Two

The Making of an H-Bomb—II

The dancer had to be a vamp in those days. The public would take to the vamp because she related to the real world. You know, a woman is not only sugar, she has to be spice too. The heroine was too goody-goody, wishy-washy for my liking. The vamp had to be seductive, a brazen hussy, have a cigarette in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other. I could never walk on the streets. I had to wear a burqa (veil). They used to go berserk if they saw me. I’d get a lot of fan mail, even from women. I became a sex symbol in the sixties. I was known as the H-Bomb—H for Helen; that made me laugh a lot!

—Helen, quoted in Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story by Nasreen Munni Kabir

It is true that there were other dancers before Helen; Azoori is often mentioned, as, of course, is Cuckoo. But in the Roman costume drama Yahudi (1958) where Helen and Cuckoo share the song Bechain dil, khoyi-si nazar/ Tanhaaiyon mein shaam-seher/ Tum yaad aate ho (My heart is restless, my gaze distracted; through the lonely nights and days, memories of you come back to haunt me), there is a fragility about Cuckoo. Helen was twenty or thereabouts while Cuckoo had been dancing for fourteen years. Against Helen’s puppy fat, Cuckoo’s face has a certain battered, gamine knowingness.

There is history behind her smile, a past. Her body is thin, her movements feline. In the contrast between rounded contours and high cheekbones, expectant eyes and eyes that have, perhaps, seen too much, it is clear that Helen is the future. Although at this stage only the coquettish eyebrow and arched hands foretell the diva of the sixties.

Women were, by then, commonplace in cinema. No longer would men have to play women as in Dadasaheb Phalke’s early mythologicals. Nor would actresses have to be drawn from the lower strata of society. Durga Khote, a Brahmin, had managed to break the taboo associated with cinema. There were genuine actresses around, and many of them came from good homes and looked convincing when they played upper-class women. However, it was clear that when it came to the somewhat questionable activities such as performing dance numbers that were meant for the delectation of men (as opposed to an offering to the gods), Anglo-Indians were easier to persuade. After all, Mary Evans had already demonstrated that there was room for a woman who was at ease with her body and used it in ways that could be construed as sexual even if they were not meant to be. From her debut as Hunterwali in 1935, Mary ‘Nadia’ Evans, or Nadia Wadia, as she became after her marriage to her mentor Homi Wadia, wore men’s clothes, performed stunts, and drove about in a car, which she called ‘Rolls-Royce ki beti’. But she was always portrayed as a good woman. She was pro-Indian, pro-poor, anti-British, anti-authority. It is seductive to look at her as the precursor to Helen, for she was not averse to appearing in figure-revealing clothes and exercising for the camera, as she did in Miss Frontier Mail. However, as Savita (the character she played in Miss Frontier Mail), Nadia only wanted to save her father from a trumped-up charge of murder. She never danced seductively, never smoked or drank. The only time she vamped it up was in Muqabla (1942) but that was still a double role in which she was both good sister and bad sister.

Cuckoo was also an Anglo-Indian but was chalk to Nadia’s cheese. She was delicate and small boned where Nadia was a statuesque woman, to put it politely. She was petite and pretty while Nadia was presented as an oddity, a macho woman. Yet, in an odd way, the two of them prepared us for Helen.

Helen took the path they cleared, but walked to places neither of her predecessors had shown us. She redefined the grammar of movement for women in Hindi cinema.

What we now consider the standards of seduction—the shaking hips, the thrusting breasts—are pure Helen. She brought us the signals of the coquette: the biting of a finger, the full-lipped pout, even the straightforward suggestiveness of the wink. The mixed signals so precious to the patriarchal notion of the woman who never means ‘No’— the dismissive gesture and the come-hither walk away—were reprised in song after song. To these were added the movements of abasement: kneeling, lying on the floor on her back, writhing in unrequited passion. There were mime movements too, which brought together the innocence of household activities (fetching water was a big favourite) and the anarchic arrival of romantic love. Helen’s choreographers did not let her lip-synch and forget; they also expected her lissome body to reproduce the song.

While she was trained in Manipuri dancing, she was also good at Kathak, although she herself did not seem to think so. In 1964, she told Filmfare (ibid): ‘As for styles, nothing very classical. I feel more at home doing cabaret, “singing girl” dances, folk dances, cha-cha-cha, twist, and just about everything that can be termed a film dance—a combination of various styles, Indian and Western.’ Directors and choreographers could trust her with any kind of dance movement, however sophisticated or ridiculous.

And then there was her face.

