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Shifting Contours of Indian Womanhood in Popular Hindi Cinema

Sujata Moorti

A tall, masked, pistol-wielding woman wards off a bunch of villains from atop a moving train. This blonde, blue-eyed, strapping female equivalent of Robin Hood is not a Hollywood persona but, rather, a very popular star from early Hindi cinema, Nadia. Known by her fans as Hunterwali (the huntress), Nadia is the antithesis of the stereotypical coy, all-singing, all-dancing Hindi film star associated with today's Bollywood. How did an Australian come to be one of the most popular female stars of Hindi cinema in the 1930s, during the height of the anticolonial nationalist movement? This is one of the paradoxes this chapter explores as it offers an overview of the representations of women in popular Hindi film. The iconic figure of Nadia serves as a touchstone for us to understand the complex narrative positions accorded to woman and the feminine in Hindi film. In the analysis that follows, I contend that early Hindi cinema offered a great variety of roles for women, roles that permitted women to assert their autonomy and authority even as they were tethered by social gender roles. In addition, as I illustrate, the concept of the Indian woman on screen was a capacious term not bounded by geography or narrow understandings of gender. Notwithstanding the few compelling films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this essay argues that the era of globalization has been marked by an attenuation in the roles assigned to the female and the feminine. This nonlinear historical trajectory offers some insights into the manner in which concerns about the nation are mapped onto the figure of the female. This chapter does not offer a facile equivalence between representations of women and discourses of the nation. Rather, it uses cinematic images as a way to think through the shifting ideas ascribed to gender at any given moment. It also does not offer a nostalgic idealization of the past; instead my arguments about the historical differences in gender roles seek to underscore how changes in the cinema industry, its formalization and incorporation into a global marketplace, are inscribed in narrative structures. This exegesis on the representations of women is also instructive in thinking through the relationship between technology and modernity. If cinema is the exemplary technology of modernism and melodrama the central genre for articulating its accompanying structures of feeling, then how can we understand the relationship between cinema and society in an era of global capitalism?

Much as in Europe, the technology of cinema was introduced in colonial India in 1896. In the 100 years that have followed, the Indian cinema industry has numerically surpassed its Western counterparts in terms of production, circulation, and reception. As I and other scholars have argued, Hindi cinema – one of several regional language cinemas – has largely been considered India's popular culture. The industry rivals Hollywood in terms of production; daily audiences number in the millions; and its reach expands beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, not just to the diaspora but to many parts of the global South (Larkin, 1997; Rajagopalan, 2009; Sen, 2008). Through an examination of the central role the female figure has come to occupy in this arena of popular culture, I will outline what is at stake in these images and why we must heed them to understand not just Indian media culture, but also that society at large.

For audiences unfamiliar with the conventions of Indian cinema, watching a film could be a befuddling experience. The movies tend to be long – they are now a little over two hours but in the past ran well over three hours. They are often characterized as melodramas and contain multiple storylines. Scholars describe Indian cinema narrative structure as marked by “endless digressions, circularities, and plots within plots” (Dissanayake & Sahai, 1992, pp. 10–11). Above all they are structured by the two epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana. Indian films often refer overtly and covertly to themes addressed in these ancient Sanskrit epics. The Ramayana charts the narrative of the righteous King Rama who is exiled and returns after vanquishing King Ravana. A key narrative here is Ravana's abduction of Sita, Rama's wife, and her successful rescue. The oral narrative offers prototypes of the ideal brother, ideal wife, and ideal husband. The Mahabharata is a longer epic, and documents the story of two warring sections of a dynastic family. The narrative includes the Bhagvad Gita, often identified as laying out the precepts of Hindu philosophy. These epic stories could be understood reductively as melodramas with multiple subplots and as staging the triumph of good over evil.

Most Indian films have between six and seven songs, but these movies are technically not musicals, or at least not as the concept is understood in the West. These films defy understandings of genre, and instead contain elements of romance, tragedy, action-adventure, and comedy all in one narrative. Starting in the 1970s, this multi-genre cinema was called the masala film (the Hindi word masala refers to the spices used in Indian cuisines), and this aspect is identified as a key defining feature of Indian cinema (Lutgendorf, 2006).

It is important to note that the label Indian cinema is a catch-all phrase encompassing a number of regional cinemas, with their own modes of production and distribution, most notably Tamil, Malayalam, and Bengali cinemas. The Bombay-based¹ Hindi cinema industry that I examine in this essay has come to occupy the status of the national cinema, and it is this cinema most people refer to when they speak of Indian films.

Soon after the first screening of the Lumière Brothers' film in Bombay in 1896, Indians started to experiment with this technology. In the era of the silent film, one could ague that Indian cinema could be understood in the singular. The emergence of sound technology marked the proliferation of linguistic and regional variabilities, fracturing any idea of a homogeneous Indian film industry (Ganti, 2004; Kabir, 2001). On an international level, what transpires often as Bollywood refers specifically to Hindi cinema.

The arguments in this essay are confined to mainstream Hindi cinema. I would make very different arguments about gender if I were to examine any of the other regional cinemas. For instance, it could be argued that Malayalam and Bengali films offer some transgressive paths whereas Tamil films are emblematic of the seductions of patriarchy. Any of these regional cinemas could help us understand why some ideas about femininity, femaleness, and heteronormativity continue to resonate with audiences. In the essay that follows, my focus is exclusively on popular Hindi cinema, although I make some references to art cinema. As I explain later in the essay, beginning in the 1960s, the Indian government started to sponsor alternative cinema through the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and later the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). The FTII offered formal training in all aspects of the film industry while the NFDC provided funding for films that eschewed the popular Hindi cinema grammar. Directors such as Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and Santosh Sivan are associated with this alternative cinema, which is often referred to as art cinema.

