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The word ‘nazar’ (‘look’ or ‘glance’), imported from Arabic and Persian… is applied to the eye contact of lovers, especially the first sight that arouses passion. It also connotes, in the context of a culture that idealized (and sometimes practiced) the veiling of respectable women, an illicit glimpse that can give rise to intense ‘love at first sight’ that is disruptive of social and familial hierarchy. (Lutgendorf 232) (Emphasis mine)
On the subject of the camera, cinematography, and the relationship between the wilful choices behind the camera and the revelation of any film’s ethics, Gross, Katz, and Ruby write rather eloquently — “Just as we do, the camera records selectively. It selects (if we may be forgiven for anthropomorphizing) from the myriad objects within its range of focus on some objects and not others. It suggests to us as viewers what is important and what we should attend to. In fact the camera, because it precludes our scanning outside its field of vision, limits our possibilities in ways we are not limited generally. The camera, not the viewer, determines what we see. Filmmakers are in this sense responsible for what they show us within the range of options. They determine not only what we will focus upon, but the angle, depth, and sharpness of focus, camera movements, and/or zooms. (Sound is manipulated in a similar fashion.)” (119-120) The gaze, thus, has to be considered deliberative for it to be analyzed and deconstructed. Elsewhere, Mary Ann Doanne writes, “The impasse confronting feminist film-makers today is linked to the force of a certain theoretical discourse which denies the neutrality of the cinematic apparatus itself. A machine for the production of images and sounds, the cinema generates and guarantees pleasure by a corroboration of the spectator’s identity… bound up with that of the voyeur and the fetishist…” (216). Building on these ideas, I intend to use the concept of the male gaze— as coined by Laura Mulvey— to discuss it in the context of Bollywood, and how it serves to constitute an idea of womanhood. By considering eroticization and fetishism as a fundamental component of the male gaze, I then examine the figure of the vamp, at the height of her popularity from the 1950s to the 1980s (See The Swaddle podcast, 12:00 mark for a detailed explanation for this rise in their fame), and how it stands in conjunction with as well as antithetical to the construction of the female protagonist, serving as a figure of idealized Indian womanhood through codifications of national identity within the narrative of the film.
The spheres of gender, community, and nation are not in “splendid isolation from each other; nor can they simply be yoked together… Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other” (McClintock 5). Twentieth century nationalism led to the creation of the image of a bourgeois Indian woman, posited as superior to the degenerate West and the lower classes in the country. While ‘modernity’ and materialism— associated with the West— were embraced in the outside world, the sphere of the home was cordoned off from these changes, so as to preserve the spiritual essence of our culture (Virdi 65). The home/world binary (Chatterjee 121) is a clearly gendered one, with regard to the roles that men and women are expected to commit to the respective spaces they inhabit. An imitation of the Western model of modernity was seen as imperative, even, but its entrance into the home— its influence on our ‘tradition’ — was a threat to our very national identity.
In her seminal 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey drew from theories of psychoanalysis to theorize spectatorial positions in the context of gender. Working under the basic idea that the “unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (Mulvey 14). Mulvey argues that the apparatus of the camera through the eyes of the camera(man), director, editor and so on), the gaze of masculine characters within the film, and the male-positioned spectator converge to place the spectator as masculine, and the modes of femininity depicted on screen automatically become eroticised to provide voyeuristic pleasure to the spectator. The conventions of classic Hollywood narrative cinema make the audience believe that the fictional world which is constructed within and depicted in a film are ‘actually’ occurring, obscuring the very deliberate process that delimits and controls what and how we see any particular scene— in turn obscuring the performance of looking or being-looked-at that occurs within this context. Within this, the characters within the film are placed so that femininity is objectified by the strong male characters through an active, desiring and powerful look, which the masculine spectator is supposed to identify with. While the camera helps to create such an imbalance in looking, the narrative structure in Hollywood complements this by positioning onscreen men as sites for spectatorial identification and as causal agents in the story world, in contrast to representations of women with little identity, as objects and impediments to the development of a story line (De Laurentis 11).
The vamp’s role in a Hindi film’s narrative served several purposes. The nightclub, where she typically performed, was frequented by the villain, highlighting his degeneracy. The club, along with being “an imagined, placeless and virtual space” of “excessive and dangerous display of female sexuality” (Mazumdar 86) housed the illicit fringes of society— gamblers, gangsters, villains, and such clandestine dealings— with the villain’s association with the vamp and the nightclub underscoring his degeneracy. The vamp was often depicted engaging in illegal activities with the villain, such as smuggling drugs in Jaane Anjaane (1971). Furthermore, in most Bollywood stories, the vamp existed as a sexualized woman, the only female character allowed to wear provocative costumes and dance sexually while inviting male attention upon her body through erotic gestures and movements. This exhibitionism, though pleasurable to the audience, is simultaneously condemned as immodest. Thus, the audience is free to enjoy the visual pleasure of the performance of the vamp while morally condemning the woman, in line with the narrative. Rekhari attributes this to “the creation of an ideal filmic moral universe” in which “the vamp provided ‘unofficial’ leeway into erotic pleasure and voyeurism, which freed the heroine to play her morally upright and socially acceptable role” (142).
