Leading ladies in a bias-cut

[1]

By Jigna Kothari and Supriya Madangarli [2]

Rs 299

By all accounts, the Hindi film industry is one of the toughest in the world, and the women who venture into it must be the toughest in the world as well, but not too many books have been written about them.

Of course, there have been some biographies, some chapters in other works on cinema, but hardly anything that might be called comprehensive. So Mother Maiden Mistress: Women in Hindi Cinema, 1950-2010, is exciting territory to venture into, and the blurb on its very pink cover promises everything, not least “a cracking good read”. At least one of its authors, Bhawna Somaaya, has been a well-known fixture on the Bollywood scene for 20 years or more.
But the book’s first pages tell you all the usual stuff (Dadasaheb Phalke and Kamalabai, those odd-looking “women” in the pool in Raja Harishchandra), and then we’re on to various banalities: heroines played with their pallus in the 1950s to act coy, and women in Raj Kapoor’s films were “sugar and spice”. It is said that the world of Bollywood can be notoriously secretive, hierarchical and sycophantic, but one can’t help feeling that a mere fan in far-off Jhumri Talaiyya might have had more to write about the ladies in question here. And he or she might also have given some thought to the implications of the title — it seems that the three authors haven’t thought about it too much.
In their stead, I find myself wondering — what is this book about? Surely, if you’re an adult female human being “in” Hindi cinema, it means that you’re included in what is called “Hindi cinema”. Which is to say that you’ve worked yourself to the bone on locations, sets and studios for years until perhaps the moment when you receive the accolade sweeter than applause: the gift of knowing you made your mark. Perhaps, by that time, you may be dead, but fans will talk about you long after certain books have been pulped. They may wonder who you were, as they see you doing the cha-cha in a swaying crinoline behind Shammi Kapoor. They may recognise you as the hero’s sister in one role, the heroine’s college friend in another. They may read your name in the crew credits as “editor” or “cinematographer” or “director”. And they’ll also know that the divine voice flowing from the lips of the heroine belongs to another legendary woman who needs no introduction at all.
Still, I feel I ought to name her — Lata Mangeshkar — along with her equally legendary colleagues, Asha Bhonsle and Geeta Dutt. The three deities of Hindi film music are absent from a book which has taken its title to only mean: “The heroine’s role in Hindi cinema”. Even if this premise was acceptable, it should have been apparent that the heroine could never have been constructed without her music — imagine Suchitra Sen in Aandhi without a single song to her role, merely wandering the ruins draped in a shawl…
What we have here, besides the excluded singing trio, is a book without Nadira; a book that condescends to give a “special mention” to Helen; a book that disposes of the genius of Smita Patil in one paragraph; a book that can’t bring itself to think about “junior artistes” like Tuntun and Manorama; a book that, while drooling over Madhuri Dixit for several pages, does not examine the role her choreographer Saroj Khan played, or how the editor Renu Saluja might have saved several careers with judicious cutting — in short, a book which is oblivious of the marvellous scope of its own subject.
To be fair, it wouldn’t have made much difference even if it had been such a book, because its style favours nothing so much as the kunji university students swot away at to get through exams: pages and pages of rehashed plots masquerade as criticism. So we learn that at the end of Bandini, Nutan remains a “bandini” because she runs back to the lover who betrayed her? As if everyone in this film-mad country didn’t know that already. There are no feminist readings of a performance that must surely inspire them, no investigations of the film’s metaphors of imprisonment and madness. The authors make only a few forays into extra-textual reading, and these are commonplace ones about all women on screen being Sita, Savitri, Draupadi, Kunti or Surpanakha. I began to find these mythological tropes tedious, especially when the authors made every filmi character confirm to them. Surely there are enough stories in the Bible as well, to illustrate the virtuous wife, the evil vamp and the awful mother-in-law, but no — ever since somebody or the other observed that the only two stories in India are the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, it’s become something of a film-writing pastime to match, say, the apsaras to the item girls, Draupadi to any lead role that goes a little militant, and leave it at that.
The book’s “nuanced historical perspective” is equally unimaginative: a majoritarian narrative of newspaper headlines about wars, governments, five-year plans and urban migrations. It would have been more to the purpose to excavate the hidden histories of women in film — how did they survive in this “industry”? What mysterious forces made their body sizes evolve to zero? What secret battles have they fought over the years, never deemed worthy of print or discussion?
The one section of the book quite worth reading is Shabana Azmi’s interview, in which she reflects about her evolution as an actress. Interestingly, she’s also the only person in the book to acknowledge other contributors to cinema, while the stars “walk away with the most applause”. The other interviews are more of the usual — once again we hear Madhuri Dixit talking breathlessly about her Que Sera Sera number with Prabhudeva, and Hema Malini reminiscing regally about the good old days.
I also wonder what the editorial desk was up to. I really do wonder about the inspired moments in which it decided to publish a book on cinema without a single photograph, a “guide and an archive” without an index, and allowed the euphemism “sexual non-conformism” to stand for “lesbian” in the piece on Deepa Mehta’s Fire. Enough of all this. There is something here crying out for a remake. It’s got the same title perhaps, but a huge cast of characters, a very different producer who’s keen on taking a few risks, and perhaps a few young whippersnappers who might be bold enough to come up with something like a good story. What I’ve got in my hands at the moment, however, has a “rethink and rewrite” scrawled across it.

Anupama Chandra is a bibliophile who has been working as a film editor for 12 years. She studied literature at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and the University of Oxford, UK.