Introduction

“I argue that women, even as subordinate players, always play an

active part that goes beyond the dichotomy of
victimisation/acceptance, a dichotomy that flattens out a complex
and ambiguous agency in which women accept, accommodate,
ignore, resist, or protest – sometimes all at the same time.”1

The works of Guru Dutt Padukone, now widely recognised as some

of the masterpieces of Indian cinema’s ‘golden age’ of the 1950s,

although melodramas2, are not feminist or even ‘women’s films’. In

almost every case (Baaz perhaps excepted) they chart the social

and emotional development and economic ‘arrival’ of the

impoverished but educated lower middle class man in the urban

society of modern India. In some of these cases, the films convey an

1
Quoted from A. MacLeod in Signs, 17, 3, 1992 by Shoma. A.
Chatterji, 1998, Subject: Cinema, Object: Woman, p. 222.
2
Melodrama is ‘used to describe cultural genres that stir up
emotions’ often structured around tragic notions and ideas of good
and evil, and focused on the family: ‘In melodrama, the emphasis is
not on the psychology and lifestyle of a unique individual but on the
functioning of characters in situations that push their emotions to
extremes. Melodrama needs to be read metaphorically rather than
for its literary or other values.’ (Dwyer, 2000 p. 108.)

See also Cooper, 2005, who discusses melodrama in comic and

tragic registers (pp. 8-12). Classic studies include Peter Brooks,
1995, The Melodramatic Imagination and Thomas Elsaesser, 1985,
‘Tales of Sound and Fury’. Melodrama is by definition the cinema of
‘excess’ (L. Williams, 1991, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and
Excess’, quoted in Gabriel, 2005, Imaging a Nation).

The ‘women’s film’ is a sub-genre of melodrama, often also called a

‘weepie’, particularly prevalent in the 1930s to 1950s in Hollywood,
focused on a central female character and often leading to her
punishment or tragic end as a consequence of her independence.
See Molly Haskell and Annette Kuhn’s chapters in Thornham (ed.),
Feminist Film Theory. Both forms are seen by many (western/male)
commentators as lesser than the western, privileged mode of
‘realism’, as are other popular ‘Third World’ cinema genres.
intensely narcissistic and individualistic focus – through their realist

mise-en-scène and use of close-up – of the psychological and

physical condition of the male artist-protagonist, and his suffering at

the hands of an unforgivingly conservative social order. Guru Dutt’s

films are among other things pleas for the social acceptance of

artistic creativity, interrogations of that creativity and its value,

investigations of new social realities and individual entrepreneurial

struggle in a rapidly modernising state in the process of

(postcolonial) redefinition, and politically-founded social critiques

and contestations of the colonial legacy, of the family and its feudal

traditions, and of the promises of a new Nehruvian post-

Independence constitutional settlement. Like many of the classics of

the era, they are explorations of ‘modern’ concepts of social

mobility and social relations, of the corrupt nature of old value

systems, of citizenship and relation to the state, and of morality,

individuality and identity in an economically-defined newly-capitalist

and newly-fluid world. They are also explorations of the economies

of modern romance, and of the unpleasant truths of family and

society behind a hypocritical veneer. Unsurprisingly, it is particularly

within these contexts that women feature.

I emphasise these themes over the representation of women as it is

precisely because Guru Dutt’s films are examples of mainstream – if

middle class – popular cinema, and because they are not dedicated

to any special exploration of or focus on women and women’s roles

but, on the whole, fall within the broad bounds of cinematic

convention, that the portrayal of women in them is worth

investigation. Guru Dutt’s women are interesting because they

emerge from a context of conventional patriarchal cinematic and

social norms, and must contend as individual characters with these

circumstances. Guru Dutt’s female characters are almost always

strong women, but are not feminist symbols. In some ways, Guru

Dutt’s films can be read as ultimately endorsing the conservative

status quo, and as containing reactionary themes and concerns on

the subject of women – for example the mockery of Sita-Devi,

Anita’s feminist divorce-campaigning aunt in Mr & Mrs 55. As

Chakravarty argues,3 films in the 1950s were expected to provide

‘the right solution to moral dilemmas’ not psychological truth. The

women characters are bound within Indian cinematic and social

conventions of the 1950s, yet, as I argue, in many ways the women

of Guru Dutt’s films engage critically with audiences and offer a

more progressive ‘narrative excess’4 over and above the plot

resolution on issues relating to women’s social position.

