‘Moving beyond Themselves’

Women in Hindustani Parsi Theatre

and Early Hindi Films
The first female roles enacted on stage were played by men. The first women
who tried to break the boundaries and appear on stage were those who came from
communities seen as “marginal” or too “forward”, for instance, the Anglo-Indians. Those
who came from “respectable” communities, such as actors from established Parsi families,
faced the threat of being ostracised. Acceptance by the audience and a female actor’s ability
and success in playing roles other than the merely conventional also belonged to
those who could physically claim a distance from India and Indians, as seen in Nadia’s
success in the stunt movies. But as more and more women came to dominate the stage and
later, even films, they had to pay the price for breaking the bonds of convention. Most of
them faded away after a short screen life and were later berated for their inability to settle
down as conventional “wives” and “mothers”. This article traces the careers of
some women, a few who came to dominate the stage, those who played memorable
roles in the silent film and talkie era and others who distinguished themselves
as singers, only to fade into oblivion a few years later.
MRINAL PANDE

I
n the beginning was the Hindustani Parsi theatre. Picture
this… The crucial third bell peals, the velvet curtains roll
up and the background music is struck for Chandravali
Natika. A pretty young flower girl steps out of the wings with
a basket in her arms, and begins to mince her way across the
stage, singing the hit song, ‘Do phool jani le lo’ (buy two flowers
from me my love!) in a high soprano voice. The all male audience
goes into a frenzy. Admirers whistle, blow kisses and roar, ‘Wasi
too zinda wasi’! (may you live long dear Wasi!). If stage legend
is to be believed, some fans of Wasi were so overcome by
emotions that they ripped their sleeves and fell in a dead faint
in the aisles.
This pretty vendor of flowers men were ready to kill for, was
a young boy, master Wasi of Lahore. He was not the only one.
There was also master Nisar, a young boy, whose money and
alcohol loving father kept him under vigil day and night. His
golden soprano, it is said, could rise above the scales available
on the keys of the harmonium. He dominated the stage from 1915
to 1935 but died of various kinds of addictions including opium
and alcohol.
To present-day readers news of such behaviour might
seem kinky or bizarre. But it is vital that we recognise the inter-
connections between these young baby-faced Parsi theatre
players of female roles and the present-day portrayal of
women in Hindi films. Their femininity may be different in
scope and degree, but not in kind. As women in the accepted
sense of the term in India, they have all been created, not
born. The Hindustani Parsi theatre which polished and
polished the art of female impersonation by male actors, was not
only the real precursor of Hindi films but also formed the
nursery for most of the early stars later to grace the silver screen
in India. From Parsi theatre Hindi cinema also inherited its
audiences and many of its histrionic traditions. And certainly
there was much more to this womanhood than a mere stuffing
of bosoms.
Early Years of Theatre
India of the 1920s was a society where sexes were firmly
segregated. Women from good families dared not come out into
the ‘mardaan khanas’ (spacious living rooms for men) of their
own house, where their husbands sat smoking their hookahs,
chewing pan and watching nautch girls dance and sing with their
male friends. Yet all communities, including the otherwise
progressive Parsis, believed that the presence of real flesh and
blood women in theatre groups and on stage would corrode moral
values and lead to extremes of debauchery. So not only female
impersonators but also editors, thespians, directors and theatre
owners, all came together in blocking real women from joining
commercial theatre companies and enacting female roles on stage.
Men, even company men, it was said, were so unused to serving
women at close quarters within their theatrical territory, that poor
Jamshetji Batliwala (of Victoria Company) had suffered a stroke
when he woke from sleep suddenly, and found a woman (one
Miss Fatima) in his room.
The basic reason for such extreme reactions lay in the nature
of marital relationships between man and wife in “respectable”
families. Marriage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was
mostly a euphemism for a socially sanctioned tie-up based less
on individuals and more on considerations of caste and class,
not romantic love. Sex was for procreation (‘prajapatye’), and
the perpetuation of the family bloodlines. There were many large

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joint families where husband and wife could come together only
in the dead of the night, to part before dawn like strangers. Most
adults had no opportunity for sexual experience before marriage,
and millions of married couples when the husband had to migrate
to another city for work of trade, faithfully endured long sepa-
rations – two to three full years or a decade or more, in separate
provinces.
The Indian script for romance, therefore, decreed that an
ideal man-woman union must be 90 per cent loyalty and mutual
respect and 10 per cent sexual gratification. And since sex was
not the glue of love, and abstinence caused by frequent segre-
gation was supposed to impart much spiritual cleansing, it was
but natural, that, in theatre and poetry, thoughts of love between
man and woman, should turn to fantasising. So we have plays
about old forgotten kings and queens, gods and demi-gods/and
goddesses, who could love with great abandon. They did not
have to indulge in lovemaking only to bear children. They also
did not seek permanent partnership to appease the souls of
one’s forefathers. They also could, and did, resolve all disputes
if need be, not by lovers’ quarrels or dialogue, but direct divine
intervention.
Still humankind being prone to frequent libidinous transgres-
sions, discipline for young female impersonaters, and later for
female actors, was often extreme and harsh. The man who was
most feared as a stickler for discipline, was Sohrabji Ogra, also
known as Sorabji Seth, of Victoria Natak Mandali. He was
strongly opposed to the idea of women playing themselves in
plays and quit the Alfred Company in protest when others insisted
on having them. Later he founded a new company, The New
Alfred, which did not employ women till as long as Ogra was
in charge.
Sometime ago while collecting material for a book on Hindustani
threatre, I came across Master Champalal, an erstwhile player
of female roles in various travelling Parsi theatre companies for
nearly a decade. He recounted in great detail the intense “sadhana”
that was required of young thespians to become the perfect
woman on the stage, whose ‘chal dhal’ (gait and graces) even
women from good families secretly emulated. Why, in
Maharashtra, women copied Bal Gandharva’s style of draping
the nine-yard sari, and walking, didn’t they?
