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Growing up as a 90s kid hung up on Bollywood, the options of role models in that industry were, to say the least, detrimental to any young girl’s well-being. Looking at the female stars on the silver screen, all I knew was that I wanted to grow up to be, well, ‘good-looking’. I wanted Aishwarya Rai’s waistline (despite my clear endomorph body type), Priyanka Chopra’s flawless skin and definitely, Karishma Kapoor’s legs. This jigsaw beauty puzzle (whose pieces changed with the latest beauty ‘fad’) was perhaps by far one of the most superficial and warped sense of self adolescent-me could have constructed for herself. Though with commercial Hindi cinema’s obsession with a woman’s body and image at its peak during my tweens and teens, I didn’t know which other direction to look at to fuel my aspirations.
There wasn’t a question of searching for depth and personality, in my ‘filmy’ female idols, because there were slim chances of finding them. If there was a hint of spunk in their character, it was usually soon mellowed down and cemented with generic feminine virtues because how else would she attract the attention of the leading man? I internalised that physical desirability was the ‘endgame’ to be a happy woman and I tried all sorts of torturous diets and tiresome skin remedies to get there. Perhaps I was looking for inspiration in the wrong place? I certainly was.
At the age of 16 and the brink of resignation with “trying to be beautiful”, in a chance film class that I had decided to attend I was introduced to the world of Indian parallel cinema - a new-wave movement of the 70s and 80s, known for its serious film content and neo-realism. Apart from having revolutionised the understanding of my cinematic sensibilities what it also did was show me what it truly means to be a strong independent Indian woman. The women responsible for this (desperately needed) enlightenment were Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil and Deepti Naval, who also happen to be the stalwarts of Indian independent cinema.
For me, their characters in their films stood out for several reasons. They could exist without being bound to a male relationship, they had personalities that didn’t tailor themselves to suit society’s expectations, they loved unapologetically and when they lost they relied on themselves to get back on their feet. In 1981, film magazine Stardust did a photo shoot with this iconic trio, images of which recently surfaced on social media and described them as “The New Wave Glamour Queens” - a kind that Hindi cinema, even almost four decades after their arrival on the scene, has never seen again.
Redefining Womanhood
In the previously mentioned Stardust edition, the article to the photo shoot which has been archived by Cinestaan opened something like this: “.....today’s girls, the industry’s truly liberated women in the sense of self-sufficiency and self-esteem. They are aggressive, demanding, ambitious, too proud to accept the back-seat just because of their (weaker) sex. They are all out to give themselves a fair chance, and fight shoulder-to-shoulder against the actors, for supremacy. The industry is in for a major upheaval and Shabana-Smita-Deepti are making sure it happens in their time… and to their advantage!”
Perhaps the present day understanding of this would expect female characters challenging gender roles, most likely wearing the pants in the house (but they weren’t). The leading women of parallel Hindi cinema were still playing the conventional roles of wives, mothers, lovers, mistresses. Still, in each of these roles, they were redefining womanhood on their own terms. Through revisiting their films, that I have personally watched, I still find them to be the most powerful feminist icons of Hindi cinema.
Shabana Azmi, Style With Strength.
It’s impossible for me to pick a single Azmi performance, through her career in the 70s and 80s art cinema, that particularly left me in awe, because honestly, each one did. However, in her first film Ankur (1974), directed by Shyam Benegal, 19-year-old Azmi played a path-breaking role of a Dalit woman Lakshmi, which would launch the next fifty years of her extremely successful career in cinema.
In the movie, Lakshmi (dressed in peasant saris and only a line of kohl for makeup) is married to a deaf and mute labourer. When her husband, embarrassed publicly after being caught stealing toddy, suddenly leaves the village out of shame, Lakshmi must now fend for herself. She readily gives in to the arms of the attractive young village zamindar to feed her stomach and body. When the same man unjustly beats Lakshmi’s husband on his return to the village her cries of pain are gut-wrenching and her denouncement of casteism even more vehement. Lakshmi was the first Indian woman that I had seen who took ownership of her own sexuality and still had a high moral ground when it came to issues of societal injustice. Moreover, what was most liberating was that she achieved both without belonging to the whore or virgin paradigm.
