Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (20 page)

“Excuse me, this is the first time I’ve worked with this unit, so I don’t know people, what is your name?”

I was standing on the side
of
the set waiting for instructions and was startled when one of the stars of the film, Madhuri Dixit, asked my name. I was working as an assistant for the film
Dil to Pagal Hai
(The Heart Is Crazy) at the time (August 1996), and though this was the film’s second shooting schedule, it was Dixit’s first—the previous schedule in June did not require her presence.
⁷
After seven months of fieldwork in Bombay, visiting and observing film shoots, I was aware of the intricate norms of hierarchy which governed the patterns of interaction on a film set, and it normally would never involve a star of Dixit’s stature—the highest paid actress in the Hindi film industry at the time—expressing curiosity about, much less starting a conversation with, an assistant. My task of keeping costume continuity involved silently observing actors and noting everything they wore for a particular scene in order to avoid any lapses in continuity over the course of the shooting schedule. As the fifth assistant to the director, the maximum interaction I would have with such a star as Dixit should have been knocking on her dressing room door to inform her that a shot was ready, so what sparked Dixit’s curiosity enough that she approached me? I speculated that, as a woman working as an assistant, I was quite an anomaly on a film set. Three months later, when I had a chance to interview Dixit during another shooting schedule for the same film, she confirmed my hunch when she remarked that I had been, “the first woman assistant that I ever saw on a set; otherwise I’ve never met anyone.”

During the course of my fieldwork in 1996, I too never met any other women working as assistants on the direction side, and seldom on the production side; if actresses or dancers were not required for a particular shoot, I was frequently the only woman on the set. My continuous presence on sets, studios, and offices often perplexed those who were unaware of my research project, leading to frequent speculations about who I was, since I did not seem to fit into any of the expected roles for women—actress, dancer, journalist, hair dresser, costume designer, or choreographer—visible at various production sites. Some people thought I was someone’s wife; others thought I was a girlfriend; perhaps the most inventive speculation was that I was actually an actress who had devised an ingenious method of trying to get my first break—“doing research.”

The reasons for the marginal presence of women have
to
do with the dominant image of the Hindi film industry. Due to its historical connections to courtesan culture, organized crime, “black money,” and as noted in the Shakti Kapoor scandal, stereotypes about the “casting couch,” the film industry has long been viewed as an unsavory place, especially for women. In the very early days of cinema in India, women were not willing to act due to the stigma attached to public performance.
⁸
Acting, singing, or dancing for an audience was associated with prostitutes and courtesans, and thus regarded as outside the boundaries of decent society. The public nature of the filmic image appeared to violate the dominant norms of feminine modesty. Even prostitutes were unwilling to act in films, since that would appear as a public disclosure of their occupation, so in the first Indian feature film,
Raja Harischandra
, the role of the queen was played by a young man.
⁹
When women began to act in films by the 1920s, many were from mixed British or European and Indian parentage, frequently of Christian or Jewish backgrounds, and commonly referred to as Anglo-Indians. These women, due to their hybrid ethnic and cultural heritage, were already deemed outside of normal society and thus less bound to social conventions concerning respectability.

With the introduction of sound, filmmakers needed actors and actresses who could speak the vernacular and sing well, which meant that the Anglo-Indian women (and the wrestlers) who had dominated early cinema were no longer viable. One source of talent, specifically in dance and music, came from the male and female descendants of the
tawai’f
(courtesan) tradition in India. Courtesans had existed for centuries in the subcontinent and were traditionally the exponents of high culture in the courts, performing classical music and dance in their salons for royal patrons.
¹⁰
The British (Oldenburg 1991) and the newly constituted Indian
middle class
of northern India (Joshi 2001) played an instrumental role in the decline of courtesan culture in nineteenth-century India, and even though courtesans continued their establishments in more attenuated circumstances even after Indian independence, they had lost their main source of patronage with the end of monarchy.
¹¹
Their association with classical dance and music was also a source of unease for the political and cultural leadership, which had internalized the colonial Victorian criticisms of the courtesan institution as depraved, decadent, and immoral, and so went to great pains fashioning a sanitized classical tradition that could be deemed respectable and legitimate (Bakhle 2005; Meduri 1988; Weidman 2006).