Considering the wide swathe of materials I wish to examine, any approach adopted will necessarily be partial and schematic. I have opted to track the historical variations in the representation of women. Following existing conventions in Hindi cinema scholarship, I work with a periodization practice that is simultaneously attentive to changes in the film industry and key moments in national history. Thus, I examine first the colonial era (1900–late 1940s); second, the 1950s–1980s, encompassing the “golden era” of Hindi cinema and its decline; and third, the 1990s–present, which mark the emergence of a global Hindi cinema or Bollywood. Rather than map the shifts in representations in a nationally determinist fashion, this periodization is intended to be suggestive of possible vectors of confluence. This technique is likely to raise more questions than answers, but this is also part of the essay's charge to lay out possible areas of future scholarship.

This chapter is situated within and emerges from a feminist film perspective; I consider the categories woman and femininity not as biologically fixed but as unstable and constantly evolving. Thus, even though the essay is designed to illustrate the shifting roles assigned to the figure of woman at various points in popular Hindi cinema, I will illustrate that the Indian woman depicted is an ideological construct growing out of and as a response to the newly emerging idea of the nation and a concept of modernity that is radically vernacularized (Hansen, 1999).

A few more caveats are necessary. Cinema watching in India has always been a noisy, communal, and rule-defying experience. For instance, the silent film era was silent only nominally. Apart from the live musical accompaniments, the film-viewing experience was a highly participatory one including live performances by dancing girls, jugglers, and musclemen (Burra, 1981). Even today, in an era of multiplex theaters, audiences sing along to the songs on screen, recite the hero's lines, and maintain extended conversations with the on-screen actors. Feminist film theories premised on the cinematic experience as a highly individual one do not translate well under these conditions (Doane, 1987; Mulvey, 1975). Similarly, although the majority of the audience in theaters tend to be male, Mulvian theories about the male gaze or the Oedipal structuring of gender lose some of their explanatory power in the Indian context, especially since the modes of production, circulation, and representation in Hindi cinema are at odds with the Hollywood model (Majumdar, 2009). Veena Naregal (2004) points out that mainstream Indian cinema's mode of address “makes little attempt to subordinate spectacle and visceral effect to reinforce the realist illusion” (p. 521).

Consequently, this essay is informed by insights from Anglo-American feminist film theories but is not structured by them. In this historical overview of popular Hindi film's representation of woman and femininity, I illustrate how gender as an ideology is mobilized in Hindi cinema; I signal the particular ways in which femininity, sexual difference, and heteronormativity help propel narrative movement, and I outline the ways in which Hindi cinema has worked through the conundrum of female pleasure and sexual desire. I draw as well on postcolonial feminist theory to situate the representations of women within pervasive colonial and patriarchal structures. As this essay reveals, the landscape of gender in Hindi cinema is quite complicated and does not adhere to a formulaic binarized understanding.

Reel Women?

Colonial-era films (1896–1947) are marked by great variability in representations of gender. During the silent cinema era, when the technology was still a novelty, Indian filmmakers relied largely on retelling already familiar stories. Thus the colonial era witnessed the proliferation of movies that were derived from the aforementioned epics, Ramayana or Mahabharata. The first full-length Indian feature film was about Raja Harishchandra (Phalke, 1913), a tale embedded in the Ramayana. Early Indian films also centered on biopics of iconic figures such as Kalidas (Reddy, 1931), a renowned Sanskrit poet, or Sant Tukaram (Damle, 1936), a seventeenth-century poet. These familiar stories often served as an alibi to underscore nationalist, anticolonial sentiments. Although the British had strict censorship laws in place, Indian filmmakers used a number of symbols, such as the spinning wheel, to signal their empathies for the nationalist movement. Since none of these films exists in their entirety, one must rely on extra-cinematic materials such as publicity posters or newspaper accounts to chart this period in film history.

In narratives derived from the epics, women figured only marginally, and even these figures were played by men. As Neepa Majumdar (2009) has noted, one of the primary reasons for the cross-dressing practice was the stigma associated with the cinema industry. In a tenor akin to that of Frankfurt School theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the intelligentsia in India disdained cinema as epitomizing the low taste of mass culture (and as the antithesis of high culture). Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) believed mass culture served the interests of capitalism, thereby cultivating false needs. They coined the term “culture industry” to set up a contrast with the high arts, such as painting and classical music. Indian intelligentsia, including government officials, held views that were analogous, and branded cinema as vulgar entertainment with no redeeming features. In light of this condemnation, the upper classes, particularly women, did not want to be associated with cinema. There is a double process at work here. At the turn of the century, under colonial codes of gender, “respectable” women were not associated with the public sphere. Any woman who appeared in the public arena was immediately associated with being a prostitute or at the very least as not respectable. This division of public and private realms seems identical to Victorian gender relations in the West, but as Partha Chatterjee (1993) has noted, in colonial India the public–private split took on a different salience. During the colonial era, Indian men conceded the public arena as associated with the West and modernity. The private arena was then recast as the repository of Indian tradition. In particular, the private arena was designated as the female realm and conceptualized as the domain of Indian culture and values. Consequently, women's exclusion from early Indian cinema was ideologically driven under the signs of patriarchy, colonial ideology, and class privilege. Nevertheless, because early cinema relied on the epics, women could not be thoroughly expunged; they appear in the silent era as a spectral presence with cross-dressing men hinting at the possibilities but never fully occupying the status of women. Scholars have noted that several reviews of the early cinema pointed out the delicacy of features and femininity of the cross-dressing men, but these actors' authentic femininity was also disavowed by the reminder that these reel women were real men (Majumdar, 2009). As I point out later, in this era gender was framed as performance and not as biology.

