Ten
Fade Out, Fade In
Bade-bade loot gaye,
Khade-khade loot gaye...
(The big have been defeated,
The erect have been deflated.)
—Lyrics from the Helen number in Jhoota Kahin Ka (1979)
By its nature, the exotic has very limited options. It must either reinvent itself, endlessly distancing itself from what is perceived as normal, or be eclipsed by other ways of seeing. Once a certain limit has been reached with the audience, a mind-barrier crossed, a taboo violated, the search must start again.
It is easy to see the 1970s as the time when Helen’s career began to decline. By this time, she was an old lady in cinematic terms. Twenty years into her career, the industry should have been looking—in that ugly phrase—for fresh meat. A hungry new bunch of women had invaded her space and were competing for the same roles, with or without body stockings. So the industry should have been sending out a cruel message: take things the way they are or pack up and leave.
It could be that simple.
It rarely is. The industry, one of the few genuine meritocracies we have, even if a nepotistic meritocracy, has no time for circumlocution. If it had no need for Helen, the offers would simply have dried up. Instead, she went on dancing, went on appearing—even if the roles she got were generally abbreviated to a single dance sequence, or less. But the length of the role does not always determine its impact.
For Helen managed to retain some of her luminosity. Aided by the arrival on the musical scene of R.D. Burman and assisted by the silken voice of Asha Bhosle, she did more than just survive.
This was the time I was growing up, and although I know I am making a wild generalization here, for my generation, she was far more than just a dancer. She had transcended that; she had become a category, a type, even an archetype. We spoke of Helen-type songs; we called beautiful women Helens, half mocking our own susceptibility, half in awe of the power they wielded over us.
And yet the seventies were a contradictory decade. She was still playing heroine in some B-grade films. She was still to dance some of her most memorable numbers: Piya tu ab to aaja (Caravan; 1971), Aaj ki raat koi aane ko hai (Anamika; 1973), Mehbooba mehbooba (Sholay; 1975), Mungda mungda (Inkaar; 1977) and Yeh mera dil yaar ka deewaana (Don; 1978).
Sensuous impatience; the sordid made sexy; the sex bomb who doesn’t give a damn—she danced the best of every possible bad-girl routine. None of her challengers—and there were many through the seventies—can claim to have done half as much.
And few actors were so badly wasted in trite rubbish.
While it is true that women have a shorter shelf life than men, peripheral women can go on much longer. It is not impossible to conceive of a forty-year-old Miss Lilly or Madame Lola preying on a twenty-something hero. It would simply be further proof of her degeneracy. Vamps do get older, but for a while their added years represent added sexual charge.
In Mere Jeevan Saathi (1972), for instance, Helen’s cinematic seniority to the hero, Rajesh Khanna, added an edge to her pursuit of him. Prakash (Khanna), an artist, accepts his millionaire father’s challenge to make his art pay. He fails until he bumps into Kamini (Helen), the princess of Ramgarh, who undertakes to be his patron. Before the first party she throws in his honour, she also offers herself to him. When he refuses, she tells him that she knows artists have moods and that she is willing to wait for the right mood. At the party, it is obvious that he is being assessed for his good looks rather than for his artistic abilities. The titles roll on his evolution into a society painter and a playboy (the background score underlines this with a slimy male voice oozing: ‘He’s a playboy, a sexy playboy’).
Prakash meets ophthalmologist Dr Jyoti Varma (Tanuja) and falls in love with her. Kamini hears of this and comes to visit him at his studio one evening. Since no model seems to be present, she starts to take off her clothes, the camera zooming in for a close-up. He rejects her but she throws herself at him. Jyoti witnesses what seems like a love scene and walks out. Prakash tries to explain but she drives away. He returns to his studio and slaps Kamini, to bring her to her senses. He tells her that he cannot love her; that only a man more debauched than her could.
She returns the next day to warn him. She is a hunter, she says, Jaanwar jitna khatarnaak ho, jitna chaalaak ho, use maarne mein zyaada maza aata hai (The smarter and more dangerous your prey, the greater the fun of the kill).
