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Brown gaze and white flesh: exploring ‘moments’ of the single white female
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DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2016.1195337

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Brown gaze and white flesh: exploring ‘moments’

of the single white female in Hindi cinema

Meraj Ahmed Mubarki

To cite this article: Meraj Ahmed Mubarki (2016) Brown gaze and white flesh: exploring
‘moments’ of the single white female in Hindi cinema, Contemporary South Asia, 24:2, 164-183,
DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2016.1195337

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Contemporary South Asia, 2016
Vol. 24, No. 2, 164–183, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2016.1195337

Brown gaze and white flesh: exploring ‘moments’ of the single white
female in Hindi cinema
Meraj Ahmed Mubarki*

Department of Mass Communication & Journalism, Maulana Azad Natioanl Urdu University, IMC
Building, Gachibowli, Hyderabad 500032, India

This paper posits that the contemporary (re)configuration of the generic white woman of
Hindi cinema solely as a spectacle was produced by the nationalist discourse during the
colonial encounter. This essay explores both the textual analyses and aesthetic strategies
employed in the construction of national imagery of white female subjectivities. My
approach is twofold: (i) to chart the historical specificities of the representational
construct of the white woman through discontinuous changes occurring across
Bombay cinema, and (ii) to explore the white female subjectivities across specific
historical and cultural milieu. This paper probes the historicity of the ‘Otherness’ of
the white woman in Hindi cinema reviews and re-examines how Hindi cinema
constitutes female whiteness. I posit that the representation of the white woman in
Hindi cinema as promiscuous and sexually available was constructed within the
nationalist discourse of the colonial era and is a continuation of the white memsahib
in her absence. It is my position that all that was ‘repressed’ in the Hindu woman
resurfaces in the white woman – the racial, sexual ‘Other’, onto whom everything
repressed within the self could be projected.

Keywords: white female; male Gaze; Hindi cinema; sex; other

Tracing the genealogy of ‘Whiteness’

Gangoli (2005) notes that the Anglo-Indian Christian female in Hindi cinema emerged as a
proxy for the white woman’s ebullient libido.1 However, Gangoli overlooks the aesthetic
strategies of Hindi cinema that offer ‘white’ erotic pleasures by deploying a vast range
of representational codes and aesthetic conventions through which ‘white feminine subjec-
tivity’ is owned, disowned and ‘Othered’ simultaneously without employing white feminine
corporeality. This paper posits that the contemporary (re)configuration of the generic white
woman of Hindi cinema solely as an erotic spectacle was produced by the nationalist dis-
course during the colonial encounter. While Thomas (2005) has reviewed the white woman
through Fearless Nadia’s portrayal of the Virangana or ‘woman who manifests the qualities
of virya or heroism’ (Hansen 1988, 25), Gopalan (1997), Chatterji (1998), Gupta-Cassale
(2000), Virdi (2006) and Erndl (2013) have explored the avenging woman and feminine
resistance to Hindi cinema. Much critical literature is also available exploring the vamps
in Hindi cinema (Kabir 2001; Kasbekar 2001; Nijhawan 2009), women of mixed racial

*Email: merajmubarki@gmail.com

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

 Contemporary South Asia 165

and cultural heritage (Gangoli 2005), the Muslim Tawaif/courtesan (Ansari 2008), the item
girl (Kasbekar 2001) and the female dancer in Bollywood (Nijhawan 2009). Nevertheless
these studies do not explicate the socio-historical relationship between female sexuality in
colonial times and Hindi cinema’s circulation of white female subjectivity. The represen-
tation of white women on the screen as a cinematic trope is different to the appearance
of actresses who were at times classified as white. White women or women with fluid
racial identities like Patience Cooper, Renee Smith, Effie Hippolet, Bonnie Bird, Winnie
Stewart and Beryl Claessen, played ‘brown’ lead roles in the inter-war period. Similarly,
from the 1960s onwards, ‘brown’ actresses such as Helen, Bindu, Aruna Irani, Faryal,
Mumtaz, Saira Bano, Shashikala and Vyjanthimala transiently assumed white women sub-
jectivities. Reflecting upon both these forms of white female subjectivities, this essay will
attend to both the textual analyses and aesthetic strategies employed in the construction of
national imagery of white female subjectivity.
The approach I adopt in this paper is not to present ‘case studies’ as such, but to chart the
historical specificities of representational constructs of the white woman through discon-
tinuous changes occurring across Bombay cinema. Through this, I shall also explore the
subjectivities of the white female across specific historical and cultural milieu. This
paper will probe the emergence of white female subjectivity through the articulation of
whiteness in early Hindi cinema, in cabaret, and in the eventual emergence of the white
female body as a sexual backdrop in contemporary Hindi cinema. It will explore the histori-
city of the ‘Otherness’ of the white woman in Hindi cinema, review and re-examine how
Hindi cinema constitutes female whiteness, explore the cultural processes that enable(d)
this (re)presentation of whiteness and simultaneously build up an adequate theoretical
basis to trace the genesis of the vamp, the avenging heroine, the modern/ized woman of
Hindi cinema, and interrogate the original sin(ner) – the single white female. I posit that
the representation of the white woman in Hindi cinema as promiscuous and sexually avail-
able was constructed within the nationalist discourse of the colonial era, and is a continu-
ation of the white memsahib in her absence. It is my position that all that was ‘repressed’ in
the Hindu woman resurfaces in the white woman – the racial, sexual ‘Other’ onto whom
‘the repressed within the self’ could be projected. Since it is through the representation
of the ‘Other’ that the self is located, being sufficiently ‘Othered’ facilitated the white
woman’s violation within the emerging nationalist discourse. It is in this context that the
unconscious project of Hindi cinema must be unmasked. The construct of the white
woman as a concupiscent figure, embodying wayward sexuality and bodily pleasures,
‘runs deep in the Indian imagination’ (Delaney 2013) and was largely fashioned within
the nationalist discourse that regarded them as sexual/cultural ‘Other’. Through the pres-
ence of the ‘Other’, Bombay cinema ‘substantiates rather than discounts the continuities
in cinema’s relationship with ideology and dominant socio-cultural anxieties’ (Mubarki
2014, 265).