As Indian films started to move out of the familiar narratives of the epics, they became an important staging ground for the rehearsal of a nationalist gender ideology. In contrast to British understandings of India as a society and culture oppressive to women, the anticolonial nationalist movement exculpated religion and Indian tradition. Nationalist leaders were apt to turn to a (mythologized) distant past of gender equality in India. They argued against the civilizing mission of colonialism, claiming that a return to India's true past and not a turn to the West would restore women's rights. Within such a discourse women had to simultaneously ascribe to age-old traditions and be modern subjects.

In her sweeping overview of the representations of women in Indian cinema, Urvashi Butalia (1984) identifies Gunsundari (Why Husbands Go Astray, Chandulal Shah, 1927) as the first film to address the “woman question.” Unlike in the earlier movies where men performed female roles, in this instance the female protagonist was played by Dorothy Kingdom, a foreigner. The narrative centers on a philandering husband who turns to a dancing girl because his spouse does not perform her wifely duties to his satisfaction. In an attempt to secure her marriage and draw her husband away from his paramour, the woman becomes more modern. Butalia (1984) argues that the movie instructs women to be dutiful wives and companions to secure happiness. Even while acknowledging the focus on wifely devotion, other scholars have singled out the film as characteristic of the manner in which colonial Indian cinema tried to recast conjugality in a modern mold, as a companionate relationship (Barnouw & Krishnaswamy, 1980).

During the silent era, the individual roles offered women were quite limiting, reiterating a restrictive gender ideology. Nevertheless, what made this era interesting is the range of women who were given these roles. Most “respectable” women did not enter films; nationalist ideology had secured the private sphere as that of women and of tradition. This ideological practice was compounded by Hindu and Muslim codes of conduct, which enjoined women not to display their bodies to the public. However, those who were not structured by such authoritarian patriarchal codes of docility, chastity, and purity found the Indian film industry to be a receptive work arena. Thus there was Patience Cooper, the aforementioned Dorothy Kingdom, Ruby Myers, who took on the stage name Sulochana, Renee Smith, who was cast as Sita Devi – these women were Anglo-Indians and Eurasians, or people who could be theorized as subaltern in this context. In film after film these actors were assigned roles from epic tales that extolled the virtues of docile, obedient, and self-sacrificing women. These actors adopted familiar “Hindu” names (except for Patience Cooper), but their embodied presence also opened up the space assigned to the category Indian woman. In this instance, Indianness was not about biology but about how one performed femininity. Such an expansive definition suggests that Indianness was about how one behaves, the values one espouses, and was not determined by consanguinities. Sangeeta Datta (2000) characterizes the presence of these foreign women as an early moment of global forces operating in Indian cinema. In subsequent years, many of these women could speak enough Hindi to carve successful careers after the advent of sound technology. As mentioned previously, the talkies resulted in the fragmentation of Indian cinema into a variety of linguistic and regional cinemas.

During the colonial era, Hindi films often gave voice to ideas that were central to the nationalist movement. British censorship laws, however, required that these messages were coded. Ideas pertaining to social reform, such as securing women's education and widow remarriage, could be articulated unambiguously as they were not seen as anticolonial. In this milieu of redefining the modern Indian woman, Devika Rani emerged as the “first lady of the Indian screen.” One of the first “respectable women” to enter the film industry, Devika Rani worked initially as a set designer before she was cast as a princess in Karma (Frantz Osten, 1933), a bilingual, IndoGerman production. She also starred in Achut Kanya (Untouchable Girl, Frantz Osten, 1936) a film that adopted a key topic of social reform within the anticolonial nationalist movement: the dismantling of the caste system. The film narrates a doomed love story between an upper-caste Brahmin boy and an untouchable teenager. While the fathers of the two protagonists approve of this transgressive romance, others in society frown upon them. By narrative's end the romance is thwarted as the two marry within their caste. If Devika Rani's character was revolutionary because she crossed caste lines, she is also domesticated by narrative's end when she becomes the self-sacrificing wife who dies to protect her husband. Scholars have singled out this role as creating the archetype of the village belle in Hindi cinema (Datta, 2000). Achut Kanya is emblematic of the limited perch provided women in the colonial-era cinema. While the narrative gestures toward (radical) social change, the figure of the modern Indian woman serves to recuperate the existing order where the wife remains bound by conventions and devoted to her husband. While on screen Devika Rani's character ends up fitting the narrow confines of the modern traditional woman, offscreen she challenged the social order. She was a co-founder of Bombay Talkies, a major Hindi film studio, and a collaborator in Indo-German productions. The choices Rani made in her private life shaped her star persona and illustrated how the Indian female star has been fraught with contradictions (Chakravarty, 1993; Majumdar, 2009).

Devika Rani's reign as a star occurred at the same time as the popularity of Nadia – the swashbuckling hero who figures in the opening paragraph of this essay – soared. Cinematic depictions of Indian women tap into two contradictory representational archives. The most prevalent one is that of the docile, chaste, and submissive woman, as I have already outlined. By tapping into images of fierce warrior goddesses, Indian women could also be represented as aggressive and independent. Nadia fits into this second model of an authoritative and strong femininity (Gandhy & Thomas, 1991). Born in Australia, Mary Evans adopted the name Nadia. Working with the studio Wadia Movietone, she was predominantly known for her roles in stunt films, riding atop a speeding train, chasing villains on a charging horse, or physically outmaneuvering villains. Her iconic role in Hunterwali (The Lady Hunter, Homi Wadia, 1935) captures some of the anomalies of the positions assigned to women of this era: even as Devika Rani had to resort to being a subservient, tradition-bound wife, Nadia could wield a whip, clad in a tight sheath and tall boots. The blonde star's sexuality was carefully elaborated, but her films rarely concluded with a traditional romantic ending for her character.

