Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s
272
Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s
272eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252091780 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!
FEMALE STARDOM AND CINEMA IN INDIA, 1930S–1950SBy NEEPA MAJUMDAR
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Neepa MajumdarAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07628-2
Chapter One
The Split Discourse of Indian StardomIn our country the feelings in the star's heart remain in the heart. —Ibrahim Haji Mohammad Mistri, "America's Arrogant Stars," Rangbhoomi, 24 June 1933, 9–12 (quote on 11; my translation)
In the 1932 annual Puja issue of the English-language film weekly, Filmland, director Charu Roy complains that in nearly fifteen to twenty years of filmmaking in Bengal, "there was never a film whose market value was mainly due to its feature player." This, he says, is unlike Hollywood, where "generally we find that the public cares more for the featuring star than for the producing company." He unfavorably compares Bengali cinema's inability to profit from its stars not only to Hollywood but also, more immediately, to Bombay cinema. Even though he says that "most of us [in Bengal] have [a] great aversion for Bombay pictures for cheap stunts," he cannot help but name Bombay's "successful" stars and their films in order to demonstrate his point about the state of Bengali cinema. By the end of the decade, the need to create an Indian cinematic identity still continued to be seen in terms of the absence of, or the need to redefine, Indian stars. In 1937 the Bombay magazine filmindia made exactly the same point as Charu Roy and about the very same performers who had appeared in his list of successful Bombay stars: Sulochana, Gohar, Sabita Devi, and Durga Khote. As in Charu Roy's article, the filmindia author, Baburao Patel, negatively defined India's stars in relation to Hollywood stars who functioned as the exemplary products of a rationally ordered and efficiently operating star system. In both of these articles, as in a host of others from the same decade voicing similar concerns, there is the sense that stardom is always the already understood, instantly available concept whose best examples are inevitably Hollywood names.
Film stardom or, more broadly speaking, cinematic and mass-mediated modes of circulation of fame, similarly drew simultaneously from Hollywood and diverse local practices. As a practice of celebrity, stardom belongs in a longer history of fame in India, understood both as forms of public presentation of the self and as modes of circulation and exchange of knowledge about individuals. But while sharing in a longer history of fame, cinematic stardom also marks a rupture of sorts because of radical forms of intimacy and distance associated with the new medium that changed the very terms by which individual selves were circulated in the public sphere. While stars were closer and more "present" in terms of sheer scale, if one were to compare the size of human figures on stage and on screen, they no longer shared a physical space with their audience. Thus, shaped by mechanical reproduction and its attendant proliferation of images of the self, film stardom entered a much wider sphere of cultural practice that now included an anonymous mass audience and reconfigured the relation between public and private identities.
Working from the argument that the discourse of stardom in India was deeply divided between the dual imperatives of matching a Hollywood-style discourse and responding to Indian cultural needs and constraints, this chapter situates "stardom" in a broader history of fame, examining non- or precinematic forms of celebrity in India that were akin to the dynamics of film stardom as understood in its Hollywood context. Earlier contexts of fame explain the link between the social genre and the emergence of "stars" in Indian cinema. At the same time, a dual discourse on Hollywood and Indian stars circulated in Indian film magazines of the 1930s, emphasizing different ways of managing gossip and private information. The cultural apparatus of Hollywood cinema that accompanied the technology of filmmaking included the institution of stardom in all its aspects. From the format of film magazines to the look of stars and star photographs, the entire mise-en-scène of stardom as practiced in Hollywood became a ready-made model of stardom, which was widely discussed and circulated in film magazines. Yet there was a deep contradiction between the impulse to discuss Indian stars in Hollywood terms (hence the use of titles like "the Indian Douglas Fairbanks") and the reality of a very different set of constraints and desires pertaining to the reception of Indian celebrities, involving issues such as the construction of private identities, the social status of female stars, the management of sexuality, nationalist politics, and the social relevance of stars. Several competing models of cinematic stardom circulated simultaneously, even as the question most often discussed in film journalism was whether the players in Indian cinema were "real" stars in relation to Hollywood stars.