When Prakash is blinded in an accident, Kamini kidnaps him and holds him hostage in her palace. She whips him when he will not play the piano for her, but also throws herself at his feet. This has a dual purpose: his enslavement is atonement for his debauchery; her abasement plays to the eternal male fantasy of the nubile woman desperate for a man. The song Aao na, gale lagaa lo na/ Lagi bhuja do na, oh jaan-e-jaan (Hold me, put out the fires you’ve ignited in me) is one of the classics of feminine seduction. Asha Bhosle delivers it with an added breathiness to her voice, the rhythm of the song broken into short erotic gasps. And Helen cuts loose. She throws herself into it, abases herself, rubbing her face against the hero’s feet, kneeling in front of him, pushing herself into him.
Kamini fails. Prakash will not succumb. When he tries to escape on a horse, she follows, hugely enjoying the chase. It’s a shame when she plunges off a cliff; the rest of the film is the usual grinding melodrama without the Rani of Ramgarh to give it an edge of sexual danger.
Mere Jeevan Saathi would not have worked as well had a younger woman played Kamini. The power equations between struggling artist and patron, princess and commoner, but especially older, experienced woman and younger man, make her temporary control acceptable and limned with forbidden charm.
However, such roles were few and far between. Already by the end of the sixties, she was being given much less screen time than before. And the camera had begun to take liberties. In Yakeen (1969), Helen has a single cabaret with a second-rate song. This happens when a fake Rajesh Verma (Dharmendra), a spy, has replaced the original Rajesh Verma (also Dharmendra), a nuclear physicist. The fake one is from Mozambique, where a gang of international composition (some Arabs, a few Whites) seeks to steal the nuclear science formulas that the original Rajesh Verma has been developing. The Indian intelligence forces (represented by that gnome David) suspect the impostor when his dog doesn’t recognize him and his servant ends up dead. They take him to a bar to get him drunk, and Helen sings: Bach - bach - bach - bach ke/ Bach ke kahaan jaaoge/ In nigaahon se, in adaaon se/ Bach ke kahaan jaaoge? (How will you escape from my gaze, from my charms?)
The song is a series of low shots, some with her holding her crotch. In one shot, she is framed by men’s legs, a shot that would begin to be repeated since it defined her status as a sexual object, trapped in a world of men.
It was almost as if there was a multiple personality at work throughout Helen’s career, but this was accentuated in the seventies. For, when, in 1972, she was getting respectable films like Mere Jeevan Saathi and Apradh, and even a heroine’s role in Sultana Daku, what was she doing in Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche? This begins as a horror film but ends as a fairly tame revenge story. After the death of his first wife, scientist Raghuvansh (Surendra Kumar) has led a monkish life. One day, after visiting his wife’s grave, he sees a group of men attacking a woman. He rescues the woman, Anjali (Shobhna), and takes her home. In the night, she snuggles up to him and they make love. Naturally, as an honourable man, he marries her.
All this is actually a ploy, devised by Anjali’s Mamaji (starting with the Mahabharata, the evil uncle is almost always the mother’s brother) to get money out of Raghuvansh. When they think they have finally succeeded in killing Raghuvansh but can’t find his money, things begin to fall apart. Mamaji begins to drink and goes to a bar. Helen is partly herself (russet hair) and partly a tribal (green and purple half-sari and a nose-ring the size of a bangle). She half dances, half mimes the words of the supremely forgettable song Peeke aaye gharwa bedardi aadhi-aadhi raat (My thoughtless lover comes home drunk to me in the middle of the night). Then she vanishes.
It could be argued that Helen’s career was a case of mismanagement. She was still associated with P.N. Arora at this time. When the relationship finally ended, she was left penniless. In a profile of notorious gangster Karim Lala, journalist Saswati Bora quotes an insider, Zaffar Khan (The Age on Sunday, 17 March 2002): ‘Zaffar Khan recalls the time when the actress Helen came to Karim Lala for help. “Helen’s friend P.N. Arora had taken away all her earnings and was refusing to give her any money. A desperate Helen went to Dilip Kumar, who told her to go to Karim Lala. Helen came to meet Karim Lala with a letter from Dilip Kumar. Lala mediated in the matter and Helen got her money back,” says Zaffar Khan.’
