Five
Good Girls, Bad Girls
Such women don’t have a history.
—Miss Ruby (Helen) to Devendra (Sanjeev Kumar) in Anamika
In almost everything that has been written about the vamps of Hindi cinema, there has been a tendency to reduce the figure of the bad girl to a caricature. Her story is seen as the Progress of the Harlot: she fell, she smoked, she drank, she danced, she snuggled, she smuggled, she died.
This ignores the moral role the vamp played in the films in which she appeared. She was not merely about eye candy, which makes nonsense of the claim that the vamp has returned in the item-number sequences that began in the late nineties. The item-number girl has no other function than to appease the male desire to be voyeur while a woman dances. The name itself—item number—has a cynical quality to it, a revelation of how the industry has adopted film-maker Manmohan Desai’s dictum that to be a success a commercial film should offer the viewer a treat in every reel, an ‘item’ per reel, as it were.
The vamp, however, was not just visual spectacle. Her more significant function was as an alternate moral pole in the cinematic universe whose centre was the hero. Helen performed this role to perfection. As the epitome of destructive femininity, she threw into prominence the virtue of the other women, chiefly the heroine, but also the hero’s mother and sister. This also validated the hero’s roots, or his origin. The vamp’s failure to subvert the hero permanently emphasized not just his basic goodness but also his right upbringing.
Until the advent of the seventies, the hero fitted easily into this moral universe. Even when he was part of the gang, he was on the side of the good. The jewel thief was invariably uncovered as the policeman operating under cover. The hero might be suspected of murder but we knew that the police had got it wrong. If he began bad, he would either see the light or there would be a good twin waiting in the wings. In each case, the vamp, symbolic of his past, would be left behind.
Nor was there a single kind of vamp. Helen played several different kinds, again based on the demands of the script. Some of them were script markers, others had more interesting functions. Take that moment in Junglee (1961) when Shammi Kapoor, as Shekhar, has learnt to love and decides to let the world know. In the beginning of the film, we are told that the millionaire Shekhar has never laughed in his life. But once he has been to Kashmir, fallen in love with his Kashmir ki kali (Saira Banu) and learnt to feel fear when she falls ill during a snowstorm, he turns over a new leaf with a vengeance. However, he still has a termagant of a mother (Lalita Pawar) to deal with, and a fake Maharaja who wants to marry his daughter into the family to acquire their wealth. At a party thrown to introduce Shekhar and the fake princess, Helen puts on a show.
The lights dim and we see a single leg first. (The symbol itself is often symbolized by body parts. In Helen’s case, it was mostly her legs, but it could as well be her torso, as in Inkaar; her rump, in Bulundi; her fingers, in Dil Daulat Duniya; down to her right eye in Elaan.) For a whole minute, she dances alone. Then Shammi Kapoor joins her on stage to exult: Ai-yai-ya karoon main kya sookoo sookoo/ Kho gaya dil mera sookoo sookoo (Ai-yai-ya what do I do, sookoo, sookoo/ I’ve gone and lost my heart, sookoo sookoo). It is an exuberant, uncomplicated song, reflected in the meaningless lyrics and the de-sexualized flirting between Helen (unnamed in the film) and Shekhar. Now that Shekhar has discovered the joy of love, he can shed the straitjacket of his wealth and his stiff dignity. Since Saira Banu was a good dancer, indeed her legs were the first serious competition to Helen’s, it seems odd that it should not be the heroine at this celebration of the power of love. But it is Helen, who has no other role in the film, who was called upon to romp with Shekhar, almost in tribute to the energy she could bring to such dances. Besides, the vamp endorsing and celebrating this love gives it far greater currency with the audience, the quality almost of a miracle.
In the hundreds of films that Helen appeared in, it is possible to see clearly the main functions that she performed. The following categories are not watertight compartments, nor is this intended to be a complete taxonomy of the vamp. It is only an attempt to demonstrate that the vamp was not constructed as a monolith of evil.
