In contrast to the matrimonially ever-ready, emotionally giving heroine, these women were demanding—sexually, emotionally, materially
Illustration/Uday Mohite
The year is 1945, the film Zeenat. The song, a qawwali, “aahen na bhari, shikwe na kiye, kuch bhi na zubaan se kaam liya” (no sighs, nor complaints, no words did I deploy), perhaps the first all-woman qawwali on screen.
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If you already know she is there, you will see the actor Shashikala, in the chorus, in her first onscreen appearance, alongside future star Shyama. She was 11 years old and the teekha andaz of her presence is already discernible, along with a child’s slack body language. Shashikala, who passed away last week, was among the few remaining people who began their film careers before independence and represented a complicated history of women. Like others, Shashikala entered films as a child to support a family fallen on bad times. After 18 years in bit parts, negative roles, stunt pictures and the like, a classic mean bhabi role in 1962’s Aarti, inaugurated the most successful phase of her career. Her tight sarees, her sleeveless V-necks, her bouffant with side fringe, her angular eyebrow and dialogue delivery that sliced clean life a knife, defined her style.
People use the word vamp for such negative roles. But, it seems insufficient, because it is strongly tied to the idea of the campy sexuality of the cabaret, and provides a falsely limited history of women on the Bombay cinema screen. In reality there were a series of female antagonists in the social pictures of the time—kittenish and golden-hearted like Helen, breathlessly headstrong like Bindu, sharply mean like Shashikala, commanding like Nadira. There were older women too, like Lalita Pawar and Manorama.
In contrast to the matrimonially ever-ready, emotionally giving heroine, these women were demanding—sexually, emotionally, materially. They personified all the passions—sexual desire, jealousy, competitiveness, petty intolerance, toxic resentment—sometimes modulated, sometimes overflowing. Unlike masculine villains though, they rarely got the explanatory back story that contextualised them.
Women protagonists often sang in manicured nature, like gardens. But, female antagonists were often filmed singing near water bodies—especially those playgrounds of the rich, swimming pools at the Sun n’ Sand hotel, and indoor fountains—like mermaids, or perhaps sirens, we were supposed to hate, but who whispered sweet seditions in our ears with their style, glamour, adventurous risk taking and direct gaze. Amphibious creatures inhabiting some space between marginalised and privileged, attractive and acceptable, thrilling and threatening, the domestic and non-matrimonial.
Critics have spoken about the split of womanhood into heroine and vamp, but this critique seems limited, overly focused on their sexuality and also defining these sexualities in very narrow terms. Female antagonists also displayed a desire for power and importance, while heroines, however feisty, rarely challenged social structures. Even married vamps exceeded the limits of matrimony by asserting themselves strongly, sometimes unpleasantly.
In keeping with this mindset, the oft-noted merging of the heroine and vamp happened along tokenistic sexual lines. Heroine figures are now more sexy, but shorn of the vamp’s edge, her politically incorrect, but soul-stirring acts of revenge, anger and assertion. Even sexually, heroines often take up space primarily as victims of violence.
For the women who played vamps, like Shashikala, personal life does not seem to have been easy either. Demanding women erased from cinema, continue to be uncomfortable figures in life too, thrilling but threatening, searching for the stories that see them as people.
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
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