Master Champalal himself had still retained some of this acquired
“feminine” airs as he reminisced about his past, fluttering his
eyelashes, moving his eyebrows up and down suggestively, and
making delicate gestures with his hands as he shared a particularly
juicy piece of stage-gossip. For the most part, the strange trans-
vestite world, as this talk revealed, was almost conventional, of
which parts such as the following would be especially familiar
to all women:
– You must never, ever cut your hair short. Long silky tresses
are a must for being a woman.
– As long as you play at being a female, proximity to males must
be a big no! no! If you must meet boy friends or male members
of the family, take care the threatre-goers never see you – meet
other men, and you risk getting a “reputation”.
– While travelling, you must sit in separate compartments from
male actors and stay in your tents upon arrival. You must never
invite men into your tents, whether from the troupe or from the
audience.
– The dance and music teachers would teach you how to modulate
your voice and carry yourself. Their word is your command.
– You should neither drink nor eat spicy food. They
Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2006
spoil the complexion and your voice, and make you manly and
“hot-tempered”.
Thus all communities in India were opposed to women on
stage. The credit (then mostly discredit) for introducing
women upon the Parsi stage belongs to Dadi Patel for which he
received support from Kaikhushrooji Nawaji Kabra (b1842), the
editor of the Parsi paper Rast Guftar. The other supporter of
women in commercial theatre was the well known actor
Kawasji Khatau, who later married the Anglo-Indian actor Mary
Fenton and allowed her to act on stage despite mumbled protests
from his colleagues. Kawasji was also a great admirer of
Shakespeare and was instrumental in getting several of his plays
translated (and adapted) in Urdu. Several of these plays went
on to become a hit on Parsi stage: Hamlet as Khoon-e-Nahak,
Romeo and Juliet as Bazm-e Fani, Winter’s Tale as Murid-e-
Shaq, Measure for Measure as Shahid-e-Naaz. Later Kawasji
founded his own Alfred Natak Mandali. In 1916 he travelled to
Lahore with his troupe to stage plays based on the epics, Mahabharat
and Ramayana. An editor, Lalchand ‘Falak’, who asked for free
tickets and was miffed upon being denied, spread nasty stories
in the city about one Muslim nautch girl (Gauhar) being presented
in roles of noble Hindu women such as Sita and Draupadi. The
result was an attack on the company and the destruction of its
valuable stage props which upset Kawasji deeply and he died
soon after a stroke.
First Female Actresses
After Batliwala’s Victoria Theatre Company introduced the
dazzlingly pretty Anglo-Indian, Miss Mary Fenton, many others
followed. Among them were Miss Gauhar, Miss Fatima, Miss
Jamila, Miss Bijli, Miss Kamali, Miss Gulab, Miss Ganga and
Miss Umda Jan. However Mary Fenton remained the most
sought-after female actor. She was the daughter of an Irish
soldier who after retirement went around presenting magic
lantern shows in Delhi. Mary and after she met Kawasji
accidentally and agreed to join his troupe, she rose to be a real
star. She played the role of Jogin in the Hindustani play
Harishchandra (by Talib) and Bholi Gul (Gujarati) in a play
by the same name and both the plays went on to become runaway
hits. Miss Gauhar and Miss Khatun were sisters who created
a brief flutter by doing female roles in Victoria Company. Miss
Khatun had a large circle of passionate admirers, one of whom,
it is said, cut off Khatun’s nose after a spat and nipped her
career in the bud. The New Alfred Theatre, owned by the Parsi
comedian Sohrabji Ogra, held out till the end, against hiring
women. It was only after Sohrabji Ogra retired, did the company
open its doors to women. Among the women actors, marriage
and having a family still exercised a great appeal. Mary Fenton
marrying the owner of Victoria, Kawasji Khatau, then quitting
the stage to become a respectable Parsi wife, mirrored the
aspirational trajectory of a female star.
According to the testimony of the veteran Parsi theatre actor,
master Fida Hussein “Narsi” (the title was bestowed on him for
his memorable role as “Narsi” Bhagat) women first entered the
commercial theatre around 1910-11. And the actor who
heralded the end of female impersonation by young boys was
one Miss Bijli who joined the Batliwala Theatre. She was
subsequently to shift to another company, the more pro-female
New Alfred Theatre where the famed actor-singer Gauhar
Jaan’s mother Putli Bai and her sister Sultana were also
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employed. Dadi Patel eventually managed to bring two Muslim
nautch girls from far away Hyderabad, to Mumbai, to act in
the musical Inder Sabha (by the 19th writer Amanat). One of
them, Latifa Begum, was a dancer and created such a sensation
(she danced, we are told till her socks tore), that the playhouse
on Grant Road could barely contain the audiences that poured
in to see real woman dance in a play. Passions ran high, and
came to a head, when one day a rich and unnamed admirer
arrived backstage and according to theatre legend, hid the
demure Latifa Begum in his overcoat and sped away in his horse
carriage. Two other actresses Amir Jan and Moti Jan (both from
Punjab) became singing stars. She too finally married one of
her many admirers and left the world of theatre along with her
sister. Both were not heard of after this.