White women and brown men

How did the nationalist discourse shape the way in which the white woman was represented
in Hindi cinema? I am concerned with tracing how the white woman was (re)configured as a
symbol of erotic longings, and how apparently disparate modes of representation and ‘gaze’
constituted the white woman and converged on her wayward sexuality. This essay attempts
to present the representation of ‘whiteness’ that is scattered across cinematic texts, and to
tease out the meaning that points to or presents the textual representation in terms of
wayward sexuality.
166 M. A. Mubarki

Pertinent to our understanding of this representation is the Freudian concept of the

return of the repressed. Human society’s movement into civilization is marked by the
‘basic repression’ of primitive impulses and instincts which are sublimated into higher
social ends. ‘The essence of repression lies in simply turning something away, and
keeping it at a distance, from the conscious’ (Freud 1974, 147). Herbert Marcuse suggested
that repression operated at two levels: basic and surplus. If basic repression made us human,
capable of co-existence, surplus repression guaranteed the subject’s submission to an
oppressive social order, and the ‘Other’ becomes/is what is repressed within the self.
How does the white woman embody the ‘Other’? How does the dominant regime of rep-
resentation make us see and experience the white woman as the ‘Other’? The ‘Other’ rep-
resents that which the bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with,
either through rejection and annihilation or ‘by rendering and assimilating it, converting
it as far as possible into a replica of itself’ (Wood 2003, 66). A corollary to our understand-
ing of the ‘Other’ is to enquire what is suppressed and eventually returns as the repressed.
White women were ‘introduced’ in the Indian subcontinent contingent upon imperial
plans to endow the burgeoning officers of the British Empire with a sense of respectable
bourgeoisified domesticity. The white women who came to the subcontinent as young
brides, unmarried sisters and grown-up daughters were thus ‘deployed in the cause of
empire as potential mothers and progenitors of future generations of empire-builders’
(Sen 2002, 3). The arrival of the white woman hastened the disappearance of the Indian
mistress, fostered social exclusiveness and ‘triggered protective responses from the Eng-
lishmen wary of lascivious Indians’ (Hyam 1990, 118). The unaccompanied single white
female could excite the lust and sexual aggression of the brown man and needed protection
in colonial land.
The loss of authority over the political sphere by Hindu patriarchy to the colonizer led to
various coping strategies to make the colonial encounter less traumatic. One strategy,
posited by Chatterjee (1999), was the construction of the inner/outer domains. The outer
world lost to the colonizer was positioned as the domain of colonial bureaucracy, secular
laws, science and reason. The inner domain was the realm of family traditions, faith and
religion, tralatitious practices, still within the ambit of the recuperating patriarchy, and
outside the periphery of the colonial gaze. Wary of exciting open hostilities, the post-
1857 imperial apparatus ‘labelled issues related to religion, kinship and other forms of com-
munity identity as apolitical … not requiring the attention of the state and its institutions’
(Freitag 1996, 212). To offset any colonial encroachment upon the inner domain certain
social activities and institutions were categorized as religious and placed out of bound of
the colonizer’s imperious gaze.
The European imagination drew upon a long tradition of travel as ‘erotics of ravish-
ments’, where the uncharted territories of Asia, Africa and the Americas were presented
as ‘a detached jumble of sexual organs, spread-eagled before their conquerors’ (Lewes
1993, 66). To ward off such quasi-sexual ‘penetrations’ into its inner world, the emerging
Indian bourgeoisie corporealized the nascent nation by imagining it as a Mother Goddess.
The other strategy was to ‘offer’ modernity to the Hindu woman sufficient enough to ward
off any intrusive action of the modernizing colonial gaze, but still short of transforming her
into the white woman. Cartographically the nation was presented to its citizen-subjects as
‘mother, woman, goddess’ (Ramaswamy 2001, 97). Representing the woman as the nation
and embodying the national spirit through her corporeality meant diffusing the female
form’s crude sexual connotation and endowing it with quasi-religious meaning which
allowed the colonized subject to keep it out of the colonizer’s gaze. The sexual was con-
flated with the maternal. As the Hindu nationalist intelligentsia fashioned Bharat Maa/
 Contemporary South Asia 167

Mother India, the sexual representation of the Hindu woman was carefully regulated and
policed to protect idealized Hindu womanhood and the sufficiently desexualized Hindu
woman could venture into the outside, keeping her cultural borders and sense of superiority
intact.

