““The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships: Helen and Public Femininity in Hindi Film” in Anustup Basu and Meheli Sen ed. Figurations in Indian Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan,

“The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships”: Helen and Public Femininity in Hindi Film Anustup Basu

It is well-known that a large part of the discourse on Indian modernity has

centered itself upon the idealized figure of the woman as the prime cultural

civilizational product. That is, on the theme of a principled Indian feminin-

ity as an artwork of national-spiritual interiorities—a home for the enduring

spirit of the nation—unsullied by the external realities of colonialism.1 Yet,

within the auspices of an English educated elite nationalism, the woman had

to be “recast” in order to equip her with powers for the ideological

reproduction of a new class. She had to be educated and enlightened, but also

made the lynchpin of an entire discourse of Hindu reform that involved itself

with questions about class economic realities, caste, custom, tradition, and

jurisprudence. One had to deliver her from the evils of Sati, perhaps allow

her to remarry if she is a widow, ponder over her age of consent or her rights

to property and inheritance, and ultimately bestow her with some modern

conjugal rights by the proscription of Hindu polygamy.2 The figure of the

woman had to be continually reinvented in an elemental battle- ground that

ranged between liberal measures of birth control and absolutist practices of

female infanticide. This terrain of patrimonial thinking on the woman,

one that wavers between the worldly pragmatics of liberalism and absolute

stipulations of an imagined Victorian-Indological “tradition,” spans two

centuries and continues to unfold to this day. Her figure remains an odd

gravitational site, in which the specter of the modern both emerges from and

is, in turn, engulfed by the vortex of tradition.

Ideally, the new woman would be one that could furnish a sovereign moral

definition of the home as opposed to a public world dominated by processes

of imperialism, modernity, and capital. The aspect of Mother India, or Bharat

Mata, was an iconic amplification of this primary imagination. But of course,

in its earthly manifestations in urban middle class realities, this abstract

diagram of femininity had to enter into alliances or compromises with

modern forms of society and production. This is precisely why, in the realm

of desire, practice, and ethics, the everyday “being public” of the woman has

always been a contentious matter. In popular

139

Helen and Public Femininity in Hindi Film 140

Indian cinema of the past eight decades, the filmic coming into being of the

feminine body has usually been a complex process of distilling visible signs,

by which a form is abstracted gradually, by an acute calibration of eros and

jouissance, between the world and the home, into a postulate of “traditional”

patriarchy or of its intimate enemy, the modern. The flesh and blood of the

female form are therefore always in stages of esoteric transcription, being reified and reduced into both, the drawings of the nation as well as its torrid

others—the putrid vices that prevent the nation from coming into being.

Which is why “narrating the woman” is an anxious as well as furious under-

taking, perpetually geared toward foreclosing that moment when a female

corporeality—as a voluptuous cluster of errant and naturalistic energies—

becomes apparent in passing, in between iconic diagrams of virtue and vice that mutually contend over, intersect, and occupy it. The cinematic figu-

ration of the woman is thus a relentless process of transmissions between the

icon and the flesh. It is a gestative process of writing that is at once the

unfolding story of Indian secularism and modernity.3

The woman-in-public in pre-independence cinema and the coming into being of the reformist social

What is interesting, however, is that the woman-as-nation artifact was consolidated more strongly, in a much more emphatic manner, in post-

independence Indian popular film, with the emergence of what Madhava

Prasad has called the feudal family romance4, and, in a wider sense, the

generic preponderance of what Ashish Rajadhyaksha has called the “All

India Film” of Bombay Talkies and Filmstan.5 This is not to say that the

concern with the woman was not strong in the earlier socials. The titles of some films made during the 1920s and 1930s announce, quite emphati- cally,

an abiding thematic fixation with the female figure in proximity with

instruments, spaces, and skills of the modern: Telephone Girl (Homi Master,

1926), Typist Girl/Why I Became a Christian (Chandulal Shah, 1926), Wildcat of

Bombay (M. Bhavnani, 1927), Cinema Girl (B. P. Mishra, 1930), Educated Wife

(?, Madan Theatres, 1932), Miss 1933 (Chandulal Shah, 1933), Actress (Balwant Bhatt, 1934), Indira MA (Nandlal Jaswantlal, 1934), Gunasundari/ Why

Husbands Go Astray (Chandulal Shah, 1934, remake of his 1927 silent) Dr.

Madhurika (Sarvottam Badami, 1935), College Girl (Jayant Desai, 1935), Madam

Fashion (Jaddanbai, 1937), Rifle Girl (R. S. Choudhury, 1938), and Fashionable

Wife (Dhirubhai Desai, 1938). Some of these films, but not all of them,

assumed regressive ideological positions in relation to modernity and the woman question. In Indira MA (Nandlal Jaswantlal, 1934), Sulochana plays a

graduate from Oxford who rejects the simpleton selected by her drunkard

father only to fall for a playboy. In a dramatic courtroom sequence toward the

end of the film, the repentant father blames two entities for his misfortunes:

alcohol and a British University education. The protagonist in


Dr. Madhurika (Sarvottam Badami, 1935) is a female medical practitioner who

advocates birth control and refuses to have any children and then of course

is ultimately domesticated.6

Nevertheless, the popularity of Arabian Nights style folk fantasies from Gul-

e-Bakavali/The Story of Bakavali (Kanjibhai Rathod, 1924) to Watan/ Motherland

(Mehboob Khan, 1938) and beyond, and the genre of stunt spectaculars best

exemplified by the Wadia Movietones vehicles for Nadia ensured a dynamic,

often irreverent publicness of the woman that challenged pieties of the

Brahminical joint family. The major female stars of the twenties and thirties

thus often essayed roles perhaps unimaginable for latter day, post

independence top drawer heroines like Nargis, Meena Kumari, Madhubala,

Waheeda Rehman, or Nutan. In Wildcat of Bombay, Sulochana had eight roles:

that of a gardener, a policeman, a Hyderabadi gentleman, a European

blonde, an old banana seller, and an expert pickpocket.7 Apart from Nadia in

her signature films like Hunterwali (1935), Miss Frontier Mail (1936), Hurricane

Hansa (1937), and Diamond Queen (1940),8 Lalita Pawar in Diler

Jigar/Gallant Hearts (G. P. Pawar, 1931), Sulochana in Madhuri (R. S.

