Eleven
The Making of a Legend
Tumhe sunkar taajjub hoga ki is dancing hall mein poore teen saal ke baad maine aaj kadam rakha hai. Is hotel ki maalkin hone ke alaawa main yahaan ki cabaret dancer bhi thi. Door door se log is hotel mein aate the, mera cabaret dekhne. Mujhe bachpan se hi dance karne ka shauq tha. Jab main stage pe aati, to saara hall taaliyon se goonj utthta. Aur mujhe aise lagta...ki saari duniya taaliyon ki goonj se mera swaagat kar rahi hai. Aur main. maare khushi ke be-ikhtiyaar jhoom jaati. (You will be surprised to hear this, but I have stepped into this dancing hall after three whole years. Besides being the owner of this hotel, I was also the cabaret dancer here. People would come from far away to watch my cabaret. I loved dancing even as a child. When I made my entry on the stage, the hall would resound with applause. And I felt...I felt that the whole world was welcoming me. And my...my joy would be uncontrollable.)
—Helen, leaning on a cane, in Raakhi aur Hathkadi (1972).
(But of course, immediately afterwards, she bursts into a dance, to indicate that the past is not another country; it is only a flashback away.)
In 2003, when I was halfway into the writing of this book, a VCD of seduction songs was released: Haseenon ka Hungama, priced at Rs 60, produced by Indus Video Private Limited. I was glad to have got hold of it. It joined my collection of VCDs of this kind—among them, Piya Tu Ab To Aa Ja (Indus, 1997) and Golden Girl Helen (UltraIndia.com; date not stated)—with which I reminded myself why I was doing this book whenever the grunt work got me down. There was something peculiar about Haseenon Ka Hungama, though. It had well-known contemporary heroines like Kaajol, Urmila Matondkar, Raveena Tandon et al strutting their stuff, but there was not a single Helen song. And yet Helen features twice on the cover of that VCD, in her signature flamenco outfit and in her Paris chorine leotards from Caravan. The same thing happened a year later when I found a copy of Hungama Ho Gaya (Indus, 1999). Inside, heroines like Kimi Katkar, Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit were to be found dancing. Need I say that none had the vivacity and sensual presence of Helen? Need I say that some of them seemed to be consciously or unconsciously offering versions of Helen? (For confirmation, check out Pooja Bhatt dancing Roza Roza in Naraaz.) Need I tell you that on the cover there were three images of Helen?
Helen is now shorthand, an indicator for a certain kind of dance. She’s still a presence enough to make producers want to stick her on the cover of a VCD even at the risk of being accused of misleading advertising.
When the whistling dies, it is difficult to say how a film legend is made. For instance, common wisdom might hold that first you need to be a star. But Helen was not a star in the way Hindi cinema defines stardom. Her name in the cast was not enough to pull in the punters, never mind ensuring a repeat audience. Few people, if any, would go to see a film only because Helen was in it. But were she in a film that you did want to see, your anticipation would be heightened by her presence.
As a heroine, she had no major hits, with the sole exception of Cha Cha Cha. Since film-making is about entire teams working together to a purpose, we know that it wasn’t Helen’s failure alone. Most of the films in which she was heroine were bad films. The special effects were lousy, the scripts were cobbled together from old themes, the music was pedestrian. But as we know, in public opinion both the success and failure of a film is unfairly apportioned to the lead actors.
That takes care of the notion that it’s stardom that does it.
Nor does media attention. If you go through the F ilmfare files of 1958, you find double spreads on milksop heroines like Nalini Chonkar and Peace Kanwal. You read about Dilip Kumar’s reading habits. You even find an article on Czechoslovakian cinema. But there is not a single line on Helen, though this was the year she finally managed to break through into the public consciousness, the year she danced Mera naam Chin-Chin-Choo.