Most critics compared her unfavorably against “respectable” stars, but her fans acclaimed her as Fearless Nadia. She made her career in stunt films such as Miss Frontier Mail (Homi Wadia, 1936), Hurricane Hansa (Homi Wadia, 1937), Punjab Mail (Homi Wadia, 1939), Diamond Queen (Homi Wadia, 1940), and so on. Actor and filmmaker Girish Karnad recalls Nadia as his first memory of cinema. With her swashbuckling heroics she symbolized for him courage, strength, and idealism (quoted in Thorner & Krishnaraj, 2000). Nadia transformed the already-popular stunt genre by fearlessly challenging oppressive social forces and protecting the poor in film after film. Stills from her movies and publicity posters show her with every kind of weapon – bows and arrows, swords, whips, pistols – lifting men over her head, and playing with lions. Nadia was frequently shown working out in the gym, which promoted a “keep-fit” craze at that time (Gandhy & Thomas, 1991).

Nadia as a tough, capable, omnipotent image served as an alternative role model for women in the colonial era. In addition, her films frequently exhorted women to fight for themselves. Nadia subverted the dominant stereotype of Indian woman as a docile suffering victim. Instead, she was represented as a woman possessed of exceptional physical strength and prowess, which is recapitulated in the image of Radha in Mother India (Mehbook Khan, 1957), as I explain below.

The daughter of a British soldier, Nadia served as an unlikely allegorical figure for the nationalist struggle. In more recent years, following the release of a 1993 documentary Fearless Nadia: The Hunterwali Story (Riyad Wadia, 1993), she is now being recast as the first feminist of Indian cinema while others have found her a useful entry point to offer queer readings of early Hindi cinema (Wenner, 2005).

Recent scholarship has excavated more about female stars from the colonial era such as Durga Khote and Sitara Devi. These writings offer an important palliative to the hagiographic accounts of early Indian cinema, which have been peopled almost entirely by males. Rather than rehash these narratives, I have offered above a brief account of two leading female actors and the kinds of roles offered them. While not representative, this account is suggestive of the possibilities available for women in the early years of cinema. A recurrent concern in colonial cinema is the interplay between tradition and modernity in a variety of fields, and woman becomes the central node for this discussion.

A New Nation's Cinema: From Strong Mothers to Docile Wives

The cinema of the post-independence era (1947 onward) was marked by dramatic shifts in the industry following the collapse of the studio system. Family-based banners, such as R. K. Films headed by Raj Kapoor, took the place of the studios. In addition, the partition of the nation resulted in several stars and industry figures moving to and from Pakistan. Concerns and symbols from the colonial era continued to crop up in movies from the 1950s, but the tone of Hindi films shifted. A new cadre of directors, such as Mehboob Khan, Guru Dutt, and Bimal Roy, influenced by Nehru's secular ideals and the principles of the Progressive Writers' Movement, produced a series of films that are the core of what is considered to be the golden era. Hindi films from the 1950s offered a sharp social critique with a balance of song and dance sequences; these films were deemed a new genre called the “social.” Ravi Vasudevan (2000) has identified the social film as one that addresses issues of social justice through a focus on the family. These films continued to tease out the relationship between modernity and tradition, often through the figure of the woman, but this dialectic was parsed as one central to the survival of the nation. Guru Dutt's films, such as Pyaasa (Thirst, 1957), offered a scathing critique of existing attitudes toward prostitutes and the commodification of art. Similarly, Raj Kapoor's films, such as Awaara (Vagabond, 1951) and Shree 420 (Mr. 420, 1955), emphasized the conflicts between urban and rural India, modernity and tradition, and offered a more humane vision for the new nation. The new India these films envisaged would be rid of all vestiges of the corrupt past, but only after a sustained struggle. Hindi films from the 1950s were not only popular in the subcontinent but had a huge following in the Soviet Union, Greece, Egypt, Nigeria, and other countries.

In the social film, female roles were predominantly limited to that of the lover of the male protagonist. In movies such as Barsaat (Rain, Raj Kapoor, 1949), the female stars of Nargis and Nimmi are celebrated for their constancy, loyalty, and willingness to sacrifice their happiness for their families. In the “social” film, women were presented as central to the project of nation-building, but their autonomy was not of paramount importance. Rather, the narratives helped to shore up a limited definition of the traditional Indian woman.

The rising star of the 1950s films was undoubtedly Nargis, who was paired repeatedly with Raj Kapoor. Her character in Mother India is often singled out as exemplifying the new roles assigned to women in the social film: wife, mother, and beloved. Mehboob's film drew upon the conventions of the social but also offered significant variations from that genre. In a gesture reminiscent of colonial-era rhetoric, the film validates the maternal and imagines the Indian nation as female.

The nationalist movement used the evocative slogan of Mother India (Bharat Mata) as a rallying cry and to engender a specific structure of feeling in this emergent culture. The future-nation-to-be was personified as a mother goddess and a whole range of popular culture products promoted this vision. In this rhetoric the nation was represented as a female figure, a composite of the Hindu goddesses Lakshmi (wealth), Saraswati (knowledge), and earth. The future nation was visualized as a woman in a sari, often a saffron one. The image was crafted carefully so that her bodily contours were mapped onto the geographic space of the nation. By tapping into the Hindu pantheon of goddess figures, this slogan simultaneously represented the maternal woman as caring and nurturing as well as fierce and aggressive in protecting her children. The Mother India slogan permitted nationalist leaders to conceptualize the independence movement as akin to religion (Ramaswamy, 2010). In addition to this nationalist valorization of the maternal figure, a US writer, Katherine Mayo, published a book entitled Mother India in 1927 that offered a scathing critique of Hindu society, culture, and religion. The book effectively validated the “civilizing mission” of British colonialism. During the independence movement, nationalist leaders devoted a lot of energy contesting Mayo's book. In the post-independence era too, leaders were preoccupied with invalidating Mayo's claims and offering a different vision of Mother India. The iconization of the nation as female has continued, but with different valences (Chakravarty, 1993; Datta, 2000). Mehboob's film and the figuration of Nargis as Radha must be understood within these multiple discursive strands that feminize the nation and valorize the maternal.

