Helen : The Life & Times of an H-Bomb

Four

‘Main Gud Ki Dali’

Helen became the gypsy woman, the courtesan, the nightclub Chin-Chin-Choo, the Arabic belly bombshell, the classical Kathak nartaki, the fisherwoman in a country-liquor bar, the gangster’s moll in a gold-biscuit mall—hell, she was everyone, everything.

—Khalid Mohamed in a tribute to Helen for Man’s World, April 2004

Lagta hai inki maa ne bahut Chinese khaana khaaya hai.

(Her mother must have eaten a great deal of Chinese food.)

—Vijay (Dharmendra) in the film Pyaar Hi Pyaar, referring to Helen, whom he has just met.

In Kedar Kapoor’s Tarzan Comes to Delhi (1965), there is a scene worth recording, if only for the multiplicity and diversity of its elements. Tarzan (Dara Singh) has come to the city in pursuit of a thief who has stolen a necklace from a tribal deity. The tribe is on the warpath. If Tarzan and Rekha (Mumtaz) cannot retrieve the necklace within a lunar month, Rekha’s father will be put to death in front of the totem pole—with the requisite hoorr-hoorrs and haiya-haiyas with which the tribals of mainstream Hindi cinema sacrifice their victims.

In pursuit of the necklace, the couple go to a bar where Mumbai’s renowned jazzman Chick Chocolate of the fifties is playing a trumpet while Helen is singing: Jhoom re jhoom albele/ Sab se ham hain akele (Enjoy yourself, my man/ We’re different from everyone else). She is wearing a flamenco outfit.

So we have on the dance floor a Franco-Burmese woman (who was known as an Anglo-Indian for the better part of her career) playing a Spanish senorita; a famous Catholic musician from Goa who was popularly known as India’s Louis Armstrong (because of his jazz background and dark skin) playing an anonymous bandwala; and a Punjabi wrestler playing Greystoke, Lord of the Jungle. It might have added extra spice if the Muslim Mumtaz (playing the Hindu girl Rekha Suri) and the almost-Olympian cyclist Jankidas, a Hindu (playing a presumptive Goan Catholic and fixer, Mr Pinto), were also present, but one cannot have everything.

The scene is instructive: in this exaggerated tableau of the Other, almost everyone plays a role to which she or he is not suited. Except Helen. She plays herself, which means that she plays a foreign woman who sings in Hindi while remaining an outsider.

The outsider is vital to Hindi cinema, or to all pop culture. By being odd and different, she or he validates the dominant mode. And Helen was always the outsider. She could be any number of outsiders. Often all that was done was to give her a symbolic name, or a dress that reinforced every popular stereotype, and a new version was born.

Take Ghunghat (1960), for instance. It is set in a highly traditional, overtly Romantic version of bourgeois India. Here men marry without ever seeing their wives’ faces, either at the behest of their parents (as in Ravi’s, that is Pradeep Kumar’s, case) or to spare a friend the horror of having his sister abandoned at the ritual pheras round the sacred fire (in Gopal’s, that is Bharat Bhushan’s, case). Thus, when a train accident intervenes, a newly-wed Ravi takes the wrong woman, Parvati (Bina Rai), home. When he discovers his mistake, he will not exercise his conjugal rights, which causes Parvati much concern. Her sister-in-law suggests a visit to a show (for its aphrodisiacal properties?) and they go to see Helen singing a warning against love: Dil na kahin lagaana/ Zaalim hai zamaana/ Pyaar koi jo kare/ Duniya kare haai (Never give your heart away/ For the world is a cruel place/ It damns those who love).

Helen appears in a variety of Indian costumes in the song, and in each one, she is accosted by a different suitor. Every verse, and the accompanying change of costume and singing style, is prefaced by the introductory line: Raaste mein mila mujhe ek albela (I met an interesting man on the road) which introduces, in turn, a South Indian, a Bengali and a Punjabi (all played by Gopi Krishna with suitable changes of outfit). In a highly traditional environment where men do not see their wives’ faces until they arrive at the flower-strewn conjugal bed, this free-spirited woman who meets importuning men on the roads is an absolute outsider. There was clearly a moralistic judgment involved.

In 1960, again, in Mudh Mudh Ke Na Dekh (the title itself taken from a nightclub song in Shree 420 picturized on another outsider, Nadira, a Jew), a romantic comedy starring Bharat Bhushan and Anita Guha, Helen performs a dance unconnected with the main story of two headstrong young people running away from an arranged marriage—and, of course, falling in love with each other. Dressed as a tribal gypsy, she sings: Yeh hai June ka mahina/ Aaye bada re pasina/ Mar gayi garmi se/ Le chal Shimle, babu (It’s the hot month of June/ And I’m in a sweat/ The heat kills me/ Take me away to Simla, my sir). It is a fairly straightforward invitation that can only be issued by a woman outside the straitjacket of sexuality prescribed for the Indian middle-class or upper-caste woman.