Financially insecure, it would have been natural for her to take anything that was available. It may also be that Arora’s control of her career extended beyond the monetary. Perhaps she was thus forced to accept roles that did not fit with her stature. Or perhaps that stature is only one we have established in retrospect and Helen had no such notions about herself.
Whatever the reason, there she was in Ek Nanhi Munni Ladki Thi (1970), a Ramsay Brothers production, which means B-grade schlock. Shamsher Singh (Prithviraj Kapoor), some kind of has-been royalty, believes that a bejewelled dagger and a statue of Vishnu that are in a museum belong legitimately to his family. And so, he steals them. He eludes the police and goes underground but in the process, manages to misplace the Vishnu idol. In his renewed pursuit of the statue, which is being smuggled to Portugal via Goa, Shamsher bumps into Helen in a blue Arabian fantasy outfit.
Ai nazneen ai gulbadan, a way-past-his-prime Prithviraj Kapoor sings to her, and offers her ‘bageechas’ and his heart. You can see her face slightly confused at times, as though she is not quite sure what she is doing in a film like this. The willing smile has faded, her mouth a parody now, her teeth always gritted. The camera is savage in its inspection of her body, lingering on her pelvis. This is not the spirited dancer who always seemed to be enjoying herself. And it is not age either; seven years later she would still be vamping up a storm in Inkaar.
The relationship with P.N. Arora, as we have seen, might also be the reason why Helen did not get her fair share of media attention at that time. After the coming of Stardust in October 1971, the central theme of almost all film journalism became love. Some attempts were made later to perceive it as work (Rauf Ahmed’s version of Filmfare and Super, for example). However, film journalism was, and still is, largely restricted to heterosexual love affairs between stars; or stars and star directors. Change is central to this kind of journalism. A couple of stars may be allowed monogamous images but only as a counterpoint to the hectic shifts and stratagems of the large majority. Copy is far more easily generated when something happens, as opposed to nothing happening or things remaining the same. This constancy— and with a visually uninteresting has-been like P.N. Arora— meant that the new gossip-soaked magazines had little time for Helen.
By 1975, things were beginning to look a little bleak. In Sanyasi, the ultimate male fantasy film in which a willing Champa (Hema Malini) pursues a reluctant celibate, Ram (Manoj Kumar), Helen gets half a song with Tu mera din hai, main teri raat, aajaa (You are my day, I your night, come to me) before everyone from Nazima to Hema Malini takes over. In Zakhmee, a tired tale of revenge and double-crossing, she plays Sheela, the villain’s moll, and turns up in a red negligee over dark underwear in one scene and in black leather in another. By now it would seem that the director and producer felt that audiences would be more interested in the rising star Reena Roy’s flesh than Helen’s. Reena Roy appears regularly in shorts, minis and other western clothes. She keeps a scorpion in a matchbox to test the bravery of the men who claim her hand. Her songs are provocative and sensual (Jalta hai jeeya mera bheegi-bheegi raaton mein—‘My heart burns in these drenched nights’). By contrast Helen has no songs at all in Zakhmee. In the biryani western Kaala Sona, she is paired with Keshto Mukherji. This in itself is not a problem, as we have seen that there is a history of pairing the vamp with a comic actor. However, as resident sexpot in a drug-smuggling gang, Chameli (Helen) only gets half a dance (Koi aaya aane bhi de/ Koi gaya jaane bhi de—‘Let he who arrives, arrive; Let he who departs, depart’) which she shares with Durga (Parveen Babi), whose apple farm is being used as a cover for the opium smugglers. Durga, on the other hand, gets a dance to herself: And we see more male skin (Danny and Feroze Khan) than anything else.