Choudhury, 1932), Aruna Devi in Deccan Queen (Mehboob Khan, 1936),

Gohar in Sipahi Ki Sajni/The Sepoy’s Beloved (Chandulal Shah, 1936), and

Sardar Akhtar in State Express (Vijay Bhatt, 1938) played masked crusad- ers,

soldiers, or vigilantes in male drag. Durga Khote essayed a pirate queen in

Amar Jyoti/The Immortal Flame (V. Shantaram, 1936), while Maya Banerjee was

cast as a disguised detective who infiltrates a gang in order to get back an

international trade treaty in Seva Samaj/Service Limited (Chimanlal Luthar,

1939). In a colonial cinematic space yet to be dominated by a Brahminical

culturalism of the nationalist middle class, there was scope for a surprisingly

abundant amount of on-screen kissing9 and other permissive expressions of

sexuality. In Homi Wadia’s Toofani Tarzan/Typhoon Tarzan (1937), the

Indianized “man of the apes” tries to grope the breasts and remove the blouse

from his lady love’s person in a surprisingly candid manner.10

Thematically the catastrophic balance between modern desires and the

uninfringeable stipulations of tradition was always agonistically achieved.

This agon was a central drive of the emerging melodramatic form, creating

myriad spheres of affect between the allures of a transforming world and

nostalgias for lost selves. It was parleyed into various assemblages of feel-

ing that ranged from abomination to wonder, from radical abnegations to

steadfast belief. The space of agon was one in which both the conceptual

diagrams of modernity and those of tradition were attacked, contaminated,

abstracted, revised, and purified. The figure of the woman was central to

such osmotic processes. The sphere of agon began with the anxious placing

of the woman in public, which is already a fundamental displacement and

exposure of what is supposed to be an artwork of interiorities. The original

sin of this profane publicness pertained to being in film itself, which was an

expression of an overall profanity of the woman’s being in the precincts of


the market and the city. This duality between an abiding spirit of nativity and

its profane representation as the woman on the screen—between the twilight

of the gods and the resplendence of the bazaar—can perhaps be somewhat

understood in relation to the early female stars that animated the stuff of

myth and legend, as well as the exemplary archetypes of the new Hindu

woman. Many of them were of Anglo-Saxon decent or imported from USA, UK, or Australia: Patience Cooper, Dorothy Kingdom, Ermaline, Jeanette

Sherwin, Adele Wilison, June Richards, Violet, Pearl, Kumudini (Miss Mary),

Seeta Devi (Renee Smith), Sabita Devi (Iris Gasper), Indira Devi (Effie

Hippolite), Madhuri (Beryl Clayton), Lalita Devi (Bonnie Bird), Lina

Valentine, Wilma Garbo, Vimala (Marcia Solomon), Vilochona (Marien Hill),

and the redoubtable Sulochana (Ruby Myers). The figure on-screen was thus immediately a compact of intimate memories pertaining to natality as well as

an alluring but alien object that promised a disconcerting plenitude of

modern desire.11

The cinematic woman on-screen was, therefore, even within a decorative

misé-en-scene of “tradition,” irresistibly the woman-in-the-city. Within the

phenomenology of cinema itself as industrial spectacle, the feminine figure

could be extracted only in an agonized, symbolic sense, from the sensorium

of the novelized urban space that tended to disconcertingly collapse the

moral with the libidinal. The purdah or the veil in the cinematic screen was

only a metaphysics of principled concealment and interiority; it was, over-

all, a mechanized interplay of surfaces in which signs of absolutist feudal

meaning were as evanescent and devoid of ontological fixity as were “depth”

based inscriptions of psychological lure or loathing. The image moved across

spaces, and in doing so, acquired a haptic quality and gravitated away from

an unflinching iconic stance. Much in line with Rajadhyaksha’s observa- tions

on the overall cinematic transfer between an epic frontality of the

mythological and the melodramatic modes of the early reformist social, let us

provisionally identify a conundrum for the latter genre: the woman, once

brought down to earth from the heavens, acquired an anthropological or

sociological profile that came in the way of a purely symbolic engagement

with the image. She unconcealed herself when she moved across historical

spaces. The woman thus had to be publicly revealed (along with the dis-

cursive revealing of cinema itself as a spectacular public institution) before

femininity could be narrated to perfection.

The moral turpitude in a film like Paapi No Fej/The Debt of Sin (Ardheshir

Irani and Naval Gandhi, 1924)—the tale of a young woman who plots against

her husband and ruins her lover—is affectively informed by an energetic

tryst with spectacular modernity, marked by “a race course, the cotton

markets, and bars.”12 The Kohinoor Film Company’s The Telephone Girl (Homi

Master, 1926) was advertised as containing “nightclubs, a Turkish bath, and

college life”13 and declared to be India’s “long awaited Cosmopolitan

Picture” (Bhaumik, “Sulochana,” 90). In Gamdeni Gori/Village


Girl (Mohan Bhavnani, 1927), the star Sulochana plays Sundari, a village girl

lost in the big bad city. The film’s publicity pamphlet touted “electric trains,

motor cars and buses, the giant wheel, cinemas and theatres” (Rajadhyaksha

and Willemen, Encyclopedia, 250). Mission Girl (1927) was advertised as “A

picture of momentous moments depicting the life romance of the patrol

leader of Bombay Girl Guides” (Bhaumik, “Sulochana,” 102). Kohinoor’s

Mojili Mumbai/The Slaves of Luxury (Manilal Joshi, 1925) and Saraswati Films’

Mumbai Ni Mohini/Social Pirates/Night Side of Bombay (Nanubhai Desai, 1925)

were two of many films that, within a thriller format, offered a moral yet

luridly spectacular picture of lust, seduction, marital infidelity, and crime

amid the colonial bourgeois of Bombay. The cinematic persona of Fearless

Nadia, the iconic caped crusader of the stunt genre during the 1930s and

1940s, was of course quintessentially that of the Bombaiwali, the woman from

Bombay.14 The accessories of the blonde, blue eyed actress of Australian stock

included masks, hoods, leather attire, whip, the horse called “Punjab ka beta”

and the car named “Rolls Royce ki beti.” The industrial spaces of the urban

order were rife with objects and events at once morally disconcerting and

fascinating that assembled in overall figurations of scan- dalous or exemplary

femininity.

The woman was perpetually caught between a desired iconic stasis in the

ritualized domesticity of the “home” (the cradle, the kitchen, the tulsi tree in

the courtyard, the puja room, or rituals like the Karva Chauth) and her public

outgoings in the historical spaces of production and vice in the city. The

movement of the woman both diurnal and exceptional, her body and its

paraphernalia both exotic and mundane, her proximities and affin- ities with

other bodies and objects, the spaces she occupies, the judicious and moral

segmentations of those very spaces, her attires, her speech, her languages, her

vocabulary and terms of reference, her profession, her pro- clivities toward

habits and toward poesis, her needs and her desires, the basis of determining

what is need and what can be articulated as desire, her nature and the

naturalization of that very nature—all formed a formidable assembling field.