My contention is that Helen’s face was almost as important in her dancing as her body. Take, for example, that beautiful song of yearning, Tumko piya dil diya (Shikari, 1963), which she dances with Ragini, one of the Travancore sisters, renowned for their classical training in dance. Ragini’s execution is perfect, her body supple. But when you watch the two of them, it is Helen who holds you. Her face echoes the words. Ragini dances well, but Helen’s abhinaya is much more deeply felt, more attuned to the lyrics. In the last sequence, which is the usual crescendo, Helen’s face has the abandon of the born dancer, while Ragini still looks like someone who is smiling because she is supposed to smile.

Thus, it was on Helen’s mobile face that sexual desire was first played out. This represented the immediate and most direct change. Generous to the point of caricature, she made great use of her mouth. There are hundreds of Helen smiles. There’s the one that suggests playful challenge; the one in which she suggests mockery; the one in which she conveys sensual desire; the one in which she smiles while biting one side of her lower lip in a most suggestive manner. She was almost always smiling when she danced, but this was no mechanical rictus. It was a smile in constant motion, an animated smile. She made great play with her eyes too. She hooded them in half-slumbrous anticipation; she rounded them in mock-excitement; she cocked an eyebrow in erotic challenge.

All this was new to Hindi cinema, even if the idea of the erotic dance was not new to the country—we even have a rasa for it, shringara, codified in the Natyashastra. But traditionally the look that signifies the erotic has little to do with the come-hither variety of sex. For sex is not mere pleasure, but a variation on the theme of the love of God— the carnal as a route to the Divine. The tantriks explored all conceivable forms of sexual experience only to transcend it. In the carvings of Khajuraho or in the miniatures of the Pahari school, the faces of women and men indulging in every variation of intercourse were not very different from the faces of the lover in waiting or out on a hunt, or the naayika combing her hair, receiving a letter or bathing. This led Kenneth Clark, an art critic of western origin and training, to describe them with little understanding as ‘passionless’. Helen, he would have understood. If her standard moves were Indian ‘film dance’ (which is now accepted as a genre of dance in acting institutes), her face was western in its conception of kama. It would not have looked out of place in a Toulouse-Lautrec. She was a revolution in Indian cinema.

Finally, of course, there was the sheer transcendence of Helen’s personality. Where cinema sought to slot her into a small, well-defined space, she simply burst out of those confines. When she was given silly stuff to do, she did it with huge panache. This must have been especially difficult for Helen, and must count as her greatest triumph, because silliness can be anti-aphrodisiacal. It is not my contention that sex must be a deadly serious business, but impersonal or public sex must take itself seriously. Any hint of irony or self-consciousness can bring the whole structure crashing down. Even laughter can be dangerous to this hothouse.

And yet, how could one not laugh? Take Sachaai (1969), a moral tale of good versus evil, where Helen features in a bizarre song sequence. We begin with her dancing inside a liquor bottle. Outside, a slowly revolving dais supports a dozen wine glasses, each large enough to contain a flailing chorus girl. Water isolates them from an audience we do not see. Helen is wearing little more than a bikini covered with cookie-sized sequins. She sings: Kab se bhari hai saaqi/ Botal sharaab ki/ Aa pee le isme bandh hain/ Raatein shabaab ki (The cupbearer has long since filled the bottle with wine, come drink of it, for trapped within are nights of passion). The last line is accompanied by a suggestive stroking of the thigh. Against a studio sunset, Shammi Kapoor, dressed as the legendary lover Majnun, rises, holding a glass. He joins in the song and comes to press up against the bottle. The trapped Helen presses against it too. A stock-shot lightning flash and she’s out of the bottle. Another chorus joins them dressed in white flamenco outfits. Meanwhile, the bathing beauties in the wine glasses are heaving their chests in and out of the water. Two outfit changes later (the most memorable of which has Kapoor in a blue wig and beard), the song ends with both the lead dancers trapped in the bottle.

In Tum Haseen, Main Jawaan (1970), Helen’s number begins in a club, with four men clad in tigerskin pants and marigold necklaces playing bongos. Tina (Helen) appears in a silver gown and silver shoes, framed against a ten-foot African drum. She then steps into a fountain and emerges from it, sniffling and shivering. She wiggles a finger under her nose and then sneezes loudly, Aachhee. She bends forward to one of the patrons near the ramp and sneezes on him—Aachhee— causing him to splash his drink into his face. She dances over to another patron, seizes his handkerchief, explodes delicately into it and returns it to him. Only then does she start singing: Chhee, meri jaan, chhee (Yuck, my love, yuck).

At the Hotel Mercanto in Kaalicharan (1976), several things are going on while Helen dances. Kaalicharan (Shatrughan Sinha) has come looking for the villains who are hiding in dark corners, waiting to shoot him. Helen, dressed in an Arabian fantasy costume, sings: Aaj husn par marne ka mausam/ Mujhpar markar jee le (Time today to die for love, time for you to live by dying for me). The menacing overtones of this song are dispersed—indeed, made ridiculous— when a caricature Santa Claus stomps on to the night club floor, bearing a bunch of balloons, declaring, Main tera sachcha aashiq (I am your true lover) and is revealed to be the Police Commissioner (Premnath) himself.

