Opinion Just being herself

The actress who played that woman was my mother,Jamuna. She was just 16 years old,a child of the village facing a city and a profession deemed disreputable for women. It was not an auspicious debut. Puttillu was condemned as an affront to womanhood and failed at the box office.

It should have been the end of her career. But it wasn’t. She went on to act in nearly 200 films,in four languages at that,though even that might not have been. A pair of leading male stars,around whom the whole business revolved,suddenly proclaimed a casting embargo against her. They said she was arrogant. She said a woman had a right to her own dignity. She survived that too.

Then,many years later,an on-set accident: an actor fell on her head during a song. In time,its effects started to show,especially in close-up. When she wept,her head trembled. Worse,weeping,and looking old,was what her roles called for by this time. Her male cohorts still played young men,even her sons. It was implausible. They looked old and fat,she didn’t. But India’s cinematic cult was always of hero-worship. Finally,after 30 years in the industry,she left movies for politics. In politics too,she found a male culture hesitant to accept a woman as equal. She still won an election to Parliament.

I grew up in the shadow of my mother’s stardom. But it was only with the experience of growing up and working and along the way getting an education in a critical academic tradition perhaps,that I learned to see her story as that of a woman who worked,and in a work culture legendarily subservient to male power at that. I sometimes hear from women of my mother’s generation about what she meant to them. I used to think the admiration was for her image,the roles she played,like the goddess Satyabhama (who even kicks the crown off Krishna’s head in one movie),a Mughal empress,a modern working woman,an IAS officer no less (whose estranged husband ends up as her subordinate) and,of course,a good Indian mother and wife. But the admiration,I now realise,was more than symbolic; it was also for the fact that she worked.

On a recent visit to India,I accompanied my mother to the village where she lived before becoming famous. She was invited to speak to students at a local college there. She urged them to join the protests sweeping India in the wake of the brutal New Delhi gangrape. Later,she joined film industry colleagues on a protest march in Hyderabad demanding a change in India’s attitudes towards women. It was an inspiring moment. But I had to wonder about what has changed in the industry.

In the 1950s,despite the adversities my mother faced in her career,there were roles which,even in the guise of tradition,expressed female agency. There was also relatively little onscreen violence against women. The decline,some might say,began with the rise of action films in the 1970s. Women became increasingly caricatured as either sex objects or pious mothers. The formula for romance was reduced to something as venal as poor-boy-slaps-rich-girl (and that makes her fall in love). In the last decade though,a few movies have sought to restore women’s agency in the narrative,but films like Kahaani or English Vinglish stand out only because they are exceptions. As for the rest,they seem to have only one space for women to show spirit,and that is the celebrated “item song”.

The trouble with our debates on women and cinema and culture is that in our eagerness to safeguard our political positions,we forget the obvious. An ageing Indian conservatism blames the intrusion of Western culture and clothing into Bharat for all the problems we have with men and women today. An assertive,newer liberal sensibility haughtily blames a monolithic idea of the past,especially religion,as if the newer forms of media and globalisation do not need to answer for their persistent normalisation of objectification (or shall we call it itemisation?) and brutality against women. I know that someone of my mother’s generation and experience would perhaps lean towards the former,towards sensibilities that in the English-speaking media we tend to view disdainfully as a rightwing fantasy about Bharat. But despite her occasionally anachronistic views on clothing and parties,I know that she represents a bolder struggle as a woman in a male-dominated industry and public culture than our patronising view of our past may credit her for. I know that a movie liked Puttillu could not have been made if our elders too did not know,in their own way perhaps,that the world needed to change. It may be true that in the old movies,women were typecast as good wives and mothers,but we cannot believe that the only alternative to that is only to be typecast as sexual objects. Sometimes,as in Puttillu,a woman can just be who she is too.

The writer is professor of media studies,University of San Francisco and the author of ‘The Mythologist’