The neglect was only marginally less in later years. Journalists don’t get paid much; nor are they rewarded for research. Almost every film journalist who has ever interviewed Helen has got the same set of replies. The same questions were avoided, the same topics came up. Few would prepare by going to see what Helen actually did, perhaps because they all felt they knew what she did. She danced for the men in the cheap seats, didn’t she? That was all they needed to know. As for her off-screen life, as we have seen, it wasn’t interesting enough for them.
Even recent profiles of Helen merely describe her best songs, a list that will now live forever and will be circulated endlessly, thanks to the Internet. The rest of her career is whitewashed, perhaps out of respect, perhaps out of ignorance.
Common wisdom also holds that you have to stick around a long time to make it to the hall of fame, or you have to die young. Helen did manage to stick around for quite a while. But then so did Jeetendra, who romanced four generations of heroines, starting with Rajshree and ending with Anita Raj, and he hasn’t made it. The same could be said of any number of actors of varying levels of success.
Then there is the competency argument. You have to be exceptional at what you do; it is not enough to be good at it. There is no doubt that Helen was a brilliant dancer, even when the choreography demanded the fancy footwork of Kathak. But again, Johnny Walker was an exceptional comedian and Sulochana was brilliant at what she did (suffering maternity), yet they aren’t counted as icons, legends, whatever. Helen was their equivalent, cinematically. Like their characters, she was rarely central to the plot. Her roles were generally incidental, sometimes irrelevant, often divertissements. Despite this, the same industry began to turn her into an icon.
It is possible to trace a cinematic origin for this process.
It began as early as 1978, when in Chor Ke Ghar Chor director Vijay Sadanah gave the dance sequence with the seductive movements, tribal outfit and suggestive words (Nathaniya kaaga lekar bhaagaa—‘A crow robbed me of my nose-ring/virginity’)—to his heroine Meena (Zeenat Aman). And Helen he turned into a mnemonic of her earlier glamour.
The film revolves dizzily around the theft of an idol from a temple. The many twists and turns in it are impossible to summarize, so assume whatever train of events you desire to arrive at two middle-aged men, Ranjit and Mangal (played by two stars from the past, Ashok Kumar and Pran), one keen to restore the idol and the other to get hold of it; one driven mad by circumstances and the other pretending insanity. This means that they are both in funny wigs and rags when they turn up at a kotha where Helen is dancing in a purple and white mujra costume. She continues singing to the two ragged madmen: Har cheez jaanti hoon, har raaz jaanti hoon/ par jaao saiyyan main na kahoongi (I know all there is to know, I know every secret/ But go away, love, for I’m not about to tell).
The comic and the nostalgic collide to ugly effect in the sequence. Here is the woman who sang Mera naam Chin-Chin-Choo to a younger Ashok Kumar, in what was the highlight of that film. She is still portrayed as appealing, she is still a dancer, but her appeal is not directed at the hero. It is directed at a couple of old misfits. Unable to handle a woman who would not age, the film lets her down by placing her in a situation where her dancing is no longer the central motif but part of an array of asinine exploits by two ageing men in what might have been, under more skilful direction, a good-natured romp. Consider the sharp contrast to Waheeda Rehman’s mujra in Namkeen (1982), central to the cinematic moment, brilliantly shot, respectful of the dancer and her memory, especially since she was playing an old woman in the rest of the film.
This is not to suggest that Sadanah was actually making a cinematically self-conscious reference to an earlier Helen so as to invoke an earlier Ashok Kumar. It is equally dangerous to suggest that the response he wanted of us was the memory of an earlier affection, an earlier lust. But the song is clearly part of a pattern.
In less than two years time, Helen would be an old woman. She would play a mother in Lahu Ke Do Rang (1979) and win a Filmfare award for Best Supporting Actress. Odd, because she was not the hero’s mother, and even the mothers of heroes don’t get supporting actress awards, unless they are Nirupa Roy. Odd also because there was nothing in the role that a hundred other senior actors had not done, and done better. The film stars Vinod Khanna as Shamsher, an Indian freedom fighter on the run from the British colonial forces in Hong Kong. He takes shelter in Suzie’s (Helen) house. There he has an affair with her, and marries her in a Buddhist temple. She is half-Indian, she tells him, so she knows Hindi and even remembers a song her mother used to sing to her: Maathe ki bindiya bole, kaahe ko gori dole, saajna gaye re pardes (The bindi on my forehead asks: why are you so happy; your lover has gone away).