If language is a signpost of reality, then the notion of stardom certainly predated the cinema in India as it did in the West, through its regular use in urban Indian theater, for example, in the name of nineteenth-century Calcutta's Star Theatre. The English word star was more often transliterated than translated into Bengali and Hindi. But even in its precinematic usage in India, the term star seemed to have been borrowed with the implicit understanding that its meaning was transparently self-evident, that it needed no explanation in its new setting in India, and that its "real" referent was to be found in English theater practices. Star became a word that conjured far more than a celebrated performer, and as a widespread naming practice, it became so overdetermined that its referent no longer carried any specificity. A Times of India report on the film actress Ermeline in 1927, for example, says that she "had been employed as a star in the Shri Krishna Film Co., of Bombay." In other words, "star" is a salaried profession like any other. It is not the product of publicity, charisma, or sheer luck. Such uses of the term star continue even today in writings about stars of that period, as in this example: "Most of the studios maintained a permanent staff of technicians and stars. The female stars were still largely drawn from among 'dancing girls' and Jewesses [sic] or Anglo-Indians like Sulochana (Ruby Myers), Ermeline and Patience Cooper."
Yet the casual mention of "stars" in Indian cinema of the 1930s was also complicated by knowledge and consumption of American cinema and its stars. An early example of this complication is the Calcutta-based production company Madan, which self-consciously emulated the Hollywood-style star system and ambitiously targeted Western markets though an alliance with Italian producers. In its advertising, Madan used Hollywood star names along with the promise of "beauties from Bengal." For example, the company's 1920 advertisement for the mythological film Shakuntala promised "European acting" from the "eminent American star Miss Dorothy Kingdon, the celebrated Gohar from Calcutta, and several other beautiful Indian ladies." Madan was known and criticized for not being "Indian" enough because of its perceived tendency to cater to Westernized tastes and a foreign market: "in Bengal Madans ... are looked upon more as birds of passage than the bonafide children of the soil." Hostility to Madan arose, in no small part, from its growing monopoly. Such a view of Madan as being "un-Indian" would actually fit with its attempt to practice and promote a Hollywood-like star system. The question remains, however, of the extent to which there was a disjunction between Madan's desire to practice a rhetoric of Hollywood-style stardom and the actual nature of the journalistic discourse around its stars. In recent histories of Indian cinema, the ready usage of the term star to refer to players in the first three decades of cinema in India functions similarly to obliterate questions about the redefinition of stardom in a different historical and social setting.
A closer look at the public discourse on film stardom in popular journalism of the time, in the films themselves, and in the publicity machinery surrounding stars (however imperfect) reveals that the term star and the concept of stardom by no means have a fixed referent until at least the late 1930s. Rather, there is a fluid coexistence of multiple and often competing notions of what star signifies. Discussions in film magazines of the 1930s suggest that the concept of stardom was invested with highly contested meanings arising from a crucial dissonance between the cultural imperatives of India at that time and the desire to import wholesale from Hollywood a "finished" concept of stardom as a technology of publicity—but without all its underlying assumptions about individuality, sincerity, the ideology of democracy (understood to mean the idea that anyone can become a star), and a specifically "modern" relationship between the public and the private. We thus find a disjunction between the practice and rhetoric of Indian stardom and the knowledge of stardom in America, but these two types of discourses coexisted on the pages of the same magazines and their differences were not foregrounded. The result was the tendency in the Indian discourse to stage stardom itself, with the enactment and management of stardom assuming greater significance than the construction of individual star personae through multiple filmic and extra-filmic avenues.
A Brief History of Fame
Despite its ready and common usage even in the context of nineteenth-century Bengali theater and early cinema, it is doubtful that the term star had, in practice, the same connotations in India as in Britain or the United States. In the U.S. context, the term star by itself conjures up the kind of sexualized image evoked in Richard deCordova's description of the theater star Harry Montague being "hounded by hundreds of female fans." How would such expressions of public (and gendered) enthusiasm translate in the context of nineteenth-century Bengali and Marathi theater or in the context of silent cinema in India? We know, for example, that "thousands of people became captivated and went mad over [the] beautiful beardless youths" who performed female roles in the play Indar Sabha. While passion for individual performers certainly marked spectatorial responses to the theater, the word star, though in circulation, was not specifically identified with the relation between audience and performer. In very early Hollywood cinema, the idea of the "star" was coupled with that of the "fan," with fandom becoming gendered as female. In India, the "star" was not typically coupled with the "fan" until the early 1940s, and even then the construct was used awkwardly and sparingly.