Guru Dutt’s life and influences

It is difficult to produce any kind of analysis of Guru Dutt’s work

3
Sumita S. Chakravarty, 1993, National Identity in Indian Popular
Cinema, p. 99.
4
‘Narrative excess’ is the residue of meaning or emotion arising
from a character or scenario that is not contained within the
resolution of the plot or plot-strand. It may remain as a problem,
challenge or sensation beyond the diegetic limits of the film: a sort
of spill-over of meaning, feeling, implication or consequence. See
also M. Citron, J. Lesage, J. Mayne et al. in Thornham (ed.), Feminist
Film Theory, who discuss the power of women figures to exceed the
plot structure for women spectators.
without referring to his career development and personal life, as his

early death has overdetermined readings of his films, giving him an

almost mythic status, in which his own romantic view of the tortured

artist is read onto his films. Nasreen Munni Kabir, in her biographical

study,5 emphasises the autobiographical aspects particularly of his

later films, suggesting that ‘Guru Dutt’s films, starting with Pyaasa,

seemed to reflect his own emotional life.’6 She reads Guru Dutt’s

films as interpretations of and parallels to reality, and his career as

intimately interwoven with his personal life – from his troubled

marriage to playback singer Geeta Roy, with whom he had three

children but from whom he later separated; to his friendships with

Dev Anand and comedy actor Johnny Walker; his discovery of

Waheeda Rehman and subsequent alleged doomed relationship with

her;7 to his own experiences of unemployment, family financial

struggle and artistic rejection and his several suicide attempts,

culminating in his death by overdose in October 1964, at the age of

just 39. It is hard, from this distance, to establish how much of this

context was relevant to 1950s and 1960s audiences, and my

intention is to focus primarily on the films as cinematic texts

5
Nasreen Munni Kabir, 2005, Guru Dutt: A Life In Cinema.
6
Ibid., p. 107.
7
Neither Guru Dutt nor Waheeda Rehman, nor any of their
colleagues, has ever confirmed any relationship beyond the
professional between them. It was said that Waheeda, a Muslim,
was insistent that she would marry a Muslim; and in any case Guru
Dutt was by then a married man. Abrar Alvi says that they were
barely speaking by the final scenes of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (Saran,
2008).
independent of their autobiographical element. Nevertheless, there

are scenes where (subsequently) audience appreciation of the

overlaps between art and reality give an added dimension to the

drama on screen, or to a character, and these aspects are likely to

be relevant to an analysis of the portrayal of women, and of men’s

relationships with women, in his work.

Kabir’s book also points to sources of influence for Guru Dutt, from

the development of his expertise in choreography, dance and

‘expression’ (the projection of emotion) during his training at Uday

Shankar’s Almora dance academy, then as dance director at the

renowned Prabhat Film Company, where he befriended Dev Anand

and Rehman; his work as assistant to Amiya Chakravarty, a leading

director of the 1940s, and to Gyan Mukherjee, a role model to Guru

Dutt and director of hit 1943 film Kismet. These, along with a

feeling for Bengali literature and culture from his upbringing in

Calcutta (a connection perpetuated through his marriage to Geeta

Roy) form the main Indian influences.

But Guru Dutt had an international focus to his work. The

interviewees in Kabir’s book, as well as his script-writer (and

nominal director8 of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam) Abrar Alvi’s account of

his years with Guru Dutt,9 suggest the many western influences on
8
Abrar Alvi wrote the script for Mr & Mrs 55 and was credited as
director of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, including winning a Filmfare
award, but it is generally accepted (though denied by Alvi) that the
film was ‘ghost-directed’ by Guru Dutt himself, a position I have
accepted in the context of this dissertation.
9
Sathya Saran, 2008, Ten Years With Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi’s
his work. His enjoyment and admiration western films, and his

occasional borrowing from them, are mentioned, for example Drive

A Crooked Road,10 and an Italian film named Bitter Rice.11 So also is

his Orson Welles-like habit of appearing in cameo in the early films,

and, as Darius Cooper points out, his ability to lift and reinterpret

scenes from western films.12 In his own essay, ‘Classics and Cash’13

he cites a range of examples including Ben Hur, How Green Was My

Valley, and Wuthering Heights.

