Marriage and the Glamour Girl

Illustration/Uday Mohite

The wife, goes the old joke, is the last to know. Of course that joke, like all wife jokes, mocks a woman for being exactly what society conditions her to be: confined by domesticity and unaware and unquestioning of her husband's ghastly goings-ons because mera pati mera devata hai. If Mr Devata's goings-on are revealed, then she must take the relationship to the next level yaniki from wife to character witness while Stand by Your Man and Show the World You Love Him soars in the background.

Being a chavvani bon vivant remains the definition of ishtyle for many gents, but times change and so does marriage. Never mind the wifey-hubby TikToks the couple posted in the early days of lockdown, Shilpa Shetty made impressive use of the stereotype of the wife-is-the-last-to-know, when she testified in the case against Raj Kundra saying she had no idea what he was up to as she was very busy with her own work. A new version of conscious uncoupling to a not-so-fairytale wedding.

Whom does an actress marry? This question often reveals something about the state of gender and its vehicle marriage, at any given time.

For many years, a woman in the movies lived on the edge of respectability. Actresses had romantic relationships with colleagues and some resulted in marriage, but almost always under the condition that the woman stops working.

But it is not only about respectability, is it? A glamour girl is both desirable and dubious for people. Once a woman has tasted a certain power, some sexual and economic freedom, inhabited that curious thing called glamour, which detaches you from ordinariness and brings you to a fuller self, who are the men relaxed enough to be with them? Often it means marrying a richer man, so that the power equations of marriage remain undisturbed and he feels he owns that glamour.

The '90s women on screen were the in-betweeners, inhabiting that transitional time between the 20th and 21st centuries, between pre and post liberalised India. They came with some education, some sense of gender equality and a different confidence. On screen they were more frolicsome, more bodily, more frankly sexual and also more outspoken in the press. But the idea of the actress as an exception - outside the norm of acceptable womanhood - was still in the air, along with the anxiety of marriage for most women.

The slightly deflating matches of '90s movie stars like Madhuri Dixit and Shetty always seemed to represent this tension of changing times and the tussle between that idea of glamour and ordinariness in women.

In the new century much changed. Television made Bollywood acceptable, aspirational, almost respectable. Women entered movies via modelling, with a little more bargaining power. Gender attitudes shifted and women continue their careers post marriage and motherhood, alongside successful and glamorous partners. Shetty's straight-faced disconnection holds no sentimental pretense about the idea of marriage. Are these signs of equality? Maybe.

But perhaps glamour girls - even those not in the movies - dwell beyond these boxy frames of the proscribed equalities of marriage, or even the graded possibilities of historical moments. The expansive and mysterious journey of the solitary self, sometimes glimpsed in a Sulochana, a Rakhi, a Rekha, a Kamini Kaushal asks different questions about freedom, love and being. Not everyone feels ready to reply.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com