This is the trademark of the way the tribal Helen would be presented—as a woman who was liberated enough to be able to declare her desire, but whose desire was almost always aimed at ludicrous males, the only men available to her. In Inkaar (1976), her song begins with a man polishing off a shot of alcohol and throwing the glass away. A hand catches it. We know that this is a signal for a ‘cabaret’ style sequence, another version of the back-to-the-camera pose: for the first thirty seconds, Helen is only represented by her torso, one of the prime locations of sexuality in the male gaze. She is simply dressed by the standards that had been set for her—a high-cut choli in black-and-yellow checks and a bright yellow sari in the Koli fisher-folk style, tied between the legs. (This is also an erotically charged outfit because it brings back the figures of fantasy of middle-class Mumbai: tribal, or aboriginal, fisherwomen.) She traps an ant on the bar beneath a glass and leans into the frame—her face now revealed—and begins the song:

Mungda, oh mungda, main gud ki dali/ Mangta hai to aaja rasiya na hi to main to chali (I am the jaggery, you are the ant/ Come get me, you rake, or I’ll be on my way).

All this is aimed at the comedian Keshto Mukherjee, who based his entire career on a series of twitches and tics that were meant to indicate advanced dipsomania.

But to truly understand what tribals, and by extension Helen (except when she was given a sympathetic role), were held to mean, we have to look at the costume drama Baadal (1966). Baadal (Sanjeev Kumar) comes from a long line of princes in Hindi films who grow up in hovels, ignorant of their royal lineage. When he comes of age, his mother sends him to the king with a talisman and tells him to follow the king’s orders. (We never find out why his mother left the palace, but the ways of kings and queens are now well known. The king misunderstood. The queen left.) In the big city, he meets Bijuriya (Helen), a gypsy of the imagination, and is quite taken by her beauty, though only in the way of the poet, or the knight paying her chivalric honour. This is an oddity because love is generally uncomplicated and monogamous in Hindi cinema. He and the audience have already met the spoilt princess who should be his wife. We know that as a prince he cannot fall in love with a gypsy— unless she, too, is discovered to be a princess, abducted or abandoned as an infant.

Baadal sings to her. This is another departure from the rules which demand that the hero must only sing to his lady love. However, Baadal is obviously a bit of a tearaway. And so, misled by his declaration—Aap ko jo dekhega, pyaar hi se dekhega/ Ki aap khoobsoorat hain, aap khoobsoorat hain (Whoever looks at you will only look at you with love/ For you are beautiful, so beautiful)—Bijuriya falls in love with him. Busy making up to the once-spoilt princess (Vijayalakshmi) and fomenting revolution against the usurper king, he doesn’t notice Bijuriya’s infatuation. Until one day she sings: Nayan bedardi chhaliya sang lad gaye (My eyes have caused me to fall in love with the heartless one). Just as the song ends, they are disturbed by an emissary from the princess who is pining for Baadal. He must leave. Bijuriya tries to hold him back, but he dismisses her, saying she is irrelevant.

Driven by her demons—and quite clearly, these arise from the notion that tribals are childlike in their emotions and therefore not to be trusted—Bijuriya betrays Baadal to his enemies.

Another way to look at this ‘Othering’, this exoticisation of Helen, is of course to see it as a mirror image of Orientalism. If Hollywood could take an ordinary girl from Cincinnati called Theodosia Goodman, smear her with lipstick and mascara, shoot her with leopards and christen her Theda Bara (an anagram, studio publicity machines were eager to point out, for Arab Death), we could take an alien who looked Western and whose name fortuitously rang with resonances of destructive femininity (she even acted as Helen of Troy in Pradeep Nayyar’s 1965 film of the same name) and make of her the woman our mothers warned us about. There is a moment in Anari (1959) where the Innocent in Hell Rajkumar (Raj Kapoor) finally gets a job painting an heiress. When he is paid, he takes his kindly landlady out to dinner and a show. It is New Year and Helen is performing a song whose lyrics include an immortal countdown, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959. At one point, Rajkumar is chosen by the greasy compere of the show to dance. Helen slithers up to him and whispers a ‘Hullo’ in three distinct syllables. Rajkumar responds with an Oedipally-inflected Oh Maaaaa! at the arrival of this threat from the West.