The precinematic forms of Indian fame that are relevant to a history of cinematic stardom are those that were themselves the product of mass culture, with its attendant separation between the anonymous masses and the well-known figure, knowledge about whom was circulated through various mass-produced and folk media. In the context of new forms of public culture shaped, in part, by print media, oral discourse continued to play an important role in constituting fame, and distinctions between "mass," "folk," and "oral" became blurred in street culture. At the risk of simplification, I would place noncinematic modes of celebrity in nineteenth-century India in a hierarchical continuum from renown to notoriety or infamy, whether seen in terms of social respectability (e.g., national leaders versus dancing girls) or, in the colonial context, in terms of censorship (e.g., "terrorists" were both renowned and infamous, depending on one's position in the colonial establishment). Within the hierarchical arrangement of these categories, there are certain consistent parameters, such as gender and the mode of circulation of knowledge about the celebrity. The more respectable celebrity tended to be male, and knowledge about him was likely to be circulated in the print media, while the notoriety of female celebrities was usually circulated through oral gossip. At one end of the spectrum, we might start with older modes of renown, such as written hagiographic traditions. The hagiographic tradition continued to some extent in the modern autobiographical and biographical literatures of nineteenth-century Bengal, particularly in the usage of the term atmacarit (autobiography) with its "allusion to the entire body of carita literature ... in which the lives of kings and saints were recorded." It is important to note, as Partha Chatterjee does, that "women's life stories were not given the status of carit" but were called smrtikatha (memoirs). Rather, as a mode of circulation of renown, the "modern" version of hagiographic traditions, such as the atmacarit, is dominated by male figures ranging from nationalists of the nineteenth-century Bengal "renaissance," such as Raja Rammohan Roy, to contemporary figures like Gandhi. Over and above the official circulation of men's public selves, mainly through print journalism, one can speculate that there was an oral aspect to their fame as well. A less official category of celebrity would include popular national heroes, both male and female, ranging from the Rani of Jhansi, made heroic in the anti-British uprising of 1857, to the more recent "terrorists" of the 1910s and 1920s, such as Bhagat Singh and Khudiram Bose. Since information about them, unlike news about national leaders, was censored, their renown had a more oral and visual basis, passed along in folk songs, doggerel, and popular lithographs.
Another category of celebrity that brushes against notoriety was to be found in the medium of Kalighat pats, anonymous paintings sold on the streets of nineteenth-century Calcutta. One of its popular subjects was the new relationship between men and women, which differed from earlier iconographic traditions in Indian art and represented anxieties about contemporary altered gender relations. Through the presentation of new character types, such as the Babu and the Westernized woman, and well-known scandals of the time, the pats circulated notoriety in drawings that were popular and marketable, and that disseminated multiple versions of contemporary scandals. The most famous of these scandals was the affair between the head priest at the temple at Tarakeshwar and a married woman, Elokeshi, whose husband eventually murdered her. This crime was a sensational event involving a prolonged court case, and besides its representation in pats, also became the subject of stage plays. Kalighat paintings were a site of generalized gossip about Westernized women and their dominance over decadent and foppish babus, as just one instance of this medium's "intense aversion from [sic] the kind of society created by the modern age." They participated in a broader street culture where similar forms of gossip and critique formed a dense oral culture targeting well-known babus and their goings-on.
For the purposes of this study, a more significant category of celebrity is that of the performing woman, ranging from stage actresses (such as Binodini of the nineteenth-century Calcutta stage) to courtesans of all classes, who were uniformly considered to be prostitutes. Rimli Bhattacharya notes the need to distinguish between the "emergent group of theatre actresses who, in the first decades of public theatre, were for the most part first-generation, and the existing professionalised class of baijis (used here in the generic sense for courtesan singer-dancers)." Although both groups of women were sometimes extremely celebrated, their popularity was always framed within a discourse of respectability in which they were strictly marginalized. Thus one cannot talk about their stardom or fame in the same terms as that of Western theater stars such as Harry Montague. In general, rumor, gossip, and scandal, as modes of circulating knowledge about celebrities, were attached to "low" art forms and tended to be gendered as female. A tenuous link may be drawn between such preexisting sites of gossip in India and the status of gossip surrounding early Indian cinema, with its attachment to female stars. We find that links between aesthetics and social class, and other recurrent tropes in discussions of celebrity or notoriety in Indian entertainment—specifically, celebrity that is based upon forms of female performance—appear again in discussions of cinematic stardom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! by NEEPA MAJUMDAR Copyright © 2009 by Neepa Majumdar. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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