Gujarati child actors have been working on the Indian screen since 1952, when Bimal Roy cast a ten year old billed as Baby Asha Parekh in Maa. Asha Parekh went on to the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2020. Bhavin Rabari won the National Film Award for Best Child Artist at the 69th National Film Awards for Pan Nalin's Last Film Show, India's entry for the 95th Academy Awards. Hitu Kanodia collected three Best Child Artist awards before he was sixteen and was later elected to the Gujarat Legislative Assembly from Idar, and Ghanashyam Nayak's child role in Masoom in 1960 began a career of roughly a hundred films and around three hundred and fifty television series that ended only with his death in 2021.
Every list of child actors is really a list about survival rates, and most of them refuse to say so. A ranking would be dishonest here anyway, because the interesting variable is not who was best at nine, it is what the industry had available for them at nineteen. Hindi cinema, in particular, has no category for a teenager who has already carried a feature. Darsheel Safary won a Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actor at ten and then spent most of the following decade with nothing appropriate to do. That is not a story about a failing actor. It is a story about a missing rung.
So this page tracks twelve verified Gujarati child performers and what actually happened next, in the order the industries used them. The ones who converted a child credit into something else entirely, including a Dadasaheb Phalke Award and a seat in the Gujarat Legislative Assembly. The children of the nineties satellite television boom. The class of 2007, when two Gujarati boys turned up in the same Aamir Khan production and one of them ended up holding a Screen Actors Guild trophy. The children who grew up inside a single daily sitcom and got recast anyway. And the Gujarati screen's own children, where the answer to what happened next is the most encouraging on the page.
The list at a glance
| Performer | The child credit | Year | Where they went |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asha Parekh | Billed as Baby Asha Parekh in Bimal Roy's Maa | 1952 | Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2020, and the Padma Shri in 1992 |
| Ghanashyam Nayak | Child artist in Masoom, billed as Ghanshyam | 1960 | Around 350 television series, and Nattu Kaka in Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah |
| Hitu Kanodia | Best Child Artist for Meru Mulade | 1980 to 1981 | Over a hundred Gujarati films, then MLA for Idar from 2017 |
| Kavin Dave | Bunty in Filmy Chakkar, then Junoon and Jai Hanuman | 1993 | Rakesh Jhunjhunwala in Scam 1992, plus Bey Yaar and Gujarat 11 |
| Avika Gor | Anandi Singh in Balika Vadhu, after Ssshhhh...Koi Hai | 2007 | A Telugu film career and a SIIMA Best Female Debut award |
| Gracy Goswami | Pinky Patil in Bandhan | 2014 | Begum Jaan in 2017 and young Khanzada Begum in The Empire |
| Darsheel Safary | Ishaan Awasthi in Taare Zameen Par | 2007 | A study break, then Hukus Bukus and the Gujarati film Kutch Express |
| Tanay Chheda | Rajan in Taare Zameen Par, then teenage Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire | 2007 | A Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the Slumdog cast |
| Bhavya Gandhi | Tapu in Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah | 2008 | Five Gujarati films from 2017 onward, and a negative role in Pushpa Impossible |
| Jheel Mehta | The first Sonu in Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah | 2008 | Left in 2012, and the role has been recast three times since |
| Aarohi Patel | Child artist in Moti Na Chowk Re Sapna Ma Ditha | Not published | A commerce degree, a TV9 internship, then leads in Gujarati cinema |
| Bhavin Rabari | Samay in Last Film Show, also called Chhello Show | 2021 | National Film Award for Best Child Artist at the 69th National Film Awards |
How this list was built
Inclusion needed a documented child screen credit plus one of three Gujarati links, applied the same way in every entry: a documented Gujarati family in a public source, birth or upbringing in Gujarat, or a substantial body of Gujarati language screen work. Kavin Dave is here on the third leg, since English Wikipedia states no family origin for him but records the Gujarati films Bey Yaar and Gujarat 11, and this page says so in his entry rather than implying an ancestry. Names were dropped for evidence, not for interest. Satish Vyas, the child actor of Toofan Aur Deeya in 1956 and Hum Panchhi Ek Daal Ke in 1957 who later led the 1968 Gujarati film Maadi Mane Kahewa De, has no free licensed photograph and no verifiable account, so he is named here rather than shipped as a blank. Nidhi Bhanushali, who played Sonu on Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah from 2012 to 2019, and Kush Shah, who played Goli for sixteen years, were both cut because a live Instagram scrape returned only low follower accounts with no corroborating detail, and a name match on an empty profile is not verification. The child cast of Gandhi & Co., which won the Golden Lotus for Best Children's Film at the 69th National Film Awards, and the child cast of Dhh, which won Best Feature Film in Gujarati at the 65th, were researched and left out for the same reason: no encyclopedia entries, no free photographs, and no scrape verified accounts. Aruna Irani, who made her debut as a child artist in Ganga Jumna in 1961, was excluded because English Wikipedia records an Irani father and a Hindu mother and gives no Gujarat connection at all. Where a date is not published it is left out rather than estimated, which is why two entries are absent from the chart.