Shamsher returns to India where we discover that he is already married and has a son. He is betrayed and is killed. Back in Hong Kong, Suzie gives birth to Suraj (Danny) who turns into a small-time hood. He seems to feel only contempt for his mother who fasts for a husband who has abandoned her. The two sons meet when Suraj is hired as a diver to retrieve sunken treasure and Raj (Vinod Khanna again) is a policeman on the trail. Suzie follows her son to India, and, by a series of coincidences, finds her husband’s other family. But she hates no one, condemns no one and weeps and forgives a lot.
Helen’s face was beginning to show signs of age now— the softening chin, the early jowls, the crow’s feet—even if her body was holding up perfectly. And towards the end of the film, there are quite a few close-up shots of her face.
Perhaps it was the industry’s way of encouraging her to take up her ‘proper’ role in the world of cinema. Perhaps the patriarchy, uncomfortable with this agelessness, was willing her to turn into a mother.
They wouldn’t have their way yet.
In 1979, other than Lahu Ke Do Rang, she appeared in eight films: Duniya Meri Jeb Mein, Guru Ho Ja Shuru, Jhootha Kahin Ka, Kanoon Ka Shikaar, Magroor, Raakhi ki Saugandh, Teen Ikke and The Great Gambler. In almost all these films, she has a single song to sing, but in Jhootha Kahin Ka Miss Helen is still ‘the most sensational show in town’. At the end of her performance (the Khade khade loot gaye song), we have a flashback to an earlier Helen. For while she has a wealth of beefcake on display through the song, in the form of literally panting bodybuilders, it is old Dara Singh who walks in, clad in a dressing gown. He strips it off to reveal a body far less-developed than the boys but since he is a bigger star (in these lower reaches) he gets to whip her up in his arms, whirl her round and then drop her on the floor.
In 1980, she was still dancing in Abdullah, Angaar, Bereham, Dostaana, Garam Khoon, Hum Kadam, Jaayen To Jaayen Kahaan, Karwa Chouth, The Great Gambler and turning up for a special appearance in Shaan. In that year’s release Raakhi ki Saugandh, she plays Sweety, another famous cabaret dancer, another member of another gang. Seth Chamanlal (Ajit) heads this one and organizes a bank robbery. Inspector Shankar (Vinod Mehra) finds that the car used for the heist belongs to Sweety and comes calling at her nightclub. A golden cage drops over him and a bunch of caricature tribal Africans surround him, poking at him with spears. This is obviously a replay of the seminal Intequam song—Aaa Jaane jaan—again a harking back. The only difference is that this is no inarticulate savage in the cage; this is the hero. Helen can mock him, singing, Khud hi phas gaya pinjre mein/ Tu shikaari bada anaari hai (You fell into your own trap/What a hunter you are!), but eventually he’ll kick his way out in style.
Although she again played a mother in Ram Balram in 1981, Helen was still dancing in Bhula Na Dena, Bulundi, Chhuppa Chhuppi, Josh, Paanch Qaidi, Raaz, Sannaata, and Shaaka. In Bulundi (1981), the story of a charismatic professor— Raj Kumar—and his attempt to change the lives of four rich boys whose parents are the elite of the criminal underworld, she has a quick number when the boys are chasing a killer. Our first view of her is a rump shot. She is at the top of a staircase and begins descending after she has wiggled her rear to the percussion. She sings: Tera dil oh re babu/ Tere kheeshe mein rakho/ Na baba, na re baba/ Mereko nako-nako (Put your heart back in your pocket, good sir/ I want nothing to do with it). Once again, the inclusion of the character actor and comic Bhagwan as the bartender implicates an earlier era, seeks to establish nostalgia for the past.