It is in this combustive sphere that statements of tradition were abstracted,

necessities of political economy and imperatives of culture formulated, and

the historicity and essence of being woman both lamented and celebrated.

Her sins as well as her virtues were at once of this mortal world and of a

cosmic horizon of meaning. I will discuss this early, contentious issue of

“publicness” of the woman in relation to the interesting later day stardom of

Helen, the actress and dancer who was the major “vamp” of the industry for

three decades, from 1950s till the end of 1970s.

Being of French-Burmese-Spanish stock, Helen’s oriental looks marked her

as an exotic outsider,15 much in line with the aforementioned Patience

Cooper, Sulochana, or Fearless Nadia, but more strongly affiliated than her

predecessors to a totalized domain of vice. That is, within the auspices of a

Hindu/Hindu template of narrating the nation that came to the fore


during the late 1930s and 1940s with the studio products of Bombay Talkies

and Filmistan. The portmanteau format was installed by a Brahminical-

nationalist recoding of the multifarious energies of a bazaar cosmopol-

itanism of the colonial era through the rising influences of a Bengali literary-

realist modernism, Gujarati reformism, and a Gandhian patrimony. This

overall monitoring gaze (with its own inherent tensions) worked by the way

of an increasingly strident middle-class film journalism and state censorship.

It was from the late 1930s that the kiss began to disappear from Indian

cinema, masked women turned to home and heath, and the irreverent

powers and attractions of the stunt genre began to be relegated to poverty

row pictures excluded from a national cinematic mainstream. This alignment

of cinema with the nation in its political wake was part of an overall

Sanskritization of culture ministered by high priests like K. M. Munshi and

abetted by activist enterprises like the one by Rukmini Arundale to extract a

classical Indian dance tradition free of immediate associations with Islamic

courtly or courtesanal institutions, or that of V. N. Bhatkande and V. D.

Paluskar to invent a classical Indian music by the marginalization of Tawaif

traditions like Thumri and Kajri.16 When she made her debut in the Hindi

film industry during the early 1950s, Helen could thus emerge only as the

vamp—the absolute counterpoint to the nation imagined as woman—in the

new dispensation of the free republic. However, it needs to be also kept in

mind that she was a regular “heroine” or leading lady in quite a large number

of low budget, post independence Orientalist fairy tale fantasies and stunt

spectaculars like Hawa Mahal/Wind Palace (B. J. Patel, 1962), Kabli Khan (K.

Amarnath, 1963), or Aya Toofan/The Typhoon (Kedar Kapoor, 1964) opposite

second string actors like Ranjan, Ajit, and Dara Singh. These films—targeted

primarily at semi-urban, working class, or peas- ant populations—formed a

subliminal underbelly of Islamic and worldly attractions in relation to a

dominant picture of imagined community life for the nation. That terrain

would perhaps present a much more interesting counter-memory to a

national narrative writ large, but for the present we will focus on the

comparatively marginal figure of Helen in top drawer, “All India” films.

Helen and the Hindi feudal family romance

In the feudal family romance, the predominant Hindi film genre of the 1950s

and 1960s, the good woman is usually a cinematic drawing of coveted

qualities and inverted male desires bereft of any subjective “depth.” She is

not a sexual subject capable of will because in the feudal epistemology, pro-

creation or the simple chastisement of male desire accords no hermeneutic of

pleasure for the female entity. Madhava Prasad has elucidated this in his theorization of the absence of the kiss in dominant nationalist cinematic

modes after independence. The culturalist proscription of the kiss in Hindi


films, as per his understanding, amounts to a foreclosure of the private that

is dictated by a psychoanalytic assertion of the feudal, that “there is no sex-

ual relation.”17 The prohibition of sex amounts to the denial of an intimate

zone of nuclear conjugality, and in extension, the ban of a modern notion of

cinema itself that has the individual and individuated desires at the heart of

its operations. Prasad locates the problem in a realm of subjectivity and ideology; I will transpose it to a consideration of discourse regimes and

power. In this feudal reckoning, what is missing is the sexual relation as a

perverse, “western” picture of a symbiotic and equitable exchange of pleas-

ure between consenting adults. That is, it is missing as a body of permitted

visibilities and articulable statements. Women can certainly be taken licitly or

illicitly; they can be loved or raped, gifted between males (as it happens in countless films like Raj Kapoor’s 1964 blockbuster Sangam/Confluence),

impregnated, or exhibited publicly. But what can never be admitted is a

social acknowledgment of the feminine body as being capable of partaking

in the patriarchal monopoly of sexual pleasure. Women can therefore always

be objects of desire, but it is the picture of the desiring woman that must be

banned. The agon of “tradition” is to relentlessly abstract the body of the woman as pure ethical theorems, or as reproductive machines that can only

endure the myriad modern commerce of pleasure and value. This in itself is

of course never a simple or a complete process; total commitment to feudal

strictures is always informed by modern experiences of the tragic. In L. V.

Prasad’s Sharda (1957) for instance, the hero undergoes a baroque

disintegration of the self when his father enters into an arranged marriage with his beloved. The melodrama of the film is elaborated at that severe

interface between the preordained epic dictation of faith and a profane dis-

pensation of “chance.” The heroic figure, as an ensemble of emotions and

duties, is thus caught between the woman as territorial emblem of private

desires and the woman as a public incarnation of mother, as announced by

the patriarchy’s absolute name giving rights. The historical narrative of the still arriving national-spiritual subject is consequently torn between the

inflexible principles of the feudal scion and the creeping guilt of Oedipus.

In the classical Hindi film, the physicality of the woman cannot threaten or

overwhelm a pristine economy of the Hindu-normative household. The

woman as mere body is usually displaced into an isomorphic “other” zone

with its own grounded typologies. The gangster’s moll or the cabaret dancer belong to this set and are frequently marked by pure pathologies and

illicitness. But this shift takes place in many more registers of a dominant

national imaginary. It is not restricted simply to the idea of an immoral

vocation (for prostitutes, much in line with examples in Victorian sensa-

tionalism, often develop golden hearts). The stigma becomes cinemati- cally

apparent only when a moral idea of fallenness combines with Hindu cultural-anthropological determinations of minority profiles and practices. This is

why public women of the bazaar are often Christians/Anglo-Indians,


Banjarans (gypsies), Muslims, lower class, or tribal people. The gallery of

characters played by Helen is symptomatic in this regard. They are a host of

named and nameless figures attired and augmented by a plethora of foreign

qualities, exotic memories, and totemic values. It is under a horizon of a

worldly “outside” that actually affirms the stringent limits of “home” that

the figure of Helen can fleet between an assembling range that is book- ended by a spectral west and a primordial orient. She can thus be a Chinese dancer