The ones who became something else
Three careers that began with a child credit and ended somewhere the child could not have predicted.
1Asha Parekh
Bimal Roy saw her dance at a St Xavier's College function in Bombay and cast her in Maa in 1952. She was ten, and for the next four years the credits read Baby Asha Parekh: Aasman in 1952, Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in 1953, Baap Beti and Dhobi Doctor in 1954, then Ayodhyapati, Aasha and Ustaad in 1956. She also shot for Jwala from 1956, though production delays kept it unreleased until 1971. Then Baap Beti flopped, the offers thinned, and she went back to school. That is the ordinary ending for a child actor and it is what makes what happened next unusual.
At sixteen she tried again and Vijay Bhatt rejected her for Goonj Uthi Shehnai on the grounds that she was not star material. Eight days later Subodh Mukherjee and Nasir Hussain cast her, and she spent the next two decades as one of the biggest box office draws in Hindi cinema. Kati Patang won her the Filmfare Award for Best Actress. Akhand Saubhagyavati won her the Gujarat State Award for Best Actress in 1963. She directed the Gujarati television series Jyoti in 1988. She later chaired the Central Board of Film Certification, published her autobiography The Hit Girl in 2017, took the Padma Shri in 1992 and the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002, and in September 2022 was handed the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2020. Seventy years from a child credit to the highest honour Indian cinema gives, with a schoolgirl's gap in the middle.
Photo: Prime Minister's Office, GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons.
2Ghanashyam Nayak
He grew up in Undhai, a village in Mehsana district, the son of a man who wrote music for Gujarati plays. He was billed on screen simply as Ghanshyam when he appeared as a child artist in Masoom in 1960, the Satyen Bose film that carried Nani Teri Morni Ko Mor Le Gaye, a song that every Indian child has sung since without knowing whose film it came from. That was the fame. Then came sixty years of work that almost nobody outside the trade could name.
The numbers are the argument. Roughly a hundred Gujarati and Hindi films. Around three hundred and fifty Hindi television series. More than a hundred Gujarati stage plays. Playback on more than twelve Gujarati films alongside Asha Bhosle and Mahendra Kapoor, and dubbing work on more than three hundred and fifty Gujarati films. He played a Bhavai performer in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. And at sixty four he became Nattu Kaka, the accountant at Gada Electronics, which is how most of India will remember a career that began before Nehru died. He worked through a rare cancer, told his family he wanted to die with his makeup on, and his son had a professional makeup artist do it before the funeral. Tu Rajee Re, a Gujarati film, released after his death.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
3Hitu Kanodia
He is the son of Naresh Kanodia, which in Gujarati cinema is roughly the equivalent of being born inside the studio. He started as a child artist and collected three Best Child Artist awards before he turned sixteen, for Meru Mulade in the 1980-81 season, for Jugal Jodi in 1982-83 shared with Bhavik Vyas, and for Ujali Meraman in 1985-86. Three awards for three separate films across six years is not a lucky casting, it is a working child professional inside a functioning industry, at a moment when Gujarati cinema was still producing enough films a year to sustain one.