By 1926-27, song and dance item numbers by groups of
young women had caught theatre goers’ fancy in a big way. The
Madan Corinthian Company had a group of 12 Anglo-Indian
girls groomed by the company’s dance teacher master
Champalal. Among them was one “pari chehra” (fairy-faced)
Patience Cooper, who soon became a rage all across north
India where the company presented its plays. Patience later
married a tea estate owner, one Isphahani Saheb and in 1947
migrated to Pakistan with her husband. Another Anglo-Indian
beauty was Molly. She created a sensation but disappeared
early, as she could not cope with the extremely harsh discipline
of Fida Husein’s company. In those volatile years when
theatre artists were considered playthings for the rich and
famous, and theatre groups regularly “stole” good actors,
dancers and singers from each other, the owners kept a hawk-
like vigil on their human resources. What was a trickle in 1911
became a flood by 1931. Several of the actors like Angoorbala,
Sita Devi, Indubala, Harimati and Kamala Jharia, were also
patronised and groomed by His Master’s Voice (HMV) music
company, and rose to become famous singing stars. As the
company travelled from one state to another and the need for
localisation grew, these singing stars and the company’s music
directors became invaluable to the company. Together they
would pick up and polish some local folk songs and introduce
these as a “special item” in whatever plays that were being
staged then. These songs became a big draw. Thus Sitadevi’s
Punjabi song, ‘Daal galay main bainyan main roye roye jaaniya’
(I would hug you around the neck and weep and weep, my love),
in the play Chalta-Purza, brought many “once morein” (once
mores), from the audiences in Punjab, and Alexandra Company
Heera Bai’s patriotic, ‘Khuda yeh Kaisi museebaton mein, yeh
Hind waley padey hue hain’, (oh god what hardship the
people of Hind face!) had the audiences yelling “once more !!”
in Delhi. Among the famous singing stars were the two
Zubeidas, known also as Zubeida one and Zubeida two. The
first was the daughter of a Burmese mother and one Hashain
Mir. She was born in Rangoon and rose to fame as a singing
star in Calcutta’s Moonlight Theatre in the early decades of the
20th century. Zubeida II was the niece of another famous actor
Putli Bai. She later joined the silent films and played the lead
in the first “talkie” Alam Ara. Angoorbala, who hailed from a
family of singing women, had such a lovely rich voice, that she
was chosen to play a male lead as Inder in Inder Sabha (by
Amanat). The recording company HMV, cut several discs with
her. For these, she was paid the princely sum of Rs 80 per disc.
It was later when a fiery Bengali musician, K C Dey took up
the issue of paying decent royalties to singers, song-writers and
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music directors, that the company relented and started paying
the singers 2.5 per cent of the total sales as royalty.
World of Motion Pictures
It was in an atmosphere such as this, that D G Phalke made
and released the first Indian motion film, his historic Raja Harish
Chandra on May 3, 1913 at the Coronation in Bombay. In the
film the role of the selfless king Harish Chandra’s tragic queen
Taramati, was played by a young boy Salunke whom Phalke had
discovered in a restaurant. Salunke was employed there as a cook
on a salary of fifteen rupees per month. The film went on to
become a hit and as the first world war broke over Europe, the
young cook Salunke became the first “female” star of the Indian
silver screen.
They say, Dadasaheb Phalke like, Sorabji Ogra before him,
had initially not been too keen to have a girl to play the female
part in his films. Like most Indians in the show business, he had
misgivings about women who fraternised openly with men, and
danced and sang. But shrewd businessman and sound judge of
the brand new medium that he was, he also realised that the camera
image was going to be a relentless destroyer of the willing
suspension of disbelief that had made female impersonators
acceptable to Indian audiences. But in the early years of the 20th
century, even prostitutes were unwilling to play female roles upon
the silver screen. After much persuasion, one such “professional”
woman did agree, but gossip has it, that when Phalke began
coaching her, her pimp materialised upon the scene and whisked
her away. Her loss was Salunke’s gain. And so pleased was Phalke
with his star performer that for his next film he conferred on
him honorary bi-sexuality for the silver screen. As Ram and Sita
in Phalke’s Lanka Dahan, Salunke became perhaps the first film
star in the world to bag the roles of both man and wife in the
same film.
Soon, however, the relentless exposures and close ups of the
cinematic image began to reassert the demand for women in
women’s roles. Also as the courtly ethos that made transvestitism
a socially accepted eccentricity of the “rich”, male actors also
become reluctant to play women’s roles. The legendary
V Shantaram, in his autobiography, registers his deep sense of
humiliation and hot resentment when he was made to don a sari
and play the role in a theatre company. When he later made his
film debut in Surekha Haran (1921) he saw to it that he played
a male role. The female lead opposite him, however, was played
by another young boy V Pagnis.
By the time Dadasaheb Phalke made his film Bhasmasur
Mohini (now lost) he had managed another miracle by acquiring
not one but two women to play the female roles in his new film
which was to be shot at three locations. This was the historic
mother-daughter team of Durga Bai and Kamala Bai Gokhale.
Kamala Bai Gokhale had already made her debut on the stage
as a dancer and actress although stalwarts like Bal Gandharva
– who enjoyed the hegemony over female roles – put up a tough
resistance against her entry into “their” world.
In an interview given to Cinevision magazine, the octogenarian
actress said:
No one encouraged a girl to take up film acting as a career… we
faced fierce opposition, particularly from actors who were playing
female roles on the stage. We were their first natural enemies.
They hated us. Some companies actually would not have women
performers as a matter of policy... like Bal Gandharva. He wanted
Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2006
 my husband to join this company, for major male roles opposite
his female roles, and when my husband accepted only on the
condition that myself and my mother should also be taken into
the company, Bal Gandharva refused.
(Cinevision, Vol I, p 25)
Women in Films
This was the internal irony of the performing arts from the
Parsi theatre era to the beginning of Hindi films in Dada Phalke’s
time. A caste of “shameless women” was necessary so that ‘honest
women’ could be treated with the most chivalrous respect; both
upon the stage and within the society. Yet it was necessary not
to let the “bad” female outshine the “good” and become respect-
able in real society, and so the actresses and singers might win
plaudits for their role of a “good” woman but they were firmly
showed their place outside and cast off stage when their time come.