At the heart of Orientalism, too, is the impulse to create an Other; it is not necessarily something that only white, western men do. While not denying the validity of the term ‘Orientalism’, it is important to remember that it can also be seen as an accident of history. White men came, saw, conquered and Othered. Had men of other colours moved first, I find it hard to believe that they would have behaved differently.

So how would the cinema patriarchs of a newly-liberated nation handle the gift of a white woman? (Yes, Helen was not white, but she was seen as white; in cinema, what you are perceived as is what you are.) Acting on instinct rather than ideology, they would have realized how easily they could turn her into a symbol. Popular discourse monolithizes the West, and rural discourse goes even further and creates ‘foreigners’ out of everyone from any other geographical region. So Helen could be anybody.

To begin with, Helen played an Anglo-Indian. If the Indian Christian community suffered from stereotyping, the Anglo-Indian community, far smaller, far more westernized, far less of an audience category, was treated even worse. In Saazish (1975), meet Peter K. Murray (the comedian Rajendranath) whose name itself is a cross-lingual pun, since the initials, so he tells us, can be read as ‘peeke mare’ or ‘drank and died’. Murray is Anglo-Indian (he says so), and his singular preoccupation on board the cruise ship on which this smuggle-fest is set, is to try and capture as many bikini-clad white women on film as possible. Anglo-Indian Julie Morris (Lakshmi) in the 1975 monster hit Julie loves the Hindu household of the hero because it smells of incense. Her own, she says, smells of alcohol, extinguished cigarettes, meat and fish. It was not until Aparna Sen gave us the indomitable Violet Stoneham in 36, Chowringhee Lane (1981), that the Anglo-Indians were ever treated with any understanding.

In Gumnaam (1965), Helen plays Kitty Kelly, one of seven suspects in a murder. Kitty Kelly is the gold standard for the stereotype Anglo-Indian young woman, and Helen’s work in the film was rewarded with a Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress. In this wildly Indianized version of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, the suspects find themselves stranded on a not-very deserted island. We can already tell that Kitty is in some manner involved in the murder of Seth Sohanlal. If we needed further subliminal cues, on the plane that dumps the seven little Indians on the island, she wears red while the heroine Asha (Nanda) wears white. Even when they are warned that they will die for their complicity in the murder, Kitty remains upbeat. Is duniya mein jeena ho to/ Sun lo meri baat/ Gham chhod ke manaao rangreli/ Aur maan lo jo kahe Kitty Kelly (If you must live in this world/ Listen to Kitty Kelly:/ Forget your worries and make merry), she sings on the beach, leaping from rock to rock, kicking up sand, playing with a beach ball in the waves, looking altogether too lovely in a swimsuit with a little skirt.

Surprisingly, she does have at least one ‘Indian’ virtue that rescues her from being a complete tramp: she does not drink. But the manner in which we learn this doesn’t quite redeem her completely: Mujhe sharaabi pasand hain, sharaab nahin (I like alcoholics, not alcohol), she declares at one point in the film. She only breaks this rule to forge a bond of feminine solidarity with Asha, when they both broach a bottle of Scotch.

However, when the hired help (Mehmood as a camp butler) shows signs of attraction, she rejects him on the grounds of his dark skin, thus re-ascribing the pan-Indian vice of racism to a specific ‘alien’ community. Her rejection causes the butler to remark that when a white spot appears on black skin, it’s called leprosy; but when a black spot appears on white skin, it’s called a beauty spot. This, however, does not prevent him from indulging in a fantasy about Kitty Kelly, presented as a dream sequence in which he sings, Hum kaale hain to kya hua dilwaale hain (What if I’m black, I have a big heart).

Kitty Kelly becomes Kitty Williams in Dus Lakh (1966). The first time we see her, she is behind a translucent curtain, changing into a swimsuit in slow seductive movements that her beau Jerry (Pran) enjoys. Jerry’s suit is hindered because Kitty’s mother (Manorama) wants Scotch but he can only provide her country liquor. This strange menage, completed by Mrs Williams’ infantile adult son Willy (Brahmachari), indicates clearly that unlike the coy heroine Rita (Babita in her first film), Kitty is not quite respectable.

To get the money for the Scotch that will make Kitty his wife, Jerry organizes a scam: Kitty and Rita will dance at a benefit for blind children. Rita dances in blue and saffron in front of the backdrop of a south Indian temple, complete with a deepstambh, a column of oil lamps. Kitty in a red and gold pant-suit dances in front of a skyscraper with cutouts of a tuxedo-clad band. The lyrics Rita mouths draw from traditional sources: Baaje mori paayal chhanana chhanana (My anklets tinkle chhanana chhanana). Kitty offers a westernized Twist karoon mein, shake karoon mein, karoon mein rock and roll (I’m gonna twist, I’m gonna shake, I’m gonna rock and roll).