The adult career runs past a hundred Gujarati films and a Best Actor award for Saajan Tane Mara Sam, and it is still running: his Instagram lists Vash Level 2, Faatine, Ekka, Raado, Kothi, 1947 Kamthaan and Behadd. The second career is the one that separates him from everyone else on this page. He lost the Kadi seat in the 2012 Gujarat Legislative Assembly election, came back in 2017 and won Idar, and served a full term as an MLA. Almost every child actor spends adulthood trying to be taken seriously. He got himself elected.
Instagram: @hitukanodia (verified 2026-07-29).
Children of the satellite television boom
Indian television started needing children in bulk in the nineties and never stopped.
4Kavin Dave
Indian satellite television arrived in the early nineties and immediately needed children. He was one of the few who could deliver on a daily schedule. Bunty in Filmy Chakkar from 1993, then Vishal Rajvansh in Junoon, the Doordarshan era serial that ran from 1994 to 1998, and then, at twelve, the double job of playing both Bal Hanuman and Bal Raavan in Jai Hanuman. Playing the child versions of a god and a demon in the same mythological is the sort of casting note that only makes sense in a decade when there were maybe fifteen employable child actors in Bombay.
The adult career took a decade to restart and then did not stop. Mumbai Meri Jaan in 2008, then My Name Is Khan, I Hate Luv Storys, Kyaa Super Kool Hain Hum, Kick, a Telugu debut, a Marathi film and the lead in Bumboo. He has two Gujarati films on the record, Bey Yaar in 2014 and Gujarat 11 in 2019, which is the documented Gujarati screen work his place on this page rests on, because English Wikipedia states no family origin for him. In 2020 he played Rakesh Jhunjhunwala in Scam 1992 and a generation that had never heard of Junoon learned his face. Maja Ma, Dhoom Dhaam, Andhera, Mrs. Deshpande and Ek Din have followed since.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
5Avika Gor
Balika Vadhu was a serial about child marriage and it needed a child who could carry the weight of the subject without being cute about it. She was around ten when she started playing Anandi Singh, and the show made her one of the most recognised children in India while the story it was telling was about a girl with no say in her own life. Four ITA Awards followed. She then played Roli in Sasural Simar Ka, which is the trap: the same industry that hires a child will happily keep her in the same building for the next fifteen years.
She left the building. Morning Walk in 2009 was a Hindi film debut, but the real move was south. Uyyala Jampala in 2013 won her the SIIMA Award for Best Female Debut in Telugu and she built an actual Telugu filmography out of it, through Cinema Choopistha Mava, Ekkadiki Pothavu Chinnavada, Raju Gari Gadhi 3 and Shanmukha in 2025. In between she made a film in Kazakhstan and its spin off. She married Milind Chandwani on the set of a reality show in September 2025. Of everyone on this page, she is the one who most deliberately used a different language industry as an escape route from a child image, and it worked.
Photo: Ajay Kumar, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
6Gracy Goswami
Born in Vadodara in 2003 and working on Hindi television by 2014, which makes her the youngest verified entry here and the only one whose entire career sits inside the streaming era. She played Pinky Patil in Bandhan at eleven. Three years later Srijit Mukherji cast her as Laadli in Begum Jaan, a period film about a brothel on the Radcliffe Line, which is a hard first film for a fourteen year old and a long way from a daily serial.
In 2021 she played the young Khanzada Begum in The Empire on Disney+ Hotstar, the child version of a character Drashti Dhami carried as an adult, which is a neat illustration of how the Gujarati bench on Indian television keeps handing roles down its own line. She has no free licensed photograph on Wikimedia Commons, so her entry here rests on a live scrape of her Instagram account, which carries the platform verification badge, a talent management contact and a working professional address, checked on 29 July 2026.
Instagram: @gracy.goswami (verified 2026-07-29).
The class of 2007
Two Gujarati boys in the same Aamir Khan production, and the two very different decades that followed.
7Darsheel Safary
The Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actor went to a ten year old in 2007, and Indian cinema then had no idea what to do with him. That is not a criticism of the boy, it is a structural fact: there is no part in the Hindi film economy for a thirteen year old who has already carried a two and a half hour feature. Bumm Bumm Bole came in 2010 and Zokkomon in 2011, both of them still built around him being a child. Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children in 2012 was the last of them. Then the roles ran out, because the only category he fitted had closed behind him.