in Howrah Bridge (Shakti Samanta, 1958), a Malaysian village girl in Singapore

(Shakti Samanta, 1960), a North Indian tawaif in Gunga Jumna (Nitin Bose,

1961), a mythical demon princess in Sampoorna Ramayana/ The Ramayana

(Babubhai Mistri, 1961), a Mughal court dancer in Taj Mahal (M. Sadiq, 1964),

a Flamingo artist in Inspector (1970), or a gypsy in Sholay/ Flames (Ramesh Sippy, 1975). She has played nightclub singers, gangster’s moles, smuggling

operators, spies, Countesses, beauty queens, and assas- sins of myriad, if

spurious national-cultural origins spanning from Spain to Arabia to the Far

East. Such outsider figures of course more often than not come with

orphanated Christian/Western “single” names like Miss Kitty, Suzie, Sophia,

Sylvia, Cham Cham, Rita, Rebecca, Shelly, Rita, Carmen, Roma, and perhaps the most famous one of them all—Monica.18

Indeed it would be most pertinent to say that Helen (also Sulochona and

Fearless Nadia to a certain extent) was the first and so far the most geo-

televisual star figure in Hindi cinema. In her body was incarnated the

manifold allures of the world that constantly informed, impinged upon, and

seduced the “home.” I propose the “geo-televisual” in a basic philosophi- cal

sense, in relation to the inevitable transmission of sights and sounds between

cultures, across global distances.19 It is therefore not a one way imperial

process by which the global relentlessly invents the local, but a complex of

affects and semiotic procedures by which both the ideas of the endogamous

home as well as the world of awry energies are transformed. The geo-

televisual is not merely the manner in which the subject cognitively maps and

expands his/her environment, but also pertains to how the very map of

cognition and the given attributes of the self are altered.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Helen and her predecessors/contemporaries

like Cuckoo, Nadira, and Kuldip Kaur presented a figure of the bad woman

that was largely a mirror image of the good one. The qualities of virtue and

vice were distributed between them in almost a manner of punctual

inversion. Such complimentary assemblages could indeed therefore be

understood, to a large extent, by way of molar binaries like east/west, tradi-

tional/modern, wife/whore.20 However, from the 1970s onward, one notices a

diffused, often surreptitious exchange of desire and prohibition between

these prototypes, to the extent there is a gradual subsuming of the figure of

the vamp into that of the heroine. We will see that in due time, but first let us

understand Helen as a cinematic phenomenon. In order to do that, we have

to comprehend her filmic figure as an assemblage.21 That is, we have


to grasp the fact that more often than not, the cinematic Helen is a loose

ensemble of qualities, appetites, vices, and indices of identity that do not add

up to an integrated psychological/subjective profile.

The “Helen” assemblage of the 1950s and 1960s is a body of desires and

fantasies, fears and prejudices that are lodged between eros and thanatos. For

she is the one who shares with the heroine the sovereign judgment of a

Dharmic22 patriarchy about life that must be allowed to live and one that is

to let die. At the same time, it is she who brings to the fore the question of

style as a concern of an evolving urban sensibility under the horizon of

capitalism: the very thought of a life that is worth living. In the melodra-

matic dispensation of the feudal family romance, the presence of Helen spells

a death that is not at a great distance from the foreclosed allure of

consummation. This is precisely why she is either summarily killed off or

dies trying to save the hero. The resplendent Kitty in Gumnaam/Nameless

(Raja Nawathe, 1965) lights up the screen with the defiant sea beach num-

ber “Gam chhodke manao rangreli” (“Get over sorrows and celebrate”) only to

be brutally strangled a little later. Ruby in Teesri Manzil/The Third Floor (Vijay

Anand, 1966) meets the same fate. In Pagla Kahin Ka/The Mad Hatter (Shakti

Samanta, 1970), Helen plays the hero’s first love who is raped. The “death of

Helen” can however be taken in a larger, symbolic sense rather than a matter

that is always formally substantiated by the narrative. This is because her

aspect perpetually recedes toward the vanishing point in which the sexual

act, as an event of mutual exchange of pleasure, suffers an epistemological

eclipse before it can enter the orbits of the community or the family. Helen is

thus always dying because a feudal-patriarchal authorship of culture fearfully

awaits her demise. The verve of her body—which is motion devoid of a

unifying language of law, culture, and ethics—ominously fore- tells a secret

power. This is a power that can potentially objectify and use the male organ as

a source of pleasure, and hence cannot be named in the feudal world. In his

book on the star, Jerry Pinto correctly points out that the charms of Helen

hardly ever manage to entice the hero who incarnates in his own body the

composite attributes of modern stardom, the feudal idea of kingship, and a

cosmic power.23 However, this principled “look away” or an impenetrable

blindness on part of the hero to Helen’s charms is in itself an absolutist

patriarchal non recognition of the female body as a body capable of desire

of its own. The “look away” does not presume a democracy of viewership

aided by the camera (and thereby on a psychoanalytic “identifi- cation”

between the heterosexual male viewer and the hero) but affects an axiomatic

feudal patriarchal abnegation of the female appetite. The camera on the other

hand can easily break away from the hero’s line of vision, move horizontally,

and voyeuristically detail the dancing female body primarily through the use

of the zoom.

This patriarchal ban, as a constantly renewed sacralizing act, is of course

always already imperiled. This is precisely why the perverse possibility


she hosts—that of a symbiotic drawing of sexual pleasure—makes Helen a

“modern” figure in a special sense. But in order to understand that, we have

to unravel and analyze her as an ensemble of appetites and qualities, and not

as a unified representational entity. For as far as “representation” is

concerned, Helen’s powers of seduction and devouring are distanced by her

minority status (often that of an Anglo-Indian Christian) and an ethnophobic understanding of the same. The facile subjectivity that is accorded to her

aids a dogmatic narratological explanation of her “strange” behavior as being

motivated by lack of culture, or greed for money, power, and social status

beyond her ken. Helen is therefore never to be described by the Sanskrit

epithet kamini, which would simply mean a woman impelled by desire;

instead she and women like her are best described as kamini, or ones driven by a pathological avarice. Both Hindi words are etymologically drawn from

the word kama, which covers a wide range of meanings from sexual desire to

greed to aesthetic enjoyment. It is indeed interesting that in the universe of

the Hindi melodrama, kamini is predominantly a decorative, metaphysical,

aesthetic or simply nominalistic entity, while the latter gravitates toward a

purely schizophrenic or criminal status. Helen’s appetites are not appetites in themselves; they are never granted an autonomy that would allow them to