But because nothing in Hindi cinema will ever follow any graph, however retrospective, in 1981, Helen also danced in Sanjay Khan’s Abdullah. The song forms part of the celebration of the wedding of the hero Mohammad (Sanjay Khan) and the heroine Zarina (Zeenat Aman). Helen in an Arabian fantasy costume proves that she has the moves in Jashn-e-bahaara, mehfil-e-yaara aabaad rah (May the festivities of spring and this meeting of friends be favoured by fortune).
In 1982, there were Alladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, Ayyash, Chorni, Eent Ka Jawaab Paththar, Heeron Ka Chor, Kachche Heere, Sawaal, Teesri Aankh and Waqt Waqt Ki Baat. In Ayyash, a ham-handed update of Guru Dutt’s classic Saahib, Bibi Aur Ghulaam, four mujras are performed as indicators of the ayyashi (decadence) of Thakur Jaswant Singh (Sanjeev Kumar). Helen dances in the last of these, sung to celebrate the birth of a child (Topiwaale ne kar ke salaam mujhe badnaam kiya— ‘The policeman greeted me and ruined my reputation’), and it works almost as a tribute to her memory.
It was only after 1983 that she finally began to slow down, with a single film, Haadsa. The other production from that year which has her in the credits is not really a film at all, despite its title, Film Hi Film. It has a depressingly thin storyline about a director who resurrects his career with a bunch of young actors. As they make the film, he tells them about cinema, using clips of movies that never got made. Helen appears in one of these clips.
The following few years would be the years of retirement. She made just a couple of appearances, in Pakhandee and Bond 303. Her next big release would be a film Salim Khan wrote, Akayla (1991), standard issue late-Bachchan. Vijay Verma (Bachchan) is a good cop—even if one with an alcohol problem—who turns vigilante. In a flashback we are told that his best buddies were Seema (Meenakshi Sheshadri) and Shekhar (Jackie Shroff). Vijay and Seema loved each other but on the day that he wanted to offer for her hand, Shekhar confessed his love for Seema and asked him to present his case to her mother (Helen). The bigger star is always allowed the sacrifice and Vijay has his first drink that evening.
There are two Helen moments in the film, two references to her past, although one is allusive. This allusion is in the moment in which Vijay, or Akayla, the loner, meets his new love interest, Sapna (Amrita Singh), a nightclub dancer. Success casts a long shadow and here it is particularly clear: Sapna is wearing a flamenco outfit in red and black. The other Helen moment is when Vijay comes to her grandson Bobby’s birthday party. The three of them together sing a song: Jeenewaalon jeevan chhuk chhuk gaadi (The train of life runs on). And then, suddenly, in an act of obeisance, the band plays a riff from Mera naam Chin-Chin-Choo and Helen takes off, kicking away and whirling the skirts of her sari, until she recollects her age and her status and flounces off happily.
In a post-modern moment, the figure of Seema’s mother, Bobby’s grandmother, suddenly dissolves and the actress playing her surfaces with all her screen history.
This would be repeated again in Mohabbatein (2000). Helen has one of those minor add-on roles that you might miss if you sneezed and then blew your nose. Narayan Shankar (Amitabh Bachchan) is the principal of a school who believes in rules, not love. Raj (Shah Rukh Khan), who was once in love with Narayan’s daughter Megha (Aishwarya Rai) but lost her to her father’s intransigence, comes to the school to teach the principal the value of love. In charge of the boy’s hostel, Raj plays cupid. Helen as Miss Monica is in charge of the girl’s hostel, a role hitherto assigned to the mad-eyed character artiste Manorama. At the annual get-together, Raj plays a riff from Ai haseena zulfonwaali jaan-e-jahaan on his violin, and Helen lets down her hair and dances for a few moments.