The melding of the material, romantic lover and modern female subject come together in an evocative fashion in Mother India. Scholars have offered very nuanced accounts of Mehboob's vision, his depiction of the female protagonist, and the effects of the film in contemporary Hindi cinema (Bagchi, 1996; Chatterjee, 2008; Thomas, 1989). Mehboob's film was made ten years after India secured its independence and has been characterized as a paean to the new nation. In a film noted for its production values, its musical score, and its script, the narrative centers on Radha, played by Nargis, who we first encounter as an old woman, revered by her community. Through a story narrated entirely in flashback, we come to understand how Radha comes to occupy such a central location in the village. We witness her transformation from a young submissive wife to the village's grande dame. Through a lifetime the film documents her persevering against a corrupt moneylender, natural disasters, her husband's disappearance, and the death of her children. In this melodrama, Radha is clearly the focus; the film extols her strength and power, which are seen as integrally bound with her respect for traditional values (Thomas, 1989). Through all her travails she remains a paragon of wifely devotion and chastity. She is also depicted as honorable; when her adored younger son abducts a young woman, Radha kills him, asserting that she may be a mother but she is also a woman.

In her in-depth and provocative analysis of the film, Gayatri Chatterjee (2008) points out the different ways in which Mehboob mobilizes Hindu mythology to layer and thicken the narrative. Radha comes to stand not only for the ideal mother but also for the future of the nation; through her tenacity she propels her community from destitution to industrial modernity, a site of dams and cranes. Mehboob offers a melodramatic account of womanhood but his film also acknowledges the conditions of the peasant class. Radha is depicted working the fields, a perfect comrade to her husband; once he disappears she tends the fields alone. She is simultaneously in charge of the home and the domestic sphere. Mehboob's Mother India blends socialist ideals with traditional values. Radha is shown consistently as a worker and a mother, linking repeatedly work and sexuality. The film depicts motherhood as an affective condition and also as labor. Through this juxtaposition the movie offers a celebration of femininity that goes beyond a sentimental evocation of the mother. In an unusual move, the film begins with a third-person documentary-like account, but then the narrative is taken over by Radha and it is her point of view that predominates. She appears as the iconic wife, an active narrative agent, and a symbol. In most of the social films from the 1950s, the female characters are presented as strong and their power resides in their adherence to traditional values. Mother India is unique in that it does not present a male protagonist as securing Radha's rights. Rather, it is she who fights for her rights and those of other dispossessed people in her community. It is also narrated from her point of view.

Binarized Femininity

The 1960s marks the decline of the golden era and the rise of romances and action-adventures. In terms of gender, what is most significant is the emergence of a binarized femininity: the good woman/bad woman. In film after film, the good woman is depicted as a self-sacrificing mother, a dutiful daughter, or a respectful wife. She does not question the men in her life and reveres social traditions. The good woman is always pitted against the bad woman for the hero's affections. In a resuscitation of anticolonial rhetoric, the bad woman is conjured as someone “Western,” independent, and presented as antithetical to middle-class values (Butalia, 1984, p. 109). In effect, the other “side of the coin of modernity” is equated with being bad. The figure of the bad woman became so formulaic that a small group of actors was associated with it and stars like Helen gained a following for her performance as the vamp.

I have argued elsewhere that Helen acquired cult status, playing the figure of the femme fatale in over 700 films (Moorti, 2003). Her character offered the counterpoint and the foil against which idealized Indian femininity could be reiterated; she is the negative print of the ideal Indian woman and a condensation symbol of Western degeneracy (Mazumdar, 2007). Helen Richardson, the actress whose screen name is Helen, is of Spanish and Burmese origin. She is reminiscent of Nadia because her racial otherness was signified similarly through overt markers of alterity: hair, dress, name, and behavior. Like all the bad women or vamps, Helen was typecast in a narrow mold: licentious, Westernized, overtly sexual, given to drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, and, above all, putting on lewd staged performances dubbed as cabaret. Given names like Rosie or Mary, “she was parodied as either an Anglo-Indian (a racial outcaste) or a member of India's Christian minority. A demi-mondaine, she was often a cabaret dancer operating in smoke-filled bars, nightclubs, or similar ‘foreign’ dens of vice [. . .] where clad in a tight-fitting western gown she performed audacious dances” and tried to lure the hero (Kasbekar, 2003, p. 299). Above all her deviance from the good woman model is marked by her demonstrations of uncontrolled female lust and wantonness.

Although she is the antithesis of Indian femininity, the vamp's role is often more of an equal to the hero than the heroine. The vamp's role is also feminine in that she is present on screen to evoke desire and be the sex object. Dressed in campy feather boas, elbow-length gloves, and fishnet stockings, the vamp represents the rebel who does not seek social acceptance. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the figure of the vamp, specifically that of Helen, has been incorporated in Indian gay subculture. In effect, some scholars have argued that in the good woman/bad woman model of Indian femininity, the vamp becomes the site of all sexuality and the good woman is leached of any affect or desire, except that of compliance and subservience. In Hindi cinema from the 1960s and 1970s, the vamp is the only female character depicted as having agency and as a subject who acts on her own behalf. She never wins the hero's affections but she has an autonomy and subjectivity that are denied the good woman.