Darius Cooper argues of Guru Dutt that ‘Hollywood was his

consummate teacher and inspiration’. Guru Dutt’s adoption of

Expressionist-derived ‘noir’ elements, including lighting and mise-

en-scène, particularly in the earlier films such as Aar Paar, and

Baazi, and his focus on modern technique, such as Cinemascope

(Kaagaz Ke Phool was India’s first Cinemascope production), the

entry of his films to international film festivals including the Oscars,

and later that he sent his cinematographer, V.K. Murthy, to Greece

to learn about colour filming on the set of The Guns of Navarone

(1961), all indicate his ability to draw inspiration from a wide range

Journey.
10
Cited in Kabir, p. 86. A Hollywood film: no date or director cited.
11
Cited in Kabir, p. 55. Jaal was based on Riso Amara (1949),
directed by Giuseppi De Santi, according to Guru Dutt’s brother.
12
Darius Cooper, 2005, p. 5, for example, he cites Dutt’s use of
‘screwball comedy’ and also similarities to Citizen Kane (Orson
Welles), as well as Mozart’s 40th Symphony in G Minor, (p. 80-1),
Singin’ In The Rain, and others (p.82, 85).
13
Reprinted in Kabir, p. 209-13.
of sources. They also suggest that his eye was on an international

context, and on techniques of filming and narration that would

engage a wider audience than Indian cinema-goers alone.

Cooper goes on to say: ‘All his films show a very conscious adoption

of the Hollywood ‘modernist’ mode,’ and reads Guru Dutt’s films as

largely derivative of western cinema adapted for an Indian context.

These elements certainly make it easier for western audiences to

understand his films. For example, they rarely depend on a religious

context, as most Hindi films do.14 His subjects, as director Farhan

Aktar is quoted as saying,15 ‘are contemporary… Guru Dutt’s films

were about human emotions and they don’t change.’ And his

themes are those of modern life: the city, relationships, poverty and

unemployment, ambition, recognition, isolation and loneliness,

success and failure, artistic creativity, sexuality and desire, identity,

death and despair.

Yet however recognisable these themes and tropes may be to a

westerner (as I am), it is not possible simply to apply western

14
The only film with religion as a motivation for action is Jaal, which
is set in a South Indian Christian fishing community (see Kabir, p.
50). Other films, for example Pyaasa, also contain Christian
references. The characters, however, are from a range of faiths and
are not seen practicing their religion. As Kabir points out, “Guru Dutt
always showed a secular India in which his screen characters, all
belonging to different castes and creeds, interact freely.” This
statement doesn’t include Chaudvin Ka Chand, a Muslim social
directed by M. Sadiq and produced by Guru Dutt, which I have not
generally speaking included in this analysis as it doesn’t bear all the
hallmarks of a Guru Dutt film.
15
Kabir, 2005, back cover blurb.
cinema theory or feminist criticism directly.16 Theories of melodrama