One of Helen’s most famous songs is the slow, smoky cabaret (sung, unusually, by Lata Mangeshkar) Aaa jaan-e-jaan, mera yeh husn jawaan, jawaan, jawaan/ Tere liye hai aas lagaaye, oh zaalim aajaa na (Come, love of my life, my beauty and my youth long for you), from Inteqam (1969). Helen herself invariably lists this as one of her best numbers. You can see why. It is difficult to think of another song that expresses such a level of heated sexual desire and translates it into such charged visuals. Azad is bound in chains and confined in a golden cage, as if he is a trophy of sorts, or a plaything. He is presented as barely human, a dark, pre-literate Noble Savage who communicates in grunts and snorts. By contrast, Helen is presented as the epitome of the liberated Western woman, her ‘sophistication’ underlined by her ostrich-feather fan, gold wig studded with rhinestones, blue contact lenses under eyebrows that are also picked out with rhinestones, and leggings under a dark blue bikini bedecked with shiny doodahs. In case we miss the point, she sings, Door se kitni aayi hoon, tu jaane na (You have no idea how far I’ve travelled to be here). She writhes all over his cage, tickles him with a feather, tantalizes him by remaining just out of reach, while a cockatoo struggles with the chain that keeps it on a ring just above the cage. When Azad breaks free, she does not seem unduly troubled, for he is soon back inside it, driven in by slave-drivers with whips. Even today, thirty-five years after it was filmed, there is something seductively dangerous, something outre about the song.
For the Indian audience, the alienation here is doubled: the woman is white, the man black. Placing both the lovers in alien racial identities was efficient in a sense. Tangentially, it made the case for lust being non-Indian while reinforcing stereotypes of the sexual immorality of white women and the sexual degeneracy of black men. It is tempting to suggest that in 1969, this was still a hangover dating back to the sexual unavailability of the memsahibs, but the formula persisted.
In Mehmaan (1973), once again the male, in leopard skin this time, and a sheepish grin, is tied up. A golden net is brought on stage which opens to reveal a golden-haired Helen in a pink and silver Arabian outfit. Once again, we have a somewhat primitive man striving to express his sexuality, and the woman liberated enough (because white enough?) to speak for both of them. This is indicative, of course: the strong tribal bound in chains, the sensual white woman who encourages him to sin. The lyrics run: Tu dar mat dar mat yaara/ Gham kar mat, kar mat yaara/ Pal do pal dhoom machaa le/ Yoon mar mat mar mat yaara (Do not fear/ Nor be sad/ Enjoy yourself for a moment or two/ Don’t suffer like this). In this version of the song, she even unties him herself (and the lights go off, to the consternation of the audience). However, in shadow-play, she tames him and controls him. Then she vanishes.
The version of this theme that we see in Apne Rang Hazaar (1975) is a climax-filler. The rich womanizer Sunil (Sanjeev Kumar) seems to be falling in love with the wrong woman (Bindu) but is saved by the connivance of his mother (Kamini Kaushal) and his driver’s daughter, Mala (Leena Chandavarkar). But then, he spends much of his screen time being saved. When he is about to be disinherited, his friend Vicky (Danny Denzongpa) kills his uncle. Later, Vicky asks for a return of the favour in a Strangers on the Train-style plot development. Vicky wants Sunil to get out of the way while he kills Mala (she is Vicky’s long-lost half-sister and will inherit if she lives). The friends fall out and Vicky tries to kidnap Sunil’s mute brother Guddu (Master Tito). Guddu escapes and wanders into a theatre where Helen is dancing on stage with a bunch of blackface tribals with feather-flocked spears. The song basically consists of a series of yaaaows and haaoows and c’monbaby-s. It is not clear what this scene was meant to achieve, other than providing an unusual backdrop for the cliffhanger ending.
In 1979, the theme was replayed again, in Raakhi Ki Saugandh. A car used in a bank robbery sets Inspector Shankar (Vinod Mehra) on the trail of ‘mashhoor (famous) cabaret dancer’ Sweety (Helen). He follows her into a nightclub where a golden cage drops over him and a bunch of hubshees (he uses this pejorative term for Africans later in the film when interrogating Sweety) poke at him with spears and knives. Sweety mocks him in song: Khud hi phas gaya pinjre mein/ Tu shikaari bada anaari hai (Caught in the trap you set yourself/ You’re a fool of a hunter). Only, since this is the hero locked in the cage, he kicks it open himself and beats up the tribals and then proceeds with his quest.