The one other instance in which female sexuality is foregrounded is in the courtesan film. The tawaif or courtesan film was a subgenre centered on the figure of the female public performer. Unlike the caricatured figure of the vamp, the courtesan is a site from which Hindi cinema reflects upon the historical transformations unleashed by modernity (Chakravarty, 1993). The courtesan films are tragic melodramas where the gendered contradictions of the modern Indian nation are laid bare. Significantly, the courtesan is a public performer, literate, and well versed in high culture.

Courtesan films, with their focus on a lost Mughal culture, could be interpreted as representing a nostalgia for a pre-British India. Scholars have also identified these films as representing a limited form of resistance to conventional gender roles (Virdi, 2003). The tawaif encapsulates key masculine and feminine characteristics and challenges gender binaries. As a financially autonomous, public woman, the courtesan occupies a masculine cinematic space; her ability to control her sexuality allows her to reconfigure the mantle of respectability. For instance, the courtesan may reject a suitor and proclaim her respectability by refusing the highest bidder, if necessary. However, her cinematic presence as a seductress reiterates her femininity. She is repeatedly presented as a sexual subject, and an object of male desire. Greg Booth (2007) contends that the tawaif constitutes a third gender while Oldenburg's (1991) ethnographic account fleshes out how this resistant, female-centered community survives in patriarchal society. However, the filmic version of the courtesan narrative domesticates this transgressive figure by positioning her as someone who seeks the respectability offered through marriage and domesticity. Once she falls in love, she willingly gives up her independence (and her public performances) to become an abject figure longing for conjugal bliss; she willingly submits herself to a singular male figure. While the domestication of woman was a common theme of the “socials,” the courtesan genre hinges on how this domestication is accomplished.

The tawaifs are more heroic than their respectable counterparts, and they are often more heroic than their lovers as well. The courtesan is a more active agent of narrative resolution than other Hindi female film figures. Her desire to be desired is, however, repeatedly relocated within the confines of domesticity and conjugality. The courtesan's ability to queer gender scripts is thus very limited. In Hindi cinema grammar the tawaif, who was once an active participant in courtly Mughal culture as a singer, is reduced to a prostitute (Arora, 1995). The courtesan film is exemplified by Pakeezah (Pure Heart, Kamal Amrohi, 1971) with Meena Kumari as the protagonist, who falls in love with an aristocrat. It is also one of the rare films where a courtesan successfully transitions from a public performer to a respectable woman. This sub-genre is emblematic of the modes through which Hindi cinema inched its way through the ideological contradictions laid bare in the narrative transition from feudal romances to modern romances.

Urvashi Butalia (1984) contends that in the 1980s, Hindi cinema starts to respond to some issues raised by the women's movement such as rape, dowry, and widowhood, if only in a superficial manner. Insaaf ka Tarazu (Scales of Justice, B. R. Chopra, 1980) is emblematic of a film that seemingly responds to feminist concerns about rape, but the manner in which the topic is narrated and depicted does little to dismantle dominant (mis)understandings of the crime. The film's heroine Bharati (Zeenat Aman) is an independent career woman working as a model; she is financially independent and is able to support her schoolgirl sister, Nita. Bharati is raped by a rich industrialist, Ramesh, and presses charges against him. She loses the court case, and subsequently her job, and is forced to relocate to a new town with her sister. When Nita comes of age and seeks a job, she is raped by the same industrialist during her interview. Bharati responds by taking a gun and killing the rapist at his office. In the criminal trial that ensues, Bharati gives voice to familiar feminist claims about the trivialization of female complaints and the law's inability to attend to rape claims. Comprehending the misogyny of the legal system, the judge frees Bharati. On one level the film is attentive to issues raised by the women's movement; however, the camerawork serves to reposition women as sexual objects of the male gaze and not as sexual subjects. The rape scenes are enacted at great length; the framing and editing of these sequences are more akin to seduction than violence. This and other rape-revenge films offer the possibility of an “angry woman” genre with women positioned as vigilantes. Apart from the visual grammar, the film's narrative too undermines its feminist claims (Virdi, 2003). In her impassioned address to the court, Bharati reiterates a conventional good woman/bad woman dichotomy and positions Indian women as “temples of worship.” Such rhetoric erases the violence of rape as an assertion of male power and instead redefines it as a religious desecration. Insaaf moves the female protagonist beyond the status of a self-sacrificing victim and into a vigilante. However, through Bharati's assertion of a virgin/whore dichotomy as a counterpoint to rape, it becomes clear that the film's engagement with feminism is only skin deep. Insaaf was representative of a range of rape-revenge narratives that emerged in the 1980s, replete with possibilities but disappointing in the final analysis.

However, there was at least one thin slice of Hindi cinema that offered some more affirming possibilities. The decline of the golden era was accompanied by the rise of an alternative cinema, which was often characterized as art cinema in direct opposition to the popular aspects of Hindi cinema. As I have mentioned previously, the training and funding sources for this genre of Indian cinema are the most significant markers of difference between this and mainstream popular cinema. Alternative cinema narratives offered a wider range of possibilities for female protagonists. In these movies, women occupy locations of the socially disenfranchised such as in Manthan (The Churning, Shyam Benegal, 1971) or Nishant (Night's End, Shyam Benegal, 1975), but they also possessed an agency that is refreshing. Mirch Masala (Spices, Ketan Mehta, 1985) is emblematic of this genre foregrounding the manner in which women are sexually objectified in rural India, where feudal practices predominate. However, the female protagonist does not submit to the local patriarch and instead mobilizes other women to collectively fight the oppressive system. Unlike popular Hindi films that reiterated women's cinematic status as objects of the male gaze, Mehta's film refuses the Mulvian gaze (Bagchi, 1996). For instance, the film shows the male landlord gaze lasciviously at women, but the audience never sees the women through his gaze. Mehta's film does not position the audience as voyeurs; rather, he subverts our expectations to see women through the male gaze. The historical setting of the narrative draws attention to the continuities between historical formations and contemporary settings in how gender roles are materialized.