This is how iconization works. The assumption is that you would know why she is called Miss Monica, a reference to her all-time hit from Caravan. The assumption is also that you would know the Ai haseena song. This means that the song is familiar, has lost none of its potency and can be referred to without explanation and certainly without disrupting the story. It is a self-reflexive moment in a cinema not given to self-reflexivity. Very few Hindi films have been made on the making of cinema, for example, and those have not been commercial successes, not even Guru Dutt’s spectacularly beautiful Kaagaz ke Phool (1959).
While Hindi cinema has never been commercially or critically successful in treating itself as subject, it does know how to make a playful bow to its own icons. The longest of such sequences is in Manmohan Desai’s Naseeb, in which John Jaani Janardhan (Amitabh Bachchan) plays a waiter at a ritzy hotel. Desai thought up a novel way to expand his already diverse star cast. By having a song set in a party to celebrate the 50th week of a Manmohan Desai film (Dharam Veer, which was released in 1977), he managed to refer to his own successes, pay homage to Raj Kapoor and have a procession of big-name actors adding value to his new film.
The stars come in as Bachchan (who is, of course, the biggest star) sings: Har picture dekh-ke socha/ Main bhi actor ban jaaoon/ Kismat ne ghoomaaya/ Hotel mein pahunchaaya (After every film I saw, I thought/ I too should be an actor/ But fate set me to wander/ And brought me to this hotel). At one point, Raj Kapoor is given an accordion and asked to play it, bringing back memories of other films, other tunes.
Of course, Raj Kapoor was playing himself, in a way that Helen would never be asked to play Helen. She could only remind us of the persona she had created over thirty years of acting, and eventually she did what almost all ageing actresses do. She turned into a mother figure.
In Khamoshi—The Musical (1996), she plays Mariamma without any traces of Helen, the dancer. It is true that she executes a vigorous skirt-waving, petticoat-displaying number, but she is an old lady and there are no traces of the coquette, no references to Lilly or Jenny or Kitty. Mariamma is the quintessential old lady: warm, reassuring, mothering, optimistic, straight-talking. Her granddaughter Annie Joseph Braganza’s (Manisha Koirala) world is split into the silence of her deaf-mute parents (Nana Patekar and Seema Biswas) and the music that Mariamma (an odd South Indian name for a Goan lady, although the cross on her grave reads ‘Mary’) plays on the piano. The first song is the song in which we are introduced to the family’s happiness. As raindrops begin falling on their heads, the young Annie and Mariamma whisk a piece of plastic over the piano and over their heads and begin to sing: Mausam ki sargam ko sun/ Kya gaa raha hai samaa/ Tu bhi gaa, tere sangh/ Gaye saara jahaan (Listen to the season’s song/ Listen to what the land sings/ Sing with it, and the world will sing with you).
Later, when Annie steals some fish for their dinner and her father throws her out of the house, Mariamma gives him a piece of her mind—and deals some very low blows: his freedom fighter father had hanged himself because of his deaf-mute son. It is one of the few instances in Indian cinema when a matriarch is allowed a moment in which she lets down her guard and attacks with whatever comes to hand. Helen seems strangely right for this. It is difficult to see the usual character artists who have played Indian mothers being trusted with such an outburst.
Her second song is when the piano is sold and the family is desolate. Like Pollyanna, she sees the good in evil and claims, Gaate the pehle akele/ Aaj gaata hai saara jahaan (Before, we sang alone/ Now the world sings with us). It is here that she dances.
Afterwards, the piano is covered with a white cloth, a shroud. Just as it is about to be loaded on to the ferry, she runs to it and plays one last time. Then she pulls the shroud off it and runs away into the dusk, one of the most effective cinematic metaphors for death.