In all four songs, contrasting the white woman and the black or tribal man was a way of maintaining an ambiguity about the lust lives of the Indians. As Aryans (our way of distancing ourselves from the more uncomfortable term ‘brown’), Indians could be seen as representing a civilized mid-point between the lust of primitives and the degenerate liberation of white people. That civilized mid-point is Romanticism, an Indian Romanticism with its own hierarchy of acceptable emotions. The alien persona of Helen was ideally suited to keeping these desires at some distance from the principals, whose emotional lives might be dominated by negative emotions such as revenge, anger and Oedipal struggles, but never by lust.
INSTANT DEBAUCHERY
We have already seen that as a dancer, Helen marked the shadowy areas of society into which the hero or heroine had stumbled. Similarly, when it was necessary to establish the villainous nature of one of the players, association with the vamp would serve just as easily. Since a certain group of character actors played villains, there was never any tension as to whom the audience was supposed to identify with. So this further device might seem like over-emphasis. Nevertheless, it was an economical way of enhancing the drama and getting the audience involved in it. In Taj (1956), the king crushes a child with his chariot and then drives on, yet a song and dance by Helen is necessary to further underline his decadence. Now there’ll be further trouble, we know. In the middle of Helen’s performance, the young princess walks in and interrupts it. Enraged, the king slaps his only child and disables her right limbs (until, much later, a singer-mendicant restores them to life with his song).
The easiest way to establish the debauchery of the villain—or the villainy of the debauch—was to present him at a mujra or in a nightclub. In that wild romp Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi (1958), the arch-villain Raja Sahab (K.N. Singh) attends a mujra at which Helen and Cuckoo perform some extraordinarily fluent kathak. In the very next scene, he will be plotting the seduction of the heiress Renu (Madhubala). But for the moment, a classic feat of economy is achieved. The song, Hum tumhaare hain zara ghar se nikalkar dekho/ Na yakeen aaye to dil se dil badalkar dekho (We are yours, just come out of your home and see/ And if you still do not believe, exchange hearts with us and see), changes the tone of the film which until that point has been almost Wodehousian in its light comedy. By presenting Raja Sahab as a silhouette in the first shot and then withdrawing into the kotha, the seduction is aimed directly at the audience. The villain, too, has been successfully indicated and we know that now the drama will turn darker.
In Ganga Jamuna (1961), Dilip Kumar plays one of two brothers, Ganga, who turns dacoit; while Nasir Khan plays Jamuna, the brother who joins the police. In her red mujra dress, singing Tora man bada paapi saanwariya re (Your mind is a sinner, my love), Helen is clearly a simple marker, emphasizing the debauchery of the zamindaar who has forced Ganga (with all the ironies of that name) into a life of crime. In Sagaai (1966), Rajesh (Biswajeet) and Sheel (Rajshree) get together fairly quickly despite the tension between their fathers over the rights to a certain piece of forest. The fly in the conjugal ointment is Kailash (Prem Chopra), and his second scene is set in a kotha in which Helen in a pink mujra outfit is singing: Sajan tori preet raat-bhar ki (Your love only lasts the night).
Smuggler (1966) tells the tale of Inspector Rajan (Shaikh Mukhtar) who sacrifices his honour to pay for his brother’s education. Until the time that he accepts the bribe, the songs are non-threatening: a child’s song at a party, a romantic duet. When he accepts the bribe and the action moves to the exchange of diamonds, Helen appears. The song itself has nothing to do with the loss of honour—Dil ka lagaana is duniya mein/ Poora dhokha khaana hai (Falling in love is an invitation to disillusionment)—so it is clear that she is only another step on his journey to degradation. In Aulad (1968), Helen’s song, Dil dhadakta hai saans rukti hai/ Dekhte ho kis nazar se mujhe (My heart quickens, my breath stops/ When you look at me like that), is sung for the delectation of a pretender son who has replaced the lost heir. The song cuts between the mujra and the aged father’s sickbed.