Brown woman as the nation

Since all expressions of reproductive sexuality were linked with the effervescent nationalist
project, non-reproductive sexuality was condemned as western, deviant and anti-national. If
the ideal Hindu woman became the symbol of sexual naivety, sexual agency was transferred
to the available Other – the white woman, for in the symbolic matrices ‘of all the figures in
the colonial scene – it [was] only the white woman whose identity was available – for the
Indian man – as relatively open, mobile, malleable’ (Roy 1998, 123). The deification of the
brown woman and the disapprobation of the white memsahib went hand in hand, as Partha
Chatterjee points out – Bengali literary composition and prose around the mid-eighteenth
century ridiculed the white woman and created stereotypes (1999, 22). A social parody
of the white female in Bengali jeu d’esprit marked the mythopoeia of the single white
female as morally deficient, given to sensuous pleasure, and the mythos of her identity
emerged at this time. ‘To ridicule the idea of a Bengali woman trying to imitate the ways
of the memsahib was a sure way to evoke laughter and moral condemnation’ (Chatterjee
1999, 122). The westernized tea-drinking, novel reading, mother-in-law baiting wife
[was] presented as a kind of a folk devil on whom [were] placed all the anxieties and
fear generated by a rapidly changing increasingly alien social order’ (Sarkar 2005, 266).
Indian women who were alleged to be ‘arrogant, lazy, immodest, defiant of authority and
neglectful of domestic duties’ (Chakrabarty 1993, 9) were often pejoratively described as
‘bibi (dandy), beshya (slut) or the memsahib [my emphasis]’ (Chakrabarty 1993, 9).

The ‘bad’ Western woman was the critic, the ‘muckraker’, social reformer or missionary,
attacking local customs and religions … the ‘good’ Western woman … was the Theosophist,
Holy Mother, Orientalist or devotee of a guru … [who] sympathized with and supported local
nationalist aspirations. (Jayawardena 1995, 2)

Hindu femininity was built in opposition to this ‘Other’ woman. The white woman became
the cultural ‘Other’ in the autochthonal aesthetic and cultural discourse, and the represen-
tation of the white woman as an erotic spectacle unworthy of emulation emerged as a
mimetic response to the colonizing authority’s intent to present her as a role model. The
spatial insularity afforded to the white woman and the British colonial community
through the cantonments, civil lines, exclusive European recreational clubs and cottages
was later undermined through the discourse of popular performativity, where ‘[the] rep-
resentation of the memsahibs and the white man’s ordinary life in filmic melodrama
were at variance with the carefully constructed discourse on the ordinary life of the
British in India’ (Arora 1995, 36).

The articulation of whiteness in the Parsi theatre

This image of the white woman/memsahib as the ‘Other’ was crafted not only through lit-
erary compositions but also through the performing arts of theatre and the silent cinema.
The popularity of the theatre, specifically Parsi theatre, marked the inauguration of a
new discursive regime and the project of defining nationhood acquired new inflections
which must be discussed at length here. Public performativity carried a certain degree of
168 M. A. Mubarki

disrepute owing to its association with courtesan culture in the subcontinent. While early
Parsi theatres employed male impersonators on stage, the introduction of cinema and the
close-ups of the cinematic images ‘began to assert the demand for women in women’s
roles’ (Pande 2006, 1648). Parsi theatre owners’ could resolve this problem initially
through female impersonations by clean-shaven male actors, and later by the travelling
foreigners or the many Baghdadi-Jewish and Anglo-Indian females who had no qualms
about being featured in Parsi theatres and later in silent films.
As the progenitor of Indian cinema the Parsi theater dished out the Anglo-Indian and
Jewish actresses as convenient proxies for Hindu female leads, opening up performative
possibilities for Hindu women’s entry into the public arena. However ‘the advertising
employed by the Parsi theatre companies overtly appealed to [the] audience’s desire to
gaze upon whiteness’ (Hansen 1999, 145). With close racial affinity to the white woman
and pronounced whitish complexion these Anglo-Indian and Jewish actresses not only cap-
tured the Parsi stage and the early silent cinema, but were in fact advertised as such. Even if
several such actresses with imprecise racial ancestry had immigrated to India in the preced-
ing century, there were notable attempts by Parsi theatres to play upon classic miscegena-
tion fantasy and use ‘foreign-sounding actresses’ names to lure the public’ (Hansen 1999,
145), where the spectators, mostly subaltern males, were promised the pleasure ‘to see
English memsahibs dancing (Hansen 1999, 145). As Hansen notes, these Anglo-Indian
actresses’ were integral to Parsi theatre’s domestic comedies and melodramas, presented
‘as feminine embodiment of the West … domesticated and subordinated to the Indian
hero’ (1999, 144). On the other hand, the cinema in the Indian subcontinent demolished
the distance between the self and the ‘Other’ and allowed for the symbolic appropriation
of the white image. With its close-ups, cinema symbolically allowed for a subversive
annexation of images of whiteness by providing access to hitherto inaccessible recesses
of the Empire. This further accentuated imperial anxieties and surreptitiously brought
down the empire’s remoteness and unapproachability. The cinema of the Raj disrupted
the Empire’s pleasure of seeing without being seen.
Hansen (1998, 1999), Thomas (2005), Ramamurthy (2006) and Majumdar (2009)
speak of two parallel discourses at work in the silent cinema; first, the discourse of respect-
ability, where the brown women or her male impersonator ‘through the figure of the tragic
woman, the wronged wife, the victim, the ‘abala nari’ [was] rendered non-threatening, a
stimulant of tears rather than titillation’ (Hansen 1998, 2296). Concurrent to this was the
uneasy fascination for erotic display at work where the exotic ‘foreign’ woman with her
fair skin, fluid racial identity and availability to the scophilic gaze of the subaltern was
enshrined ‘as denominator of desirability’ (Hansen 1998, 2291). Coterminous with early
cinema’s narrative traditions of social realism and pedagogical melodramas was the
Modern Girl cinema2 of the inter-war years that narrativized ‘rebellious, even libidinous
wives, who explored new relationships with [their] in-laws and husbands … exercised indi-
vidual autonomy and freedom to choose partners … [indulged in] indiscriminate kissing
… [and] intimate heterosexual love scenes’ (Ramamurthy 2006, 202–203). This genre
mostly starred actresses such as Sulochana (Ruby Myers), Indira Devi (Effie Hippolet),
Seeta Devi (Renee Smith), Sabita Devi (Iris Gasper), Madhuri (Beryl Clausen), Firoza
Begum (Susan Solomon), Vimla (Marcia Solomon) who reiterated the image of the
white woman as morally deficient. Their Hindu nom de plumes merely hint at the pervasive-
ness of the nationalist discourse and its alignment with the domain of public performativity.
These White/Anglo-Indian (and Non-Hindu) actresses, despite their sanskritized names,
were flagrantly eroticized and presented in films as ‘sexy and provocative … sport[ing]
bobbed hair, lipstick, plucked eyebrows, mascara, and painted nails, [and being] racially
 Contemporary South Asia 169

