Kinjal Rajpriya

Chhello Divas premiered on 20 November 2015. Krishnadev Yagnik wrote and directed it, it follows eight friends through their final year of college, and it did a reported Rs 18 crore. She played Nisha. Janki Bodiwala, Malhar Thakar, Yash Soni, Mitra Gadhavi and Aarjav Trivedi were in the same twenty two person cast list.

At the time it was a film. In hindsight it was a starting gun: the picture that told distributors a young urban audience would buy tickets to hear its own language on a screen. Most of the careers that matter in Gujarati cinema right now start in that cast list, which makes what happened next unusually easy to compare.

In 2016 Yagnik remade his own film in Hindi as Days of Tafree, with Anand Pandit and Rashmi Sharma producing, and recast almost the entire ensemble. Two actors carried their characters across: Yash Soni as Nikhil and Rajpriya as Nisha. Nobody else made the crossing with their role intact.

It did not work. Days of Tafree opened to a reported Rs 60 lakh in its first weekend and disappeared. That is the crucial detail. She got the Bombay credit that every Gujarati lead is supposed to want, at twenty seven, on the exact terms an actor would ask for, and it delivered nothing. Everything she has chosen since reads like a person who has already tested that door and found it painted on.

Shu Thayu? in 2018, again with Yagnik, reported around Rs 21 crore. Then 2019 gave her two very different films in one year. Saheb, opposite Malhar Thakar, was a straightforward romantic drama. Short Circuit, directed by Faisal Hashmi, was the first science fiction film Gujarati cinema had ever tried, built on a time loop, and it needed visual effects on a budget that barely covered them. It came out to positive reviews and did well.

Kem Chho? followed in January 2020, written and directed by Vipul Sharma, and it brought her the Gujarat State Award for Best Actress. That is the only citation on her record that belongs to her alone rather than to the film. It came from a family drama, which is the one genre on her filmography nobody would call an experiment.

The 2020s have been dense. Dhummas in 2021, then 53 Mu Panu and Medal in 2022, then three in 2023: Nava Pappa, 3 Ekka and Var Padharavo Saavdhan. 3 Ekka reported around Rs 25 crore and stood second on the all-time Gujarati list on release. Var Padharavo Saavdhan, reunited with Vipul Sharma, was reported by The New Indian Express as the first Gujarati film to release in Kannada.

Put those two 2023 films beside 2016 and the shape of her career resolves. She has now personally tested both of the exit routes available to a Gujarati film. One went upward into Hindi as a remake and died inside a weekend. The other went sideways into another regional language and worked. She is the only actor with her name on both experiments, and she is still in Ahmedabad.