But it is the collision of the Williams family with the family of the hero Kishore (Sanjay Khan) that foregrounds all the beliefs about the decadent semi-white Anglos. Kishore’s father Gokul Chand (Om Prakash) inherits the dus lakh (Rs 10,17,753, to be precise) of the title. At first, he organizes a pooja and sings a heartfelt bhajan of thanks. Then he goes off to a hill station. Things begin to go very wrong here, for he meets the Williams bunch. Mrs Williams teaches him to drink, to shake hands, to dance, and finally gets him to pop the question at so unsuitable an age as his. But not before they have sung a pretty duet together:

Gokul Chand (to a very large and middle-aged Manorama): Teri patli qamar, teri baali umar/ Teri baanqi ada pe hum qurbaan/ Arre tum bhi jawaan aur hum bhi jawaan (Your narrow waist, your enticing youth—/ I’m maddened by your matchless charms/ Hey, you’re young and so am I).

Mrs Williams: Yahaan health bhi hai aur wealth bhi hai/Love ka season, dil mein armaan/ Arre tum bhi jawaan aur hum bhi jawaan (There’s health here and there’s wealth/ It’s the season of love and there’s desire in our hearts/ Hey, you’re so young and so am I).

Once they return to the city, Gokul Chand evicts his family through a series of engineered misunderstandings too tortuous to be outlined here. In comparison to their vicissitudes, the Williams children form a dance troupe and sing a very peculiar number. Willy turns up in long trousers for the first time, but, for no clear reason, with a globe on his head. Helen is rolled in perched on a larger globe, wearing a bowl of fruit for a hat and a flamenco outfit.

Willy: Arre du du du

Kitty: Arre ni ni ni

Willy: Arre ya ya ya

(If you haven’t got it yet, try reading those syllables downwards to get duniya, the world.)

Kitty: Duniya uski sunti hai/ Yeh duniya uski banti hai/ Jo kadmon pe usko jhuka le (This world listens to you/ This world has time for you/ Only when you conquer it).

As often happened with Helen, there is someone rather nice hiding inside Kitty Williams. Inluenced by Kishore, she connects with her good side. She participates in another dance, this time to bring Gokul Chand to his senses. It is a surreal sequence at the fancy dress party that Gokul Chand throws for his engagement. He himself comes as the mascot of the national airline carrier, the Air India Maharaja; Mrs Williams is Queen Victoria; Jerry is Napoleon Bonaparte and one of the guests is a huge green lizard. Here, Kitty and Rita sing, Agre ka lala laaya Angrezi dulhan re (A merchant from Agra has taken himself a British bride). It is a synchronized dance until they take on the role of the henpecked husband and the wife. At the end, they present a tableau of Gokul Chand’s impoverished family. Gokul Chand realizes his mistake, repents and takes back his family.

Kitty then becomes a nurse, and thanks Kishore, for she has been saved from a life of degradation. Her adoption of what are presented as Indian values and the consequent willingness to enter a life of service—never mind the Anglo-Indian community’s long tradition in education and medicine— saves her from a fate worse than death.

In Jahaan Pyaar Miley (1969) an amnesiac Shashi Kapoor’s search for love ends with three communities fighting over him, the Hindus, the Muslims and the Christians. The Muslims are represented by an Urdu poet who introduces him to aficionados of music. The Hindus are represented by a famous singer called Lalitaji who wants to cut a record with him. The Christians are represented by the Anglo-Indian Angela (Helen) and her mother. He meets Angela in a hotel—naturally—where he finds a job. Angela dances there, as is her wont, and sings a song that reflects his state: Baat zara hai aapas ki/ Saari duniya ho gayi meri/ Bolo main hoon kiski (This is between us:/ The whole world is at my feet/ But to whom do I belong?).

When her mother meets him at the hotel she christens him Richard and invites him home for Christmas. Although his true love (Hema Malini) is ill, he goes because he believes that one should go wherever there is love (hence the title) and in any case, having forgotten his past, he doesn’t know himself where he belongs. When he turns up, they are drinking and Angela insists on kissing him. He accepts only the wine, again because he wishes to respect all religions. The equivalence is clear: this is the religion of winebibbers and loose women who kiss on their festivals. Obviously, the hero can have nothing to do with it.