be extended to the very core of a being that is woman. For then the body of

the female would assume an unwarranted dimension beyond the question of

good and evil; it would emerge as an entity capable of craving and demand-

ing sexual gratification. Intercourse would cease to be a one way street of licit

and illicit male pleasure and insemination. The aura of the devouring female is therefore to be foreclosed along with the sex relation itself. Devoid of a

social-patriarchal mark of “honor” (which means sticking to the task of being

a receptacle for legitimate insemination and birth), Helen cannot be “raped”

in an absolute sense of the feudal. For in this world, rape can only be a forced

eviction of the female self from a scope of honor (izzat) bestowed by

patrimony. Since there is no question of recognizing a sexual “will” in the being of the woman (she can only have ethical will laid out by the father and

the husband), “rape” is limited to an illicit male possession of her body. Just

as there can be no consensual love outside marriage, there can of course be

no rape within it. But that apart, Helen’s figure also harbors a potentia drawn

from wicked appetites—if she is taken, she too might take. It is precisely here

that the pathological dimension becomes important. Helen cannot be rav- aged because even an unsanctioned possession of her body may not give rise

to a patriarchal monopoly of pleasure, if she is violated, it is feared that she

might enjoy it. These neat diagrams are of course often challenged, recoded,

shifted by movements of bodies, affections, and the discursive calisthenics of

cinema but let us inhabit them for a minute to bring out its exact ramifi-

cations in relation to the modernity question. Within the Helen “assemblage” the appetite of the body is denied legiti-

mate expressions of female sexuality like love, conjugality, or courtship by


a continual attachment of it to exotica and ethnophobic dogma. This is not

merely because she is a “bad” woman but also because female sexuality can-

not be seen to be a determining factor in movements of love, courtship, or

conjugality. The appetite is also foreclosed from the language of law and eth-

ics or from the diurnal procedures of social life itself by an excessive formal-

ization of it through choreographed dance movements. The Helen dance is a plastic sublime that is to be used up by its spectacular usefulness; therefore it

cannot be recalled in tranquility. It is thus always a dance toward death

itself—a phenomenon that must be affirmed to maintain the universality of

the feudal-bourgeois joint family. This death, as we have noted before, can

be brought about in many ways. She can be killed off or made to exit from

the narrative without any ceremony, as it happens in countless films like Junglee/The Wild One (Subodh Mukherjee, 1961), in which she appears only

for a musical number.

The dance/death of Helen is an expression of primal lust that cannot be

named within the scope of the social and is an affective counterfoil to the love

displayed by her good counterpart, the heroine. However, if one cannot fall

in love with Helen, one can also not have sexual intercourse with the true

beloved. The sexual relation is foreclosed in the latter’s case because her

desire for the hero assumes a transcendence in the form of devotion. The

“love” assemblage in the feudal family romance is closely affiliated to a

state of godliness brought forth by a host of cultural associations and

memories—Meera’s or Radha’s love for Krishna that comes from the rich,

multifarious vein of the Bhakti movements, or the precept of ishk (love) being

close to a metaphysics of Khudai (the divine) to which the self can be

extinguished (fanaa), as in the Islamic-Sufi traditions. Love wavers between

being a radical otherworldly power capable of challenging social norms—

the resident interests of the feudal joint family, and given distinctions of class,

caste, and religion (the memorable epic melodramas of Guru Dutt for

instance)—and being a stance of self effacing, devotional surrender to patri-

archy. It can indeed claim different ontologies and affect radical departures,

but it can never rest on an acknowledged baseline of physicality. Even in

memorable instances like the “Na Jaon Saiyan” (“Do not leave, o beloved”)

song sequence in Guru Dutt’s Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam/The Lord, the Wife, and the

Slave, the neglected and increasingly schizophrenic wife’s appeal is split

between a devotional prayer to the husband as a fallen god and the calling of

an unnamable center of being in the body. The latter can be presented only

decoratively, as a destinying thirst (pyaas) across several lifetimes, poetic

metaphors of disheveled hair, kohl in the eyes, tinkling bangles, the

intoxication of the mind and through other stylized expressions of the

sringara (erotic) rasa.24 It is unrecognized by the husband who leaves to visit

a courtesan. The desiring wife can then only continue to extinguish desire

itself by transforming, body and soul, into a baroque artwork of alcoholic

decadence. Conversely, as we see in Dutt’s other memorable film Pyaasa/


The Thirsty One (1957) and many other lesser memorable ones, the courtesan can also develop a golden heart once she unmistakably transcends the calls

of the flesh. The prostitutes in Chetan Anand’s Hanste Zakham/Smiling Wounds

(1973) and B. R. Ishara’s Chetna/Consciousness (1970) get engaged or married

to the heroes but are either killed or commit suicide before the relationships

can be consummated. The terrain of romantic love in Hindi cinema is thus a

complicated coming together of utopian or irreverent associations and a modern Brahminical-Victorian invention of a “tradition” that can be traced

back to the early nineteenth century. But predominantly, the feminine entity

in heterosexual love achieves a state of godliness only by forming the self as

receiver of the blessings of patrimony, sustenance, and insemination. At

times this feminizing process is differentially, but radically extended to the

male participant in the process as well. This is why it is also the male who often genuflects in front of the female once she assumes her iconic/ideal

status. The latter becomes an entity capable of demanding unwavering

devotion (puja), stirring madness (deewangi), and a groundless, poetic

dismantling of the self in pursuit of her.

It is the sexual body of the female that disappears in a nebulous zone

between the death of Helen and the devotion of the good woman. The various implications of this epistemological forfeiture can be illustrated by a

comparing it with a western diagram of idealized conjugality. That is, an

ethical template of marriage which is only one among many western ones

and one that can be provisionally summoned to this occasion and discur-

sively collided with the feudal dictum just described. What I seek here is thus

a deconstructive splintering of meaning on both ends, rather than a historical elaboration of the unrestful relationship between modernity and Hindu

conjugality, of which there are many admirable instances especially in the

works of feminist scholars like Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Tanika Sarkar, and