So he stopped and went to study, which is the single most useful decision available to a former child star and the one almost none of them make in time. He came back through the anthology Yeh Hai Aashiqui in 2016 and the sports drama Hukus Bukus in 2023, and in the same year turned up in the Gujarati film Kutch Express. The interesting number is the gap: sixteen years between the award and a career that looks like a working adult actor's, spent mostly not working. Nobody warns child actors about the middle bit.
Photo: Indiapuppet, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
8Tanay Chheda
He was in the same film as Darsheel Safary, playing Rajan, the classmate on crutches who is the only person in the school who is kind to Ishaan. Then, the following year, he played the teenage Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire. Two films, two years, one of them the Indian film of that decade and the other the film that swept the Academy Awards, and he was twelve for both.
The Slumdog cast took the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture and a Black Reel nomination for Best Ensemble, which means a Gujarati Jain boy whose family comes from Mundra in Kutch holds a Screen Actors Guild trophy. That sentence is worth sitting with, because Kutch does not usually appear in conversations about Hollywood guild awards. What he did afterwards is the same quiet answer several people on this page give: he did not chase it. There is no long adult filmography, and the record does not pretend otherwise.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Growing up inside one sitcom
A daily show cannot let a child grow up at her own pace. It recasts her instead.
9Bhavya Gandhi
The job he had was the most secure position available to a child in Indian entertainment: a named role on a sitcom that has not stopped airing since 2008. He held it for nine years and left in 2017, saying publicly that the makers were sidelining his character. Then the production did the thing that proves the point about how these shows work. It recast Tapu twice more, first with Raj Anadkat and then with Nitish Bhaluni. The character is bigger than any actor who plays it, and every child on that set eventually learns this.
The Gujarati filmography since is a working list rather than a nostalgia tour: Pappa Tamne Nahi Samjaay in 2017, Baap Kamaal Dikro Dhamaal and Bau Na Vichar in 2018, Kehvatlal Parivar in 2022. He had also played the child lead Suryakant in the Hindi film Striker in 2010, so his screen work predates the sitcom's peak. He now runs a verified Instagram account with over seven hundred thousand followers and his own website, which is a reminder that for this generation of child actors the audience is an asset you keep after you leave the show that built it.
Instagram: @bhavyagandhi97 (verified 2026-07-29).
10Jheel Mehta
She was the original Sonu, the girl in the Gokuldham gang who was cleverer than every boy in it, and she played her from the show's launch in 2008 until 2012. Four years, and then she was gone. What happened to the part afterwards is the most instructive thing on this page: Nidhi Bhanushali played Sonu from 2012 to 2019, Palak Sindhwani from 2019 to 2024, and Khushi Mali from 2024. Four actors, one child character, eighteen years and counting. A daily sitcom cannot let a child grow up at her own pace, so it replaces her instead.
The public record on her after 2012 is thin, and this page will not invent a second act she has not published. What the record does hold is a photograph from December 2015, taken at Samay Shah's fourteenth birthday celebration, with Bhavya Gandhi and Mandar Chandwadkar beside her, three years after she stopped being Sonu. Two of the three children in that frame had already left or were about to leave the show. The picture is the answer to the question this page asks: sometimes where they went is back to a normal life, and quietly staying friends with the people they grew up on set with.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Gujarati screen raises its own
The one place on this page where a child credit reliably turns into an adult career in the same language.
11Aarohi Patel
The detail that makes her the most interesting case here is the paperwork. She debuted as a child artist in Saandeep Patel's Moti Na Chowk Re Sapna Ma Ditha, and then she went and got a commerce degree at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, did a two month internship at TV9 Gujarati between April and June 2014, and took a postgraduate degree in development communication from Gujarat University. Nobody does a newsroom internship if acting is the only plan. She built a fallback and then chose not to use it.