ambiguous and religiously hybrid’ (Ramamurthy 2006, 200). Even Patience Cooper, who
acted in many Hindu mythological genres, ‘mostly played roles of naïve, sensuous
women caught in the web of passion’ (Somaaya, Kothari, and Madangarli 2012, 22).
Thus even before Fearless Nadia’s entry through Lal-e-Yaman/Son of Yemen (Wadia
1933) ‘the white woman as a subject of sexual fantasy [had become] acceptable’ (Pande
2006, 1650).
Scenes of the blasé erotics in American film productions featuring white women in less
than salutary portrayals had already raised the hackles of the imperial authorities; ‘by all
accounts, during the 1920s and 1930s the British India government’s interest in Indian
film audiences was governed by racial anxiety rather than a desire for economic profit’ (Jai-
kumar 2003, 82). Erotic scenes depicting the white woman invariably had the tendency to
‘arouse’ the audience, as an observer noted, ‘when there is anything suggestive there is
often a sort of hushed silence and suppressed extasy [sic] over the suggestion’ (Mazzarella
2009, 71). Theatres became spatiotemporal locations where brown men could transiently
cohabit with white women. The congregations at cinema halls/theatres became carnival-
esque moments where racial hierarchies could be abandoned, spatiotemporal distance
overcome and the white woman appropriated by/through the brown gaze. Cinema trans-
gressed the imperial/national divide and ‘colonial spectatorship potentiated a transgression
of the sexual and racial hierarchies that were central to imperial legitimation’ (Jaikumar
2006, 45).

Colonial spectatorship and eroticized white woman

In a scene now immortalized on celluloid in Miss Frontier Mail (Wadia 1936), Fearless
Nadia boards a speeding train and climbs up the compartment’s roof to pursue a bunch
of hoodlums. The camera’s gaze, subconsciously mindful of the colonial censoring auth-
orities, frames her from behind but is careful enough not to linger too much on her derriere,
and a wide shot, in which the framed object is composed to the full, refuses to fetishize any
particular body part. In another scene from Diamond Queen (Wadia 1940), Nadia, dressed
in a short skirt, walks into an open enclosure to rescue her horse Punjab Ka Beta (Son of
Punjab), who is being whipped for trespassing on private property. The chief henchman,
holding a gun, asks Nadia to leave immediately. With one electric swing of a shovel she
disarms this menacing figure, and then abandons the spade in favour of her bare hands.
She punches a threatening figure straight in the solar plexus. A kick in the posterior
disarms another. The gun is recovered and the chief baddie orders that Nadia be ‘arrested’.
This is the closest that the narrative allows the henchmen to ‘possess’ Nadia. Nevertheless,
she overpowers them and singles out the principal villain who is ‘wheelbarrowed’ into a
water tank. An important component of the action sequence is the victim’s scenario of dom-
ination. The leering villain never threatens Nadia with sexual violation. Nadia’s filmic
action bears a rude earthiness because it is executed without a body double, and in its pres-
entation of physical contact and sensation appears gross. Without the special effects of
‘rigged pulleys’, Nadia’s action appears ‘tacky’, possessing a raw physicality when com-
pared to the surreptitiously introduced body doubles of actresses like Rekha in Khoon
bhari Maang (Roshan 1988), Sri Devi in Chaalbaaz/The trickster (Parasher 1989), or
the digitally decorated frames and uber-rapid cuts filled in by persistence of vision of
Priyanka Chopra in Drona (Behl 2008) and Don 2 (Akhtar 2011), or Deepika Padukone
in Chandi Chowk to China (Advani 2009), who fights with unbelievable precision and
measured movements. These fight sequences are marked by a qualitatively textured differ-
ence. Nadia’s action is thoroughly sustained and engaged through body contact, displaying
170 M. A. Mubarki

