The feisty screen women of the 1950s

Senior writer, Monsieur Jean Marc Gonin from Le Figaro newspaper, Paris, wanted to know, “So… are your heroines changing?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Wonderful. That’s what we have been hearing. They are changing.”

“...their clothes,” I said sardonically, to which the Gallic gent guffawed. And we ended up discussing the relaxation on bikinis, midriffs and liplocks. Thematically alas, vis-à-vis the representation of women, the Bollywood factory is still located in some Jurassic century. The Dirty Picture is majorly bold but at the end, the game-changer wraps herself in a wedding sari, seems terribly repentant and kicks the tinsel bucket.
And if Kareena Kapoor sashays off to a boudoir with Shahana Goswami after a glass of wine — now what deadly vintage was it? — the eponymous Heroine is mad as hell about the same-gender boudoir romp, the next morning. Hilariously, Goswami looks at her one-night amour to declare, “Come on, I’m not a lesbian.” Truly in terms of the progressive — or even quasi-permissive — portrayal of the New Age Woman, veiled hypocrisy persists. Take one step ahead and be applauded. Then take three backward, run for cover and hope no one notices.
Indeed, the status of women in popular cinema, or the lack of it, has been a long-agonised-over debate, which so far has yielded fuzzy conclusions. Although the female protagonist may no longer be the weeping willow per se or the main chup rahungi silent, suffering stereotype, she is still subservient to the “heroes”, or the males who remote-control every breath she takes. In fact, quite paradoxically, it was in the 1950s black-and-white cinema — when social concern was key to the plots — that the heroine was a woman of spleen and substance.
Surely, despite the pseudo-feminist fulminations of Madhur Bhandarkar’s Heroine, she is a joke compared to the screen heroine enacted by Nutan in Shahid Latif’s Sone ki Chidiya (1958). Scripted by the iconic literary writer, Ismat Chugtai, the “chidiya” was the believable goose who lays the golden eggs for her exploitative family. The film is rarely quoted for its ahead-of-the-times pugilism, obviously because it wasn’t a commercial success. Similarly Kamal Amrohi’s Daaera (1953), about a young woman’s entrapment within outmoded conventions, is rarely discussed. After all, it was more intimately scaled and psychologically incisive than the writer-director’s Pakeezah (1972).
It isn’t only nostalgia or sprints-down memory lane which are responsible for our abiding respect for the portrayal of women by V. Shantaram (Duniya Na Maane, Pinjra, Chani), Mehboob Khan (Amar, Mother India), Bimal Roy (Sujata, Bandini), the Wadia Brothers (Hunterwali, Fearless Nadia) and Raj Kapoor (Aag, Barsaat, Prem Rog). Back in the late 1940s and the ’50s — justly remembered as the golden age of Mumbai-produced cinema — there was no antipathy towards scripts revolving around the woman. No trade tracker dared to advance the notion that “a women-centrict picture” would be pure poison at the cash counters.
Such a prejudice didn’t infect the 1960s either, a decade suffused with escapist hilltown romances in which the heroines may have been sugar and spice, and everything nice, but never treated as expendable objects of desire. The rot, obviously set in with the action blockbusters of the 1970s — striking root in the Emergency era — when the angry young machine, Amitabh Bachchan, played the dual role of the exterminator-cum-entertainer. The heroines were fine for a peck on the cheek, a rambunctious cabaret or rustic dance, and became arm-marzipans. Glamour was of the essence for the heroine, and not acting, which was left to the likes of Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil in groundbreaking films, which largely appealed to a niche audience.
None of the emerging Zakhmi Aurats, or vendetta-spewing women, could compare to their forebears like Amiya Chakrabarty’s Seema (another undervalued film). Neither could they hold a torch before Anarkali of Mughal-e-Azam or the sprightly Geeta Bali who tragically passed away before completing Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Ek Chadar Maili Si, in which the woman asserted her equality in a traditionally chauvistic environment.
Inevitably Monsieur Gonin of Le Figaro, like every global journalist, finds news value in the bold, brassy and beautiful Bollywood heroines of today. When I bring that up, he reasons, “See, Europe is interested in knowing about them. They are endorsing top cosmetic brands… they are so beautiful.”
Absolutely, they are beautiful… but not bold. If they drink, smoke or get sexually adventurous, they’re either apologetic the next morning, or kick the first bucket visible in the vicinity. A pity. No two ways about it, then: the screen woman of the 1950s has remained imperishably independent and feisty. For all the tokenism support given to her today, she’s still a shallow, confused Heroine.

The writer is a journalist, film critic and film director