For Mulvey, this masculinised gaze is inherently fetishistic, for it is a vessel of “scopophilia”, the act of using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight (Mulvey 18) by subjecting them to a controlling gaze. She delineates the term “fetishistic scopophilia”, which, by “building up” the physical beauty of the object— in this case, the female character on screen— “transforms it into something satisfying in itself” (Mulvey 21). The camera is a significant contributor to this, for example, close-up shots that frame the object in an intimate setting by reducing the distance between the spectator and the object of desire, or lingering shots on exposed feminine bodies. The vamp typically wears a bikini or revealing dresses, with tracking shots emphasizing her exposed body and erotic movements. Over time, the popularity of the vamp’s dances grew so much that by the late 1960s and 1970s, distributors informally mandated their inclusion in films (Mazumdar 86).
In the context of Bollywood, the gaze produces a sort of staple feminine identity which can be heavily attributed to ideas of preservation of ‘tradition’ and anxieties around ‘modernity’, notions of individual and collective respectability, and an interplay between the two (Chatterjee 1993, Virdi 2003, Gokulsing & Dissanayake 1998, Mazumdar 2007). The woman was posited as a symbol of the nation, and thus it became necessary for the patriarchal tradition to monitor and police the woman’s body and sexuality in whichever way possible. This reconstruction of womanhood defined it in terms of “culturally visible spiritual qualities” (Kalpana & Roychowdhury 253) such as self-sacrifice, devotion, chastity, devotion, benevolence, and so on culminating in the image of Sita, the embodiment of ideal womanhood as propagated through a cultural history. In the ancient epic Ramayana, during their exile, Sita asks Laxman about the permissible distance she can travel from their dwelling. Laxman responds by creating the laxman-rekha (Laxman’s line), enclosing her within it. This act metaphorically delineates a boundary around Sita— and, by extension, around all women— signifying the defined perimeter within which every woman is expected to remain, imposing restrictions on her ethical and sexual explorations. This boundary, ingrained in the patriarchal consciousness, dictates the boundaries of conduct expected from women.
The code of izzat— that is, honor— is intrinsically tied to the family, and is a gendered notion in the way that it is embodied differently by women and men. It is mostly directed towards controlling the activity and behavior of the woman— the daughter, the wife, the mother— by the man. The greatest threat to this honor lies in the woman, in her body, conduct due to her reproducing and procreating capacity (Chowdhary 2007). Sexuality and the body are thus controlled by izzat, which exerts its power through becoming an internal regulator of one’s identity, through sharam (shame). Derné and Jadwin, for example, mention the trend of film journalists emphasizing the “modesty” of female protagonists as “distinctively Indian” (53), citing an article for India Today which reported that “what seems to have really got to people is [Maine Pyar Kiya’s] advocacy of a particularly Indian virtue moth-balled for a long time: sharam (coyness)” (Jain 65). The ethnographic field study carried out by Derné and Jadwin on Indian men shows us men’s descriptions of how women must restrict their movements in order to appear correct “in the eyes of society” suggesting that a controlling gaze is an important component of male power in India (51).
Women in commercial Hindi cinema are often represented as uni-dimensional creatures divested of all “realistic human and social complexities” (Kishwar & Vanita 59–67). This stereotyping manifested itself in the polarization of female characters into either ‘chaste/virgin’ (the heroine) or the ‘vamp’. There was a deliberate construction of a desexualised Indian womanhood (the heroine) as an antithesis to the licentious West— morally degenerate, materialistic, defiant, brazen, sexually promiscuous (the vamp)— projected as superior because of the maintenance of a spiritual essence in line with age-old tradition. Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) (trans. Ram, Your Ganga is Tainted), for example, weaves political commentary, loose references to Shakuntala, and the female protagonist Ganga’s gradual degradation to create an allegory for the purported moral collapse of the nation of India.. Addressing the film, Raj Kapoor explained:
What has inspired me in making this film is the rapidly changing values of our country, the changing morality, the decadence of moral values, the loss of our spirituality…. The only, real, inherent strength of our country through our long history has been our spiritualism. This loss can be a disintegrating force, a disruptive one (Bhatt 128).