From 1975 onwards, it is possible to show Helen’s growing irrelevance almost chronologically:
1975: Dharmatma
The son of the head of a crime syndicate, Ranvir (Feroze Khan) has left his home and his property to work as the manager of an estate in Afghanistan. There he meets Reshma (Hema Malini), falls in love and wins her hand. His father (Premnath) has enemies who rig his jeep but kill Reshma instead. In the course of getting his revenge, Ranvir has an assignation at a nightclub. African drums shoot into the screen along with an owl and a man painted in tiger stripes. The man-tiger has a snake over his shoulders with which he torments/tantalizes Helen who is prone on the floor. With Hema Malini playing a tribal and therefore allowed a great deal of mobility and Rekha playing second string, Helen doesn’t even get to sing. All she gets is to laugh—‘ha ha ha’— at the beginning of the sequence.
Raju (Feroze Khan) abandons decency when he is jilted by Preeta (Hema Malini), who has, in fact, been forced to marry someone else. She dies in childbirth, and the infant is brought up by her younger sister. The infant grows up to be Radha (Neetu Singh), and somehow her path crosses that of an older, still-handsome Raju. He begins to fall in love with her, and shows signs of becoming less bitter, less cynical. Aware of what it will do to the older man if she rejects him, Radha agrees to marry him and sacrifice her own love. It is at the celebration attendant upon this marriage that Helen sings: Aaj ki mehfil, aaj ki shaam/ Aap ki khaatir, aap ke naam (This celebration, this evening,/ All of it is for you, all in your name). She has as little as 20 per cent of the screen time since the song is intercut with shots of Raju on the balcony above, Radha being dressed as a bride and mourning her lost love, various lovers holding hands, and Raju’s Parsi friend Jehangir (Jagdeep) drinking.
1978: Parmatma
If a temple treasure needs to be looted, surely Johnny (Ranjit) will send in his most faithful agent?
‘Who is the agent, boss?’ asks a sidekick. ‘The agent is... (significant pause). Lily.’
Cut to a red feathery boa covering a shapely thigh. The boa parts to reveal the name ‘Lily’ embroidered in sequins on dark pink hot pants. We see only a pair of legs, while the owner has her back to us. All this might lead you to think Helen is going to burst on to the scene. Only, this time it is Aruna Irani, playing at being Helen.
They’re not the only ones after the temple treasure. There’s Zorawar Singh and his gang of dacoits and an escaped criminal pretending to be good in Bhairon Singh (Shatrughan Sinha). Lily is actually very good. She manages to get the treasure and whisks it off to Bombay. A reformed Bhairon Singh and Deepa (Rekha) come to the city to find the treasure. Here Rekha gets her chance at a dance too, with Suraangani Suraangani/ Kamaal karegi (Suraangani, Suraangani/ She’ll perform miracles). She is in a pink and black flamenco outfit. If that sounds familiar, you got it. She’d doing a Helen too.
When Bhairon Singh finally meets Zorawar Singh in the latter’s hideout, we find the original in a red pant suit and halter top tied beneath her breasts, table dancing after drinking alcohol from a glass with hands tied behind her back. Aankh ladti hai lad jaane de/ Baat badhti hai badh jaane de (If our eyes meet, let them/ And if this affair rages, well, let it.) She is watched by a greasy bunch of men, dwarfs and serving girls. The song, remarkable for its lack of shot coherence and the absence of any choreography, ends in a catfight between Helen and a young mute woman, which ends with Helen pinned between the mute’s legs, pulling the blouse off her shoulder.
1979: The Great Gambler
This should have been Helen’s film since it has more than its fair share of casinos, hotels, airports and underworld dens. However, she makes a small appearance as a woman dancing in a film reel. There is something sad and dreadful about this figure, without its normal accoutrements of men, musicians, audience, dancing alone in a little room. Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan), the CID Inspector, guesses that her gestures are a code; this is how the smugglers are passing their message. But, asks his boss (Iftikhar), the other cop in the room, what do the gestures stand for?
Amitabh Bachchan goes in search of the dancer, who is all kitted up to die in a bouffant and a red-and-gold gown. When he frog-marches her off, one of the goons sees them and kills her. She dies in his arms, leaving him with a name as a clue.