In her later films like Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth (1982) and Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom (1983), Azmi’s characters find themselves at the other side of infidelity- a happy middle class wife who finds herself being cheated on by her husband. In the former film she leaves her adulterating husband and in the latter forgives the spouse. After an inner war with both desperateness and hatred at the end it is her own intelligence that probes her towards her chosen path. Traditional values attached to marriage and motherhood remain distant when it comes to her decision-making. For someone who had been conditioned that compromise was the cornerstone of being an Indian woman, Azmi’s characters gave me a new meaning to what self-respect and self-worth truly meant.
Though an extremely beautiful woman, and one who wore the most tasteful saris I have ever seem , when it came to playing a role Azmi didn’t flinch from shedding away the glamour. I remember being struck by this when in Goutam Ghose’s Paar (1984) playing a village woman she crossed a river while swimming with a herd of pigs (even though she happens to dislike animals) and in Benegal’s Mandi (1983) she put on twice the amount of weight to play the fabulous matriarchal Madam of a brothel. Commitment to her craft came over what appealed to the public eye and it definitely meant more than supporting a fake uni-brow.
In her later films, like Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth (1982) and Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom (1983), Azmi’s characters find themselves at the other side of infidelity- a happy middle-class wife who finds herself being cheated on by her husband. In the former film, she leaves her adulterating husband and in the latter forgives the spouse. After an inner war with both desperateness and hatred at the end, it is her own intelligence that probes her towards her chosen path. Traditional values attached to marriage and motherhood remain distant when it comes to her decision-making. For someone who had been conditioned that compromise was the cornerstone of being an Indian woman, Azmi’s characters gave me a new meaning to what self-respect and self-worth truly meant.
Though an extremely beautiful woman, and one who wore the most tasteful saris I have ever seen, when it came to playing a role Azmi didn’t flinch from shedding away the glamour. I remember being struck by this when in Goutam Ghose’s Paar (1984) playing a village woman she crossed a river while swimming with a herd of pigs (even though she happens to dislike animals) and in Benegal’s Mandi (1983) she put on twice the amount of weight to play the fabulous matriarchal Madam of a brothel. Commitment to her craft came over what appealed to the public eye and it definitely meant more than sporting a fake uni-brow.
Smita Patil, Queen Of Intensity
If Azmi was about what real strength meant, Smita Patil dazzled me with her intensity. In Arth alongside Azmi, Patil played the ‘other woman’ – a nervous alcoholic portrayed in a gripping way that it is hard to imagine anyone else being able to fill in her shoes. Throughout her career in the art canon of Hindi cinema, Patil has given one riveting performance after another, however, two of her characters Usha in Benegal’s Bhumika (1977) and Sonbai in Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala (1987) will be vividly etched in my mind along with Patil’s burning coal-like eyes.
Her character Usha will not wear a label – a famous Marathi actress, she is a wife and a mother that flits from lover to lover as each man in her life attempts to confirm her to a role. Her choices have no logical explanations like the possibility of a mental illness but can only be guessed as a form of anxiety induced by society’s persistence to give her a ‘settled life’. Despite her inconsistencies, Usha for me revolutionised what it meant to be a woman because she was so fearless about her choices, even if they wavered.
While as Sonbai, Patil plays the beautiful married village woman in colonial India, who carries herself like a Queen. What is striking about Sonabai’s character is her razor tongue that shames her patriarchal village and an iron mind that enables her to protect herself and other women from sexual assault. Sonabai’s aggression and call-to-action are characteristics rarely celebrated in Indian women today.
Deepti Naval, The Charms Of Uninhibited Abandon
Another strong character in Mirch Masala is the village headman’s wife Saraswati, played by Deepti Naval. Seemingly, a meek woman at first, she later plays a pivotal role in the film by leading the women in the film to revolution. Through minimal screen time and equally minimal dialogue in the film Naval’s presence still remains poignant. That’s because she has the ability to convey every emotion known to man through her eyes. Though she has played powerful female leads in films like Kamla (1984) and Anakhee (1985), for me it was her light comedies that won my heart.