Rochana Majumdar.25

According to Immanuel Kant, the modern institution of marriage is based

on a free association of consenting individuals. The important corollary to

this formulation is that human beings can be attributed freedom only when

there is no slavish objectification of the self involved, even during the natural

union of the sexes. Marriage, in this sense, is possible only when it is

absolved of all despotic procedures. The act of consummation therefore

becomes a sexual intercommunity (commercium sexuale) in which

objectification and one-way exploitation of sexual organs is avoided by a life-

long mutual usage of the other’s sexual parts and faculties. The perma- nence

of this pact is of course important, for it is that which distinguishes Holy

Matrimony from animal nature (vaga libido [unsettled lust], venus vulgivaga

[roving sexuality], or fornicatio [fornication]).26 The two-way sexual

objectification on part of both sexes ensures their reciprocal cancellation. It

preserves freedom at both ends, and the monogamous intransigence of this

union attaches it to the universal laws of humanity. In other words,


among other things, Kant’s thesis rests on the admirable recognition of the

heterosexual woman/wife as human and an entity deserving of rights and

liberties. In his comprehension, the capacity of the woman for a reciprocal

enjoyment of the other’s sex organs and faculties is an essential part of the

human sexual relation as distinguished from animal passions. Like the man

himself, at no point can the woman be reduced to a mere thing, for that would be “contrary to the right of humanity in his own person” (Kant, Science of

Right, 39). Kant makes it clear that if this reciprocity is absent, the union, even

if it is a monogamous one, is indistinguishable from concubi- nage (a pactum

fornicationis) for it would be surrendering a human entity to the arbitrary will

of another. Such “left handed marriages” are contrary to an organic

personhood of the modern union, and are incapable of claiming a universal status for themselves because of their susceptibility to annulment. They are

not real marriages.

The Helen assemblage and that of the “good woman” in Hindi cinema set

up worlds of interactive desire perhaps more complex than Kant’s strictly

heterosexist and monogamous ground plan. However, when one brings all

three into a state of critical proximity, there is a paradoxical transfer of possibilities, goals, and qualities. The Helenic figure of engulfing femininity

is morally censured because it is seen to be pathologically prone to pactum

turpe-s (Shameful Contracts) that do not conform to arrangements of

reproduction and propriety. At the same time, it is Helen who is capable of

fulfilling Kant’s essential condition by using the male sexual organs and

faculties on a reciprocal basis. Her serene counterpoint, the “good woman,” on the other hand surrenders those very rights of personhood to enter the

realm of home, heath, and property. Once we isolate the sexual dimension of

Helen’s figure, we can say that she is a fatally bad woman because she refuses

to be a wife for reasons that, in terms of a Kantian modernity, are

indistinguishable from why she sexually refuses to be a concubine. The par-

adox becomes even more complicated when one extends it to the point of view of the “tempted” male. If one were to fall in love with Helen, it would

result in taking masochistic love to an intolerable extreme, by which the male

enters a domain of the modern by abnegating the feudal patriarchy’s absolute

nomination of the husband as despot.

In the melodramatic dispensations of the 1950s and 1960s, the exchanges

of affects and principles between these polarized diagrams of femininity were of course far more complicated. There was always an insidious

commerce between them, but in later years this becomes pronounced—to the

extent that the traffic threatens to collapse the extremes of good and evil

themselves. From the 1970s onward, what can be noticed is a mutual

deterritorialization of the Helen model and its intimate other, the heroine. It

is from this point that Helen’s physicality gradually shifts from being a dying spectacle or a wistful resonance of pleasure that cannot establish its own

socially sanctioned hermeneutic of desire. The figure gravitates away


from a hard artifact of pure immorality to sociological profiles of disenfran-

chisement, orphanhood, and privation. Helen is increasingly featured in

roles that are sympathy inducing precisely because she can be understood in

terms of exchange, circulation, and survival within a disturbed political

economy rather than a pathology diagnosed by an absolutist moral uni-

verse. Helen’s dance cameos like the “Aj Ki Raat” (“This Night”) sequence in Anamika/The Unknown (Raghunath Jhalani, 1973) or the “Piya Tu Ab To Ajaa”

(“Come hither beloved”) cabaret in Caravan (Nasir Hussain, 1971) are self-

contained narrative segments with her at the center of affections. In both of

them she is seen to be pining for her lover—in the first, she is molested by a

hoodlum before he arrives; in the second, she breaks out of a symbolic cage

to greet him. In Imaan Dharam/Conscience and Duty (Desh Mukherjee, 1977), she plays a tragic lead role of a single mother opposite a figure no less than

super star Amitabh Bachchan. In Chandra Barot’s Don (1978) she is a seducer

who attempts to lure the nefarious titular character (once again essayed by

Bachchan) to his doom because he was responsible for her boyfriend’s death.

In Mahesh Bhatt’s Lahu Ke Do Rang/Two Shades of Blood (1979), Helen

features as the loyal second wife of the hero and the dutiful mother to his son. Such turns were undeniably interspersed by many conventional vampish

appearances, but the point is that Helen’s “death” changes from being a

morally absolute imperative to a dismantling of her prior incarnation as an

unflinching archetype of badness. The energies of this figural assemblage

were rendered free and distributed spectacularly or surreptitiously among

the emergent figures of the new age woman.

Helen’s unacknowledged daughters: The public women of the seventies

The star figures of Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi were unrestful yet glam-

orous images of femininity that came into being during the 1970s. In some

ways, they can be considered to be Helen’s progeny who were allowed move-

ment in a wider politico-cultural space that opened up in a climate of tre-

mendous political upheaval, during which an eclectic Gandhian-Nehruvian

feudal-bourgeois ruling coalition was coming apart in the seams. It is through Babi and Aman that the old patrimonial designs of the good woman were

brought into torrid relations with dynamic spheres and temporalities of the

industrial city. Their tall, decidedly western, lissome, “fashion model” bodies

were contested over by feudal ideas of propriety on the one hand and the

orphanated, professional realities of the urban kind on the other. Especially

around the period of Internal Emergency (June 25, 1975–March 21, 1977), there was, in commercial Hindi cinema, a rise in disenchanting urban mid-

dle class themes of survivalism in an elemental city that no longer offered a

mythic horizon of homeliness, but only a refuge. Aman played a gold digger

who is finally domesticated by her own debilitating conscience in Manoj


Kumar’s Roti Kapda Aur Makaan/Bread, Attire, and Roof (1974); in Ajnabee/

Stranger (Shakti Samanta, 1974) she was an ambitious girl who aborts her

baby to pursue a career; in Dev Anand’s Hare Rama Hare Krishna/Praise Rama

Praise Krishna (1971) she was cast as a pot smoking hippy; in Manoranjan/

Entertainment (Shammi Kapoor, 1974), as an unrepentant prostitute; in

Dhund/Fog (B.R. Chopra, 1973) she was an unhappily married woman who has an extramarital affair; and in Prem Shastra/The Art of Love (B. R. Ishara,

1974) her character falls in love with her mother’s ex-husband, who is also the

brother of her biological father. Parveen Babi essayed a prostitute living alone

in the city in Deewar/The Wall (Yash Chopra, 1975) who then moves in with

her gangster boyfriend. In Ramesh Sippy’s Shaan/Style (1980) she played a con

artist and jewel thief, in Meri Awaaz Suno/Hear My Voice (S. V. Rajendra Singh, 1981) she was once again a gangster’s moll, and in Namak Hallal/The

Trustworthy (Prakash Mehra, 1982), a seductive assassin for hire.