do not fit neatly onto Guru Dutt’s work either, particularly in

representations of women, given their cultural specificity. As Mishra

says: ‘The point is that there is no exact match between an Indian

film and a Western melodrama. What happens is that melodramatic

features are selectively used… because melodrama in this cinema is

not simply a genre, it is collectively representation, narrative

structure, and a “mode of cultural production/assimilation”.’17 Darius

Cooper’s readings, for example, sometimes feel contrived,

overlooking essential cultural perspectives. Understandings of the

‘male gaze’,18 the fetishisation of female stars19 or women’s roles in

16
Authors such as Dwyer (2000, 2006), Dwyer and Pinney, eds,
(2000), Nandy (1998), Das Gupta (1991), Vasudevan (ed.) (2000),
Chakravarty (1993); Prasad (1998), and Mishra (2002), have
theorised Indian Cinema and its development extensively,
delineating differences in spectatorship, genre, aesthetics, myth,
and socio-political context that shape the way meanings in Indian
cinema are constructed. Chatterji (1998) elaborates strategies of
feminist film criticism derived from western sources that provide
useful methodologies for reading films critically (pp. 3-9) but
highlights the problems these raise, namely their cultural and
epistemological specificity. She says: ‘I myself found them difficult
to understand and place within the context of Indian Cinema’ (p.
11), saying that they are ‘too Western’ in their constructs and
therefore an ‘artificial, superficial imposition from without would
have intruded into the specifics of Indian cultural, mythological and
social foundations’ (Ibid.) This position is one that Gayatri Spivak
and Chandra Mohanty have elaborated in greater detail.
17
Vijay Mishra, 2002, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, p. 36,
(quoting Rajadhyaksha, 1993, p. 59).
18
Laura Mulvey, 1999, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in S.
Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory. Mishra (2002, p. 100-1)
criticises this as ‘post-Enlightenment individuated subjectivity’,
while Prasad (1998, Ideology of the Hindi Film, p. 74) says that
‘darshan’ (see explanation on p. 14 n. 27 below) prevents the effect
of voyeurism from occurring where it is used in Indian films.
19
Mulvey, in Thornham (ed.).
film noir20 and other feminist film theories do not offer

unproblematic sources either. Guru Dutt experimented consciously

with most of the genres of Indian cinema – the social (generally

family-based melodrama and romance21), the historical or period

film, the thriller, and the Muslim social, as well as effectively

creating a new ‘confessional’ genre of his own in Kaagaz Ke Phool.

He also worked closely with traditions of Urdu and Bengali writing,

particularly its aspects of the ‘renouncing’ hero22 and tropes of love

and romance, including the work of the Marxist-aligned Progressive

Writers’ Movement, which included figures such as lyricist Sahir

20
See E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), 1998, Women in Film Noir, and
particularly Sylvia Harvey in Kaplan. The readings of women specific
to post-World War II US/European situations do not apply with the
same effect in India and the understanding of the ‘vamp’, while
borrowed in Guru Dutt’s films, is reworked in much less sexually
threatening Indian style but is set against different standards
including nationalist meanings, for example.
21
Rosie Thomas defines the ‘social’ as: ‘the broadest and, since the
1940s, the largest category and loosely refers to any film in a
contemporary setting not otherwise classified. It traditionally
embraces a wide spectrum, from heavy melodrama to light-hearted
comedy, from films with social purpose to love stories, from tales of
family and domestic conflict to urban crime thrillers.’ (Rosie
Thomas, 1987, p. 304, quoted in Prasad, 1998, p. 46). Prasad
explains how the social became the dominant form and included
fragments of other genres within itself, during the period of
transition from studios to independent producers (late 1940s, early
1950s).
22
Exhibiting a fatalism and passivity typical of the Devdas tradition
originating from the Bengali writing of Sarat Chandra
Chattopadhyay and picturised by P.C. Barua (1935), Bimal Roy
(1955), and more recently Sanjay Leela Bhansali (2002). For this
reason, Devdas is the film Suresh is making in Kaagaz Ke Phool. The
Devdas tradition is a self-referential trope indicating great Indian
cinema and tragic heroes. Dutt’s films followed on from the Devdas
era but his male protagonists in Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool, and
also for example in songs in Baaz and Mr & Mrs 55, exhibit many of
the same qualities.
Ludhianvi.23 Thus, Guru Dutt’s films may have a western sheen in

their technical aspects such as editing, camera angles, lighting,

close-ups and mise-en-scène and certain themes or scenes, but

remain deeply embedded in the historical development of Indian

cinema, the structural composition of Indian so-called ‘masala’24

films including in their adoption of a mix of genres subsumed within

melodrama, their blend of song and dance (adopting both western

and Indian musical styles with often highly poetic Urdu lyrics) with

narrative plot,25 their innovative (and often comic) use of regional

and local dialect, and some of their the visual modes, for example

the ‘tableau’26 and ‘darshan’,27 that characterised earlier

mainstream Indian cinema.

