't one for sitting around. The star of India's big screen took time off from shooting a crime thriller last week to spend a couple of days in town supporting Hong Kong's first festival of Indian culture, India By the Bay.

Seemingly undaunted by the overnight flight, she had already been shopping ahead of our interview and had big dinner plans. "I keep saying I have to slow down, I have to take a break," the actress says. "My husband says that I am genetically incapable of taking a break."

Family comes up a lot in conversation: they are Azmi's absolute rock. It is not only a tight-knit family, but also one that is unusual in that everyone is involved in the arts: her father was a member of the Communist Party of India, a poet and writer, her mother a theatre actress. Her brother is a cinematographer, her sister-in-law an actress and her husband a writer. And in the Azmi household, art comes with a message.

"I grew up in a family that believed art should be used as an instrument for social change. It was something that I just imbibed by a process of osmosis," says the 64-year-old star.

That process didn't happen immediately. As with most young people, there was a period of rebellion. "There was so much politics discussed at home that there was a time I said I didn't want to have anything to do with it. I'm an artist, that's it. And it was to my father's credit that he never pushed it," says Azmi.

She made her screen debut at 24 and by the time she was 33 had won the National Film Award for best actress for Arth, the story of a woman's search for her identity. She went on to win the top film accolade the next two years and again in 1999. And along the way politics crept in - as she suspects her father always knew it would.