The gang needs another dancer. Shabnam (Zeenat Aman) steps in. She has two sensuous numbers: a standard disco number in Oh deewanon dil sambhalo, dil churaane aayi hoon main (Hey you crazed men, watch out, I’ve come to steal your hearts) and a ‘belly dance’ in Rakkaaza mera naam (My name is Rakkaaza). This is because Zeenat Aman is heroine and heroines get such songs now that they are willing to show leg and cleavage and wiggle.
Which leads us to another current explanation for the decline of Helen’s career. Her downfall, and of vamps in general, has been assigned easily enough to the rise of another kind of heroine. When the new, westernized female lead was willing to show a little skin and to dance with erotic energy (without needing the perpetual excuse of a charity show), what need of a vamp? So, while the tribe of Helen grew through the seventies, they also began to look like also-rans. A mere handful of people, or even less, can tell Faryal from Komilla Wirk or the difference between the sisters Meena and Jayshree T. Only Bindu and Aruna Irani managed to stand out. As for the rest, they were interchangeable pretty faces with pretty bodies attached.
Yet it was not a heroine who rang in the change. It was a sister. And a super hero.
Zeenat Aman had won the Miss India title at a time when contestants still went backstage and raised their saris for the judges to examine their legs. In 1971, she made her debut in Hulchul, where she and Kabir Bedi went unnoticed. The same year, she also appeared as Dev Anand’s kid sister in Hare Rama Hare Krishna, a young woman led astray by the hippies of the West in search of the wisdom of the East. The film, set in Montreal and Kathmandu, was an instant hit.
The seminal song from the film—Dum maaro dum, mit jaaye gham (Take a puff, drown your sorrows)—which can still bring reluctant dancers onto the floor at most discos, would, even five years prior to that, have been classic Helen, one of her songs of forgetfulness. The good women in the hero’s life—and most communication in songs is directed at him— would urge him to live for others, to consider the future or the good of his immortal soul. But now, here was the hero’s sister singing a song of alienation and disenchantment, asking: Duniya ne humko diya kya/ Duniya se humne liya kya/ Hum uski parwaah karen kyun/ Kisne hamaara kiya kya? (What has the world given us/ What have we got from it?/ Why should it bother us?/ What has anyone done for us?). Here was the anthem of doomed youth. Not only was the woman in a public space, she was also in a disco, she was wearing pants and she was smoking pot. The eyes of the world were upon her and she only shrugged.
Although it was clear from the moralistic tone of the film that this was not really something that a good girl should be singing (or doing), it was indicative of the sea change that Indian cinema would be going through in the seventies.
One of the most elemental changes would be in the nature of the hero. Until then, heroes were generally men in love. The trials and tribulations they faced were associated with that emotion or due to the machinations of family members who wanted to disinherit them, generally because they were in love. There were a couple of exceptions—Sunil Dutt as Birju in Mother India (1957) and Dilip Kumar as Ganga in Ganga Jamuna (1961)—but even here, ugra rasa, or anger, was not the central force in their lives. The first ugra hero was Amitabh Bachchan, who, it is said, brought his four years out in the cold backwaters of Hindi cinema to the raging, tormented Vijay of Zanjeer (1973). Alternative explanations for his stunning performance have implicated the revolutionary poetics of his father, Harivanshrai Bachchan; the powerful script by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar; the clarity of the focus on the hero’s rage (he sings no songs in the film, which, legend maintains, is why Dev Anand turned down the role); and the loss of Independent India’s innocence that had left audiences hungry for something other than pallid heroes singing pretty duets and touching their elders’ feet.
Amitabh Bachchan wasn’t just an angry young man. He was a man in a towering rage. He would flout society’s laws if they stood in his way, even if he was supposed to uphold them as a policeman in Zanjeer. He would refuse the solace of God and even of his mother, preferring money and sex in Deewar (1975). He would attack his father in a titanic Oedipal battle in Trishul (1978) and he would win. In these three films, now seen as the archetypal Bachchan films, he did not simply beat up villains, he reorganized society. And he dealt a bodyblow to the weeping lovers and chocolate-box heroes who had preceeded him.