23
Ludhianvi wrote lyrics for Baazi, Jaal and Pyaasa.
24
Mixture (of genres, styles, song and narrative, separate elements,
different influences etc), see for example Dwyer, 2000, p. 106;
Pendakur, 2003, Indian Popular Cinema: Industry, Ideology and
Consciousness, p. 169.
25
Guru Dutt was innovative in making songs integral to the plot.
26
See Vasudevan (ed.), 1998, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, p.
108, re: Andaz (Mehboob Khan, 1949). A tableau is a static, posed
arrangement of figures on the screen in symbolic relation to one
another, often seen frontally, as in religious symbolism or a
mythological film.
27
Darshan is the practice of looking at devotional object or being,
based on an exchange of looks between worshipped and
worshipper, and the notion of seeing and being seen. Darshan is
given by the person/deity being looked at, and taken by the looker.
Prasad, calls it a ‘message from the symbolic’, while Dwyer explains
it is ‘dissimilar to elite western disembodied, unidirectional and
disinterested vision’. Darshan interrupts the cinematic gaze and
notions of fetishisation; and as Gabriel (p. 102) argues, it ‘precludes
the possibility of voyeurism’ because it is a two-way process. See
also Prasad, p. 75-7; Dwyer and Pinney, 2000; and Dwyer, 2006, p.
19.
Guru Dutt’s films are also situated firmly within the social, cultural

and political milieu of one of India’s most convulsive periods, the

time immediately preceding and following Independence and

Partition. As such, the political, legal and social context of

decolonisation and of the constitutional process that determined the

shape of the new Indian nation loom large within his films, from

social unease and fractured families to the passage of the divorce

laws in 195528 to planning and political processes setting out new

modes of citizenship and utopian ideals for the state’s role and

relationship to families and individuals, among which was the

fraught question of the role of women, and the control of women’s

bodies and femininity.29 Women’s roles were contested nationally,

28
The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. See Patricia Uberoi, 1996, in P.
Uberoi (ed.) Social Reform.
29
See for example Maitrayee Chaudhuri in Patricia Uberoi (ed.)
1996, Jyotika Virdi, 2003, The Cinematic Imagination, and Partha
Chatterjee, 1993, The Nation and its Fragments. Chatterjee argues
that Indian nationalism’s focus on women as the locus of
differentiation from the colonial power, upholders of tradition and
essential Indianness, and symbols of the nation, was in part because
women were associated with ‘home’ as opposed to the ‘world’ – the
male domain – where colonial rule had applied. It was also a
material/spiritual dichotomy. ‘Nationalists asserted it [the colonial
power] had failed to colonize the inner, essential, identity… which
lay in its [India’s] distinctive, and superior, spiritual culture.’ When
home/world was seen as divided into gender roles, Chatterji says,
this gives the framework on which nationalism responded to the
question of women, thus making women bearers of the spiritual and
symbolic production of the nation. (Chatterjee, 1993, p. 121).

Jyotika Virdi (2003, p. 67) says: “The female figure as mother and
nation also embodies sacrifice and forebearance. Fixing the figure of
the woman in this context within the national unconscious occurred
culturally along with the idea of reclaiming a reinvented “Indian”
past.’ Why, she asks, have women been constructed so relentlessly
in this idealised mode in the period following Independence, when in
other respects Indian cinema was relatively progressive? Her
as well as cinematically (as nationalism was contested through

women), with the almost ubiquitous trope of the mother – the

idealised, self-sacrificing, but also morally avenging woman-as-

nation – taking centre screen. However, while his films contest

almost every other aspect of women’s roles, the role of mother in

Guru Dutt’s films is curiously absent (see chapter 3, below).

Feminist film criticism

Film studies were early on influenced by feminism, particularly with

psychoanalytically-based theories such as those of Laura Mulvey30

and Mary Ann Doane.31 Mulvey’s study provides the foundation for

much feminist film analysis. It theorises the ‘gaze’ or look as a

masculine one and bearer of power within the film and between

character, camera and spectator, creating a relation of voyeurism

(scopophilia) from which spectatorial pleasure is derived, but in the

process dividing male and female viewing pleasure into active

(male) identification with the male protagonist and passive or

‘masculinized’ female identification – either as the ‘object of the

look’ or having to identify with the male protagonist in fetishising

response is that the figure of ‘woman’, usually as the mother, ’was

once again deployed to shore up a sense of unity.’

Chaudhuri discusses the Sub–Committee on Women of the National

Planning Committee (1938, headed by Nehru), which produced a
Utopian document on Women’s Role in Planned Economy, setting
out paths to equal citizenship through family, work, education, law
and social customs, see Chapter 2 p. 34 and n. 72/3 below for
further discussion of this.
30
Mulvey, (originally 1981), in Thornham (ed.), 1999.
31
Doane, 1999, in Thornham, (ed.).
the female characters. Subsequent theorists have critiqued this and

other psychoanalytic views as insufficiently ‘resistant’,32 for failing to

take into account women’s capacity for critical or oppositional

readings of film. Feminist theory went on to explore issues such as

ideology, subjectivity, agency, genre, the spectator, and the

relations of gender to all of them.33 However, as Gabriel says, ‘the

non-western subject remained outside the field of vision’.34

Feminist theories have been gradually problematised as they

became applied out of their original contexts in the increasing

globalisation of knowledge. One of the most important critiques to

arise from this process with relevance to applying feminst theory to

Indian culture has been that of commentators such as Gayatri

Spivak and Chandra Mohanty. Mohanty, for example, seeks to

unpack the western globalised capitalist bias and assumptions of

much of feminist theory, arguing that western-written or western-

published writing on women and feminism tends to lump ‘Third

World women’ together as an undifferentiated lot, thus often

32
See Judith Mayne and Julia Lesage in Thornham (ed.), and
Thornham’s own commentary, p. 111-2; See also Annette Kuhn in
Thornham (ed.), p. 161.
33
See Gabriel, 2005.
34
My own approach to feminist analysis is based on literary theories,
which share many of the same psychoanalytic, structuralist and
socialist roots with film studies, including the works of Julia Kristeva,
Luce Irigaray, Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bhakhtin, along with
theorists from Kate Millett to Mary Daly and Toril Moi among others,
and on to sociological and cultural studies and postcolonialist writers
such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhaba. I have not
cited these in the bibliography unless they have been directly
quoted elsewhere in the text.
overlooking or eliding problems of race, class, nationality,

colonisation and decolonisation, sexuality, ‘identity’, and ways in

which knowledge is produced and privileged, while assuming that

US or European culture is the norm upon which theoretical

assumptions can be predicated. She argues particularly that there is

no single monolithic construction of patriarchy and that western

feminism is often constructed as imperialism by women from

South/Third World nations.

The notion of ‘woman’ as a ‘cultural and ideological composite Other

constructed through diverse representational discourses’ is

produced differently within different cultural contexts, Mohanty

points out, as women are constructed by the social relations into

which they are inserted as subjects: ‘That women mother in a

variety of societies is not as significant as the value attached to

mothering in these societies. The distinction between the act of

mothering and the status attached to it is a very important one –

one that needs to be stated and analyzed contextually.’ The concept

of women in 1950s’ India was further complicated by decolonisation

which, Mohanty says, involves: ‘profound transformations of self,

community, and governance structures. ‘35

Women in Indian Cinema

Although there are studies specifically about women in Indian

35
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 2003, Feminism Without Borders:
Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, p. 7. See Mohanty pp. 4-
12 for an outline and p. 19 and ff. for notions of constructions of
‘woman’ and feminist imperialism.
cinema, there is only a limited body of work on which to base

feminist analysis rooted in Hindi cinematic tradition.

Shoma A. Chatterji36 states that she set out to write her book

precisely because she realised that it was not possible to map

western feminist cinema theories onto Indian film, and that women’s

roles in Hindi popular cinema deserved exploration and

understanding within their own context. Instead of psychoanalytic or

Marxist/socialist methodologies, she examines the place of women

in Hindu myth as one foundational source for the representations of

women in cinema – both as ideal and as deviant – and goes on to

look at themes of marriage and divorce, rape, adultery, suicide,

prostitution and male masquerade, suggesting that the ways in

which women are figured in cinematic texts are inevitably almost

always linked to their sexuality and their family roles.