Not all of Helen’s recent films have been quite so big budget, nor were all of them successes. In the B-Grade Saazish—The Conspiracy (1998), she is a social worker, a lay nun, an aunt, a mother figure, all rolled into a black dress, with concerned and tearful eyes as accessories. David Braganza (Mithun Chakraborty) plays a grave-digger who has sacrificed everything to keep his brother Tony (Vikas Bhalla) in medical school. David is an alcoholic who is torn between the competing love of Mrs D’Costa (Aruna Irani), who runs a bar, and Mary Aunty (Helen), who is intent on closing down that bar as part of her social development endeavours. What was obviously meant to be a funny subplot gets lost because neither the dialogue nor the direction explores any of the possibilities of the situation. Both women come off poorly. Their feud ends when David is faced with the problem of paying for the last year of Tony’s degree. He needs a lakh. Mary Aunty writes to the missionaries and gets a loan. Mrs D’Costa sells her bar and the two sworn enemies make up. Unfortunately, Tony discovers a drug scam and gets bumped off by a bunch of goons.
The next year, however, she was back in a blockbuster, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. Half Italian and half Indian, Sameer (Salman Khan) comes to a picturesque haveli in the desert regions of Gujarat to learn music and to find his roots. He falls in love with Nandini, the daughter of the house. The marriage is forbidden by her father, who, as guru dakshina, asks Sameer to forget Nandini. Sameer returns, heartbroken, to Italy (played by Poland) to be comforted by his Italian mother (played by Helen). There is an added frisson in this casting: Helen being Salman’s (step)mother in real life. She really does not have much to do in the film. She gets a single punchline—‘I love you, Jesus’—delivered when she hears that Nandini may be within Sameer’s reach after all. She isn’t.
In Shararat (2001), Anuradha Mathur (Helen) is one of the inmates of an old-age home to which Rahul Khanna (Abhishek Bachchan) has been sent to do social service in expiation of his crime of turning off the traffic lights and causing the mother of all accidents. She is a new arrival whose son is going to Canada—‘for training’, he says, but she knows that she has been abandoned, as she tells Prajapati (Amrish Puri), the inmate whose benevolent tyranny has been accepted by all the others. The central battle of the film is between Rahul and Prajapati. Anuradha is peacemaker, the voice of Rahul’s conscience. The only Helen moment is when she dances with Rahul at the birthday party that the residents of the home organize for him.
Other than the regrettable Saazish, it is interesting to note that Helen returned to the big banners with a vengeance. She is now not just another name, she is a value-add to the cast. A new generation of young people queues up to see her, even in such a tiresome film as Dil Ne Jise Apna Kahaa (2004), where she plays the adoptive mother of Dhaani (Bhumika Chawla), who has a heart problem. When the heroine Dr Parineeta (Preity Zinta) dies, Dhaani receives her heart and her emotions and therefore immediately falls in love with the good doctor’s widower, Rishabh (Salman Khan). The failure of Dil Ne Jise Apna Kahaa proves that Helen still cannot make a film a success any more than her presence can guarantee that a television serial starring her will at least get a headstart on the competition.
But an appreciation of her now seems synonymous with an appreciation of what Hindi cinema really is.
Bad girls sometimes make good.
How?
In some ways, 1981 was the turning point. Helen married Salim Khan, and settled down to the life of a second wife. In time, she was integrated into the original family. As far as I can remember there were no scandalized whispers, no public outrage. This may have been because the principals in the drama were not stars; or it may have been because none of them spoke to the media, except for that one exclusive interview to Savvy. But I like to think it is because of the goodwill Helen had earned over the thirty years she had been in the film industry.
The year 1982 was her last fully ‘active’ year. After that Helen, the dancer, turned into a scarce commodity. At the height of her career, you couldn’t see a film without seeing those famous legs. She was everywhere and she was all things to all men. And while everyone enjoyed her dancing, even in her silliest, most idiotic moments, it may have been that this was too much of a good thing. In the last twenty odd years, however, she has appeared in just a handful of films. Now when the next Helen film comes out, someone, perhaps Shah Rukh Khan, is going to say that he is waiting to see the film because of her. When the reviews come out, they will all bemoan the shortness of her role. This never happened when she was at the peak of her fame, it certainly didn’t happen when she was still dancing in the late seventies.