At the next level of alienness is Helen as the girl from China. We know that even if the songs from Alif Laila and Baarish were her first solo numbers, the Helen story seems to begin by common consent with Mera Naam Chin-Chin-Choo. This was to follow her through her career, so that the comment in Pyaar Hi Pyaar that forms the epigraph of this chapter was sure to raise a laugh among the cognoscenti, even if the character she played in that film was Indian.

Thus it should be no surprise that China Town (1962) is full of persons of Chinese origin, evil characters all. The film begins with an invitation to Tangra, the little suburb of Calcutta that was settled by the Chinese who came there after Yong Atchew set up a sugar mill and brought Chinese workmen with him. They were later joined by what were called the Macao ship deserters—Chinese sailors who, virtually kidnapped into service, had deserted ship and were waiting for a ‘friendly’ vessel.

The titles roll on a nocturnal cityscape and a song begins: Rangeen bahaaron se hai gulzar, China Town/ Sheherwaalon ki shaam-e-bahaar, China Town/ Aake to dekho ek baar, China Town (China Town is bright with youth and beauty/ China Town is the place to go for a night on the town/ China Town, you ought to see it at least once). Into the third verse of the song, Pyaar ka town, China Town (China Town, the town of love), the titles are over and we are inside a hotel in which Suzie (Helen) is entertaining the customers with her rendition of this song. Duniya se begaana ho toh aa China Town, she sings, inviting those disillusioned with the world to a night on the tiles. While she is wearing what might pass for a Chinese shift (it has a dragon picked out in sequins over her chest), the rest of the supporting chorus is in kimonos with knitting needles in their hair. Helen also twirls a paper umbrella, indicating that no one was quite clear where China ended and Japan began. However, the intent is clear. We know that China Town is not an innocent place; that Suzie is part of the underbelly and that there will be dark deeds afoot.

The song ends on the face of the gang leader Wong (the villain Madan Puri, who, with plucked eyebrows and unconvincing make-up, always played Wong, especially in films made after the Sino-Indian War of 1962). Suzie is in love with Wong’s top goon, Shankar (Shammi Kapoor), a violent opium addict. In this shadowy world Suzie may not even be her real name. She may have another, and it may well be Chin-Chin-Choo.

Miss Chin-Chin-Choo would turn up in odd places. In Singapore (1960), a secretary is named Chin-Chin-Choo and speaks Hindi in the way that Miss Lilly would always be made to speak it. Ostensibly a murder mystery, the film seems to have been made with the express intention of promoting Singapore as a destination. When Shyam (Shammi Kapoor) arrives to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his friend and agent, Ramesh, he goes out in the night to sing: Yeh sheher bada albela/ Har taraf haseenon ka mela (This is an interesting city/ Bevies of beauties wherever you look) with a group of Singaporean girls offering the chorus: Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. Later, in the middle of a romantic moment between Shyam and Seema (Padmini), a bunch of girls hop out of the shrubbery and begin singing: Jeevan mein ek baar aana Singapore (Come to Singapore at least once in your life).

Helen figures in a dance once the story is well underway. We know that Seema’s uncle (K.N. Singh) is after the map that will reveal the treasure hidden on Shyam’s rubber plantation. He manages to steal it, but Shobha (Shashikala) sees him and gives the alarm. A fight breaks out and Ramesh and Shyam hide in the coolie’s quarters. There’s a festivity on and Helen appears, in a vague cross between Indonesian and gypsy clothes. Raasa sayaang re raasa sayaang sayaang re/ Pyaar ka naam, raasa sayaang sayaang re, she sings—Raasa sayaang sayaang (as far as I can tell) is the name of love.

The Spanish inheritance, the French blood—that could come in handy too. Whenever Hindi cinema needed a Western woman for a touch of exotica, Helen was at hand. In Prince (1969), she played the Countess Sophia who could provide suitable competition to the homegrown princess, offering another polarity of feminine availability, posing flamenco and belly dancing against Bharatanatyam and Odissi. In Ek Se Badhkar Ek (1976), she was the Baroness Carolina, a rather ripe cat burglar out to diddle various other claimants to an unlikely diamond found on the battlefields of Kurukshetra. And in hundreds of films she donned a mantilla, flounced her black-and-red frilly skirt and rattled her castanets as a Spanish senorita. This indeed has almost become an iconic image of her now.