Jasbir Jain and Sudha Rai37 examine women’s representation from a

range of perspectives, though mainly in relation to films from the

1970s onwards, including how female bodies are presented,

courtship, Muslim women and marginalisation, Bengali cinema,

women and Hindu nationalism, gender and caste, comedy and

space, offering a range of different ways of reading specific aspects

of women characters in Hindi and other Indian cinema.

36
Chatterji, 1998, Subject: Cinema, Object: Woman. A Study of the
Portrayal of Women in Indian Cinema.
37
Jain and Rai (eds), 2002, Films and Feminism: Essays in Indian
Cinema.
Karen Gabriel38 looks at the sexual economy of Indian film since the

1970s, investigating the construction and articulation of gender in

cinematic discourses and the process of exchange between gender,

sexuality, representation and nation involving the transfer of

meanings and values, and the shaping of desire and forms of

femininity and masculinity in mainstream Indian films.

Other texts look at gender and women more or less incidentally, as

one part of a broader set of interpretations, whether that is about a

particular era or genre, in the context of sexuality and romance, or

cinematic figurings of nationalism, citizenship, and the shaping of

the national psyche, or investigating ways in which films create

cultural meaning. While a number of authors place the roles of

women in cinema at the heart of national cultural symbolism – much

has been made, for example, of the iconic role of Nargis as Radha in

Mother India39 – few make an investigation of the representation of

38
K. Gabriel, 2005, Imaging a Nation: The Sexual Economies of the
Contemporary Mainstream Bombay Cinema (1970-2000).
39
See Gayatri Chatterji, 2002, Mother India; Vasudevan in Uberoi
(ed.) 1996, p. 97; Chakravarty, 1993, p. 149-56; Dwyer, 2000; and
Mishra, 2002, among others, on the iconicity of Nargis/Radha in
Mother India. Vasudevan quotes a publicity release on Mother India:
“The woman is an altar in India. She is loved and respected,
worshipped and protected. Be she child, a wife, a mother, or a
widow, she is so jealously protected that the entire culture of a
nation revolves around her person.” Mishra calls her a
‘supermother’ and a ‘semantic and structural invariant’ in Hindi
cinema. The role was consistent with and symbolic of the
mythification of the essence of womanhood – defined as
motherhood – in nationalist thought (see p. 14, n. 29 above). Indira
Gandhi later also adopted an association with Mother India to call on
values that would embue her with populist power, when she
claimed: “India is Indira”.
women’s roles as central to their thesis,40 perhaps because of the

cultural predominance of this single trope of motherhood, as well as

the multiplicity of necessary ways of analysing women’s roles: both

India and women are too diverse, yet are held together symbolically

and culturally in a unity of value(s) signified by motherhood.

Similarly, texts specifically on the works of Guru Dutt have not given

the portrayal of women in his films a central place.41

Chatterji lists the generalised facts of women’s representation in

Indian popular cinema, and cites also the findings of a Delhi feminist

group, the Committee on the Portrayal of Women in the Media in the

1980s.42 This committee found that the characteristics of women’s

portrayal were focused on domesticity and submissiveness, that the

‘good’ woman did not work or assert herself, but remained directed

toward marriage and the family.43

40
Karen Gabriel (2005) is one exception. Most have focused on
nation and looked at women, the construction of ‘woman’, and
women’s roles in film in relation to the nationalist context, while
others have focused on the ongoing struggle between the modern
and the traditional, both of which use women as signs for and
measures of cultural or psychological shift.
41
See N.M. Kabir, 2005/1996 Guru Dutt: A Life In Cinema; R.
Doriaswamy, 2008, Guru Dutt: Through Light and Shade; D. Cooper,
2005, In Black and White: Hollywood and the Melodrama of Guru
Dutt. Cooper does refer to feminist film theory, particularly in
relation to melodrama. He also gives quite extensive consideration
to some of the women’s roles in what he calls the ‘trilogy’ of Pyaasa,
Kaagaz Ke Phool and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam.
42
Chatterji does not give an exact date or reference for this quote
from the report or for the Committee itself. See Chatterji, p. 261-2.
43
The full quotation reads:

“ a woman’s place is in the home

- the most important and valuable asset of a woman is physical

According to this committee, the media defined ‘deviant’ females as

dominating their husbands and staying away from home, having

selfish personal ambitions, breaking up family ties and being

sexually promiscuous. Chatterji adds that from her own study of

cinema, mainstream films reaffirm and reinforce social definitions of

women, seeing them in gendered categories only in relation to men

and the family, and as subordinate to men.44

beauty

- a woman’s energies and intellect must be directed at finding

the right man and keeping him

- Women are dependant, coy, submissive….masochistic….

- The good woman is the traditional housewife, long-suffering,

pious and submissive. The modern woman who asserts herself
and her independence is undesirable and can never bring
happiness to anybody nor find happiness herself.

- The working woman is the undesirable exception who must be

brought into the marriage fold and must be made to submit to
the norms of society.”

44
Ibid. The full quote reads:

- “By and large, Indian mainstream cinema reaffirms and

reinforces social definitions of women.

- This underlines the fact that women are constantly defined in

relation to men, different from or complementary to them.

- Men, masculinity and male behaviour are always the

reference points for women.

- Women are defined in familial terms as carers and nurturers.

- Women’s identity and status derive from their relation to the

explicitly gendered categories of mothers, daughters and
wives.

- Therefore, women are defined not only in relation to men, but

also as dependent on men and subordinate to them.

Men on the other hand are never defined in relation to women….

but, in relation to a larger ‘public’ world in which they function as
While it is not clear from Chatterji’s book how these conclusions

were reached, or how the Delhi Committee on the Portrayal of

Women in Media established their definitions, I am not here going to

question their premises but to accept as a given the analyses on

which they are founded and use these criteria as a reference point

to establish where, and in what manner, Guru Dutt’s films conform

and deviate from these perceived Indian cinematic ‘norms’.45

This essay does not argue, therefore, for an understanding of Guru

Dutt as a ‘feminist’ director, although his was a radical vision and

several of his films featured trenchant social criticism of the

treatment of women. Instead, it hopes to lay the ground for a more

‘resistant’46 reading against the grain of the women characters in his

films, a reading that shows where Guru Dutt consciously broke the
workers, colleagues, citizens.”
45
The notion, and deification, of the ideal woman is all-pervasive in
Indian culture. Dwyer (2000) says the ideal is Sita-Savitri – the
submissive and faithful wife, drawn from Hindu myth, and that
conceptions of sexuality are different from those in western culture.
Dwyer and Manjunath Pendakur (2003, Indian Popular Cinema:
Industry, Ideology and Consciousness) both also quote the Laws of
Manu, which define women as ‘not fit for independence’, and view
their sexuality as dangerous unless it is controlled and positively
channelled by marriage where women are subjected to mandatory
sex with the aim of reproduction. Chatterji gives a range of different
feminine ‘ideals’ from goddesses in myth including Sita, Draupadi
and Radha (see chapter 1 in Chatterji (1998)). Dwyer also quotes
the 18th Century Stridharmapaddhati (Guide to the religious status
and duties of women), which exhorts: “Not only may a woman not
worship any god other than her husband, but she is also forbidden
to engage in any religious observance other than devotion to him.”
(See Dwyer, 2000, pp. 23-7). Gopalan, in Vasudevan (ed.), 2000,
says women are seen as ‘embodying and sustaining tradition,’ see
p. 227.
46
See Julia Lesage in Thornham (ed.), p. 111-12 and p. 115-21. See
also Annette Kuhn and Christine Gledhill, also in Thornham (ed.).
mould in his portrayal of women’s lives, but also where those

characters go on to resist the closure and re-absorption of their

dilemmas and desires into the bourgeois narrative structures

imposed on them: where convention is upheld, but ‘narrative

excess’ remains.