The lyrics to Helen’s songs could sometimes be spectacular (some may have suffered from my clumsy translation and some from the inability of the English language to deal with the romanticism of Urdu), but just as often they were pretty pathetic. In Mome ki Gudiya (1972), she sang the immortal lines: Nainon ki gaadi chali, gaadi chali chhuk-chhuk-chhuk-chhuk (The train of eyes has begun to move, chhuk-chhuk-chhuk-chhuk). These elegant lyrics are attributed to Anand Bakshi who is also introduced as a playback singer in this film. Other lines continue: Jeevan hai kya, ek rail hai/ Do din jawaani ka khel hai (What is life? It is a railway line. And youth is a fleeting game).

This was what the original, the best-loved diva of Indian cinema had to contend with.

Nor was she always treated in a manner befitting her beauty, her grace and her ability to dance. But she survived all that as well. One of the most commonly held ‘truths’ about Helen is that she was never vulgar. This was shored up by the assertion that she always wore a body stocking, which in turn meant that she was never actually showing as much skin as was indicated by the brevity of her clothes. When I told a friend about the strange affection I felt for the Helen figure, he repeated this bit of film lore with the air of a man saying something incontrovertible. ‘Helen,’ he said, ‘was never vulgar.’ I agree. But it couldn’t have been easy.

In a collaborative enterprise like cinema, the blame for vulgarity is difficult to apportion. It might be the placement of the camera for the purpose of a lewd shot; the costume may be designed to serve the viewer’s voyeuristic desire to see female underclothes; it might be the dance director’s notion of how the lyrics should be translated into abhinaya; and of course, it might be the dancer herself trying too hard.

Consider Night in London (1967), a title that already spells trouble (‘London’ = The Colonizer = The West = Decadence; and ‘Night’ of course is a time when all kinds of unsuitable people and emotions are on the prowl). Renu’s (Mala Sinha) father has been kidnapped by villains who want her to masquerade as a princess and get hold of a clutch of diamonds in the keeping of a British aristocrat. The diamonds also contain a formula that can spell the end of the world. (Whatever.) In London, three sets of villains, from Hong Kong, from America and from England, pursue Renu. Sue (Helen) belongs to the gang from Hong Kong, perhaps a tribute to her South-East Asian roots. Somewhere halfway into the film she sings the rousing Aur mera naam hai Jameela (And my name is Jameela). In the song she appears in a white raincoat, bearing aloft a white umbrella. She drops both and is revealed to be wearing a sleeveless black-and-silver top that ends in triangular lappets that lap around her hips and black tights. She is soon joined by a group of dark, half-dressed men who pant after her, their chests and stomachs heaving, as she flirts with them, approaching and then withdrawing, dancing towards them and then spinning away. In one shot she throws her arms around two of her plump studs and raising her hips, jerks her pelvis at the camera while throwing her legs apart.

But vulgarity is not merely a function of what is done, nor even of how it is done, but also of how it is received. If it is in the eye of the beholder, my friend was quite right. There was no vulgarity because it was not perceived. We did not see Helen as vulgar and so nothing she did on-screen was vulgar. Perhaps that was because our responses were veined with the affection one might feel for a youngster. In many of her films Helen was called Kitty (Gumnaam, Dus Lakh, Hulchul, Raakhi ki Saugandh) or other such diminutive names. This allowed us to be adult because Helen was trapped in a juvenile identity. It was another way of handling all that sexual charisma, all that powerful femininity. We loved her because we knew she could challenge us but she didn’t. Everyone watching Helen was allowed to be in charge because she was not. But ah the thrill, the underlying possibility, that one day something might snap...

By the happy accident of retaining her Western name and inhabiting a space that allowed mobility, Helen created a liberated—and liberating—persona. She belonged totally to Hindi cinema, she was its creation, but she seemed to be slightly apart from it. (This might be, in part, because of that famous aloofness, the complete professionalism she is said to have exuded on the sets. But then, it must have been difficult to perform erotic dances on a set full of men and then hobnob with them.) While most of her dances were meant for mass seduction, turning her into something of an object for the male audience, many women, too, found a lot that was appealing in the Helen figure. And men could also use the Helen persona, as we shall see, to examine their own ideas of masculinity and femininity. There was something for everyone in the way that the Helen figurine was constructed: for the heterosexual man and the homosexual one, for the feminist woman and the patriarchal film-maker. She became everybody’s favourite vamp, and sex, I think, didn’t have all that much to do with it.