Next, Helen acquired a new respectability with age. Rehabilitation is important and it comes when the scandal loses its teeth, when the shock has turned into a fond memory of being shocked. The tearaway has now been revealed to be one of us, all along. This means a certain amount of ironing out and a collective amnesia. It is important to point out here that Helen was almost never scandalous. She saved that for the screen. In the course of her long career, even the gossip magazines had nothing to say about her. Now, of course, she is a good woman even on-screen.
Now that the exotic and the dangerous have been co-opted, we remember only that Helen was a great dancer. We do not choose to remember that she was surrounded by second-rate dance directors, colour-blind art directors, and dress designers with some pretty wild notions about what a dancer should wear. We choose not to remember the bad and the ugly moments, of which there were plenty. But then, our own notions of ugliness have changed, now that the middle class has decided that it has the confidence to appreciate the tinsel attractions of kitsch. While the over-the-top outfits in her better numbers are now subjected to an interested and faux-bemused scrutiny, we really have no memory of Helen as Rubaba in Mujhe dekhiye main koi dastaan hoon (Look at me, I am a story) from the film Lootera (1965), dancing in a mauve blouse with the breasts picked out in gold, a multicoloured skirt of knotted scarves, pink leggings, and her hair in russet rat-tails.
It won’t surprise me at all if Helen has no memory of this either.
But there is something else at work here. When I once asked an editor if I could review Hindi cinema for his newspaper, he asked me why.
‘Because I like it,’ I said.
‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘My readers don’t like Hindi cinema. I don’t like it.’
We were not supposed to like Hindi cinema then, we the educated middle class. I remember meeting my physics teacher coming out of the first day, first show of Mr Natwarlal (for which my sister and I had braved an eight-hour queue for tickets) and I remember her embarrassment at being caught at a theatre.
We don’t have that problem today. Thanks to our new-found confidence (we are the second-largest consumer market, are we not?) or to western appreciation and critical discourse on Hindi cinema, we’re allowed to like it. This latitude has also been extended to Hindi film music, which is now ubiquitous. Television countdowns have multiplied and promos, also song-based, seem to dominate television time. FM radio now competes with All India Radio (which once handed over all its audience to Radio Ceylon by refusing to play Hindi film music in the fifties) to keep playing a judicious mix of old and new songs.
And of course, the remix artists have found a treasure trove of danceable tunes. They already carry an enviable freight of goodwill and recognition value, only a couple of percussion instruments need to be added to create a new song entirely. Helen’s songs fit in naturally. Most of them are dance tunes.
Added to all this is a new ironic appreciation of kitsch and those costumes—Helen’s, especially—which were sneered at for their bad taste and are now displayed in specially curated upmarket exhibitions.
Whether it is Canadian drag queens or bhangra babes in Bradford or simply a bunch of young people in Mumbai finding their second wind at a disco, the queen has been re-enthroned.
Helen has returned. As a cult classic.
Of course, when music channels play Helen numbers, they stick to the old favourites, the numbers we all carry around with us in our heads, the ones that come to mind when her name pops up. But there are more opportunities to see her now than there ever were when she was at her peak. Through the writing of this book, friends would ring up to tell me that a Helen song was playing on Channel So-and-So or that a new compilation of her songs was available on the streets of the city.
Many of these songs are ludicrous. But that, in an odd way, helps maintain the legend. Now that we are all comfortable with kitsch, we can celebrate the worst aesthetic excesses of Hindi cinema. The hybrid costumes which came from a variety of sources—from Heidi to the kothas of Lucknow—the exaggerated make-up which included sequins to outline eyebrows and spiky eyelashes that looked like they might tear the skin of anyone who came close enough to kiss, the improbable sets with their bottles of Vat 69 and weedy white people as props, even the irrelevance of the songs, everything was validated because it wasn’t just kitsch, it was High Kitsch and we were all allowed to enjoy it.
Four films have been made on or about Helen, and all four have been made by Western film-makers or film-makers settled in the West. Nasreen Munni Kabir’s Helen: Always In Step has been discussed earlier. It is built around an interview and is clearly affectionate in its treatment of Hindi films and Helen.
The first film on Helen was made by a British film-maker in the age before Orientalism became a catchphrase. He called it Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls. It is obvious that it was James Ivory’s response to the sheer Otherness of the cinema he experienced in India. The Merchant-Ivory film now is something of a cliche; it is tasteful to the point of lacking any flavour; it has some beautiful performances, finely tuned, perfectly poised, as artificial as a Bloomsbury conversation; it has, in short, a very clear aesthetic defining it all. It is the aesthetic of the cosmopolite, and it travels easily. In 1973, the year that Queen of the Nautch Girls was made, this aesthetic might have been in its formative stages but it was already becoming clear.
Ivory came to India quite often, and he would still have been thinking in water colours while all around him, commercial Hindi cinema was daubing colour extravagantly in the bright shades of a box of crayons. Every time Ivory came to India, then, he must have been inundated with the glossy lavishness of it all, by the complete lack of any thought of the market in Cannes or the statuettes of the Academy, by the way in which a medium was being redefined in total ignorance of what an international market might want. His films travelled; in 1973, Indian films didn’t. There were no Saturday night shows at the multiplex at Piccadilly; no reviews in The New York Times; no self-aware love of kitsch.
And while Helen was, by 1973, no longer central to this circus of the East, the idea of a Franco-Burmese woman as the reigning Love Goddess of it all, dressed in feathery creations that would not have raised an eyebrow in Las Vegas, appearing in the narrative breaks that songs meant to the Westerner, must have been delicious. I am sure James Ivory may have had many more and far subtler reasons to make Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls. I am sure that he would not have named it that today. I am sure I have wronged him and if I have, I’m quite prepared to apologize. But if you watch it today, it becomes clear that Ivory sees Hindi cinema as an opiate of the masses (‘mindless escapist fantasies’). His tone is condescending: ‘Sleek plumpness seems a virtue in a land of undernourishment.’ And yes, he wrote the script. He brutalizes the films he picks, never naming them, even turning the Aa jaan-e-jaan number from Inteqam from colour to black and white.
Nearly thirty years later, and cinematically that is a very long time, another film-maker, a Canadian of Indian origin, Eisha Marjara, made Desperately Seeking Helen, a documentary that is as much about Eisha Marjara’s perception of Helen as it is about Helen. Like me, she did not get to meet Helen, and uses the iconic image as a way of interrogating the construction of femininity—for herself, as a Canadian of Indian origin, and for the subcontinent.
Marjara said in an interview: ‘Helen was a larger-than-life figure, the icon of Indian cinema which is the world’s largest dream factory. More than a movie star, she was a glittering figure of desire and playfulness, the mistress of a thousand disguises, yet always herself.’
In 2004, US-based Anuj Vaidya offered us Bad Girl with a Heart of Gold, a film in which he explores the reasons why Helen had to die on-screen. He himself plays four Helen roles, another exploration of what Helen meant for a marginalized community. Inhabiting these roles allows Vaidya to comment upon the marginalization of homosexuals while ostensibly talking about Helen’s cinema. It is apparent that while Vaidya enjoys the sheer exuberance of the dance sequences he incorporates, they are his tools for an analysis of quite another situation.
Whatever the mechanics of it, Helen is now a legend in her lifetime. A legend reminds us about the way we were when they were big. We must have an earlier, less-conditional emotional response to call up when the legend shows up in a later avatar. This older response is the one against which we test all the new information we have about her; the Helen who goes to church on Sundays, practices reiki and praanic healing is only delicious because she may be placed against Monica ripping her clothes off in a fever of sensual impatience or Kitty lisping warnings from a swathe of fur. But there must be an emotional response that was once shared and which has now been accepted as a common mythology.
We have a Helen mythology today. It is one that has been reshaped and refashioned so that its appeal can cut across communities. Men, women, the trans-gendered, the old, the young, Hindi cinema buffs, the new constituencies which view cinema through irony-tinted roseate lenses, the old constituencies which have followed every move, all these are now part of the Helen cult.