This continues up to and beyond the tear-jerker Bikhre Moti (1971) in which Kamini Kaushal’s children are separated after the arrest of her husband, so that one grows up to be Anand (Jeetendra), the son of a respected judge, the other to be Gopi (Sujit Kumar), a criminal. Gopi meets his father on the road—and not knowing that he is related by blood—takes him to his hideout where diamonds are being concealed in dolls. Here four men dressed as Cossacks throw knives into a life-sized statue. They run those knives down the pink plastic of the statue, their faces bathed in red (lecherous) light. The doll falls apart and Helen steps out, singing, Ek nazar chahoon main halki halki/ Aa yeh keemat hai mere dil-ki, dil-ki (I want a glance that’s light and fleeting/ Yes, that’s the price for my heart).
BAD WIVES, BAD WOMEN
The Helen figure could also be called upon to represent or indicate a bad marriage, one that the hero makes out of a sense of duty to some senior figure. It might be acceptable at some level for a man to want to go and see a ‘cabaret’, but when his wife insists, it is a sign that the marriage is in trouble and that the woman is not really a good mate.
In Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai (1960), we know that Dr Sushil Verma (Raj Kumar) has been forced into a loveless marriage with Kusum (Nadira), the spoilt daughter of the man who sponsored his medical education. His true love is an orphan, Karuna (Meena Kumari), a nurse in the hospital at which he works. One night, one of his patients, Girdhari (Om Prakash), falls very ill. This is the night Kusum has chosen to go out and enjoy herself, always a dreadful crime for a woman, especially heinous in a wife. When Karuna calls to speak to Sushil about Girdhari, Kusum hangs up and whisks him off to a restaurant where Helen in a strappy dress asks: Haai itni badi mehfil aur ek dil/ Kisko doon? Dil kisko doon? (My, such a huge gathering/ To whom should I give my heart?). That Kusum should choose a show of such blatant licence over her husband’s duty is meant to shock us. Girdhari’s death and Sushil’s anger pave the way for Kusum’s death so that Karuna and Sushil may be reunited.
A similar situation was repeated in Hariyali Aur Rasta (1962). Shankar (Manoj Kumar) and Shobhna (Mala Sinha) are childhood sweethearts who have grown up together on his father’s tea estates. However, Shankar has been promised to Rita (Shashikala), a social worker, who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. Shobhna sacrifices her love and is presumed to be dead after an accident—although she is fished out of the river. Shankar marries Rita, who turns out to be a very bad wife. She spends money with both hands, dismisses old servants and even forgets to send him his lunch. Instead she spends time at the club where she has invited Miss Dolly (Helen) and party to dance, after which there will be a fancy dress competition with a prize sponsored by her. Thus even as Miss Dolly sings Parwaanon ki raah mein, deewaanon ki chaah mein/ Jaloon aur Jalaaoon Mohabbat nibhaaoon/ Mera bas yahi kaam hai (In the way of the moth, in the manner of lovers/ I burn, I inflame, I love/ That’s my job), she is not just entertaining the club (and us) but she is also proving that Shankar has married someone unsuitable. The scene is set for Rita to die. She does.
This remains the pattern right up to Agnirekha (1973) where Suresh (Sanjeev Kumar), a young widower, is forced by his rich mother-in-law to marry Mohini (Bindu), though he loves Nirmala (Sharda), his children’s governess. Helen dances for the engagement: Babb-babber-loo/ Ek main, ek tu/ Hum dono jo mil jaayen/ To bada mazaa ho (Babb-babber-loo/ You and me, me and you/ When we get together/ We’ll have such fun). Both Mohini and Helen try to get him to show some affection but Suresh remains adamantly, almost caddishly unresponsive. We know, of course, that later events will prove that he was right to do so.
COMMERCIAL SEX WORKER
In all but a few of Helen’s roles as the bad girl, there was an implication that her favours were available for money. In Bairaag and Ginny Aur Johnny (both 1976), for instance, she seems to be available for the price of a diamond necklace. Although Hindi cinema was ambiguous in its attitude to dancers, alternating between the defence that dance was an art mentioned in the shastras and the charge that dancers themselves were generally women of ill-repute, the mass of the evidence was that the woman who danced for the delectation of men did not belong in respectable society.
In Main Chup Rahoongi (1962), the unwed mother Gayatri (Meena Kumari), who has voluntarily abandoned her lover Kamal (Sunil Dutt) and chosen to suffer alone, begins a career in private tuitions. One of her young charges is the daughter of a dancer (Helen). A heartbroken Kamal arrives at Helen’s house one day, brought by a friend, who thinks that she might be able to cure him of his megrims. She offers him ‘chai, coffee or Ovaltine (!)’. The friend explains that he needs stronger stuff and withdraws. Helen sings, Mere dil, kabhi to koi aayega/ Humdum jo tera ban jaayega (O my heart, there must be someone/ Who will make you his own). An unsuspecting Gayatri, who is in another room with the little girl, asks the maid of the house about the distracting music. The maid replies, ‘Bibi, yahaan to har subah Id aur har raat Diwali hai (Madam, every night is Diwali here and every day is Id—i.e., night or day, it is time for celebration).
When, as Jenny Francis, Helen tells Ahmad Raza (Amitabh Bachchan) in Imaan Dharam (1977) that she truly has no idea who the father of her daughter is, she is admitting to a life of multiple sexual encounters. In Raakhi Ki Saugandh (1980), Inspector Shankar interviews Kitty about her possible involvement in a bank robbery and she tells him: Shaayad aap bhool rahe hain ki main ek cabaret dancer hoon. Badmaashon ya shareef; har ek ke saath taaluqaat banaaye rakhna hamaara pesha hai (Perhaps you forget that I am a cabaret dancer; villains or pillars of society, my job requires me to maintain relationships with all of them).
In all these roles, the contrast was between the purity of the heroine and the moral degradation of the commercial sex worker. To move from one to the other was impossible. In Imaan Dharam, therefore, Jenny’s attempt to go respectable ends in her death. This would happen almost invariably. It was not just a divide between good girl and bad; it was a chasm.
MOLL
Helen endlessly reprised the role of the moll. Through the late sixties and early seventies, where there was a gang, there was Helen. She appeared in every key scene which featured the gang, and was often sent out to offer false friendship to the heroine or to vamp the hero (unsuccessfully). But more often than not, her role was to make appreciative squeaks when something evil was suggested, perform a cabaret as suitable cover for some nefarious activity and then vanish towards the end when the real action began. Whether the gang was smuggling drugs (as Sophie’s was in Jaane Anjaane), pursuing diamonds with the secrets of world peace hidden in them (Sue’s gang in Night in London) or setting out to bump off an heiress (Rita’s in Kab? Kyoon? Aur Kahaan?) or filching fighter-plane designs (Rita’s in Shareef Badmaash), Helen played the bells and whistles.
However, she could take a hand when she decided on a double-cross, and it is not surprising that she so often did. In Elaan (1971), for example, Lilly (sic) is part of a gang of spies who wish to acquire an atomic ring of invisibility that has been developed by Indian scientists. Naresh (Vinod Mehra), a journalist, lands on their island to get at the truth. He is caught and tied to a pole and rotated at high speed. Later, he is led into a den decorated in every colour known to man where Lilly, dressed as a matador, is waving her red cape at a man in a bull mask. After a while Lilly throws her cape over the camera. When the red pulls away, we see her face in such extreme close-up that only her right eye is visible. She winks and the camera pulls back to let us see that she has changed, unaccountably, into a Heidi costume: blue pinafore, white blouse and black apron over pantalettes and school-girl shoes. The song is pretty straightforward by comparison: Dil dena ho to do/ Dil lena ho to lo (Give your heart away if you want/ Take my heart away if you want). Lilly has designs on the atomic ring of invisibility herself. After her second song, Janaab ko salaam hai/ Zarina mera naam hai (Greetings, my lords/ My name is Zarina), she teams up with Ram Singh (Vinod Khanna), another gang member, to chase Naresh (who has by now acquired the ring).
A lone woman in the midst of such a number of men of suspect character, her attempt at double-crossing them, and her inevitable death are routine tropes in almost all films with gangs. Her love was doomed, her acts of expiation insufficient and her fate was death.
THE SKELETON IN THE CLOSET
In Afsana (1966), Kamini (Helen) is the cause of Shekhar’s (Pradeep Kumar) misogyny. He tells his new lady love Renu (Padmini) about her in grim detail. He first saw Kamini dancing in a club. In a series of odd symbols we follow his proposal (the wake of a boat), his marriage (a chandelier) and his disillusionment (an extinguished candle) when he discovers that she has another lover. He drives her from his house and later hears that she has died in an accident.
