Twelve

The Cult of Helen

Main bhi ek raaz hoon (I, too, am a mystery)

—Lyrics from Helen’s song in Raaz (1981)

Miss Kitty herself is there, shaking her groove thing and further cementing her position as the character we’d least like to lose. She’s a heck of a looker, a charming actress, and...a terrific dancer.

—From the review of Gumnaam by Scott Hamilton and Chris Holland on stomptokyo.com

The ancient cab driver was fascinated.

‘Helen?’

Yes, I said, Helen, preparing to defend my territory.

‘I pray for her.’

I looked up.

‘She made me very happy when I was a young man.’ His eyes were shining in the rear view mirror.

In a way, this book has tried to explain what Helen meant to Hindi cinema and the ways in which three generations of film directors chose to employ what she represented: the multivalent figure of the white woman. It has also been, thus far, my viewing.

But it hasn’t been a solitary experience. Every time I said I was writing a book on Helen, eyes would light up. It was as if her name alone was enough to conjure up all the jouissance of the subcontinental experience of viewing Hindi cinema; as if she were simultaneously a catalyst for memory and a way back into a less politicized, perhaps more innocent, way of experiencing cinema. The standard conversation then ran on these lines:

‘...a book on Helen.’

‘Helen? The dancer?’

‘That Helen.’

‘Oh great. Have you seen.’

Like Abhay Sardesai, poet, translator and editor of the monthly Art India Magazine, many remembered ‘the erotic charge’ that Helen’s name in the film-credits carried. ‘Picchharan Helen aasa. Mhantakuch tasle scenes aastale (The film has Helen in it, so it’s bound to have “that kind” of scene), I recall my elder cousins whispering,’ Abhay told me. I have heard variations of this coming from people of very different backgrounds, and always said with the same hint of nostalgic wonder.

For Hindi cinema is a near-universal memory, a collective encounter in most of India. And since Helen has danced in films across linguistic barriers, lip-synching lines of love and desire and seduction and mockery in Hindi, Tamil, Bhojpuri, Malayalam, Rajasthani, to name a few, there are memories of her across the country.

In most cases, the memory of Helen is the memory of a dance. The ‘Helen song’ became, and still is, a signifier. It could often be divorced from its surroundings, remembered in isolation from the rest of the film. Vikram Kapadia, actor, director and playwright, suggests that even the lyrics were not the point in a Helen number; only she was: ‘I can’t really remember my favourite Helen song. The lyrics or melody did not matter as much as watching her dance...Besides, her kind of numbers were not the sentimental or emotional ballads that I would sing while driving a car or having a shower.’ To Kapadia, Helen was ‘a pretty Indian [film] dancer who looked like a foreigner’ and thus represented ‘a relief from the Indianness of the rest of the film. She looked Caucasian, spoke with an accent, wore enticing costumes and showed her stuff, which was far more exciting than watching a sati savitri attempt amateurish Bharatanatyam in a mangalsutra and a sari. And yet there was no loss of dignity in Helen’s act...She was never, never vulgar. She was graceful.’ But she was a lot more than just that to most men, including Kapadia. ‘I now realize that Helen was an integral part of my life, of growing up,’ he says. ‘She was there, no questions asked. She was immortal because heroines came and went but Helen went on for ever. I now look back and feel that she was literally a masala in the dish of Hindi cinema. And more often than not hers was a complete act in itself and not a link in the plot. We don’t question why this particular masala is required, but we lap it up. It is a custom, a tradition.’

‘A thousand films?’

Ritu is surprised but pleased. As one of the assistants in Video Plaza, Lamington Road, he expects to make a killing. A week later, when I return, he is a bit disconsolate.

‘Those &*%*s haven’t put Alif Laila on VCD. Can I get you a video cassette?’

He finds that he can’t.

‘Look at those %&^@#s. Don’t they have any respect? Such a great artiste and her films are not available.’

I agree that I also find it shocking.

‘This is Bombay. One day you’re on top and the next day you can’t find a place to take a dump.’

Fahad Samaar, independent producer, film-maker and director, who was behind the televised ‘Golden Girl Tribute’ in 2001, agrees. ‘She remains an indelible part of the whole experience of cinema because she was part of your rites of passage. She represented the first wet dream for two, perhaps three generations of Indian men.’ As a pioneer of television’s Hindi film countdowns, Samaar would often escape the tedium of number-crunching and dealing with teenyboppers with huge egos by putting together Specials. ‘The Helen Special was always a big hit; you couldn’t go wrong with her. There was such a body of work, of such extraordinary variety and range, that you could pick almost at random and come up with a brilliant segment.’

He remembers his first encounter with Helen. ‘It was at the Mehboob Khan Studios, where she was dancing. There may have been other stars present, more important in a commercial sense, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. And then a spot boy made a lewd remark, the kind that every man was thinking as Helen shook her booty. She got to hear of it and the spot boy was fired. On the spot. I remember him weeping and asking for his job back, to no avail. But I guess, when you’re doing the kind of dances she did, in a set filled with Indian men, almost all of whom see women as objects, you have to have some defences. It was well known that she wore a body suit, so that the flesh she showed was not flesh at all but simulated flesh.’

In a way, this helped support that ubiquitous remark about Helen, that she was never vulgar. Kapadia has already said it above. Here’s Shah Rukh Khan, repeating pretty much the same sentiment to the now missin’-in-action website pyara.com: ‘She [Helen] was a cabaret artiste who did not look cheap. Just like Cuckoo. My father was a great fan of hers. I am not taking away anything from Nana, Manisha or Salman but I want to go and see the on-the-floors Khamoshi for Helen and I know a lot of people like me who feel the same way.’

For her male viewers then, the relationship seems to have been a complex one, carrying with it the impersonal charge of public sexuality, which seems to be necessarily demeaning, and a personalized affection which works against any sexual objectification. Hence, perhaps, the need to continually reassert the lack of vulgarity in Helen’s dances.

I have just returned to my hotel from trying to track down Alif Laila at the National Film Archive and have been told that it isn’t available. I am hot and tired and angry. I believe Alif Laila is there, I have just been stonewalled. And the bag in which I am carrying my material breaks, spilling Helen pictures all over the floor. The ancient receptionist helps me pick them up and looks at one.

‘Helen?’

I explain.

‘I would see all her films. If there was a film with no other actor of note I would still see the film for her. I would wait for the song and once it was finished, I would still wait, hoping she would come back again for another song.’

Did he whistle, shout, throw money?

‘I was an officer in the railways before retirement,’ he says haughtily. ‘Officers do not behave like that.’

I smile apologetically. He relents.

‘But I wanted to whistle.’

That Helen should have a legion of male fans seems obvious. But such is the power of her persona, the complexity of her position, that I also met almost as many female fans, many of whom would call themselves feminists, although they would perhaps nuance the word differently in each case.

‘Helen,’ says Rachel Dwyer, Reader in Indian Studies and Cinema, SOAS, UK, ‘does not threaten women, because she is always naughty but never evil.’ In fact, for film-maker and writer Paromita Vohra, Helen did exactly the opposite of unsettling or threatening her. ‘Helen was one way in which I could access the pleasure principle. When you watch a film, you attach yourself to certain moments and these can have some role in defining who you are. To me, Helen was one of those moments. She seemed to be about pleasure, but about the kind of pleasure that was a good thing.

‘The pleasures into which Helen could release you were the ideas of dressing up, dancing, being in your body, making a display of yourself in a manner that is both sexual and socially sanctioned. In my family, I was the brainy girl and my sister was the pretty girl. That meant I had no way to construct myself as a sexual being. There seemed to be few non-typical spaces that I could occupy. In some way, and I can only say this in retrospect, Helen offered a concept of femaleness that I would not have found myself able to accept. Helen had a lack of agency in most of her roles as a vamp; her love was a masochistic surrender to the notion of love. These are seductive notions in themselves and they are ways of accessing mainstream discourses of romance.’

To Arshia Sattar, writer, translator and teacher, Helen represented ‘the first shock of recognition of ourselves as sexual beings’. To her, Helen was unmatched. ‘As a “cabaret artist”, she was far superior to Jayshree T. and Bindu and even Prema Narayan. I think I understood that she really was sexier than all the rest. I knew she was “Burmese”. She was slinky and exotic—her slanted eyes, her permanent pout, her fair skin, all made her stand out. And she seemed to be enjoying herself as she danced.

‘Maybe I was able to like her better because she was so clearly different. She didn’t look like us and she had an Anglo name—all mechanisms of distance and separation—so nothing she did—act sexy, deliver come-on lines—impinged on me and my desire to be a good girl. Sometimes, the other vamps made me cringe and embarrassed me with all that they stood for, but Helen never did.

‘When I saw her in Sholay, dancing to Mehbooba, all the love and admiration I had for Helen came flooding back. It is still my most favourite song-picturization in Hindi films. When I think of her, it is this song that comes into my head. Those scenes capture everything about Helen that I loved the most—her sensuality, her physical grace, her freedom, her exoticness, her exuberance.

‘Much later, after being schooled in Orientalism, I...was sure that she was being cruelly exploited. She seemed to be the perfect subaltern, an Anglo-Indian woman being forced to demean herself by a classist and racist system. It was as if she was carrying the burden of all our prejudices about Anglo-Indians, and about Anglo-Indian women in particular, in her role as the illicit woman, the vamp, the moll, the slut. And I could not decide whether to pity her for being a victim or be mad at her for being complicit. But this was the po-co-po-mo-po-fem consciousness of the 1980s that I now realize needs far more nuances and shades.’

For Sumati Nagrath, a Ph.D student working on Hindi cinema as popular culture, Helen has transcended time. Sumati grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by which time Helen had long retired. The typical Bollywood film, too, had changed and the new heroines had usurped the vamp’s territory. And yet Sumati is a serious fan. ‘She occupies so much of my mind space when I think about Hindi movies. My mother loved Helen as much as my dad did, or perhaps more. Maybe that is where my love for her stems from. They would sit together and hum her songs and tell me about how gorgeous she looked in this film, that song. Their favourite was Mera naam Chin-Chin-Choo. I first saw it on Chitrahaar, I think. There she was, dancing, full of life, and with a smile that touched your heart instantly. Helen did the impossible, she managed to win your heart when you were meant to despise her. She was almost always objectified and portrayed either as the highly sexualized temptress or as a threat to the moral fabric of society. But, as an actor, she rose above all that. I loved her because she danced with such abandon, like she didn’t care about the people looking at her, the hero’s disapproval, the heroine’s moral high ground.

‘Her every movement seemed to mock the morality of those around her, right down to Khamoshi and Mohabbatein. Helen has been replaced by item numbers and that makes me ill. Where is the fun? Yes—that, I think, was what appealed to me the most about Helen: she always seemed to be enjoying herself. And that enthusiasm was infectious, especially if you see the heroines of that time who stood there shaking their pallu or prancing around trees. At least when Helen pranced she did it with panache.’

In Vohra’s opinion, Helen transcended not just time but also categories. ‘To me, Helen was always a sexualized figure. Which is why she seems to transcend categories like white-black-brown, Catholic-Hindu-Muslim. The story into which I would put Helen is a story in which she would not be trapped by these. She would be like the character Maggie Gyllenhaal played in Secretary, a self-destructive social misfit who takes a job as a secretary and finds that her sadomasochistic relationship with her boss releases her.’

To say that Helen was a sexualized figure might also be a way of saying that she was routinely the object of the male gaze. ‘You can’t get away from that,’ agrees Ruchi Narain, a film-maker. ‘There is no denying that she was objectified in her most famous avatar, that of a dancer. But reality is not so simple. Objectification may also be a choice, especially in a country like ours, where the prescribed good girl is clad from head to toe, practically in a burqa. In this context, Helen is empowered by the very act of choosing to be seen. We could, of course, extend this to the Miss India contest and beauty pageants of the kind. It may be politically incorrect to judge a woman on the length of her legs or the smoothness of the upper slopes of her bosom, but once again, these women choose to be so seen. There is something encouraging about Miss Bhatinda or Miss Bhubaneshwar, especially encouraging that their mothers support them. It is in this respect that Helen becomes empowering. She emboldened a generation of women—the adult women of today grew up watching her shake her booty.

‘I’m not arguing that she was the feminist movement here or that she was the cause of the new freedom women have with their bodies. Helen simply had a greater reach because Hindi films have that kind of reach. Yes, she could have been used better, cast as a sassy woman who knew her mind and her sexuality, because that is what she had: she had sexuality while the other screen women had hearts and ghunghats and wombs.’

It is not surprising that Helen the outsider would also find a following in the gay community that has always been Othered and held up to scorn by Indian cinema. Although there has been a tradition of homoerosis in many classical Indian art forms, the gay man and the lesbian woman have yet to be represented fairly in Hindi films. A tentative attempt at understanding had been made as early as 1971 in Badnaam Basti, but the homosexual community was otherwise served by transvestites, transsexuals or simply limp-wristed catamites who would bed anyone. At the time of writing, Hindi cinema may have discovered the use of lesbian fantasies (played out with a barely disguised misogyny) for heterosexual men in films like Girlfriend (2004), and My Brother Nikhil (2005) has dealt with homosexuals fairly, but otherwise gays and lesbians have been kept out of the frame.

Stars matter because they act out aspects of life that matter to us; for the homosexual man the very fact of Helen’s existence and her defiant declaration of it is important. On her supple form and her heightened projection of the feminine, audiences could play out a variety of fantasies—most of them sexual, many of them aspirational, some of them identificatory.

‘I always wanted to be Helen,’ says Anil K. (name changed to protect identity), an insurance salesman. ‘Not that I wanted to dress up like that and dance, but because I have spent my life slinking around, looking for love, while she pursued it openly. My sex life has been spent in toilets, in maidans or on the beaches at night. Helen always had the lights turned on to her. And the characters she played could speak about love and desire openly. I wanted that.’

‘I always admired the way she dressed, or was dressed,’ he adds. ‘She seemed to be saying, “Look at me, look at me.” She was saying, “I am here and I won’t go away.” I’m afraid that I will never get to the point when I can say that. I am afraid that I will get to the point when I will have to say it.’

In her hyper-femininity, Helen was almost as much of an ‘ambulatory archive of womanhood’ as a drag queen, synthesizing all that was defined as feminine—as opposed to what actually constitutes the feminine—into three minutes of dancing.

Her standard costume was built only to play revelation against concealment. The big hair, rainbow make-up and costume jewellery were so outrageous and outlandish that it became clear that they were more than just accessories. They were as much part of the persona as the over-large mouth (painted to caricature) or the bump and grind routines. Her power over men was also mythologized, both in the lyrics of her songs as well as in the choreography. We can begin at Baarish (1957), where she claims, Jo bhi dekhe mera jalwa ho jaaye qurbaan (One glimpse of me is all it takes to fell any man) and knocks the male dancers over so that they lie helpless on their backs, and go on to Raaz (1981), where she’s still crooning, Main bhi ek raaz hoon (I, too, am a mystery).

There was nothing small or even life-sized about Helen. This was the original over-the-top girl. This extravagance, this reckless pursuit and seduction, matters to the marginal because of its in-your-face nature.

It is this sense of the unreal that also makes it possible for heterosexual men to ‘play Helen’. All over Hindi-movie-watching India, young men will wriggle their hips and make play with their eyelashes and even go lap-leaping. At one level, they are simply caricaturing the object of their desire, distancing themselves from what they want and reducing it to what they can handle. At another level, Helen liberates the sense of rhythm, or the innate desire to slip and slide over a continuum of sexual roles. It is also possible, dressed up safely as Helen and ‘only performing’, to experience the nature of being desirable, as opposed to desiring which, especially in the Indian moral context, is invariably the male lot.

Perhaps this is why Anuj Vaidya chooses Helen as his way of interrogating issues like sex, death and marginality in Bad Girl with a Heart of Gold. Says Viraf H., advertising executive, ‘I see Anuj’s film as a way of looking at what it means to be silenced. Helen died in many of her films; those of us with alternative persuasions are killed by degrees. Our families don’t want to recognize us. They may love us but they don’t want to love what they see as our “abnormal tendencies”. Society wants us to conform. Even we want us to conform. Check out the gay listings. “Straight-acting” is highly prized because no one wants to meet someone who may be advertising his sexuality. And then there is Helen, always advertising her sexuality, emphasizing it, playing it up, rubbing the noses of the bourgeoisie in it. How could she not be our heroine? When she dies, we know why she dies. We know because we die a little every day.’

The one regret that I have is that I did not meet Helen. It’s not just my regret:

‘I’m doing a book on Helen.’

‘Are you going to meet her?’

Three years ago, when I started writing this book, I began by saying, ‘Yes.’ Two years ago, I made that a ‘Maybe’. A year ago, I made it ‘I hope so’. Then I stopped calling her and began to make excuses.

‘I don’t need to meet her. This is not a biography.’ ‘Awwww.’

‘It just didn’t happen.’

‘Awwww.’

I know. I feel it too.

And I miss Helen. It’s nice to watch her as an old woman in Dil Ne Jisse Apna Kahaa, but I miss that electric presence. I miss the enthusiastic dancing. I miss the thrill of affection I always felt when she began to lisp her lines. I miss the films of the seventies—perhaps because I grew up on them but also perhaps because I could sense that they were treading a careful line, deliberately playing with expectation and hope, calibrating the degrees to which they could play with the sexual. When I watch an item number now, so much more glossy, so much better choreographed, the women with bodies honed to reptilian perfection and dressed in much better clothes, the men all gloss and muscle, I miss the old dances in which Helen performed. I miss the way in which colours clashed, bordello red against sunset orange. I miss the extras standing around in their stale clothes and the frumpy supporting dancers in their odd outfits. I miss the laboured camera movements and the unremarkable editing. I miss the ability to feel superior, to laugh a little at and with the cinema of my childhood.

The item numbers of the 00s take themselves very seriously. In the moue that is the standard sexualized challenge on every female dancer’s face, I do not find the laughing invitation to naughtiness that I remember in Helen’s. You would not dare laugh at—no, not even with—these women. In their catlike sinuousness and their perfection, I find a lack of specificity and an erasure of nuance. None of these women would ever be able to carry off crescent moon earrings in bright orange, sequins over the eyebrows, blue eyeshadow, a russet-gold bouffant and figured stockings and then claim, as Helen did to James Ivory, that she designed those outfits and did her own make-up. None of these women would be able to wield a raincoat or a slipper or a handkerchief with the right degree of coquettishness and sensuality. They’re never out of step but they’re not having fun.

I miss Helen.

The industry does too.

And there can be no greater tribute than that.