masculine forcefulness and intensity, unlike the action/violence of the later Hindi heroines,
who eschew physical proximity for the safety and spatial arrangement of distance that
devices such as guns, whips, sticks and choppers offer. Nadia’s films identified her body
as a site of physical prowess and vitality in a way representing a certain eroticization of
power. Her accented twang, fair skin, and androgynous attire left little doubt about her
ethnic identity. With her transgendered attires and gender defying behaviour, her character-
ization literally played into the stereotypes of the white woman constructed by the Indian
clerisy. And in screen roles that defied gendered expectations, Fearless Nadia filled her per-
formances with precisely those references to racial and sexual stereotypes associated with
the white woman.
The scopophilic pleasures that Fearless Nadia and other white actresses invoked needs
to be put in a broader socio-historical context, because ‘popular pleasures arise from the
social allegiances formed by subordinated groups … and must exist in some relationship
of opposition to power that attempts to discipline and control them’ (Fiske 2011, 40). Fear-
less Nadia’s films were action movies, not classified as erotica. But the cinema that she
patronized centred on the gross and almost vulgar display of the human body, as it
invoked infantilized prurient emotions; it shares its system of excesses with other bodily
genres of pornography and horror. ‘Alone or in combination heavy doses of sex, violence
and emotion hav[e] no logic or reason for existence beyond their power to excite’ (Williams
1991, 3). Concurrently, ‘if the aims and objects of sexual desire are often obscure and inher-
ently substitutive’ (Williams 1991, 6), then despite little or no erotic scenes, Fearless
Nadia’s films with their visuals of bodily excesses, spectacles of sadism, intense emotions,
and with Nadia herself mumbling inarticulate orgasmic ‘cries and grunts’ during action
sequences must have elicited mimetic responses from spectators and offered ‘masked’
sexual pleasures to a predominantly male subaltern Indian spectatorship. In the colonial
context, the almost orgiastic delight of a body out of control would have meant for the audi-
ence ‘a pleasure of evasion, of escape from the self-control (Fiske 2011, 41). These visuals,
patronized mostly by a colonised and subordinated spectatorship, succinctly invoke jouis-
sance or ‘the pleasure of the body that occurs at the moment of the breakdown of culture
into nature’ (Fiske 2011, 41), allowing the subject to escape the social discipline imposed
by the colonial state. But how does an all-male audience derive pleasure from a dominatrix
Nadia dressed in leather, eye masks and rubber, given to sadist violence and reducing men
to feminized subject positions? While Laura Mulvey asserts that the spectator derives sco-
pophilic pleasure by mastering the controlling gaze. Appropriating the female for scopophi-
lic pleasure, the male gaze can acquire a range of subject positions, not all seeking a mastery
or domination. Studlar asserts that, ‘the pleasure in submission … is phylogenetically older
that the pleasure of mastery … In masochism … pleasure does not involve mastery of the
female but submission to her’ (1985, 610). While the precise reception of Nadia’s films
remains to be determined and is beyond the scope of this article, in the context of 1930s
cinema her films appear appropriate to the type of excitement they aimed to generate in
the subaltern spectatorship. And if Nadia was accepted as an Indian heroine, a key
aspect of her public appeal was her Western looks and the exoticism of the white mem
[sahibness] (Thomas 2005, 51). Therefore if colonial censorious laws were legislative strat-
egies to cover up the white woman’s body from the prying brown gaze, then Imperial
cinema paradoxically became in de Certeau’s term La Perruque, diversionary practices
where the subaltern spectatorship utilized the Imperial employer’s resources for personal
use, and wherein ‘the worker’s own work [became] disguised as work for his employer’
(de Certeau 1984, 24).
 Contemporary South Asia 171