Premji: Rise of a Warrior in 2015 gave her the first lead, opposite Mehul Solanki and alongside Maulik Nayak and Malhar Pandya, and the film went on to win ten Gujarat State Awards including Best Film. She has been a leading Gujarati actress since. The important structural point is that Gujarati cinema, unlike Hindi cinema, was able to take a child artist and give her an adult career in the same language, in the same state, without asking her to move to Bombay first. On this page that is rare enough to count as an achievement of the industry rather than of the actor.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
12Bhavin Rabari
A boy from Saurashtra playing a boy from Chalala, a village in Saurashtra, who spends a summer watching films from a projection booth by bribing the projectionist. Pan Nalin's Last Film Show was semi autobiographical, its cast was made mostly of child actors, and the casting director Dilip Shankar found them locally rather than in Bombay. That decision is the whole film. Samay's face doing the watching is what the audience actually watches, and there is no adult star standing between the two.
The film won the Golden Spike for Best Picture at the 66th Valladolid International Film Festival, the audience award in the World Cinema section at Mill Valley, a special mention at Milwaukee, and a Tribeca nomination, and it became India's official entry for the 95th Academy Awards and was shortlisted. At the 69th National Film Awards, announced in August 2023, it took Best Feature Film in Gujarati, and Bhavin Rabari took Best Child Artist. He has no free licensed photograph on Wikimedia Commons, so this entry rests on a live scrape of his Instagram, whose bio names the film, names the award and lists casting representation, checked on 29 July 2026. He is the most decorated child performer Gujarati cinema has ever produced, and he is at the start.
Instagram: @iambhavinrabari (verified 2026-07-29).
What the numbers say
Years since each performer's first credited child role
Elapsed years from each performer's first credited child role to July 2026. It measures how long ago the childhood credit happened, not continuous employment, and Ghanashyam Nayak died in 2021. Aarohi Patel is not plotted because no year is published for her child artist debut.
Questions people actually ask
Which Gujarati child actor has won the biggest award?
Bhavin Rabari won the National Film Award for Best Child Artist at the 69th National Film Awards, announced in August 2023, for playing Samay in Pan Nalin's Last Film Show. The film was also India's official entry for the 95th Academy Awards and was shortlisted in the Best International Feature Film category.
What happened to Bhavya Gandhi after he left Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah?
He moved into Gujarati cinema. He played Tapu from 2008 to 2017, left saying his character was being sidelined, and has since led Gujarati films including Pappa Tamne Nahi Samjaay, Bau Na Vichar and Kehvatlal Parivar. He also appeared in Pushpa Impossible in a negative role. The Tapu part has been recast twice since he left.
Is Darsheel Safary still acting?
Yes. After Taare Zameen Par in 2007 he did Bumm Bumm Bole, Zokkomon and Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children, then took a break to study. He returned through the anthology Yeh Hai Aashiqui in 2016 and the sports drama Hukus Bukus in 2023, and the same year appeared in the Gujarati film Kutch Express.
Which child actor from this list went into politics?
Hitu Kanodia, the son of the actor and politician Naresh Kanodia. He collected three Best Child Artist awards between the 1980-81 and 1985-86 seasons, built a career of over a hundred Gujarati films, lost the Kadi seat in 2012 and was elected to the Gujarat Legislative Assembly from Idar in 2017.
Why is the child cast of Gandhi & Co. not on this page?
Gandhi & Co. won the Golden Lotus for Best Children's Film at the 69th National Film Awards and its young leads were researched carefully, but none of them has an encyclopedia entry, a free licensed photograph or a scrape verified social account. This site does not ship an entry it cannot evidence, so they are named in the methodology instead of being filled in with guesses.
Sources and image credits
All photographs are free-licensed files from Wikimedia Commons, reused with the attribution each licence requires. No press agency or studio photographs are hosted on this site. Instagram content is linked or embedded from the official account, never re-hosted.
- English Wikipedia biographies of the twelve performers, retrieved 29 July 2026
- English Wikipedia articles on Last Film Show, Masoom (1960), Maa (1952), Gandhi & Co., Dhh and Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah for casts, award years and recasting dates, retrieved 29 July 2026
- Wikimedia Commons file metadata for licence, photographer and date on every photograph used
- Live Instagram profile scrapes via Apify on 29 July 2026 for the three entries without a Commons photograph