The double standards observed by even the theatre-folk in
according respect to men and women appear sharp and clear in
master Fida Hussein’s memoirs [recorded by Pratibha Agarwal
1986]. He narrates how the awesome Agha Hashra Kashmiri,
the playwright, had made his eccentricities and addiction to
alcohol so much irrelevant so that once when a dead-drunk Agha
Saheb dressed in a satin lunghi, stood urinating in the middle
of the road, in front of the palace, his ardent admirers Sir C Y
Chintamani and Sir Mirza Ismad, asked their chauffer to turn
off the headlights and silence the engines so “Baba” may not
be disturbed. But when Raja Bharatpur’s favourite mistress, a
nautch girl Shyama Bai, reserved the prime seats for herself and
her entourage (including her English secretary) for a play being
staged by Sorabhji Ogra’s New Alfred Company, all hell broke
loose. When the lady, looking like an absolute angel in a turquoise
sari came and sat on the sofa in the “special class”, one of the
eminent males from among the audience went to the owner and
asked him if the laws of the company had been given the go-
by? How dare a lovely nautch girl come and occupy a prestigious
special seat in the area where the bigwigs sat? The owner asked
his men to withhold the performance and rushed his man, one
Amrit Lal Mehta, to Shyama Bai to request her to leave the hall
quietly. A livid Shyama Bai refused to leave, saying that she
had bought the tickets and was entitled to her seat. Ultimately
a deputy superintendent of police, from Delhi, Devi Dayal Malik,
who also happened to be in the audience, suggested that she be
physically removed by the company’s bouncers. He promised
he would take care to see, that no case could be filed against
the company by the lady. This was duly done, and despite loud
protests (in English) from Shyama Bai and her secretary, the
ladies were ejected and no case could be filed, despite Shyam
Bai’s great clout as the Maharajah’s favourite mistress.
In an interview to Lokmanya Tilak’s Marathi paper Kesri on
August 19,1913, during a trip to Poona, D G Phalke lays down
the law:
...It’d be better if female roles are enacted by women.. this is the
conclusion I have come to after spending 20 years in this (film)
industry …my five year old daughter acted in my film like Kaliya
Mandan and Krishan Janma …and when I needed help, my wife
too acted in female parts ...god willing, if one day these prostitutes
can be removed and replaced with women from good families,
our studios will no longer be compared with whore houses and
the prestige of the filmmakers and their teams will be salvaged.
...Then it will no longer be embarrassing to see films accompanied
by one’s mother, mother-in-law, daughter or daughter-in-law…
Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2006
if unfortunately women with good characters (‘charitravaan’)...
find their entry blocked by male wolves, I will request my sisters
to stare them down and chase them away. If this is still not enough
they should take to carrying sharp knives and use them in an
emergency (quoted from Patkatha in Nai Duniya, special number
on films October 4, 1988).
Inasmuch as this was a paid job, over the years, the actresses
went on to become the first group of working women to acquire
a certain financial independence. But this, instead of chasing
away the “wolves” as Phalke had termed them, and easing their
passage into respectable society, made female actors doubly
suspect. The strange, and yet not so strange story of India’s first
woman music-composer for films, (and also possibly the first
woman playback singer) Khurshid Minocher Homiji, a woman
from an educated middle class Parsi family, is illustrative of how
Phalke’s advice notwithstanding, even the most liberal and lib-
erated communities in India closed ranks when their own women
made forays into the film world. Khurshid, a Parsi girl, was the
disciple of the famous musicologist – teacher Pandit V N
Batkhande. Khurshid’s mother was a good singer herself and
secretary of Pandit Bhatkhande’s famed Sharada Sangit Vidyalaya.
She escorted her gifted daughters Khurshid and Chandraprabha
to the music school regularly where their considerable talents
were further groomed and honed under the indulgent eye of the
great musicologist. The Parsis as a community, have always been
in the vanguard of liberal change. The Hindustani Parsi theatre,
in fact owed its existence to this extremely intelligent and in-
novative community. And yet so terrible was the stigma of the
cine-world that when the Meherhomji sisters sang for an
early Bombay Talkies film, Jawani ki Hawa, the entire Parsi
community rose against them. The famous Parsi community
paper Jam-e-Jamshed launched a vicious compaign against them
and forced the girls into changing their name to “the Saraswati
sisters”. In an interview with Saraswati Devi (nee Khurshid) recalls,
My god, when I think of these days, my hair stands on end.. They
(the community) were determined to get us out of the films. The
newspapers added fuel to the fire…the result was the Himanshu
Rai and his unit were threatened, even their lives were threatened..
It feels very nice to see that things have changed today but the
memories of those days still arouse fear.
(Cinevision, Vol II, No II)
It would be several decades before film-women would be
invited into homes of the “bhadralok” and only a half century
later could one of them (Shabana Azmi) confidently challenge
the violent and suppressive anti-artist tactics of the ruling party
at a public function (the VIIIth International Film Festival) to
general applause. But one (unscheduled) speech on the
Doordarshan does not signal a radical change in public attitude
to “filmwalis”. Shabana was also subsequently hooted, criticised
and generally ridiculed for a perfectly spontaneous and justified
outburst by many media men and women, and called immature,
publicity-conscious and ungracious to boot. We have certainly
not come a long way from the time Phalke gave the following
interview to Lokmanya Tilak’s paper Kesri in 1913:
...Women from good Samskari families alone should act in films..
Brothers, how would you feel if Sita and Draupadi were to be
played by someone who is in the habit of using obscene gestures,
making lewd eyes and has a half-revealed bosom and a wiggling
behind? Would you not be enraged?…studios are not brothels…with
their innate breeding and aura of a respectable marital status, women
from good families (as actresses) will add a glow to the mythical
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 devis and to the atmosphere in and around our studios...Then no
one shall feel bad watching our movies in the company of one’s
mother, mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, wife or daughter.
(Translated from the original)
Sustaining Stereotypes
Strange as it may seem, it was also around this time the Gandhian
non-cooperation and Khilafat movements were bringing about
a rethinking on prevailing socio-political mores in some quarters.