New white female subjectivity

‘Popular cinema has always been less ashamed about the structural necessity of the ‘Other’
(Prasad 2013, 16), and as the cultural/sexual ‘Other’, the white woman ‘became a titillating
presence for the Indian libido’ (Pande 2006, 1650). Even assuming that ‘Nadia was
accepted as an Indian heroine in films that were read by many audiences as anti-British alle-
gories’ (Thomas 2005, 50), the need to articulate a ‘new’ Indian femininity/subjectivity
consonant with the nationalist goals of ‘cultured ladies’ meant that Nadia was qualitatively
and unabashedly presented differently from other Indian actresses who emerged around the
same time, like Durga Khote, Devika Rani, Chhaya Devi, Kanan Devi, Shobhana Samarth
and Lalita Pawar. If the Anglo-Indian Sulochana (Ruby Myers) and Fearless Nadia played
cosmopolitan, western/ized roles, Devika Rani and Durga Khote essayed roles that epitom-
ized a nationalist yearning for moral improvement, consonant with the need to recast
‘womanhood in the image of Vedic purity’ (Hansen 2001, 65). The onset of the postcolonial
state meant not only the revival of the idea of cultural superiority but active attempts to
assert indigenous rights and the ability to remake the white woman into one’s own
culture. And with the dissolution of the studios that were producing stunts films, the popu-
larity of the stunt genre gave way to melodramas and socials. By the late 1930s, ‘melodra-
mas had become the privileged form of representation’ (Rajadhyakha and Willemen 2012,
408). The cinema of social realism marked the (dis)location of all action from the vortex of
the corporeal to the psychological. The coming of sound made singing critical to a film’s
success, a flair that these actresses with their Anglicized accents did not possess. But
perhaps most importantly, ‘the imagination of something “Indian” as nation was achieved,
in part, by marking and solidifying the border of who could now represent [the nascent
nation], the Anglo-Indian Modern Girl became a code for the expression of un-Indianess’
(Ramamurthy 2006, 210).
Within the nationalist framework of gendered relations and the need for an ideal Hindu
femininity, dominatrix Nadia’s quest for respectability was inherently doomed. She could
not escape public scrutiny on account of her whiteness and was ‘singled out for malicious
gossip on account of her skin colour – equated with loose morals’ (Thomas 2005, 65). After
Nadia’s exit, the vamp emerged in cinema in the late 1950s ‘as the most visible intrusion of
the West into the cinematic space of Indian films, signifying an unrestrained sexuality and
license given to vices “unknown” to “Indian” women’ (Mazumdar 2007, 85). Libidinal cor-
poreality, as Gangoli (2005) notes, was therefore passed on to the class of women who came
closest to the white memsahib: the Christian female. But this position overlooks other
avenues for the registration of this promiscuous whiteness on screen, as I shall demonstrate.
The white woman’s absence was filled in generically by the leading ladies of the 1960s
through representations that were drawing in varying ways and degrees on colonial
memories.
By the 1960s, two authoritative changes engendered perceptible developments in Hindi
cinema. The first was internal mass migration from agrestic towns into metropolitan cities
across India, bringing rapid changes in the aesthetic culture of Bombay cinema. Ethno-
graphic and archival studies of the period by Srinivas (2003), Vasudevan (2003), Singh
(2008) and Athique (2011) show the emergence of a cinema ‘catering to a restless, transient
population hustling for goods and attracted to a cinema of sensation and distraction’ (Vasu-
devan 2003). It marked the inauguration of an anti-Bourdieuian taste with an emphasis on
the spectacles of the body. Statutory regulations that required cinema halls to offer a marked
number of tickets at discounted rates and price control distorted audience demographics,
172 M. A. Mubarki

and the consequent provincialization of the cinema audiences engendered changes in

themes of cinema in conformity with its new patrons.
Secondly, the introduction of colour around the 1960s opened up a bourgeoisie tem-
poral space for uninhibited desire. ‘Foreign locations were incorporated into the narratives
of the films as tourist sites, as the places of romantic possibility, and the spaces of encoun-
ters with new forms of urbanism’ (Mazumdar 2011, 131). The domain of the erotic was
renegotiated and strangely concomitant with the import substitution policies of the Nehru-
vian state; in the absence of the White memsahibs, the brown women could transiently mas-
querade as white women. Songs came to acquire a distinct erotic appeal, and the ‘amorous’
and ‘undressed’ white woman became a key trope inserted into the narratives of films like
Sangam/The confluence (Kapoor 1964), Love in Tokyo (Chakravorty 1966), Around the
world (Pachhi 1967), An evening in Paris (Samanta 1967), Night in London (Brij 1967),
Purab aur Pacchim/East and the west (Kumar 1970), Apradh/The crime (Khan 1972),
and Aashiq Hoon Baharon Ka/I am a lover of Spring season (Prakash 1977). The white
woman’s sexual objectification became a precondition for her subjectivity through specific
spatial strategies of the mise en scène, placing the white woman strategically out of focus.
Too distanced and undistinguished to be of any significance to the narrative, but still within
the frame, she maintained a wilful presence at sites deemed to be Western, decadent and
extravagant, inconsonant with austerity-driven regulatory Nehruvian economics, and thus
guilty by association. She was seen lolling at swimming pools of five star hotels, sun
bathing semi-nude on beaches, betting in casinos, crowded into discotheques and night-
clubs, or performing cabarets in seedy bars and joints. With limited visibility, anonymity
became a typicality of the representation of the white woman.
Given the generic need for the representation of ‘whiteness’ and its cultural consociates
of unrestrained sexuality on screen, lead actresses themselves came to don white subjectiv-
ities, albeit momentarily. Some examples of this include the song sequences in Sangam/The
confluence (Kapoor 1964) and Apna Desh/Our country (Jambu 1972), which in a Walter
Benjaminian sense invoke Jetztzeit, ‘an instant in which an image of the past sparks a
flash of unexpected recognition in the present’ (Lowenstein 2005, 14). I shall present
these two pertinent item song sequences to buttress my observations. Examining the
item song itself does not entail decrying its lack of realism, since songs in Hindi films
invariably are moments of digression and spectacles of ‘ostentatious display[s] that tempor-
arily arrest the flow of narrative’ (Brown 2011, 51), but rather to examine the ways in which
deep seated racial fantasies undergird scophilic pleasures. Separated from the films of Fear-
less Nadia by three decades, Sangam and Apna Desh nevertheless continue in the same his-
torical traditions – invoking the Jetztzeit moment to conjure old memories of the white
memsahib.