However, on the first night of his marriage to Renu, Kamini returns and begins to blackmail him. She comes to his wedding reception and announces, ‘All of you have come here to congratulate the married couple, and I want to say.’ And then she sings: Kitni hain albeli, haai zulfein teri, saheli/ Kitna haseen naujawaan hai, jo inse khele, haai, haai (What beautiful hair you have, my friend/ And what a handsome man he is who plays with your locks).
She and her lover now plan to kill Shekhar since she will inherit as his first and lawful wife. Of course, for this, she ends up falling off a cliff. Only, Shekhar is arrested for murdering her. Obviously even after death she can cause trouble.
Kamini bounces back in Jab Andhera Hota Hai (1974), where her mocking laughter drives her architect husband Pratap (Prem Chopra) to homicidal madness. We learn all this in a series of flashbacks as Pratap kills women, one by one. Kamini’s father educated Pratap, which gives her a sense of superiority which she flaunts by bringing her lover (Jalal Agha) home to her bed. Finally, Pratap strangles her to stop her laughing at him and then sets off to punish other women too.
In Anamika (1973), she represents the possibly unsavoury past of the heroine. The film tells the story of Devendra Dutt (Sanjeev Kumar) who finds a woman lying on the road. Anamika/Kanchan/Archana (Jaya Bhaduri) seems to have many names but no memory other than the strange belief that she is married to Devendra. In the process of discovering her identity, Devendra and Anamika/Kanchan/Archana go to a cabaret performed by Miss Ruby. This is one of Helen’s most famous numbers, encapsulating a story within a story: Aaj ki raat koi aane ko hai (Tonight, someone will come to me).
Devendra goes backstage to meet Miss Ruby after the show. She is wearing a black slip and smoking. The wig is on the desk, next to a drink. He asks about Kanchan’s past. ‘You really are a kid,’ she says in English, with a sweet, vicious smile. ‘Such women don’t have a history.’
Later Kanchan tells Devendra her story and it turns out that Miss Ruby was a procurer who offered her shelter when she needed it. A raid disrupted business the same night and Kanchan escaped and ended up in front of Devendra’s car. This proves that she is clean, a virgin without a sexual history—although not in quite the way Miss Ruby meant it.
TEACHER
Until the seventies, the hero, too, was assumed to be a virgin. This was even made explicit in films like Padosan (1957), where the hero, Sunil Dutt, has not had anything to do with women since he is still in the first stage of the life of a Hindu male, brahmacharya ashrama. The idea that a hero should be a sexually experienced male in order to master and guide the sexually inexperienced female only appeared in the seventies, with the arrival of les freres Feroze and Sanjay Khan. Until that time, the playboy was still just a young man who drank, smoked and teased young women. He did not sleep with them.
In this setting, the sexually experienced woman who would offer the hero instruction in matters sexual was not treated with much sympathy. In Chhote Nawab (1961), the Chhote Nawab (Mehmood) is a thoroughly spoilt brat who refuses to believe that he is twenty, because his birthday occurs on 29 February. This means that he pretends to be five years old, plays with children and rides a tricycle. This might lead one to suspect that he is retarded but after the death of his father, he suddenly grows up when his brother-in-law throws him out of the house. His fiancee Roshan (Ameeta) takes him in and undertakes to teach him the three ‘R’s, while a friend of the family, Captain (Johnny Walker), grooms him in social graces. Captain owns a nightclub to which he takes the Chhote Nawab. Here, Miss Sophie (Helen) makes her offer in a lovely song: Matwaali aankhonwaale/ Oh albele dilwaale/ Dil tera ho raha hai/ Gar tu ise apna le (Hey you with the mischievous eyes/ Hey you of the passionate heart/ I’m falling in love with you/ Won’t you accept the gift of my heart?). Although he refuses in song— Sun eh hasina, main woh to nahin (Listen, beautiful lady, I’m not the one)—the Chhote Nawab begins to be attracted to her. He buys a horse, begins to throw parties, frequents the nightclub without Roshan and begins smoking. Captain tries to intervene but Sophie leaves his club and takes the Chhote Nawab with her to another. There, she teaches him to drink as well. A song makes this explicit: Jeenewale muskurake pee/ Khushi ke jaam, muskura, aur pee/ Khabar kisko ki kal kya ho/ Arre yeh do din ki hai zindagi (Drink up/ Forget your sorrows/ Who knows what happens tomorrow?/ Life is too short to worry). Her duplicity is exposed only when Captain pretends to be an eccentric millionaire on the verge of death who wants to leave all his money to her.
