Cabaret Travels: Response to assignment 1
The geographical region with a history of cabaret that intrigues me greatly is Mumbai, India. Having been a very important port and place of trade during the British Raj, Bombay, as it was then called, has always had a very cosmopolitan spirit. The influences and confluences of the many cultures, some transitional and some that have inhabited the city over centuries are still very vibrantly and visibly present. One such legacy that Bombay now Mumbai, still maintains is that of its nightclubs and nightlife. Mumbai till date, boasts of a nightlife that is not only an interesting mix of times and cultures, but also has something to offer across age groups and social stratas.
Even though dance bars that targeted a certain kind audience possibly replaced some of those nightclubs, Mumbai’s elite however still have not been able to give up their club culture. Though activities like a game of bridge, billiards, wining and dining remain as part of the clubbing tradition, cabaret performances however have made an exit from their entertainment charts. One of the main reasons for this could be that all these clubs, until very recently, were open to men alone. And cabaret which never really had any social acceptance, had to be probably taken out of these spaces, which then became recreational spaces for families. But could this be the only reason? Could the entry of cabaret dances into cinema be another reason for the cabaret to have exited the nightclubs?
Narrowing down my view and focusing on a specific area that sort of documents this vast landscape of Mumbai’s nightlife, I would like to look closely at Hindi cinema and the depiction of Mumbai’s nightlife and cabaret clubs in it. Celebrating its centenary this year, the Hindi film industry can be seen as an archive that has stored, in the form of its cinema, the journey that cabaret probably took in India. These films not only map the changes in the presentation style, aesthetic and politics of the form, but also, show the change in the position of the performer and her metamorphosis from being a social outcast/vamp/fallen woman to becoming an object of desire, who in today’s Hindi cinema has gained a kind of social acceptance and even become one of the highest paid performers in a film.
Within the Hindi film industry, I would like to focus on Helen who I feel not only maps these change, but also became an icon and maybe even initiated the creation of the Bollywood dance genre. The Hindi film industry has called her their ‘dancing queen’, but Helen, I feel is much more than that.
According to Jerry Pinto’s book Helen: The life and times of a Bollywood H-Bomb, Helen Richardson, better known as Helen, comes from a mixed parentage. Her father was a Frenchman and her mother, Marlene, was half-Spanish and half-Burmese (13). Helen gets her surname ‘Richardson’ from her mother’s second husband, who was a British officer posted in Burma (13). Post the declaration of war on Burma by Japan, during the Second World War, Helen at the age of 3, had walked from Rangoon, Burma to Assam, India, with her mother and baby brother seeking refuge (14).
She had an unhappy and difficult childhood that was spent in grave poverty. Helen credits her entry into films to her love for dancing and her poverty. She started at the age of 13, as a chorus girl, with the help of the then dancing sensation Cuckoo, who was also her mother’s bridge partner. It was on Cuckoo’s insistence that Helen was sent to train in the dance forms of Manipuri, Bharatnatyam and Kathak under several Gurus and dance masters (16-17). After many performances as a chorus girl in films, she got her first solo dance in a film called Alif Laila in 1953. This probably lead to the beginning of what was then to become a long professional and personal relationship with a film producer called P.N. Arora (16-17).
P.N. Arora produced several B-Grade films almost all of which starred Helen but none left a mark on her career (19). Her first big break however that brought her to limelight was a song and dance number in a film called Barish in 1957 and Howrah Bridge in 1958 (20). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDfcXtIsgR8
From then on there was no looking back for Helen. She then not only established herself as a dancing sensation, but also started become a part of every major film project in the Hindi cinema industry. Some of her most popular song and dance sequences are:
Mera naam chin chin choo, HowrahBridge,1958
O haseena zulfon wali, Teesri Manzil ,1966
Aajane jaan, Inteqaam 1969
Piya tu, Caravan 1971
Mehbooba Mehbooba, Sholay 1975
Yeh Mera Dil, Don 1978
What excites me most about a performer like Helen is the stylistics variety present in her performances and the contradictions inherent in the way she is presented by the film industry. Despite being categorised as the ‘fallen-white woman’, she was loved by one and all. She on the one hand became the personification of desire, was labelled as a glamour doll, and on the other hand performed comic roles partnering with comedians like Mehmood and Johnny Walker. She could very comfortably handle comedy and combine it with her dance numbers, like she did in ‘Dil na Kahin lagana’ in Ghunghat, 1960 and ‘Hum kale hain toh kya hua dilwale hain’ with Mehmood in Gumnaam. She was presented as a foreigner who stood for everything that was not Indian and yet she was able to convince the audiences with her costal fisher woman look in songs like ‘Mungda’ from the film Inkaar in 1977, to being the ‘Bharatiya naari’ of modern India in films like Hum Hindustani.
Though she mostly played the role of the fallen woman, her dancing style was and still is well followed by the leading ladies of Hindi cinema. It is interesting that her cabaret numbers in particular have been described as being seductive but never cheap, sensual and never vulgar.
Since my childhood I was most fascinated by her dancing styles. As I grew up, I felt that that there was much more to her songs and dances than just entertainment.
Just watching her dance sequences I feel, one can graph the changing grammar of Mumbai film industry’s dance language. It also appears that the changes in Hindi cinema for example moving from black & white to colour, and with that the explorations and experiments that began in Hindi cinema like creation of newer plots, moving from family dramas, patriotic cinema to the more entertaining suspense thrillers, exploring new and different locales, all could be mapped via the reading the positioning of her dance sequences. The change in the position of the vamp, which in many ways defined modernity, in a very negative light, and was pitted against the image of the ideal Indian woman, also speaks about the times when a nationalistic image of India and Indian-ness and thus the Indian woman were being curated. Studying her cabaret songs alone one could read the kind of racial and gender politics that existed in the Hindi film industry,
and perhaps see them as a reflection of the Indian psyche?
In many ways, through her costumes, mannerisms etc. the change in the social, political and cultural scenarios in Indian cities, especially in Mumbai, pre and post independence could also possibly be studied.
Keeping all theses aspects in mind, I would like to look closely at Helen’s cabaret dance numbers to see the interrelationship between a city-performer-performance form and research, whether the body of a performer becomes a site where the social-political-cultural changes that develop with time can be/are projected and documented?