Thus, in the early days of cinema in India, the trope of the good family
is situated in opposition to the courtesan tradition. Due to the hereditary nature of all performance traditions—including that of the courtesan— stating that an actress was from a “good family” communicated that she was not from a courtesan lineage, along with several other things: class, caste status, and level of formal education. Even if not hailing from a courtesan lineage, many of the early actresses came from economically marginal backgrounds and were the main financial support for their natal families. Such families, having urged their young teenaged daughters to act in films, would also be regarded as the obverse of the good family. Memoirs, biographies, and film periodicals from the 1930s and 1940s display a tremendous concern about actresses’ social background.
¹²
For example, in her autobiography, Durga Khote—an actress who began her career in 1930—recounted that producers were on the lookout for educated women from good families because “in those days women from good families and films did not go together” (Khote 2006: 33). Khote, a college-educated woman from an upper-caste and upper-class Maharashtrian family,
¹³
described how the producers of her first film, in which she had a very minor role, used her family background as a marketing tool, “The film advertisements had started appearing two months earlier. Mr. Bhavnani—shrewd businessman that he was—took full advantage of my name: that is, the name of both my families. The Lauds and Khote were highly esteemed families of the time, and Mr. Bhavnani used that fact. Newspapers carried huge advertisements headlined, ’Introducing the daughter of the famous solicitor Mr. Laud and the daughter-in-law of the well-known Khote family” (Khote 2006: 35).
¹⁴
The film, according to Khote, turned out to be “the very dregs, worthless in content and in production values,” and she described how she became the object of a great deal of vicious criticism from the Maharashtrian community and the press. She recounts that it became difficult for her to venture outside her home and go anywhere in the neighborhood because of the constant gossip, and that both her natal and conjugal families were tremendously upset with her, for in their opinion she had “brought shame to the good names of the families.”
¹⁵
Two letters published within a couple of months of one another in the English-language film magazine
Filmland
, in 1931, further illustrate the concerns around acting and respectability. The first letter, published in September, “Should Respectable Ladies Join the Films,” written by an actress who chose to remain anonymous—simply listed as “a lady artiste”—argued against film acting as an honest means of livelihood for women from educated and cultured backgrounds. The problem was not
with acting per se, but with the people that one came into contact with in the studios.

The actresses from the “houses of ill-fame” were most likely women who came from—or were thought to come from—courtesan backgrounds. The writer also presented studios as sites of debauchery and sexual harassment, where innocent women were lured with the promises of a bright future, but “any one who does not respond to the desires and wishes of the producers and the directors is doomed and is thrown out in the long run or is treated in a most cruel manner” (in Bandyopadhyay 1993: 110). She ended the letter by asserting that her “educated and cultured sisters” should not join films until the low morals of the studios and associated personnel improved. She also pointed out that education and culture were not necessary for acting; therefore the energy with which some filmmakers were advocating that college-educated women join the film world could be better directed to improving the moral standards of studio life.

In November of the same year, a rejoinder to this letter was published in
Filmland
, titled “Why Shouldn’t Respectable Ladies Join the Films,” by the actress Sabita Devi—whose real name was Iris Gasper. Devi asserted that her experiences as an actress were completely unlike that of the “lady artiste.” She insisted that she was always treated with utmost respect and courtesy, and all of the men she had worked with were “thorough gentlemen” who “still hold on to the traditions of the East in respect of their attitude towards women” (in Bandyopadhyay 1993: 111). She acknowledged that because of the shortage of respectable actresses, women had been recruited from the “lowest strata” of society, but that these “unfortu
nate” women were frequently very reserved on the set and did not behave in the manner described in the previous letter. In fact, Devi went on to assert that women were equally responsible for any type of harassment they encountered and that “the attitude a man takes towards a woman is governed by the latter’s own integrity of character, by her actions, her words and her manner; if she be true, womanly, and modest, no man can approach her in any other spirit than that of the deepest reverence and respect, and in my opinion no man is so bereft of these instincts, which help in recognizing true womanhood, than to dare approach her in any but the manner I have described above” (in Bandyopadhyay 1993: 113). She stated that any woman with talent, courage, and a chaperone could work hard and achieve success honorably. The letter ended with Devi’s invitation to the “lady artiste” to visit her studio, where she would be happy to show that it was not the corrupt or licentious site described in the previous letter: “the actors and principals are gentlemen of the East in the truest sense of the word, and that actresses have not flung ‘their morals to the airs’ ” (in Bandyopadhyay 1993: 113). The themes of Devi’s remarks have been remarkably persistent features of the film industry’s discourse about respectability over time. The tautology—that respectable women behave respectably—surfaces in later actresses’ characterizations of the film industry and is a mainstay in discussions about the issue. Devi’s reference to the “gentlemen of the East,” and her general defense of the reputation of the film profession, is also similar to assertions (“they are the most decent, cultured people I know”) defending the reputation of contemporary Hindi filmmakers presented in the opening of this chapter.

The concern with respectability and actresses’ social backgrounds continued to be a source of discussion in the national media after Independence. Waheeda Rehman, who debuted in Hindi films in 1956 and was a leading actress from the late 1950s and 1960s, described in an interview in the national English-language magazine
Illustrated Weekly of India
that cinema and the film industry had achieved respectability by the time she began her career.

Like Devi, Rehman emphasizes the actress’s agency in determining her reputation, but such agency appears only possible for women who are already marked as respectable by virtue
of
being from “good families.” In this manner, both Devi’s and Rehman’s remarks evoke ideologies of the new
bhadramahila
: the respectable woman as constituted by middle-class nationalists in nineteenth-century Bengal and examined by Partha Chatterjee (1989). Chatterjee discusses how such women, educated and hailing from middle-class homes, were able to venture out into public spaces without fear of censure or disrepute because their social demeanor, styles of dress, eating habits, and religiosity marked them as separate and superior, both to westernized women and to working-class women. Just as her “culturally visible spiritual qualities” shielded the new respectable woman from any moral hazards associated with venturing outside the home (Chatterjee 1989: 629), the respectable actress from a good family possessed the qualities to ward off the unscrupulous and licentious men prowling the studios.