Again, Helen’s character had a didactic purpose. The hurt that Chhote Nawab feels when she shows her true colours brings him closer to his family, cures him of his love of upper-class sophistication and validates what the audience already knows: their middle-class values are the only ones that can bring true happiness. The moral outcastes who drink, smoke, dance and generally have a great time will only end in misery.
Ten years later, Helen would still be mocking the inexperience of the young troublemaker Ramu (Raakesh Roshan) in the film Man Mandir. His sister Krishna (Waheeda Rehman) has just married the upright taxi driver Deepak (Sanjeev Kumar). He pawns her jewellery on the pretext that there is illness in the family and takes his friends out to dinner. Here, for his troubles, Helen asks in a chant: Kahiye-ji kya loge?/ Dil loge?/ Kho doge! (What will you have?/ My heart?/ You’ll lose it!). Then she begins to sing: Tum abhi kamsin ho, tum abhi nadaan ho (You’re still innocent, still naive), lines that more traditionally would be addressed to a woman.
But perhaps the most explicit example of Helen’s pedagogy can be seen in Bhai Behen (1969), the story of two brothers, Suren (Sunil Dutt) and Mahen (Diwakar), who live in the paternalistic regime of their father (Ashok Kumar). Mahen is caught dancing in a public place, dragged home and is about to be beaten when he has a heart attack and dies. Heartsick, Suren walks out of his home and falls in with Ratan (Pran) who, it is clear to us, simply wants to milk the family for what he can get.
Ratan organizes an education in a form-fitting red gown and feathery boa. Helen sings: Hai dil karoon mein kya/ Saamna tera hoga/ Pehloo se jaana nahin/ Tu hai meri zindagi (What should I do?/ Do not leave me/ You’re my life). At the end of the song, Suren and his tutor collapse behind a pillar on to the floor, and Ratan smiles victoriously. We may safely assume that the intended lessons are coming along well.
The educative role could also include initiation into a life of crime, a life that is always presented as westernized. In Aaj Ka Ye Ghar (1976) Mala (Jaymala) appears as the linchpin of the poor household into which she is married. The opening scenes are full of a hurried domesticity, establishing the husband (Shriram Lagoo), the young brother-in-law Vijay (Romesh Sharma) and the in-laws (Lalita Pawar and A.K. Hangal).
Vijay likes money a little too much. He is shown in bad company, being encouraged to smoke and drink. His gang takes him to see Miss Roohi (Helen) who wants him to organize five thousand rupees so that they can make a profit of a lakh. Then it is time for her show, a hot number in which she appears as a Rajasthani gypsy, singing about being bitten by scorpions at night and so, wanting his company. Vijay tries desperately to look sophisticated but fails miserably. Almost all the flirtatious gestures are aimed directly at Vijay, which means the song must be read as a metaphor for his seduction not merely by the woman whose hand he will take in the end, but also for a way of life.
In a few short reels, Vijay has fought with his family and walked out, taking his mother with him. He warns her that she had better not complain about the way he lives. Then Miss Roohi comes over and looking for a light for her cigarette, finds the diya lit for the gods. A storm erupts but Vijay takes Roohi’s side against his mother. Later, when his mother is trying to sing a bhajan to Lord Krishna, Darshan do Nandkishore, she is interrupted by Vijay and Roohi dancing to a truly dreadful rock tune, ‘Come on darling, love me more’.
Finally, Vijay kicks the mother out and keeps going downhill until he ends in jail and repents his ways. Through the film we do not know much about Miss Roohi (women like her have no history, after all) but it is safe to suggest that she represents the world at its wickedest. The lessons she teaches are not likely to do a hero any good.