The Aman and Babi star figures come to the fore in an elemental urban

mise-en-scene where a profane “being public” of the woman becomes an

imperative for middle class education, professional uplift, and economic sus-

tenance. The atmosphere of widespread unemployment, political upheavals, rampant hoarding, and black-marketing that marked the tumultuous build

up to and the aftermath of the Emergency years was one in which a mel-

odrama of homeliness could be presented only in terms of local agonistic

situations of survival. The figure of the woman often became orphanated in a

metaphysical sense, torn between ontologies of virtue and unforgiving social

settings of privation. The dividing lines between the heroine and the vamp became porous and osmotic in a monstrous and spectral city that was increas-

ingly a precinct for awry, differential illegalities, rather than a realm of truth

or resident patriarchal custodianship. Not that the typologies of the heroine

and the vamp ceased to exist altogether, but increasingly they were trans-

formed into disembodied circuits of urban production and circulation (rather

than static personifications) that the woman occupied and exited from. As a result, in films like Dastak/The Knocking (Rajinder Singh Bedi, 1970), Chetna/

Consciousness (B. R. Ishara, 1970) or Hanste Zakhm/Smiling Wound (Chetan

Anand, 1973) good women and prostitutes, caught up in swirling commerce

of the city, either do, or threaten to trade places. The incoming assemblages of

modern, ‘liberated’ femininity were also, disconcertingly as well as fascinat-

ingly, dressed with manifold allures of the world: new forms, body languages, attires, foreign locales, exotic goods, and lifestyle practices.

It could of course be justly argued that more often than not, such allow-

ances for nonconformity are passive revolutionary schemas to domesticate

the proliferation of the new into the aegis of the old. These assemblages are

distinguished from prior ones by their extended elasticity and their increased

capacity to accommodate variables of urban spaces. The sexual relation still largely remains a “secret,” but it increasingly becomes an exhibited secret

vehicled by the sometime delirious, sometime shamefaced public form of the


female. The feudal foreclosure of the sex relation no longer takes the form of

bucolic innocence, but gradually assumes the shape of an openly and tenu-

ously practiced national-cultural dogma. The assembling field of femininity

thus became populated by irresistibly novel and tensile energies. The agon of

presenting the woman as an iconic aspect of the nation became more

pronounced in its elemental intensities and more worldly in its navigational scopes. In Raj Kapoor’s Bobby (1973) the Indian “teenager” is made figurable

through measures of ethnographic distancing, by which the paraphernalia of

low cut blouses, short skirts, tribal dances, and two piece swim suits can be

shown to be ingredients of a zone of infantile innocence occupied by a Goan

Christian fishing community. In Kapoor’s Satyam Shivam Sunderam/Love,

Truth, and Beauty (1978), the tall, urban, “fashion model” body of Zeenat Aman is merged with the ethnographic profile of the tribal woman. The for-

mer imparts an urban tonality and architecture to the abstract postulates of

the latter, while the coveted body of Aman is in turn claimed by an ontology

of fantasized “tradition.” The grand dialectics between truth and beauty—

between the ideal and the real—that the film poses as endemic to Indian

modernity are undertowed by a continual imbibing between these two poles. It is because of such lyrical passages and immediate reconfigurations that one

sees moments in which devotional energies are brought into concert with

expressions of appetite. In the titular song sequence, Roopa (Aman), while

bathing the Shiva lingam and preparing it for worship, embraces and kisses

the phallic emblem.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid eds (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); chapter 7, “Women and the Nation” in Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and chapter 2 of Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

2. I, of course, have in mind here a long line of legislative and juridical matters, roughly beginning with the ban on the practice of Sati (or immolation of Hindu widows in the husband’s pyre) enacted in the Bengal Presidency by the then Governor General Lord William Bentinck in 1829. The act was strongly abetted by the reformer Raja Rammohun Roy. The notorious practice, however, contin- ued intermittently in the subcontinent; the Indian government was compelled to issue the Rajasthan Sati Prevention Ordinance as late as in 1987, along with the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act. The Age of Consent Act, which raised the age of consent of consummation from ten to twelve years, was passed by the British Indian government in 1891. The Act was supported by people like the Parsi reformer Behramji Malabari and prominent activist women like Pandita Ramabai and Anadi Gopal Joshi. It was vociferously opposed by nationalist leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and organizations like the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. Women’s Suffrage was granted to women by the British government in 1935 and was


retained by India and Pakistan after independence in 1947. The Hindu Marriage Act was adopted in 1955, as part of the Hindu Code Bill (which included denom- inations like those of Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh that were included within the legal parameters of “Hindu”). It was followed by the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act of 1956. The Hindu Succession Act of 1956 accorded women greater rights to property. Feminist scholars have of course justly pointed out that it is after a point gratuitous to claim that the Hindu personal law was “reformed” during the nineties; it was merely codified. The various legal ordinances and acts have been relentlessly debated, revised, and reformulated in the subsequent decades; but the centrality of the woman question in the agonistic sphere of Indian nationalism remains as strong as ever. For Muslim women, the lot has been much worse under the auspices of a Hindu normative Indian secularism and the constitutional provi- sion of the Sharia based Muslim Personal Law. The Rajiv Gandhi Government nul- lified a landmark 1985 Supreme Court Judgment according maintenance money to a destitute divorcee Shah Bano by passing the Muslim Women (Protection of Divorce Rights) Act in 1986.

3. In her study of female stardom and Indian cinema between the 1930s and 1950s, Neepa Majumdar points out that while in other national cinemas (mentioning Shanghai and Berlin specifically) the “New Woman” is a recurrent figure, “In the Indian context, the ‘New Woman’ is quite different in meaning and appears half a century earlier as a figure of domestic anxiety over the intrusion of British administrative and legal control into the space of the home. By the early twentieth century, the ‘woman’s question’ was ‘resolved’ to the extent that a new model of ‘modern Indian womanhood’ aligned with nationalist goals had emerged.” (Neepa Majumdar). Wanted Cultured Ladies Only: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–1950s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 62. Majumdar places the word “resolved” within parenthesis. Her subsequent analysis shows that this “res- olution” was far from stable.

4. See Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 64–87.

5. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian Cinema” Journal of Arts & Ideas 25–26 (1994): 55–70.

6. See entries on the two films in Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, new revised edition, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen eds (London, Oxford University Press, 1999), 259, 262.