In the 1980s apart from “feminist” directors in the alternative cinema circuit, actors start to cross over between art and popular cinemas. Consequently, a stable of actors – such as Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Deepti Naval – start to be associated with roles which, if not feminist, at least broaden the possibilities for women. This was also accompanied by the entrance of more women directors in mainstream Hindi cinema such as Sai Paranjpe, who provided women-centered films that moved beyond the existing repertoire even while working within existing Hindi cinema grammar. Radha Subramanyam (1996) singles out Rudaali (The Crier, Kalpana Lajmi, 1992) as exemplifying this cross-over practice, wherein a subaltern subject internalizes, resists, and subverts the dominant ideology. The movie is based on a short story written by Mahasweta Devi and is overtly feminist in its form and content. Examining the movie, Sumita Chakravarty (1999) highlights the aspects that are lost in translation from literary text to filmic narrative. She argues that while the movie foregrounds an agentic female subjectivity, in an effort to appeal to a popular audience the representation of the protagonist nevertheless hews to mainstream cinematic grammar. The film foregrounds female friendships and mother–daughter bonds, but it does not offer possibilities for agency outside the stereotypical positions patriarchal culture offers women. Movies outside of the mainstream offer tantalizing possibilities for reconfiguring Indian femininities but often fall short of their radical aims.

The Global Romance

In the 1970s and 1980s increasingly Hindi cinema became more about men and masculinity as the “angry young man” genre emerged. This subgenre reflected the growing disenchantment with the Nehruvian secular project and the oppositional position popular culture adopted with respect to the government. Superstar Amitabh Bachchan is most commonly associated with this role, where he ventriloquized the common person's anger toward an unequal and exploitative social order (Deshpande, 2005; Kazmi, 1998). Like rape-revenge narratives, the vigilante justice promoted by these movies offered individual solutions to structural problems. While these movies seemed to be radical, they helped reinforce the existing social order. This is especially pertinent with respect to their reassertion of a narrow gender binary. For instance, movies such as Sholay (Embers, Ramesh Sippy, 1975) celebrated male friendship and homosocial bonds but also asserted an aggressive masculinity. The angry young man's masculinity was in sharp contrast to earlier representations of Indian heroes, who seemed almost effeminate. This shift in masculinities was accompanied by a new representation of femininity. In blockbuster hits such as Deewar (Wall, Yash Chopra, 1975) and Zanjeer (Shackles, Prakash Mehra, 1973), the good woman/bad woman dichotomy prevailed; women were reduced to the role of mother or subservient wives. These two-dimensional female figures substituted for the more robust female characters of the social film. The 1990s, however, marked some significant shifts in Hindi film representational practices.

The changes in gender ideologies I narrate below are facilitated by significant alterations in the cinema industry structure. The Indian government officially recognized the industry in 2001, changing the financing structures of cinema production quite dramatically. In 2005 the government allowed multinational companies such as Sony to co-produce Indian films. More significantly, though, in the early 1990s the Indian government started to liberalize its economy and to integrate it more thoroughly within the global capitalist system. This shift in the political economy resulted in important social shifts that are registered in cinematic representations. On another level, Indian cinema had become more aware of audiences in the diaspora and now started to consciously elicit their attention. People of Indian origin living in Australia, North America, and the United Kingdom – what Vijay Mishra (2002) terms as members of the second diaspora – had entered the middle class in their home countries and were relatively wealthy. The turn to the diaspora makes sense in terms of revenue generation, but it also significantly altered the tenor of gender discourse. In particular women of South Asian origin are represented as repositories of “Indian” tradition; female modesty and chastity are revalorized as well (Ganti, 2004; Moorti, 2005).

Hindi popular cinema was largely addressed to the middle class (Prasad, 2001). This starts to shift in the era of the Hindi global cinema, the era of Bollywood (Ganti, 2004). Although Bollywood has been used as a short-hand term to refer to all films emerging from India, scholars have argued persuasively that it more accurately references the small slice of cinema that has gained international currency. Madhava Prasad (2003) contends that Bollywood is a “new cinema coming from Bombay but also, lately from London and Canada, which has [. . .] produced a new self-image of the Indian middle classes.” In this new brand of Indian cinema, Indian identity is centered in Anglo-America rather than within the geographic space of the nation-state (Gopal & Moorti, 2009).

In the new Bollywood cinema, Jenny Sharpe (2005) contends that conjugality and romance are narrated with a focus on the wealthy. Analyzing the sudden popularity of blockbuster wedding-themed films, Sharpe argues that the class conflict central to earlier romances is reconfigured in the new Hindi cinema. She identifies the film Maine Pyar Kiya (I Fell in Love, Sooraj Barjatya, 1989) as signaling the disappearance of the middle class from the Hindi cinema screen. In this film and others circulating under the name Bollywood, consumer culture and global brand names are repeatedly thematized, thus naturalizing the shift in focus from the middle class to the affluent. Class conflict is recalibrated as a clash of lifestyles, so social structural issues are reformulated as individual choices. Thus for women the adherence to Indian patriarchal conditions is positioned insidiously as a choice between a Western lifestyle and traditional Indian values. Unlike in the socials, which tended to highlight the injustices perpetuated in the name of tradition, contemporary romances present tradition as a choice women freely and willingly opt for.

The diaspora becomes the primary avenue through which this new money class enters the screen. For instance, in a film like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (The Braveheart Will Take the Bride, Aditya Chopra, 1995), the romance is between two second-generation Indians living in London, but a large portion of the narrative is staged in India. In terms of gender, the new romance films are rid of the good woman/bad woman dichotomy. Instead, aspects of the vamp figure are collapsed onto the figure of the female protagonist. Thus, before she falls in love with the hero, the female protagonist bears all the markers of being a modern, cosmopolitan subject: she is independent, opinionated, drinks alcohol, wears “Western” clothes, and so on. She displays as well the potential of sexual subjectivity. However, once she is in love she is transformed into the image of the good woman, clad in saris and suddenly acquiescent and subservient to the male figures.