So alien was Helen that if she was white and yellow, she could also be black. Bewaqoof (1960) offers us a blackface Helen, now the complete Other for a racist nation. The film begins with a lawyer, Seth Rai Bahadur, whose mistress and wife both announce their pregnancy simultaneously. Both women give birth. The mistress blackmails the businessman into accepting her child as his own. The nurse, who has been paid to exchange the babies, finds she cannot do it. Rai Bahadur does not know this, and develops a dislike of the child who he thinks is a pretender. He lavishes his affection on the one he thinks is his legitimate son. Soon Kishore (Kishore Kumar) and his mother find themselves on the road. Kishore takes up boxing as a way to earn some money and challenges the boy his father loves, Pran (Pran), to a match. Pran wins using unfair means and Kishore seeks to retrieve his honour by masquerading as a famous African boxer, Bom Bom. (His side kick is I.S. Johar who, unsurprisingly, goes by the name Tom Tom.) At a party thrown in his honour, Helen in blackface, hair au naturel, her body covered in tassels, sings: Dhadka dil dhak se/ Dekha hai jab se/ Mar gaye hum tab se/ Tauba tauba (My heart beat so fast/ When I first saw you/ I’ve been dead since then). A totem pole and another ‘Negro’ playing an African drum add the finishing touches.

This is probably the only such dance that Helen did. Blackface was never very popular in Hindi cinema. When actors disguised themselves, they generally became Muslims, either nawaabs or Arabs, always bearded. This, along with a bouquet of frightful mannerisms, was seen as sufficient disguise, since the audience had to be kept in the know as well. The only other instance I can remember of blackface is in Desh Premee (1982) where Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini paint up to penetrate the villain’s den in the climax. However, they must indicate their acceptance of lowered status with lyrics like Gore nahin hum kaale sahi/ Hum naachne gaanewaale sahi... (We’re not white, we accept, we’re black/ It’s true, we’re mere singers and dancers.) The film flopped and blackface died with it.

Even where you would have expected Helen to belong, to claim victory, she was not allowed to do so.

When Helen began her career, Hindi cinema was experimenting with film noir. As a genre, noir focuses on the male in the city. At a time when the agrarian population was an overwhelming majority, the city was still a source of menace. Of the Holy Trinity of Hindi cinema of the fifties and early sixties, Raj Kapoor exuded a wide-eyed innocence when confronted with the city, which would either injure or co-opt him. Dilip Kumar looked past the city at the Elysian fields of pure Romance. It was Dev Anand who gave film-makers in India the confidence to risk noir. Suave and rakish, with mannerisms inspired by the Hollywood star Gregory Peck, he was a product of the city, whether as gambler, taxi driver, black marketeer, jewel appraiser. When Shammi Kapoor came into his own, the two represented the most successful urban heroes: Anand with his almost-effete insouciance and Kapoor with his version of manic nonchalance.

However, film noir in India differed from film noir in the West in one major way: the location of the moral centre of the film. In the west, noir rejected the idea of morality in favour of ethics. The ethical code was located in the hero, and it was made clear, again and again, that it was a code of his own creation. In India, however, until the seventies, when Bachchan as the Angry Young Man brought the first anti-hero into being, few films would try to escape the vice of morality.

The second major departure for Indian noir was the image of the leading lady. Like the hero, the heroine in Western noir was not a repository of moral wisdom either. She might need rescuing but there was a clear sense that the Lauren Bacalls and Veronica Lakes were clearly of the city. By contrast, the Indian film heroine of the late fifties and sixties might have been in the city but she was certainly not of it. She was aloof, distant, offering another moral pole to the attractions of the metropolis.

For instance, when we are introduced to Alka (Waheeda Rehman) in Kaala Baazaar (1960), she is tearing up the tickets for a film that her friends have bought from the black marketeer Raghuveer (Dev Anand). Later, in a bad-dream sequence, the besotted Raghuveer sees himself offering her thousand-rupee notes, which she also rips up.

Till then, Raghuveer has negotiated his way through the big city with ease; we have even watched him sing a delightful song in praise of the rupee coin (Teri dhoom har kahin/ Tujhsa yaar koi nahin—‘You’re the talk of the town, my friend/ There isn’t another like you’). Now he begins to re-educate himself, so that he can read the poetry Alka loves. This, and the love of Alka, begins a transformation. Helen’s song in the film, performed in the equivalent of a speakeasy, is one of forgetfulness but here it is not sorrow but the pangs of conscience that she is asking our hero to forget. She is black-haired, which is unusual for her, but the rest of her outfit and the music show obvious Iberian influences. Even in a noir film, she is the outsider. Naturally, she cannot succeed.

She exults in her own sensual charms: Jo bhi mera deewaana hua/ Khud se woh begaana hua/ Jo hona hai woh ho rahega/ Sochta hai kya? (Those who fall in love with me/ Lose all sense of self/ Whatever will be, will be/ Why should you worry?). Through the song, Raghuveer’s mobile face reflects the contortions of his conscience. He is horrifed at the moral degradation that easy money earned in illegal ways has brought in its wake. The men paw at the girls; they seem like animals in heat. His choice is clear: the purity to which Alka wishes him to raise himself, or the forgetfulness—the seductions of the world, the loss of identity even—that Helen is offering.