However, instead of emphasising Gandhi’s views on women’s
emancipation, Gandhi’s emphasis on temperance was cunningly
seized by both the film-world and the British to justify censoring
out what they felt “threatened” womanhood, (white womanhood
to be precise), namely love between man and woman.
The majority of films, which are chiefly from America, are
so sensational and daring, “…(full of) murders, crimes and
divorces and on the whole degrade the white woman in the eyes
of the Indians.” So appeared a statement in the London Times
quoting a bishop from India in 1925. Another report said:
In every province and state visited by the delegation the evil
influence of the cinema was cited by educationists and the rep-
resentative citizens as one of the major facts in loweing the standard
of sex-conduct, and thereby tending to increase the dissemination
of disease.
(Neville Rolfe of British Social Hygiene Council)
In view of such “moral” questionings, it was decided to lay
down guidelines for censorship of films. A subterfuge was quickly
designed and a brilliant lawyer T Rangachari was chosen to head
the Indian Cinematograph Committee in 1927, when the Indian
film industry was barely a decade old. This committee sent out
4,325 questionnaires and examined 353 witnesses. One among
them was Dadasaheb Phalke. An excerpts from the interview
follows:
Chairman; Do you think cinema has got a pernicious influence
upon the public?
Phalke: No. I don’t think so. I think, though, the love subjects
should not be shown as largely (sic) as they are at present.
How did the actresses react to all this, one wonders. Most of
them were no lily-white maidens, unsullied by worldly wisdom.
One guesses that these film actresses learned to sniff in the heady
dreamstuff of the new medium, and came to practical terms rather
quickly with their new masters – the film directors and producers.
This meant playing the same traditional feminine game of ar-
ranging and lending their egos and values totally around the
personalities of whoever happened to be the male masters of their
little world. This explains Kamalbai repeating after Dadasaheb
Phalke:
…One observes norms of propriety. I was 13 at that time and my
mother Durgabai who acted as Parvati was also in the unit.
Everyone participated in the routine of the unit… though a film
unit was a professional organisation, the inter-personal relations
between its members were modelled after the prototype of family
relationships.
This little ditty, “we – work – because – we – have – to but
– we – are – good – little family – loving – girls – at – heart
– and – will marry – and settle – soon – as – we – can”, continues
to be sung in the film-journals even today by starlet after starlet,
star after star. This also perpetuates the system of star mothers
and brothers who accompany the actresses even on the sets since
1650
the days of Kamlabai and Suraiya, whose, ‘Thehro! Baby kiss
nahin karegi!’ is about as familiar as the “baby”, confessing coyly
how she was tricked into giving a particularly sexy shot. Main-
taining the façade of a “family atmosphere” and emphasis on
“khandan” by actresses are, thus, no mere quirks of temperament
and eccentricity on the part of artistes, but a carefully laid out
strategy for legitimising the independence of the actress by
making it seem less than perfect, less than real.
The problem of the independent actress having thus been
tackled somewhat, the next major dilemma Hindi filmmakers
faced was, how to depict non-procreative sex between man and
woman, without being censored. Here the gods came to their
help, literally.
Until recently what is called popular Hinduism did not seem
worthy of scholarly attention on the part of serious students of
cinema, despite the runaway success of films from Raja
Harishchandra to Jai Santoshi Maa, and despite the recent mind-
boggling success, first of Ramayan and then of the Mahabharata,
on the television. These myths explain the central truths of the
Indian tradition more clearly to the average film-goer than any
formal philosophical system. Love in the accepted sense being
deemed a four-letter word, the myth surrounding goddesses and
other goddess types in Hindi films became to a great extent, a
means by which the Indian mind could also express its core
thoughts about sexual roles and sexual identity.
The film world of Mumbai in the 75 years since Phalke, has
continued to milk audience interest in sexual attraction between
men and women, by relying strictly on a set of myths, nearly
all of which had been worked out within two decades of Raja
Harish Chandra.
While sex and the Indian woman was a taboo subject, the white
woman as a subject of sexual fantasy was acceptable. By the
time Hindi cinema entered its second decade, Eurasian girls on
screen had become a craze. Of these Patience Cooper and Ruby
Myers were the most famous. Ruby Myers – (christened Sulochana
on screen) – was a telephone operator and when she made her
debut in 1925 in Veer Bala (The Valiant Girl) a star was born;
and the very next year Sulochana went on to make eight films!
She ruled the Indian celluloid world for 15 years and made some
50 films for different companies, including her own Ruby Pic-
tures. Her career spanned two eras, that of the silent films and
the talkie.
The peak of Sulochana’a glory also epitomises Bombay films’
fatal fascination for Hollywood and its heroines. Sulochana
became in films such as Bombay Ki Billi and Typist Girl, at once
a titillating presence for the Indian libido, starved of social
interaction with females, and also an accessible white woman,
such as the white masters alone could have had a real life.
Sulochana, the fifth recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award,
betrayed no great joy at being honoured for her contribution some
four decades later. She is reported to have said “I remember
nothing : I can not, I should not…”
(Sulochana, by Hamiduddin Mehmood
Filmfare, October 15-28, p 17,1976)
This was a woman who made 50 films in 15 years and was
paid a four figure salary when most popular male stars were
earning only a few rupees. (People in fact used to grumble that
she was paid more than the governor of Bombay). In her heydays,
Ruby Meyers was the rage of her times. Scripts like that of
Sulochana were written specially for her, in one film, Wild Cat
of Bombay, she had not one or two but six roles. Then the
Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2006
downslide came. She tried her hand at production with Prem Ki
Jyoti, which flopped. Once called the star of stars, she was forced
to do bit roles. No wonder she did not wish to recollect her past
with all its memories of insecurity and ridicule.