The body of confluence

Whiteness and its cinematic proxies released Hindi filmmakers from all obligations to
contain female sexuality. In Sangam/The confluence (Kapoor 1964), the newly married
couple Sundar (Raj Kapoor) and Radha (Vyjanthimala) are honeymooning in Europe. A
bored Sundar would prefer a strip club to the homegrown, staid, domesticised sexuality
of his cold wife Radha. This leads to a playful striptease song, where Radha promises
the same eroticized pleasures that the white woman would offer in the strip joint. The Rabe-
laisian song ‘Buddha mil gaya/Saddled with an old man’, freed from the norms of gendered
propriety and sexual decorum, takes place in a hotel room. This becomes a cathartic
moment, where unrestrained sexual desire surfaces and momentarily engulfs, only to
 Contemporary South Asia 173

recede into the background. Consequently, even when donning the overt sexuality of the
white woman, Radha, the Hindu woman, remains steadfastly committed to sexual
modesty. Sutured into the narrative, the ribald, comic song resurrects the disembodied
spirit of the white woman.
An American style burlesque dance seamed on to a double entendre lyric involves
costume changes, a strip tease, an exhibitionist tabletop dance and ‘leg shows’, all presented
in a satiric style with a saucy edge. As a carnivalesque moment the song marks the ‘suspen-
sion of all hierarchies: rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions’ (Bakhtin 1968, 10)
imposed upon the Hindu woman. The camera, restrained throughout the narrative pre-
viously, assumes a more invasive look for this song sequence, as its frames Radha at appro-
priate points in the song through the male gaze, and focuses on her bare arms, legs and
derriere. Radha conjures herself up as a ‘decked in satin and lace’ playboy bunny from
the accoutrements available readily at hand, which are transformed into erotic parapherna-
lia; a lamp shade enlaced with black taffeta doubles up as an impromptu saucy poke bonnet.
Towards the end of this musical spectacle, Radha’s impromptu striptease degenerates from
a comprehendible dance movement into awkward, random, disorganized and haphazard
movements, a pulsating mass of limb and torso, caught in the throes of unmediated
desires, bodily excesses, exaggerations and grotesqueness, that conjure up Barthes’ specta-
cle of excess of the wrestling match (Barthes 1972) (Figure 1).
Bodily dissimilarities have been important markers of difference between Indian and
western women (Nijhawan 2009, 107), and Radha’s unrestrained style as a proxy white
woman represents the dissolution of personal boundaries, a celebration of libidinal corpore-
ality. It becomes all the more conspicuous given that the classically trained actress Vyjanthi-
mala danced mostly in shastric ways in her previous films such as Nagin/The female
serpent (Jaswantlal 1954), Madhumati (Roy 1958) and Ganga Jumna/Ganga and Jumna
(Bose 1961). But the pleasure promised in the beginning is withheld, as gender subordina-
tion is reversed and Radha empowers Sundar again. The spectator is left with the image of
Sundar sufficiently aroused from his sexual languor, inexorably moving in on a now hapless
Radha, who is hoisted onto his shoulder caveman style and carried into the bedroom. Mem-
ories of the white woman are at once resurrected and revoked simultaneously. Notwith-
standing the camera’s gaze being strategically aligned with the spectator’s, Radha

Figure 1. Radha striking a pseudo-playboy bunny pose for her husband in sangam/the confluence
(Kapoor 1964). Courtesy: R.K. Film Ltd.
174 M. A. Mubarki

stripteases herself only to her husband’s gaze in private, and places the viewer uncomfor-
tably between covert surveillance and outright voyeurism, absolving herself of all blame.
While this performance in Sangam/The confluence (Kapoor 1964) takes place within
the bedroom, in Apna Desh/Our country (Jambu 1972) the docile and demure Chanda
(Mumtaz) must masquerade as a white woman to honey trap a motley crew of Nehruvian
era villains: black marketers, hoarders and dishonest traders. Chanda must then perform a
cabaret towards the denouement, uniquely positioning herself for sexual accessibility and
the public gaze. Two songs follow in quick succession. In the staid romantic duet song
‘Kajra Lagake Gajra Saja ke/Kohl in eyes, flowers in hair’, Chanda appears as a demure
damsel, averting the male gaze, almost hesitant to move, reach, or stretch herself beyond
her body movements. When required to masquerade as a white woman to honey trap vil-
lains for the song ‘Duniya Mein Logon Ko/People in the world’, Chanda transmogrifies
into a femme fatale Madame Popolita. Her auburn hair becomes the only marker of
racial difference because it remains unattainable for the brown woman. Chanda’s measured
and fluid movements witnessed earlier in the staid romantic duet give way to Madame
Popololita’s exaggerated bodily movements, reminiscent of Radha’s burlesque show in
Sangam.
This erotic song presenting Chanda as Madame Popololita is a ‘live peep show’ framed
in an entrance hall. It becomes a public performance as she slithers over the floor in a slit-at-
the-thigh gown, witnessed amongst others by the three sexagenarian fraudsters who are
being waylaid by this pseudo ‘white woman’. Chanda/Madame Popololita enters into the
frame through a phallic like passage, wherein later she breaks down the fourth wall and
invites the spectator’s gaze, unabashedly aware of the spectating subject’s voyeuristic
look. In another song, ‘Aaja O Mere Raja/Come on my Darling’, sung by reputed Indian
female playback singer Asha Bhonsle (noted for her sexy and saucy rendition of Hindi
films songs and pictured in a bedroom), Chanda/Madame Popololita, dressed in a red
slim skin tight dress with fishnet stockings, slithers provocatively with the headboard
between her legs. The song employs a series of montage-like snapshots dissociated from
each other (but part of the sequence nevertheless), wherein Chanda/Madame Popololita
strikes a variety of poses to highlight the contours of her body. In one sequence a high
angle shot looking upward increases her size as she bends down towards the camera,

