Cabaret Travels: Aditee’s written Assignment 2

Vamp. The fallen white woman. Helen. (The other…)

Upon reading the excerpts that Sandra assigned, I was not sure how to go about the assignment. Seeing how closely cabaret and politics were related in Germany, I began to wonder whether cabaret in Hindi cinema had any kind of politics at all? Was it just a kitschy glitz and glamour loaded song and dance sequence meant only for entertainment? Or was it there to justify the objectification and putting on display of women’s bodies? Or was it part of the accepted ‘formulas’ that supposedly ensure the box office returns for a film? I also wondered what kind of a formula justified the presence and position of a cabaret number in the story or narrative of a film? How did they (the filmmakers and producers) convince their viewers that such a song and dance number was required to take the story further? Or was it a way for the masses, the working class, to get a peep into what the Hindi cinema industry propagated as ‘high society’ nightlife? Did it bring the masses a step closer to understanding the recreation styles of the elite? Did cabaret in Hindi cinema ever get an opportunity to try and communicate any political stands, opinions or messages to its audiences?

Pondering over these questions, I revisited the cabaret numbers in Hindi cinema, especially the ones with Helen in them. Watching the so called ‘characterless’, alcohol drinking, cigarette smoking, night-club visiting, western garment wearing- cleavage showing fashion-ista, the fallen white-woman, I began to realise that probably the Hindi film industry did have a very clear political agenda and thus chose the cabaret for a very specific reason. The use of politics in Hindi cinema cabaret was very different from the way the German's used the cabarett platform. So unlike the German cabaret, which was resistive and anarchic, etc. the Hindi cinema cabaret seemed to have a strong nationalistic agenda embedded in it. Though very interestingly camouflaged by the Hindi Cinema grammar of glitz and glamour, these songs, which were present to increase the commercial value of a film, did serve a political purpose. 

Helen was clearly the other woman. The outsider who was vicious, scheming and almost the devil incarnate. She was the seductress who stole husbands, broke homes and caused nothing but disaster and brought misery to happy families. She was the villain’s sex object and at times his partner in crime. She, using her beauty, her blue eyes and peaches and cream complexion almost always successfully seduced rich men, whose money of course the villain took and then surely shot her. She was a chameleon who could take on the sati-savitri act at a drop of a hat and then mockingly undraped her saree to reveal her mini-skirt and to laugh at the innocence, simplicity and stupidity of the leading ladies who were the unmatchable images of sacrifice, kindness, love and wisdom - the adarsh bharatiya nari. 

So for me, the political agenda behind the use of cabaret becomes clearly that of image building for the newly formed nation - India. The task then was to probably define Indian-ness and what meaning and values- cultural as well as moral, one must associate with it. By using cabaret thus the image of the ‘model- Indian- women’ is also being built. Except that the modus operandi here being that of juxtaposition of the characters of the “good” leading ladies with that of characters of the vamps- the cabaret dancers, which were mostly played by actresses like Helen. So clearly, the outsider, the foreigner, the white woman, who in this case becomes the personification of everything erotic, bad, evil and untrue becomes the example of someone who is not virtuous enough to be Indian. In fact she could also be described as the person who introduced women from good homes to the darker side and thus needed to be avoided. She was someone no girl/woman from a ‘good family’ should aspire to become. For when weighing on a scale of virtue and morality, and judging fights of good against evil, she who is the epitome of all evil, always lost.

In the introduction of the book Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, describe ‘womanhood’ as often being a ‘part of an asserted or desired, not actual cultural continuity.’ So if the desire in post independent India was to construct a new set of cultural paradigms that put India on the world map with an absolutely unique identity, then one of the most important definitions would be that of Indian womanhood. So Helen’s characters interestingly made it easier for women to choose what they were not to be, thus creating an ambiguous definition of Indian via defining the non-Indian.    

With hardly any television or electronic media in the early 1950’s in fact right up to the 1970’s, Cinema, could be considered as the strongest medium to communicate with the masses. So it also probably became the strongest possible medium to propagate the desired national image. So maybe, cabaret in Hindi cinema did have a very strong political position but in a very different way than the German cabaret, which was all about resistance, anarchism, etc...so the opposite!