Actress Fatima Begum was the first woman to turn to produc-
tion and direction, by forming the Victoria Fatima Film Company
that made silent films such as Bulbul-e-Paristan. She had three
daughters Sultana, (labelled Sultry Sultana), Shehzadi (called
loveable Shehzadi) and Zubeida. The last named would have sunk
into nothingness like the mother, the Victoria Fatima Film Company
and her two sisters, but for the lucky break she got in acting in
the first talkie Alam Ara. At the age of 10 she shot into sudden
fame (after seven years of unreported work in silent films) and
was immortalised as the Talkie Queen Zubeida. Another intelli-
gent actress Gauhar, was also to face bankruptcy in her effort
to run a film company along with her mentor Chandulal Shah.
However, in the case of Gauhar, almost all contemporaries blame
Chandulal Shah’s extravagant habits and gambling for the downfall
of the company Ranjit Talkies.
Hierarchy and Convention
One similarity that strikes you in the lives of these stars of
the yesteryears and stars of today is their utter, often bitter,
isolation from the society. Be it Gauhar, or Sulochana, Meena
Kumari, or Rekha, one finds that if they have no husband or
children to give them a public identity once their star-appeal
begins to fade, the actresses simply cease to exist for the public
and friends alike. On screen, in their heydays, all these women
have been lively, outrageous, full of energy and innovation. All
have earned enormous amounts of money and perks, and yet their
long stint in the film world never allowed them to develop the
self-confidence that comes from knowing you could win admirers
with your talented performance. While they ruled, the actresses,
like young mothers of sons, were made to feel special, privileged
by their ‘star status’. Once they had given their best, they became
forgettable, or worse, pitiable creatures like an Indian mother-
in-law. The double irony was that housewives who scrub floor
and raise children were (and still are) made to feel dumb and
lacklustre in comparison to these screen goddesses; but the same
goddesses were put down in their later years for not having had
a house and babies “like real women”. The ultimate irony is, that
both sets of women, the housewives and the film stars, mostly
accept this stigmatisation and the envious rages and the terminal
guilt that go with it. Even today, the bitchiest pieces on actresses
in film-journals are penned by women. Hindi cinema has had
a longer lead time than the Parsi theatre of the 1930s, in absorbing
the gender politics of the Indian society that cuts across all castes
and communities. The escalating fees of the performers make
our producers even more inclined to tailor their message to justify
differential wages paid to female actress. In a typical theme, (also
borrowed by TV serials) women are still being set against women
and their anger at the circumstances of their lives is depoliticised
and flashed as their personal angst. Most blockbusters (like Hum
Apke Hain Kaun and Dilwaley Dulhaniya Le Jayenge or Sarkar)
are morality tales where good mothers win and bad (read anglicised)
liberated women are home breakers.
Though they were reluctant to concede this, but women like
Gauhar and Fatima Begum ultimately owned their survival to
the gutsiness of the very matriarchal “tawaif” tradition they
worked so hard to escape. Gauhar Jaan’s first film was the 1921
Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2006
silent movie Beggar Girl, the next was Pati-Patni, both directed
by the flamboyant Chandulal Shah. After the talkies arrived,
Gauhar created a stir by her role of a stormy young Rajput wife
in the film, Rajputani within four years of her arrival. She had
made a name for herself and in 1925 she set up her own Ranjit
Film Company with Chandulal Shah. Like Gauhar, the blue-eyed
beauty Kajjan was another celebrity from the Parsi theatre who
made it big on the silver screen. Kajjan was the daughter of a
well known dancing girl Suggan, who was the mistress of Nawab
Chammi Saheb of Bhagalpur. Kajjan’s “knife-dances” during the
interval hour in the age of silent movies kept the movie goers
spell bound. She also acted in Alam Ara with Zubeida, the niece
of the actor Putli Bai. The world of dancing girls also gave early
cinema the trio of Sultana, Razia and Minu, who came to Calcutta
in 1939 and joined Manik Lal’s company. Sultana was a five
comedienne, whose daughter Amita later joined Bollywood. The
matriarchal family backgrounds of all these women had taught
them never to be taken for granted or taken for a ride, and to
have their professional talents honed all the time. Here is Gauhar,
part owner of the Ranjit Studios and actress of several runaway
hits in an interview with Girish Karnad:
...The arrival of sound (in motion films) hit some actress very hard
...Madhuri just faded away...even Sulochana, Sulochana and I have
always been good friends and I used to tell her; Madhuri at least
is an Anglo-Indian, who speaks English at home. You speak
Hindustani. Why don’t you polish it up?…My last film was Achhut
in 1939…I decided that I should leave while I was still at the top
before they threw me out. Besides I was fairly well off.
(Cinevision)
Gauhar could also afford a surprisingly shrewd and frank
appraisal of her co-professionals and professional standards, and
is warm and appreciative when discussing the younger generation:
Actors work so hard these days. They work three shifts a day and
yet give such good performances. We were not so polished. We
overacted...We were more disciplined, perhaps more attached to
our studies. But they work harder… (Ibid)
Study in Contrasts
The popular films in those days were basically of two kinds
– socials and stunt. A good example of a social was Gauhar’s
Gunsundari or “why husbands go astray?” In this film, the simple
and unsophisticated wife treats the husband’s habit of straying
from the straight and narrow by faking a “westernisation” which
brings him running back to her. This has been a perennial theme
of Hindi films since. Between 1925 and 1940 three versions of
this were made, all of them proved hits.