Bollywood, thus, has always been involved in the project of constructing a conception of an Indian national identity. As discussed above, this is often done through the use of the woman as a site for the performance of Indianness and tradition, by coded markers such as dress, behavior, and an emphasis on chastity. This chaste Indianness, however, has been constructed by opposing it to a licentious West. The overtly Westernized “anti-heroine” (Derné and Jadwin 56), standing against the bastion of Indianness, became the vamp in cinema— a woman of unrestrained sexuality and agency, with visible markers of delimitation that included her way of dressing, a habit of dabbling in substances, frequent visitations to nightclubs, a non-adherence to monogamy and salient sexual mores, and non-adherence to any conspicuous marks of religiosity. In Talaash (1969), Helen plays Rita, and is depicted with pale eyes and blonde hair. In the film’s dance number Karle Pyar Karle ke Din Hain Yehi, she wears a blonde bob, a sequined pink bikini with elaborate jeweled headgear made of feathers. In the same movie’s Kitni Akeli Kitni Tanha Si Lagi, Sharmila Tagore wears a sari of the same color. In Chhote Nawaab (1961), the heroine wears saris or suits throughout the film, while the vamp Sophie, played by Helen, wears an unbuttoned white shirt. It is worthy to note that most actresses who played the character of the vamp were usually Anglo-Indian or Christian, providing a form of racial otherness when contrasted with the traditional Hindu woman heroine— an outsider, given to vices ‘unknown’ to the Indian woman. For example, Helen, the most popular actress to play the vamp, was of Anglo-Burmese descent, Christian, and often depicted with blue eyes and blonde hair. She was only to be leered at, consumed for scopophilic pleasure, and not to be attached to in any emotional form (which would entail, perhaps, some form of assimilation into the family system, for which only the traditional wife-figure is ‘fit’).
The vamp invited anxieties about the values of the public sphere which women were slowly entering, as well as an insecurity about female sexuality and its display. As Mary Ann Doane writes in Femmes Fatales, “There is always a certain excessiveness, a difficulty associated with women who appropriate the gaze, who insist upon looking” (27). Sometimes, the vamp would look directly into the camera, like a “sexualised interloper” (Rekhari 137). A direct look, a close-up shot, has always been about desire. In this case, directed towards the viewer, it was an acknowledgement of a quiet voyeurism which was the sole reason for the existence of this character.
The vamp, then, existed not simply as a symbol of socio-cultural anxieties, but as an erotic object too. Vamps existed to provide sensuality in a film which had to operate under certain cultural values while pursuing its own commercial goals. They were cabaret dancers in spaces such as a nightclub, which allowed for the visualization of transgressive desires and invited the view of both the men within the film text and the spectator. The actresses who played the vamp were also performers, such as Nadia and Helen, both well-renowned for their performances, but were never looked upon as ‘serious heroines’, accused of only trying to appeal to an eager male audience (Rekhari 134).
It has been established that the story of most Bollywood movies is manipulated to provide as many encounters with the eroticised feminine body as is possible (See Kasbekar, 2001) in a direct acknowledgement of the male spectator’s desire as engagement in scopophilic pleasure. However, it should also, at the same time, fall within the bounds of morality, sexuality and ideology that are delineated in ‘society’, implied in a broad sense. The mass appeal of the film— as well as the bypassing of censorship laws— is contingent on paying close attention to the moral sensitivities of the filmgoing public at large. Thus, it must also reconcile conflicting desires within a single film to align them with the prevailing cultural and moral values of the community in which it is presented. This is done via the idealized female protagonist, the innocent and sanskari girl whose most significantly highlighted virtue is her sexual purity. Indeed, her virginity is often made a significant plot point that divides the antagonist, trying to ruin the woman’s honor, and the hero that defends it. Standing in stark contrast to the moral depravity of the vamp and her seductive dance, clothed in ‘modest’ clothes (if not a salwar-kameez or sari), her image is ultimately fetishized in the obsession with chastity that it rests upon.
Bollywood films build an idealized moral universe within them (Anjaria 19) that constructs a femininity based on notions of respectability that is itself dependent on the construction of an Indian identity,, with the vamp providing an alternative and ‘unofficial’ kind of erotic pleasure. The value system of the Bollywood film permits both the preservation of purity and the voyeuristic pleasure derived from the performance of the foreign woman. It allows for the desiring gaze to fetishize the female body, while simultaneously its intentions. Through the narrative operations mentioned, erotic voyeurism is legitimized, and the gaze is made free to enjoy visual erotic pleasure. The vamp, thus, exists as a creation for the resolution of male erotic pleasure, but in its operation within “the ideological and moral preoccupations of the society within which it circulates,” which it must “acknowledge and uphold” (Kasbekar 289).
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Teista is a student of sociology, anthropology, and history at Ashoka University. They are also fond of comparative literature, Salma Agha and their Canon Prima BF-80