This volcanic rage would also have repercussions for the female figures in the films. Mothers would gain some ground, since the Oedipal conflict between the Bachchan figure and his father became increasingly central from Deewar onwards. Heroines, however, would get less and less screen time, until they were reduced to a few scenes and a couple of dances. Helen was safe as long as it was a heroine uncomfortable with the idea of dancing, but now for some heroines dancing was the only thing they were good at or were allowed to do. Along with the heroine’s new willingness to show skin, this meant less need for Helen.
Next, the second lead began to go through a transformation. Instead of a comic presence, it began to be increasingly another dominant male figure, subordinate only to the first lead. Sholay, that path-breaking film in so many respects, proved to be the turning point here as well, establishing clearly that two men can be better than one. The dominant relationships within the film are those between the friends Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) and between the sworn enemies Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) and Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan). The two heroines, Basanti (Hema Malini) and Radha (Jaya Bhaduri), get very little screen time. Jai seems to be intent on sabotaging Veeru’s wooing of Basanti and it is only his death that allows enough space in his friend’s life for Basanti. In such a universe, where even the heroine was not strictly required—she was, in fact, the temporary diversion—what hope could there be for the vamp?
Not surprising, then, that Helen’s is a non-speaking, non-singing role in Sholay. She is not even a signifier because we already know how evil Gabbar Singh is. She is an anonymous fantasy gypsy here, the kind that we do not see in India. We know this because it is a campfire song and because Jalal Agha wears a European gypsy costume and plays a mandolin while lip-synching the now-famous Mehbooba, mehbooba/ Oooh-oooh-ooh/ Gulshan mein gul khilte hain/ Jab sehra mein milte hain/ Mein aur tu-uu-uu (My love, flowers blossom in the gardens when we meet in the desert).
In the background, Jai and Veeru are wiring up the place for an explosion, and for us, that is the matter of interest.
Of course, there is only one Sholay. The Amitabh-Dharmendra pairing would wait a long time, nearly five years, before it was repeated in Ram Balram and even then it would fail. Meanwhile, other, lesser male figures took over: Vinod Khanna (Hera Pheri, Khoon Pasina, Muqaddar ka Sikandar), Shashi Kapoor (Suhaag, Do Aur Do Paanch), Randhir Kapoor (Kasme Vaade, Pukar) Shatrughan Sinha (Dostaana, Naseeb) and Rishi Kapoor (Coolie, Naseeb, Ajooba). None of them would be paired with Helen because the producers would be eager to bring in the heroines with whom these actors had been paired in smaller successful films, or the heroines with whom they were rumoured to be having off-screen liaisons.
Helen had no off-screen liaisons with actors. She seems to have gone from the shadowy P.N. Arora straight to Salim Khan. While both these men had repercussions on her career, they were certainly not screen material. And it would have to be a very big hero whose reputation would be large enough to place an imprimatur on Helen’s image as a fallen woman. Bachchan was later to be that hero in the unsuccessful Imaan Dharam, but in the early seventies, he was in no position to take chances either.
After Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), Bachchan also showed that a hero could offer himself up to ridicule without losing his machismo or his star status. When Desai dressed all three of his leads up in ridiculous costumes (Vinod Khanna was a one-man band, Rishi Kapoor was a tailor and Amitabh, a priest), he was reinventing the climax, introducing into its histrionics both cathartic violence and a note of laughter. In the process, he also reinvented the Hindi film hero. (Later, in Naseeb, also starring Bachchan, Desai would reprise this climax with a matador, a Cossack and Charlie Chaplin, throwing in three women as a flamenco dancer, an Arabian dancer and Heidi for good measure.) You now got two for the price of one: a hero and a comedian rolled into a single powerhouse package.
The comic as second lead was redundant. His desperation about his sex life, too, was unnecessary. It was valid only so long as the hero’s sex life was the central motif of the film. Now that the hero wanted revenge, not victory in love, he would need another pair of eyes to watch his back—hence the the second hero. And this second hero was also, often, the staid, upright foil to the hero’s rage. Dependable, responsible, loyal, he had no space in his life for a pair of hot lips. He had no use for the vamp.