At the end of the song he announces that the gang will no longer peddle tickets. Helen represents his ugly present, soon to be his forgotten past. Alka is the aspirational goal.

If we accept that the lasting image of Helen is a collage of sexual availability, amorality and a marker of menace—that she is the distanced Other—it seems odd to find her in mythological films, which are essentially sanitized versions of stories from the great epics. However, as soon as one accepts that religion can be co-opted into the market, her presence can be rationalized. Kobita Sarkar, who wrote a memoir of her years as a censor, You Can’t Please Everyone—Film Censorship: The Inside Story, ‘discovered that all sorts of sexual cavorting was justified if it was cloaked in a mythological garb’.

That was what Helen was doing in Sita Shankar Anasuya and Bhakta Prahlad and Harishchandra Taramati. She was playing the temptress. The great epics always involve a woman who wields destructive power, which generally arises out of her beauty.

In Homi Wadia’s Sampoorna Ramayana, Ram (Mahipal) and Sita (Anita Guha) are out plucking flowers. Sita wanders away and Ram chances upon Shurpnakha (Helen in a red-and-gold outfit and wearing a crown that looks like a pagoda), sister of the demon-king Raavan. She sings, Baar baar baghiya mein koyal na bole (The nightingale won’t sing again and again in this garden). This is an invitation to love.

But Ram wants clarity: Spasht kaho, devi, kya chaahati ho? (Tell me clearly, revered lady, what do you want?).

Shurpnakha comes to the point: Tumhe chaahati hoon (I want you).

Ram replies, unruffled: Mein vivaahit hoon (I am married).

Shurpnakha dismisses this with an airy, To kya hua? Purush to ek saath kai baar vivaah kar sakta hai (So what? A man can be married to many women simultaneously).

Ram turns her down gently and firmly as the Purushottam, the perfect man, would.

She then offers herself to his younger brother Laxman, who also refuses her. It is then that she metamorphoses into a huge, monstrous figure that looms over Sita. Laxman fires an arrow and cuts off her nose.

Even here, in the righteous world of Lord Ram, Helen represents a sexual threat, a woman who can ask for what she wants. And even here, in a world of magic and sorcery, she will fail to get it.

But in Harishchandra Taramati (1970) she actually succeeds. King Harishchandra (Prithviraj Kapoor) is famed for his honesty and moral rectitude. The sage Vishwamitra, however, believes that the king’s honesty is only a result of his wealth and position, and decides to rob him of both. He draws Harishchandra’s spirit out of his body and into a dream space, a set dominated by a giant statue of Saraswati in the middle of a forest glade. An alaap drifts dreamingly. Then Helen erupts from the undergrowth. She is an apsara—covered from head to toe, but the clothes are tightly draped to show off the hourglass figure. Eight women come hopping through the shallow stream. Other women appear by magic with musical instruments in their hands. While Helen dances a mix of Kathak and several folk forms, more statues materialize, all inspired by the divine erotica of Khajuraho. Throughout, Harishchandra seems a little gobsmacked. But at the end he is appreciative.

Harishchandra: Sunder, ati sunder (Beautiful, very beautiful).

Apsara: Mein ya meri kala? (Me or my art?)

Harishchandra: Kala ka pradarshan (The presentation of your art).

He offers the apsara a boon, which is asking for trouble. She asks for marriage. He refuses because he is already married and permits her another try. She asks for the throne of Ayodhya. He argues that a dancer would not be able to rule. At this point Helen disappears and Vishwamitra appears. As a great sage, he is of course more than able to rule. Harishchandra loses his kingdom. This is one of Helen’s rare victories on screen.

So there was always a role in mythological films for the vamp, the woman of destructive beauty. But it is difficult to explain Helen’s presence in Karwa Chouth (1980), a small exploitative film in which the heroine thinks she has given birth to a snake and is eventually blessed for her devotion to her snakechild. (Yes, that kind of film.) The story begins on Karwa Chouth, the day of the fast that women in parts of north India keep to ensure that their husbands will have long and happy lives. It should be the leading lady Mangala (Kanan Kaushal) singing the title song. Instead, it is Helen in traditional colours—saffron yellow and parrot green—and a veil who sings and dances to Karwa chouth ka vrat aisa/ Jiski mahima hai aparam paar/ O behenon karna baarambaar (The spiritual blessings of the karwa chouth fast are immeasurable/O Sisters, perform it again and again). Either Kanan Kaushal couldn’t dance or director Ramlal Hans thought the number needed a little more than she could give it.

