Coronation Street’s Shobna Gulati has opened up about their non-binary identity. The star, who was a familiar face as Sunita Alahan in the soap for over a decade, divulged that they’ve always felt this way but only found the language to express it more recently. They also shared details of being in love, with an openness to dating anyone regardless of gender. “I’ve become more happy describing myself as a person. What do people call it now? Non binary. So, I suppose that’s who I am,” Shobna confessed. “I’ve never had a word for it, but I’ve learnt from our younger generation what that might look like in terms of a word, because I know what it feels like in terms of being me.”
Non-binary individuals don’t settle on a solely male or female identity; they might experience a dynamic sense of gender, see themselves as a mix of both, or fit into neither category. On their Instagram, Shobna has stated ‘she/they’ as their preferred pronouns.
In a candid chat with Kaye Adams on the How to be 60 podcast, which airs on Friday 21 March, 58 year old Shobna shared: “All the way through my life I’ve never had the words for that and I’ve never managed to explain that and I suppose my immediate family have not really thought about it,” reports the Mirror.
“They’ve just thought: ‘Shobna is either extremely feminine or extremely masculine.’ Because I was just accepted as a person who fell out of the tree and equally the person who put on all this makeup and did a dance.”
Shobna opened up about a transformative conversation with a sound engineer while working on the same show, which sparked a personal revelation. “The sound person said to me that they were non-binary and I said: ‘what is that?’ So, then they explained and I thought – ‘well, I feel like that, but I didn’t ever have that vocabulary.'”
“They said that they saw themselves as a person and that the gender – the he or the she – wasn’t important to who they are. And I thought: ‘that’s all I’ve ever thought.’ And I think now I’m free to say it out loud. I think people around me have accepted who I am for a long time without any explanation, but I suppose when I’m asked now, I’ll say it.”
Achieving stardom in the late 1990s as Anita in Victoria Wood’s Dinnerladies, Shobna mentioned the societal pressure to conform to feminine norms during their upbringing. Chatting with Kaye Adams, Shobna reminisced: “My father would say things like: ‘oh you haven’t dressed up today,’ or ‘you haven’t washed your hair,’ or ‘your hair looks limp, you can’t go out like that.’ I’d say: ‘why not?'”
“He’d make comments along the way – I walk like a boy. Lots of people tell me I walk like a boy and I do. I just don’t know quite where it all comes from, it’s just who I am and I’m happy in that now.”
Shobna soared to fame in 2001 as Sunita, the Coronation Street shop assistant. Sunita’s on-screen journey was peppered with drama: marrying convenience store king Dev Alahan, giving birth to twins Aadi and Asha, and being at the heart of gripping plotlines.
However, Shobna has confessed feeling uncertain during their tenure in Weatherfield, revealing soap chiefs seemed eager for a dramatic exit for her character. “Keeping your job is relentless,” Shobna remarked. “It’s not a given that once you’re on a programme like that you stay. They were forever trying to kill me and eventually they did.”
A Lancashire native, Shobna entered matrimonial bliss with architect Anshu Srivastava in a traditional Hindu ceremony at the age of 23. Their wedded chapter spanned four years before Shobna took on single parenthood, welcoming son Akshay, who is now 30.
The actress, whose heart was once entwined with Emmerdale’s Gary Turner for a stretch of time while on Corrie, shared: “I did have relationships, but then they were very public.”
“It was sad for me, because I didn’t feel that I got enough time to have a relationship and to have more children and have a private life, because it was so un-private and so exposed. But it’s done now and I haven’t had any more children. I didn’t get that opportunity, which sometimes I feel sad about, or I didn’t meet the right people because of everything that was out there.”
In a heart-to-heart on the How to be 60 podcast, Shobna confessed: “I think I’ve loved this person all my life.”
They also revealed openness to dating anyone in the future, saying they’d happily date someone regardless of whether they were male or female. Shobna shared: “That is also something I’m looking at – what that means to me. So yes, I would go for a person absolutely, regardless of their gender.”
Since Shobna’s departure from Coronation Street, they have enjoyed a thriving acting career, recently appearing in the comedy series Hullraisers and portraying Vera’s boss Chief Superintendent Khalon in the last two episodes of Vera earlier this year.
They attribute a boost in acting roles to the decision to embrace natural grey hair four years ago, although it came with personal costs as one boyfriend criticised the choice. Reflecting on her experiences with men and aging, Shobna revealed: “Men have been quite aggressively anti my grey hair,” adding “I was seeing somebody and they said: ‘your sister looks younger than you because she’s got black hair.'”
She then told how she promptly dismissed him after he insinuated her worth diminished with age, “She’s actually older than me. I said: ‘is that to do with her hair?’ Apparently yes. I dropped him immediately, because I just thought – well, he already has these views about me growing older. My worth as a woman became diminished, because obviously when you’re younger you’re more valuable.”
“I just kept thinking about that and I thought – I don’t want to surround myself with anybody who thinks age is not valuable, because I think age is so valuable.”
Shobna revealed her family had mixed reactions to her decision. “There was a lot of comment from the family on the WhatsApp all around the world of different generations.”
They questioned why she stopped dying her hair, given the tradition of maintaining long, dark locks. “It was the older generation of my family who have been dying their hair and asked me why I’d stopped. I suppose because it’s such a tradition to have this long dark brown or black flowing locks. It was mainly the women who said: ‘you will look older.'”
“What’s wrong with looking older? I think it’s distinguished. For me it’s not about the aesthetic, it’s about the realisation that I am growing older.” She found that embracing her natural hair influenced her acting roles. “I found also in my work that I wasn’t getting parts that reflected my age, because I was going up for mums. It’s helped a lot; I’ve even been a grandma and I really enjoyed it.”
Content with the ageing process, she said, “I’m quite happy with the ageing process. I’m all for what’s going on in my mind. Ok, everything else is hitting the ground or sagging or whatever, but I’m not really bothered anymore.”
Shobna also looked forward to her own approach to turning sixty. “I’m hopeful of that growth emotionally, where there’s none of the noise from my youth or my midlife,” she explained, hinting at an exciting personal evolution. “I want that next journey where there’s no noise. Kids have grown, my parents have died, it’s a new beginning. I don’t want to be anything but who I am anymore.”