7. See Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 250. For an excellent analysis of Sulochana’s stardom, see Kaushik Bhaumik, “Sulochana: Clothes, Stardom, and Gender in Early Indian Cinema” in Fashioning Film Stars: Dress, Culture, Identity, Rachel Mosley ed. (London: BFI, 2005), 87–97.

8. All directed by Homi Wadia from Wadia Movietones. 9. For instance, in the Indo-German-British Orientalist fantasies masterminded by

Himanshu Rai, like Shiraz (Franz Osten, 1928), Prapancha Pash/The Throw of Dice (Osten, 1929), and Karma/Nagan Ki Ragini (J. L. Freer-Hunt, 1932). Apart from these films (designed for foreign markets) that Rai made in collaboration with British International films and Ufa, kissing often featured not only in indigenously produced Hindi films but also in regional cinema, from Jamaibabu/ Brother-in-law (1931, Kalipada Das, Bengali), to Pahili Mangalgaur (R. S. Junnarkar, 1942; Marathi). About Jamaibabu, Rajadhyaksha and Willemen observe that “The sequence of Gobardhan kissing his wife, somewhat abruptly introduced, proba- bly invokes a tradition of pre-censorship pornographic film using Anglo-Indian actresses” (254).


10. I am grateful to Rosie Thomas for this reference. 11. Later, when actresses like Leela Chitnis and Durga Khote made their debuts, the

studios enthusiastically publicized their educated, respectable, caste Hindu origins. See Majumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only.

12. See Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (1999), 246. 13. Yves Thoraval, The Cinemas of India (New Delhi: Macmillan, 2000), 13. 14. See Rosie Thomas, “Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts”

in Bollyworld: Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha eds (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 36–69.

15. Jerry Pinto, in Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), 5, points out that Helen was always perceived as a white woman.

16. See Kaushik Bhaumik, “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry: 1913–1936” (unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Oxford University, 2001), 169.

17. See Prasad, “Guardians of the View: The Prohibition of the Private” in Ideology of the Hindi Film, 88–113.

18. See Pinto, Helen 49–50 for a more detailed account of Helen’s alien profile. 19. See Anustup Basu, Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-Televisual Aesthetic

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) for a further elaboration of the concept of the geo-televisual.

20. Perhaps the most succinct and emblematic instance of this esthetic and ethical polarization was in the film Prince, in which Helen and the heroine (played by Vaijayanthimala) have a dance competition between themselves to attract the attention of the hero. The heroine performs a medley of Indian classical dances like the Bharat Natyam, Kaththak, and Kathakali; Helen counters that with a collage of “western” movements.

21. I am using the term assemblage in a transformed Deleuzian sense, that is, without partaking in his occasional tendencies towards an acosmic vitalism or a transcen- dental empiricism. Assemblages are energetic, diffuse, but practical combinations of statements, bodies, sounds, qualities, perceptions, beliefs, subjective stances, and visibilities that come together and disperse constantly, in an opportune manner. Assemblages are opportune because they exist for the moment and for the purpose; in them, there are often no hard forms, hard facts, or paramount earthly authorities. They must not be mistaken as signs of an unhappy “national” consciousness caught between the lures of the modern and the recidivist pulls of the “traditional.” Rather they are formations that emerge from a continual osmosis between both tradition and modernity as historical diagrams of thought and belief. Helen as cinematic assemblage is thus made of diverse components: her oriental looks, the alien twang in her accent, her loud make up, exotic attire, her body language, speech, and of course, the typical part she plays in the narrative. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1987); also see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault Trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1997).

22. Bimal Krishna Matilal has illuminatingly suggested that a proper discussion of Dharma as a moral philosophy can begin in a better fashion with a consideration of the epics/itihasas Ramayana and Mahabharata. See Matilal, Ethics and Epics: The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal, Jonardhan Ganeri ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 22–3. That is, much more than the Dharmasastra texts— which are enumerations of duties, ethics, virtues and vices—the moral element in the Sanskritic-Brahmanical tradition can be derived, as a Kantian retrospective gesture of the modern, from its illuminating and exemplary instantiations in


the itihasas. This is because, as Matilal notes, the ancient Indian Sastras are not primers in morality. Neither in the Vedic Brahmana tradition nor among the recalcitrant Sramana sects like the Buddhist, Jaina, or Ajivika groups does one find God being referred to as the ultimate authority on Dharma (Matilal, Ethics and Epics, 51). In the Isa Upanishad, it is said that the face of truth remains hidden with a circle of gold (see The Upanishads, trans. Juan Mascaró, New York: Penguin, 1965, 50). The Kena Upanishad too posits Brahman as that which is beyond the known and the unknown. In the Chandogya Upanishad three groups of Dharma are mentioned: rituals (yajna), study of the scriptures (adyayana), and austerities (tapas). Manu himself outlines an eclectic, potentially conflict ridden process of deriving the Dharmic from five different sources in his laws: the Vedas, Dharmasastras, virtues cultivated by the Vedic scholars, the good conduct of the honest, and satisfaction of the mind. Three ways to purify dharma are ethics, pramanas or perception, inference, verbal testimony, and debate as tarka or het- usastra. He describes Dharma as that which is honored by the learned, followed by those who are above greed, and approved by the hearts of people (see The Laws of Manu, Trans. Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith London: Penguin, 1991, 17–18). It is with a special modernist textualization of the Bhagwad Gita during the 19th century that the notion of Dharma is assigned to a singular oracular source that can potentially be affiliated to a general monotheism of the nation-state as well as to a consolidated “Hindu” identity. It is only then that Dharma emerges as a mytho-poesis devoutly desired by political dispensations, as precisely that divine entity that can occupy the gap between the horizontal proliferation of daily life and the vertical immanence of the state.

23. See Jerry Pinto, Helen: The Life and Times of an H Bomb (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006) for a journalistic biographical account of Helen’s life and career.

24. The greatness of Guru Dutt’s epic melodramatic style lies in how he uses high contrast, tight close ups of the woman to create a dissonance between permitted visibilities and articulable statements. The wife here struggles to generate, within the auspices of the home, the allure of the courtesan.

25. See, for instance, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1993); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010); Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

26. See Immanuel Kant, The Science of Right, trans. W. Hastie (Raleigh, N.C.: Alex Catalogue; Boulder, Colo.: NetLibrary), http://www.netlibrary.com.proxy2.library. uiuc.edu/Reader/ (accessed May 2, 2009), 38–39.

http://www.netlibrary.com.proxy2.library/

Documents

““The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships: Helen and Public Femininity in Hindi Film” in Anustup Basu and Meheli Sen ed. Figurations in Indian Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan,