With the entry of ‘Westernised' actresses like Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi, the ‘Mona darlings' of Bollywood had to pack their bags. But was their extinction all about the emergence of new heroines who were ready to shake their legsIJ
Naveen has always been a self-confessed fan of Kareena Kapoor. From JP Dutta’s Refugee to the just released Gori Tere Pyaar Mein, he has seen all her films and believes she has almost been spot on despite hits and flops. But why ‘almost’IJ You ask him this question and he shakes his head inadvertently. “Ah, I can’t forget that attempt to recreate the Helen moment in 2006,” recalls the 46-year-old banker, referring to Farhan Akhtar’s remake of Don where Kareena sings ‘Yeh mera dil’ to entice Shah Rukh Khan’s character in the film. “She was just a misfit for the act. You can’t beat Helen in her field. You can perfect the cabaret moves. You can put on the most stylish of attires. You can get the best of camera angles. But how can you generate the mood which Helen used to createIJ How can you dance with reckless abandon as if there’s no one to see you, no one to judge youIJ” More than seven years after the release of that film — and even its sequel has come and gone three years ago — the hurt is still palpable on Naveen’s face.
The Helen nostalgia doesn’t mean that the quality of dance has deteriorated over the years. In fact, choreography in Indian cinema has improved immensely, particularly in recent times. But now when I watch an item number, which is so much sleek, so much better choreographed, with women’s bodies grinded to perfection and men appearing all toned up, I miss the old-world charm of rustic dancing which had imperfections, both human and technical, but well compensated by unmatched individual warmth. Today’s choreography is never out of step, but it is not fun either. It’s all too perfect, too robotic to be precise. You see it with awe and then forget everything the next moment. The human, or shall we say emotional, connect is missing.
But it’s not just the nostalgia which sustains the Helen phenomenon more than three decades after she called it quits to dancing. For Jerry Pinto, the author of Helen: The life and Times of a Bollywood H-Bomb, there’s more to it than the mere yearning for the lost era. “Helen did the impossible,” writes he, “she managed to win your heart when you were meant to despise her. She was almost always objectified and portrayed either as the highly sexualised temptress or as a threat to the moral fabric of society. But, as an actor, she rose above all that.”
And she worked hard for that. In the 1978 issue of Cine Blitz, Helen recalled how she left school at the age of 12 to learn dancing. “I never really liked it... I used to detest those long hours of practice which I had put in, because my mind was always on my friends playing outside. Only the cane in my mummy’s hand kept my mind on dancing.” Years later, she remembers her mother again: “Whenever I wanted to play with the other kids, mum would beat me up with a cane... If she hadn’t been tough with me, maybe I would have just floated through life without doing a thing.”
The world of Maya
Helen wasn’t the first of the vamps in Bollywood; she was definitely the best, though. Perhaps the first to grab the eyeballs in a big way was Cuckoo. Though there was a dancer called Azoori, on whom Cuckoo was said to have modelled herself, in terms of the influence the latter was definitely the pioneer among Hindi cinema’s dancing queens. She made her debut in 1945 and in the next five years, she appeared in as many as 49 films. At the height of her glory, she worked with all big filmmakers of that time,
V Shantaram being the notable exception. And like Helen whose association with Asha Bhosle (and RD Burman) created magic in the late 1960s and the 1970s, Cuckoo’s screen voice was lent by the mesmerising Shamshad Begum. Together, they came out with some of the unforgettable hits of the era.
For the next 13 years, it was Cuckoo’s ‘voice’ that was heard everywhere. Then, in 1958 came the Kishore Kumar-starrer Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi. Amid its more popular songs like ‘Ek ladki bheegi bhaagi see’ and ‘Paanch rupaiya barah anna’, came a not-so-catchy number, ‘Hum tumhare hai zara, ghar se nikal kar dekh lo’, picturised on Cuckoo and a new girl called Helen. It was an Anand-like moment for Cuckoo. like Rajesh Khanna in the Hrishikesh Mukherjee film where the then superstar could not ignore the presence of the young, lanky Amitabh Bachchan, to be outclassed completely in the next (Namak Haram), Cuckoo could see the potential of Helen in Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi. By the time, Helen came up with ‘Mera naam chin chinchoo’ in Howrah Bridge, in the same year, she was the star and dominated Bollywood as the ‘dancing queen’ for the next two decades. In an industry where a heroine is jobless in her 30s, Helen was in demand even in her 40s, giving the heroes a run for their money. Pinto has an interesting statistics to share. “She (Helen) has the distinction of having vamped three generations of men — Prithviraj Kapoor (Harishchandra Taramati), Raj Kapoor (Anari) and Rishi Kapoor (Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan),” says he.
Interestingly, Helen’s golden period began in her 30s with the emergence of RD Burman as the music director. The Asha-RD combination gave Western music a place of pride in Bollywood and this came as a divine intervention for Helen, who was inherently seen as an outsider despite being in the industry for so long. She, being an outsider, couldn’t have survived without her cabaret numbers, based as they were on Western rhythm and tunes; and, no one understood the craft better than Pancham.
As Helen was scaling the dizzying heights of success in the early 1970s, another dancer entered the scene with Kati Patang where the only line sung was ‘Mera naam hai Shabnam’; the rest was spoken in a husky whisper by Asha Bhosle, with each antara ending with a man uttering in an erotic overtone “ah-ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-ah-haaaaaaaa”. The dancer’s name was Bindu. She might have been a rawer, perhaps less classier version of Helen, but she along with Aruna Irani and Padma Khanna could hold the imagination of the masses in the era when Hindi cinema was slowly becoming synonymous with the ‘angry young man’.
The vamps existed because the heroines refused to play the ‘bad girl’ roles. It suited someone like Helen well. She could easily see a plenty of heroines around, but a dearth of good dancers. As Helen said in a special television show, Helen: Always in Step: “They (filmmakers) couldn’t get anyone else to be Helen. But they could always get actors.”
So, the vamps in the earlier movies were a necessity: They did what heroines would never do — blatantly seduce, lure and entice men, openly flaunting their physical charm! Naturally, to do this, both the vamps and the songs had to be ‘non-Indian’. And this explains the success of Helen (of the Franco-Burmese origin) and cabaret (again French) in Hindi cinema. The sharp divide between what is Indian and what is not was portrayed by the heroine and the vamp. The latter, who is usually called Mona, Monica or lily, smokes, drinks, wears Western clothes, and doesn’t mind getting physical with men. The heroine is just the opposite version, with all ‘good’ and ‘Indian’ about her. Interestingly, even the names of the two are suggestive in nature. In Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420, for instance, Raju, who is in love with Vidya (Nargis), gets trapped into Bombay’s high life of deceit and dishonesty by a woman called Maya (played by Nadira). Interestingly, he is caught between two worlds, and two women — Vidya (meaning knowledge) and Maya (illusion).
Where have they goneIJ
So where are our vamps todayIJ Javed Akhtar, who has created the iconic Mona character in the 1970s, believes that they have got swallowed by the emergence of ‘Westernised’ actresses like Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi who were willing to look glamorous and sexy. It was this crop of heroines who made the vamps redundant. What was the need for a vamp when the heroine was willing to look glamorous and ready to shake her legsIJ
But to blame the heroine alone for the extinction of vamps would be erroneous. Amitabh Bachchan, who himself shared screen with Helen in some of the iconic songs, would actually be the reason why we don’t have vamps today. With his angry young man persona, he rewrote the script of Hindi cinema. With him, the hero was not all about good and fairness; he acquired a shade of grey. And so the very existence of a heroine being ‘Sati-Savitri’ was out of question. For Deewar, opposite to Amitabh, for instance, one would have needed a vamp-like heroine. Parveen Babi was willing to fill the slot. Things further worsened in the 1980s, which saw the emergence of the Bappi lahiri-type songs and marked the emergence of disco music; by then the foreign was very much Indian. The era saw Mithun Chakraborty sing and dance to ‘I am a disco dancer’, and with him the heroine couldn’t have pretended to be the epitome of ‘Indian-ness’!
This was the last straw on the camel’s back, and we stopped seeing the Mona darlings in theatres. The vamps were forced to transform themselves into wicked mothers-in-law, scheming step-moms and bechari bhabhis, while the heroines got busy with racy numbers like Ek do teen, Chumma Chumma, Kate nanin katate, Choli ke peechhe kya hai...
The vamp may not be surviving today, but she must be credited with providing colour to the otherwise monotonous filmi culture of the era when hero would be all righteous, and heroine all cultured! She was the only thing that still makes most of us revisit that stereotyped past, those predictable films. And it provides an excuse to someone like Naveen to look back and get nostalgic.