In direct contrast to Gauhar, who played the simple traditional
wife on the screen as per requirements but saved her native
shrewdness and sense of humour for living her own life outside
the studios, we have the frail, green-eyed Miss Vanmala (more
famed also for the educational qualifications affixed to her name
BA, BT) who displayed a different kind of strength. Her dreamy
eyes won her the role of the legendary Roxana in Minerva
Movietone’s blockbuster Sikander, and led Motilal the “casanova”
of those days, to call her “Bright Eyes.” At 21, she was a graduate
and teacher before she became an actress. One of her memorable
roles was in Charanon Ki Dasi – a forerunner of socials like
Main Tulsi Tere Angan Ki, in which she interpreted her successful
interpretation of a homeloving wife’s role to her innate longing
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‘to have a home.’ And yet few have known that this supposedly
demure homebody was also a fearless and staunch nationalist
who unflinchingly sheltered freedom fighters such as Aruna
Asaf Ali during the freedom movement. In what now seems a
symbolic gesture, she is said to have exchanged her clothes with
Aruna Asaf Ali to help her escape the ever-watchful British
police. She was to take a quiet and graceful retirement and
recede into religious meditation. When asked to sum up her
career, she said, “My life has been like a leaf in the storm”. When
asked further she missed her life of earlier days, she is said to
have just smiled.
Nadia, the star of the stunt movies in the 1940s burst upon
the scene like a meteor. Christened Mary Evans, she was born
of a Greek mother, who was a circus star and an English father
who was a soldier. A fortune-teller at Lahore is supposed to have
told her that fame would come to her if she took on a five letter
name. So she became Nadia – a five letter word. The Wadia
Movietone launched her initially with “socials” but her runaway
big hit was Hunterwali (1934). The release of this film which
cost Rs two lakhs to make and grossed Rs 10 lakh, marked the
peak of Indian stunt films. Along with John Cowasji, Nadia
became a sensation overnight. Her blonds looks made amends
for her faulty and faltering Hindi, and perhaps made her unin-
hibited style, her physical prowess more acceptable to the Indian
audience than if she had been a brunette. It is said once on
someone’s suggestion that she dye her hair black, she snapped
back, “that’s not part of my contract”.
Nadia’s career that began with a bang in Hunterwali went from
one high to another in films like Hunterwali Ki Beti, Rolls Royce
Ki Beti, Himmatwali, Stunt Queen and Bombaywali. Packed with
action and daring, her films dazzled Indian spectators with her
portrayal of Durga spouting lines such as: “Look Mister, if you
want Hind to be free, the women of Hind should also be free”
(Hunterwali Ki Beti, 1942).
In Diamond Queen, Nadia was shown rescuing a girl from
the clutches of villains singlehandedly and holding them at bay
all by herself before help came. Resilient, lithe and graceful,
Nadia gave lie to the traditional Indian belief, that women
need protection all the time. But it is doubtful if the audiences
would have swallowed a native girl doing the kind of roles that
she did. The film makers and their audiences in these days had
worked out neat little compartments in which they fitted the white
and non-white women. What one could do another could not.
The white woman could dazzle by her physical prowess and
uninhibited love-making, and the oriental could shake one to the
core by appealing to the emotions but the roles allotted were
exclusive. In a conventional “social” where Nadia was cast
opposite an “emotional” star like Pahari Sanyal and Kaushalya
in a love triangle, she failed miserably because the scene de-
manded that she cry and the audiences would not tolerate their
fearless Nadia, “the hunterwali”, shedding tears. So ultimately
Nadia retired quietly as (Mrs) Homi Wadia and has not been
replaced since.
Few Who Broke Convention
One native actress who did bring back to the screen part of
Nadia’s spark and gutsy rebellion, was Shanta Apte, called the
“stormy petrel” of the Indian films. On screen and in life Shanta
defied many conventions. In the days of contractual assignments,
she was perhaps the first female freelancer of films, the first
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female cine-star to write her autobiography Jaoo-mi-Cinemat
(Should I join films?), and also perhaps the first woman star to
drink publicly and beat the daylights out of a film critic with
a cane for having attacked her in print. V Shantaram in his
autobiography places most of the blame for Shanta Bai’s dege-
neration from a fine sensitive actress to a querulous, eccentric
alcoholic who broke contracts, upset musicians and hit out at
her colleagues, at her older brother Baburao’s door. Baburao was
a precursor of the many star brothers and “managed” Shanta Bai’s
affairs by forming with her Shanta Apte Concerns, and lived off
her for many years. He later got married and dumped her, and
died a year after his miserable sister.
Shanta Apte’s life is salient evidence, that whether in life or
in a particular profession, equal remuneration without equal
power for women usually means their returning or being
forced to revert to their usual slots in the hierarchy once they
retire from their chosen profession. It also proves, as many
working and non-working women will testify, with regard to
exploitation, the most dangerous place for the woman is her own
home, not the streets. A closer look at the life of this talented
woman begins to reveal strange parallels between her life and
that of Meena Kumari. Both were betrayed by the men they loved
and trusted and were generous to; both took to the bottle to get
over the loss of their men, and the sad end of both underscores
the need for women to look for and perhaps create a system for
mutual protection.
Generally the fire and brimstone vitality of Nadia’s kind and
the cooing concupiscent postures of Vanmala, so fancied by the
1930s and early 1940s audiences, have fallen into oblivion, but
the class-distinctions in sexual preferences evinced by Indian
audiences that these movies highlighted, still persist with few
variations. Actress still starve, steam and sweat their bodies to
shape them to male specifications. The working classes like them
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Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2006
fair and curvy but the rich pay respects to “Nazakat”, a delicate
appearance, even thinness verging on collapse. In either case,
both parameters of attractiveness have made unnatural demands
on the physiques of females aspiring to become popular stars.
A precursor of the neurotic bulimics of today such as Dimple
and Parveen Babi, was Raj Kumari, the singing star, who con-
fesses in an interview, “listen to me attentively – it (dieting) was
not a laughable matter, I wanted to be slim. I was put off food
and I had to consume Brooklaw (as chocolate type laxative) daily.
I had to live on black laxative daily. I had to live on black
tea….when my mother cooked rice or potatoes, I’d stealthily eat
the food up...I could not give up food, for which I’ve always
had a weakness” (Cinevision Vol II, No II, p17).