The comic would only return in the eighties when the non-actors were beginning to take over the smaller films and needed the likes of Kadar Khan and Shakti Kapoor to shore up their acts. Again, this extremely successful pairing did not need women for their variety of risque and misogynistic comedy.
And so it is only natural that Helen’s role in Amar Akbar Anthony, a film with three heroes, three heroines, and no comic, should take barely a moment of screen time. When Pran needs an impersonator for his adoptive daughter in order to foil a kidnap attempt, he gets Helen. She is duly kidnapped, leaving the world safe for the real daughter, Jennifer (Parveen Babi), so we can get on with this rollick of a film.
In the changing cinema of the seventies, the old, familiar claustrophobic spaces were getting smaller and smaller for Helen—paradoxically, because they were growing larger inside the film. Earlier, the hero wandered into the underworld; he did not belong there. Helen’s presence was a marker that he was now out of his natural territory and was going to have to find his way back. But the Bachchan figure did not wander into the underworld; it was his natural environment. In many of his films (Suhaag, Do Aur Do Paanch, Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Don) he seemed to be a product of the underworld. And if he turned his violence against it, he did it outside the purview of the law. Either way, he owned/possessed it.
This should have been Helen’s big chance since it was her space, this dark world of evil deeds and criminal gangs. Instead it was her undoing.
There are two options for the antisocial element. S/he must die or be tamed. Bachchan was good at dying, because he usually refused to be tamed. In Shakti and Deewar, he went too far from the family. Neither Raakhee nor Nirupa Roy could sanitize his rage. And so he died. In Muqaddar Ka Sikandar and Sholay, he was in free fall, with no family and almost no religion. In both films, he transgressed social barriers, loving above his status—the daughter and the daughter-in-law of his employers. And so he died again.
Each time he died, he went a little further in establishing the rule that if Bachchan died, the film lived. The other kind of death, the death in which he was reincarnated (Aakhri Raasta, Kasme Vaade, Don) would also be successful.
When Bachchan was dying so potently, who needed Helen to die? When the threat of the lover who did not need a family for context had been codified into the leading character, how much could the vamp do? It is odd to think of Helen’s hips and Bachchan’s fists as acting out the same fantasy-cum-moral fable, but they do. Sex and violence damage the status quo when they are unchained. She was love, even if it was outlawed love; he was death.
And as in all patriarchal societies, death triumphed over love.
Luckily for Helen, fate intervened. In 1981, she married Salim Khan and retired, although she would still dance in a few films. She told Shashi Baliga in the magazine Savvy (February 1989), ‘Something about Salim set him apart from the rest of the industry men. I respected him tremendously because he helped me out without trying to exploit me.’ She had not expected Salim to marry her, for he was already married, and had grown-up children. Salma, his first wife, admits, in the same interview, to being ‘depressed and disturbed at first’. It took her a year to accept another woman in Salim’s life. It was she who made the move to reconcile the three of them.
And so, finally, Helen had the happy ending she had never had in her film career. ‘When I married Salim, I found a security I had always missed before,’ she says in The Britannica Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema. She found a ready-made family.
But there was still enough in the old trooper for a new phase in her career, still some get up and go in the workhorse. She would return to the screen from time to time but these were rare appearances in unremarkable films. From 1981 to 1989, I can only find twenty-three films in which Helen acted. There may be more in which she was not credited but I don’t think the number would rise above fifty. She had all but retired.
But, like a good Hindi film, the happy ending was at hand. By the nineties, she was playing maternal roles and had turned into a legend, an icon. She won her Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, sharing it with Manoj Kumar. While that isn’t precisely the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, it is still an achievement, if you combine it with the Best Supporting Actress Awards for Gumnaam (1965) and Lahu Ke Do Rang (1979). Now her name would only grace the marquee when big names were involved: Salman Khan, Karan Johar, Amitabh Bachchan. When her name turns up in the credits of a television serial like Do Lafzon ki Kahani, it makes news in the manner of the stars.
Helen was finally a star. No, more than a star. She was an icon, a legend in her own lifetime.