The global Hindi films stage what Patricia Uberoi (2006) has identified as “an arranged love marriage” where the couple fall in love but wait for their parents' approval to get married. This waiting period allows the narrative to insidiously insert a return to traditional values, ideas that are asserted through the female's performance. Significantly in the new global Hindi movies, the woman from the diaspora is depicted as being more authentically Indian than those residing in the geographic space of the nation. Unlike the earlier middle-class films, Bollywood films are aimed at pleasing diasporic audiences and the cosmopolitan upper class within India. It is thus not surprising that the diasporic female subject emerges as the ideal global Indian subject. Contemporary Bollywood films have replaced competing visions of India with a banal patriotism, where lifestyle choices are seen as the most important signifier of national identity. Thus opulent weddings become one of the primary sites where the new global Indian asserts simultaneously their cosmopolitanism and their adherence to Indian tradition. Competing ideas about the nation-state have been replaced by a corporate diasporic nationalism, one where lifestyles and commodity culture become the avenues of subjectivity.

Unlike the two previous historical periods I have highlighted in this essay, in the global Hindi cinema, India and the West are no longer presented as antithetical to each other or as constituting a binary; rather, the diaspora permits a confluence. The Other or alterity, most often rural India, appears as a spectatorial backdrop against which a global Indian identity is performed.

Starting with the success of Kal Ho Na Ho (Tomorrow May Never Be, Nikhil Advani, 2003), a number of Hindi films have been set entirely in the diaspora centering around the lives of non-resident Indians (NRIs).² In these films, NRIs lead lives that are centered on other people of Indian origin; the storylines are depopulated of the local populace, who appear only as colorful aspects of the “exotic” Western landscape. Apart from advancing the idea of the arranged love marriage, the lives of these diasporic Indians has provided Hindi filmmakers the opportunity to address the topic of divorce. In films such as Kabhi Alvida Na Kahena (Never Say Goodbye, Karan Johar, 2006) and We are Family (Siddarth Malhotra, 2010), the women are not demonized for obtaining a divorce. This is a dramatic shift from the earlier ideas of subservience and self-sacrifice that were the essential pillars of good womanhood. On a superficial level, this seems like a significant shift in the depiction of Indian femininity. However, I contend that, like the arranged love marriage, these new familial structures provide a glossy façade for the assertion of a tradition-bound woman.

If the diaspora is the physical space where East and West meet, Indian woman becomes the symbolic site where the values associated with these regions come to reside. The films may visually present a woman who is mobile and independent but the narrative anchors this woman to an ambivalently defined set of Indian values. Contemporary Bollywood's global Indian woman may be assertive, self-confident, and a sexual subject, but she holds on to the supremacy of the maternal principle. The new Indian femininity is recoded as a seamless blend of the traditional and the modern, exemplified in a companionate marriage. Through this new brand of NRI films, the diaspora is no longer configured as external to the nation; instead it is recuperated within the horizons of Indians' everyday lives. India itself becomes impossible to separate from the diaspora.

Conclusion

Watching Indian films in chronological order, a viewer will be struck by the vastly different production values. Hindi films today look and sound much like their Hollywood counterparts. They are glossy and allow the viewers to participate in virtual tourism, soaking in the sights of Sydney Harbor, the Pyramids of Giza, über-modern Dubai, or iconic sites from the UK and the United States. Bollywood films capture in visual form the “shock and awe” induced by global capital flows. India itself is visualized quite differently. The slums and crowded cities of the past have given way to the opulent lives of global India. Bollywood films help audiences negotiate the forms of society enabled by the latest phase of globalization; they permit flexible attachments to more than one community.

But as I have argued throughout this essay, in terms of gender roles the films of the colonial era provided the most expansive and heterogeneous definition of femininities. Equally important, heterosexual romance was not always the central thematic. In contemporary films, as the Indian woman has come to look more like her counterpart in the West, the strictures of femininity have become more restrictive. On a superficial level, today's Bollywood films tell stories about cohabitating couples, divorced women, or even about women who proclaim single parenting. However, at the end of each of these narratives marriage and a heteronormative family structure emerge triumphant. Earlier films pointed out that marriages and family structures were the product of larger community desires, but today's films present these same old ideas as the result of individual choices. Without romanticizing the earlier cinema, it is important to note as well their more capacious definition of femininity. The female protagonists from today's films adhere more closely to the beauty ideals of the West. Indeed, I contend that while certain “Indian” values are asserted, today's film and film stars easily blend into a Hollywood landscape.

Equally significantly, Indian cinema's understandings of gender and Indianness have shifted considerably. Some colonial-era films presented gender and Indian identity as performative structures. Since the 1950s, though, biological explanations of national identity and femaleness have become ossified. Perhaps most insidiously, Indian female identity is cathected with Hindu identity. Indian cinema has opened up the space to address non-heteronormative sexual identities, but often in regressive ways. Outside of mainstream cinema, however, there is a growing independent industry that has offered challenges to these hegemonic ideas of gender, sexuality, and national identity. Amidst the sexily clad, thin, dancing Bollywood subjects, audiences are left longing for representations that commodify neither feminism nor tradition. The project to fashion a cinematic space for the new Indian woman remains deferred.

NOTES

1 Although the city is now called Mumbai, I use the older name Bombay to signal the historical antecedents of the Hindi cinema formation.

2 NRI is the term by which the Indian government acknowledges and solicits the economic resources of the population of Indian origin.

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