In Sai Paranjpye’s Katha(1982) she plays the shy resident of a Mumbai chawl, Sandhya Sabnis whereas in Chashme Buddoor (1981) she plays the delightful salesgirl ‘Ms Chamko’ that went on to become an iconic comedy of errors in Hindi cinema. In these films Naval was very lady-like; soft-spoken, delicate, dressed in traditional outfits of pastel colours and floral patterns. However, through these roles and many others, she exudes a carefree abandon, like an infectious smile and full-laugh which took off the mask of constructed femininity. She had an untouched naturalism which at best can only be seen again in few fleeting moments, by even the so-called best Bollywood actresses of today.
Crossroad Of Common Choices
Becoming these exceptionally talented actresses and playing these extraordinarily diverse roles in the 70s and 80s was not a mere coincidence for Azmi, Patil and Naval, but a matter of specific choices they had made in their lives. They all came from a background in theatre; Azmi and Patil had graduated from the renowned Film And Television Institute in Pune while Naval had studied American theatre in New York, which certainly endowed them with a superior acting craft. After all of them were launched by the pioneer of Hindi parallel cinema Shyam Benegal, they made sure that early in their career they chose quality over quantity. In an interview with The Hindu, Naval had confessed, “It wasn’t as though I couldn’t do commercial cinema, but something made me decide that art films is what I wanted to do. It wasn’t easy because only a few films of that kind were being made. So you had to wait for the right role to come.”
Whereas for Patil, whose tryst with the camera first began in the early 1970s when she was was a television newsreader on the Mumbai Doordarshan, was equally sceptical about commercial cinema. In another interview with The Hindu Patil had said, “I know I want to act in good films. But good directors are so difficult to come by. I hope I don’t get pushed into doing commercial films because, truly, that will be the end of Smita Patil!” Ironically in the few commercial Hindi films she did do–like Dard Ka Rishta, Namak Halaal and Shakti (all 1982) – she was regarded a ‘misfit’.
Another point of intersection that bound these women towards becoming legends in their own right, was that despite being in the limelight their art was far from frivolous. It was for them the strongest medium of social change which is repeatedly reflected in the scathing and subtle ways the characters they played stood against patriarchy, casteism, poverty and other taboos of Indian society. They internalised their social responsibility in a way that Azmi puts across best in her interview with Asia Society when describing the crossroad between art and politics – “....when you are in films playing characters struggling with social injustice and exploitation, then a time comes when you can no longer treat your work like a nine-to-five job. I could not think that as of 6:00 pm every day, I would no longer concern myself with the lives of the people I choose to play.” They were in every sense of the word, as Naval branded herself and her two contemporaries, ‘the angry young women’ of Hindi cinema.
Coming back to the present day, Azmi, Patil and Naval’s cinematic lives are vastly different to what they were during the 80s. Where Azmi still remains India’s finest actress who is now also globally renowned, Naval is a celebrated author and does appear from time to time in small poignant roles, like her cameo in the Oscar-nominated film Lion (2016). As for Patil, she died an early tragic death in 1981 and continues to hold a legendary status in Hindi cinema. As for today’s films, sure we have had strong female characters in the past decade like Vidya Balan in the Dirty Picture (2011), Kangana Ranaut in Queen (2013), Alia Bhatt in Highway (2014) and a couple of others which I am probably missing. Still, these films and roles are sporadic and far from the driving force with which Azmi, Patil and Naval brought power, authenticity and a cultivated quality of acting to the screen. They were persistently challenging and changing the narrative for womanhood long before anyone else in the industry was doing the same, at a time when strong female, three-dimensional characters were few and far between. For these reasons alone they remain – at least for me – the undisputed ‘Glamour Queens’ of film.
Feature image courtesy of Magna Publications via Cinestaan.
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