But you can see the strain. The dancing is traditional garba, but in the close-ups Helen offers us a few facial ticks and coquettish twitches from her more worldly series. It seems like the dilemma from hell for dance directors Badriprasad and Saroj. Here is a dancer whose work is already well known. Her audience will expect her to offer something sensually exciting. But the song is a regressive paean of praise to a fast for husbands. Their way out? A dandiya frenzy at the end of the song.

It is easy to see that Helen’s distance from the social order would depend on the needs of the film and the script. Malleability was perhaps the most important quality that her persona and heritage lent her. She could be what was needed and there were many different not-so-good women needed. Helen was exotic as all vamps must be, but the Bombay film industry’s somewhat uncomplicated notion of exotica was such that Helen could be made to fit any set of circumstances. As an alien with no fixed place of origin, she could be any kind of foreigner, any outsider.

This malleability can also be seen chronologically. Helen herself maintained that she owed the length of her career to her discipline and her dancing. While this is true—she kept her body in remarkable shape—this was not all there was to it. What is of much greater significance is that the persona she came to inhabit could be moulded to fit whatever was needed.

In the fifties, she was a dancer, but more coquette than seductress. At that point the attraction relied on the tension that her songs generated between presumed innocence and assumed experience. The lyrics presume her innocence, but the fact that she is dancing for us at all leads us to assume experience. Especially since at that time heroines did not dance. They tripped away from the hero, they risked a couple of skips, and very often they would show up cycling—they were rarely allowed any greater mobility than this in their song sequences.

In the sixties, the heroines were given a lot more latitude in the amount of movement in a song. The entry of Asha Parekh (whom Shammi Kapoor once accused of imitating him), Babita and Rajshree into Hindi films and of several trained dancers from the South as heroines upped the stakes. This also coincided with the arrival of film noir in India. And Helen went underground. She became the instant underbelly; just add percussion. The broad brush strokes of film noir— Hollywood’s way of retrieving melodrama and adding it to what Orson Welles described so well as that ‘bright guilty place’—demanded more blacks and whites. Helen’s white face and bright sensuality were used to darken the guilty places of smugglers’ dens and criminal hang-outs.

In the seventies, when the heroines began to actively seduce the heroes, Helen was as much a part of the landscape as anyone else. The exotic had given way to the notion that every gang comes equipped with one white or semi-white moll. Hotel rooms were similarly stocked with a woman in green Arabian fantasy outfits. The arrival of R.D. Burman’s music and Asha Bhosle’s voice also gave Helen’s career as a vamp a new dimension. The fusion RD infused into Hindi film music demanded a new vocabulary of movement. Who else could dance to Pancham’s irresistible beats? Who else could look convincing when executing Western dance steps and follow them up, seamlessly, with some fancy footwork from Kathak?

In Don (1978), for example, Don (Amitabh Bachchan) is unsurprised to find that his hotel room comes with all the mod cons, including a belly dancer. Kamini’s (Helen) lover was put to death when he sought to leave Don’s gang. Now she wants revenge and offers to assist the police. She turns into Sonia, whose job is to find out where Don is and once he has been located, keep him there until the police arrive. She locates him in a hotel and tries to seduce him. ‘Not now, baby,’ he says, brushing past her, and Helen, just past forty, begins one of the dances for which she is best remembered: Yeh mera dil yaar ke deewaana/ Deewaana mastaana, pyaar ka parwaana/ Aata hai mujhko pyaar mein jal jaana/ Mushqil hai pyaare tera bachke jaana (My heart is maddened with love/ A moth drawn to the flame,/ I know how to lose my all for love/ You cannot escape). There is a moment in the bridge between verses when she appears in the door of his bedroom. She stands there and—it is difficult to put this any other way—she shimmies. Every inch of her body, liquid, toned, perfect, moves to the music.

On her belly in front of Don, playing with his gun (we get it), she empties it of bullets (we get it, all right), flicking them under the bed. It is possible to read a wealth of Freudian symbolism into this symbolic castration. The delay is, for a moment, successful. The police do arrive on time and Kamini/Sonia has a moment of triumph, but it is short-lived. Don kidnaps her with an empty gun and then kills her. Which is expected—for, were she to succeed at this point, the film would end, but almost as importantly, it would also mean the validation of female sexual power.

And so Helen’s brief candle was extinguished once again. Who else could dance like that? Who else could stop you in your tracks with her shimmy in the doorway? If there were no Helen, we might have had to invent her.