For the traditional Indian mind, as specified before, sex is for
reproduction – ‘prajapatye’. So the familyline would continue
and the ancestors continue to be propitiated. The fact that human
beings have a memory, a will and understanding to experience
the pleasures of sex and to desire it for itself has been a thought
repugnant to our filmmakers and filmgoers generally. The re-
sultant stereotype who loved and kissed and desired men on the
screen was a being sought by most men, The ultimate value of
this perfect creature was attested by the demand she excited in
the audiences, as she innocently drove men to madness and war
on screen. But one must remember that at no point does her
dominion entail the rule of female stars in the world of films.
She is not a human being. Her lips never look stale, her eyes
are never puffy from crying. Even when in throes of pain, her
composure is perfect. She must not portray humour or curiosity,
but either hauteur of an absurd kind, smouldering lust or idiotic
children glory. A hot-blooded actress like the dancer Sitara Devi,
was accepted as good by almost none, except perhaps by rare
madcaps like Sadat Hassan Manto:
Sitara is a woman who knows men. She knows all the wiles
that attract a man, but which you may say, render him useless
and impotent for other women… I’ve written this article, and I
know Sitara will be angry with me – but after a while she shall
forgive me, for her heart is wide and although she is diminutive
to look at, she is a tall woman...I consider her a woman who
is born perhaps only once in a hundred years” (Translated from
Urdu Meenabazar).
Songs came into Hindi films with the first talkie Alam Ara
(1931),and with it began, the golden period of female singing
stars. For a long time film songs had to be sung in films by
actors and actresses. Playback singing was to come much later.
Here also it was theatre that supplied the talent like Bibbo,
Kajjan, Amirbai Karnataki, Kamla Jharia, Munni Bai Faizabadi
and Sita Devi. All the female singers came from professional
singing families since no others would permit their girls to sing
in public. Most had husky voices and the deliberate and man-
nered style inculcated by traditional ustads and their mothers
and aunts.
Then came the legendary Noorjehan, the singing sensation of
such 1940s films as Anmol Ghadi. In those days, with singing
stars like Gohar Bai, Shamshad Begum, Zohra Bai Ambalewali,
Hansa Wadekar and Shanta Apte, Noorjehan was still ahead of
most having been given a classical ‘talim’ and groomed with great
care. Partition uprooted this talented star from her motherland
and forced her to accept another. For her also, notwithstanding
her fame and financial clout, one finds that the decisions were
made for her by men and enforced by them as well. She was
like many other women of whether Hindu or Muslim of their
Economic and Political Weekly April 29, 2006
generation, at this crucial juncture, unable to make a choice of her
own. During a visit she made 35 years after this cruel wrenching,
(during a function at Shanmukhananda Hall), she recalls:
Thirty five years ago, till the last moment before we left the country
Yusuf Bhai (Dilip Kumar) tried persuading my husband not to
go, that it was not right to leave one’s home land. Finally, when
he found all his attempts were futile, he said, ‘Us Waqt Allah
beiman ho gaya tha’ – (then god cheated).
Ironically the era that was the beginning of the end of the
system of singing female stars, was rung in by a woman
playback singer. This was Saraswati Devi (nee’ Khurshid Minocher
Homji). Once in 1934, when talkies were barely two years old,
and songs were recorded routinely during the shooting, Saraswati
Devi’s sister Chandraprabha – who was a singing star – had to
sing in a film being made by their mentor Himanshu Rai. On
the crucial day Chandraprabha landed with a sore throat. Since
the song had to be picturised that very day, Rai suggested that
Saraswati Devi sing the song into the microphone while the sister
would only move her lips. Thus the first playback song was
recorded.
Saraswati Devi was later to achieve success and fame as a
music director herself. The first song she composed was
‘Kya Janoo Kahu Ki Baat Sakhi.’ (Raag Durga), for the movie
Miya Bibi. She also composed all time favourites such as ‘Chana
jor garam babu (Bandhan) and ‘Mein ban ki chidiya’ (Achhut
Kanya). Music direction was, however, a low-key affair with no
credits mentioned in the films or the discs. In an interview
Saraswati Bai modestly shrugs off the need for such
acknowledgement:
When the firm (Miya Bibi) was released, a lot of people wrote
to us and asked us (Himanshu Rai’s unit) about that particular
song (‘Kya janoo kahu ki baat’) and who had composed it. They
wanted to buy the record, but we hadn’t cut any discs of it. The
point I’m making is, that in those days we used to lend our voices
to other artists but, did not make a big issue out of it.
Ultimately, art, literature, music, are attempts to found the
world anew on the basis of human liberty : that of the human
creator. It also means that the artist must transcend all bitterness,
recrimination and ill-will. Saraswati Devi is one of very few
women, one realises, who miraculously retained their innate
simplicity, their womanly generosity of soul, even after the
harrowing experiences of their initial years, and memories of all
those intrigues and the traumas of being part an industry that
was its aesthetic and commercial teeth simultaneously. She, says
looking back, not in anger but in contentment:
...Today I have no regrets! Even today my music can be heard
somewhere or the other. I am also proud of the fact that I played
an important role in establishing an institution like Bombay Talkies.
I was able to popularise my Guru, Bhatkhande’s music all over
India. Songs like, ‘Na jane kidhar meri nav chali re’, have found
a permanent place in the heart of my fans. I consider that a great
achievement [Cinevision II, Vol II]. -29
Email: mpande@hindustantimes.com
References
Agarwal, Pratibha (ed) (1986): Master Fida Hussein, ‘Parsi Theatre Mein
50 Varsh’, Natya Shodh Samsthan, Calcutta.
Manto Sadat Hasan (nd): Meena Bazaar, A collection of writings on Mumbai’s
film world and its women translated by Sharad Dutt, Hind Pocket Books,
New Delhi.
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