Figure 2. A close up shot crams up Chanda/Madame Popololita (Mumtaz) body leaving the viewer
no escape in Apna Desh/our country (Jambu 1972). Courtesy: Olympia Pictures & Venus Pictures.
 Contemporary South Asia 175

and the frame, now cramped with her figure, does not allow the viewer to escape her body,
compellingly offered for scopophilic pleasure (Figure 2).
The song, a sensual game of hide and seek without necessarily delivering the pleasures
it promises, endows Chanda/Madame Popololita’s body with a surplus of erotic meaning as
she lies down and kicks her legs in the air in orgasmic delight, subjecting herself to as much
visibility as the censors would allow. Her ‘whiteness’ manifests not only in her morals, but
also in her free movements, and in the easy ways where she flits about coquettishly. She
courts and titillates her suitor while spurning his advances in mock rejection, evocative
of Radha’s sexual deviltries in Sangam/The confluence (Kapoor 1964).
But, if this is a pretense, then on whose behalf is this masquerade of sexuality being
employed and used? How do these provocative, overtly sexed up images in songs breaching
the boundaries of socio-sexual propriety square off with the demure characters that these
actresses play in the rest of the narrative? It is appropriate to note that, while both
Chanda/Madame Popololita (Mumtaz) and Radha’s (Vyjanthimala) transmutation into
public spectacles reveal a simultaneity of both brown and white subjectivity within the
same corporeal body. These portrayals are camouflages. Radha’s burlesque show and
Chanda’s cabaret are subterfuges adopted in the interest of the larger familial ‘good’.
Their ‘whiteness’ is merely an assumed identity that will eventually fall short of complete
approximation, because it is an imitation. Cloaking the brown body in ‘white skin’ allows
for this wayward sexuality to be vowed and disavowed at will.
Radha in Sangam (Kapoor 1964) and Chanda in Apna Desh (Jambu 1972) only transi-
ently assume the disreputable public role of the white woman, and disavow it when the song
spectacle ends. In Sangam, playback singer Lata Mangeshkar’s virginal-adolescent girl
voice further dissipates sexual overtones, and Radha reverts back to sexual modesty as
the song ends. The camera no longer frames her through the piercing male gaze, even as
Radha herself portrays a consistent preoccupation with the subordination of erotic desire
to familial obligation. Despite Chanda possessing visible signifiers of whiteness, such as
blonde hair and accented Hindi, her appropriation of whiteness appears to be as unconvin-
cing as Fearless Nadia’s effort at an authentic Indian femininity. Radha and Chanda/
Madame Popololita can therefore represent ‘whiteness’ and simultaneously escape from
it. If ‘the [Hindu] woman could be perceived to contain a charge of sexuality which
always threatens to run free’ (Zutshi 1993, 102), then Hindi cinema addressed the
dilemma of the desires of the Hindu woman by offloading it onto the Cultural Other: the
(proxy) white woman.
Not necessarily mapped onto whiteness, there were other tropes of illicit desire and non-
reproductive sexuality. For instance, the Muslim Tawaif (courtesan), the eroticized subal-
tern drawn from the realm of tradition and cultural backwardness signified by the nameless
female performer generically played by Laxmi Chaya in Mera Gaon Mera Desh/My
Village, My Country (Khosla 1971). Further examples include Aruna Irani as in Jyoti/
The Light (Chakravorty 1981), Malaika Arora Khan in popular songs like ‘Chaiyya
Chaiyya’ in Dil Se/From Heart (Ratnam 1998), ‘Munni Badnaam Hui’ in Dabangg/The
Brave (Kashyap 2010), and the Anglo-Indian/Christian vamps played by actresses like
Bindu, Fariyal, Shashikala and Helen, who with their telltale Anglo-Indian/Christian
names ‘provided the antithesis to the ideal [bourgeoisie Hindu] woman’s embodiment of
chastity by [their] demonstration of uncontrolled female lust and wantonness’ (Kasbekar
2001, 298). Their genealogy, however, is not the focus of this paper.
The racism of a text is not simply a matter of narrative, characterization or formal fea-
tures of production; it is also ‘an effect of its aesthetic language’ (Wiegman 1998, 165). If
pre-colonial Fearless Nadia appeared largely in long shots undermining voyeurism, the
176 M. A. Mubarki

collapse of the corporeal into the sexual becomes pervasively distinct and generalizable in
Purab aur Pachhim/The east and the west (Kumar 1970). In Purab aur Pachhim, the cor-
poreal reductionism of white female subjectivity is accomplished through the visual code of
low and high angle close up shots that frame disproportionately enlarged but dismembered
body parts – body parts reminiscent of hardcore pornography where the white woman is
reduced to just her genitals and breasts. Such distorted orientations of the camera are
embedded with the clear assumption that the aesthetic value of the white woman is
bound up with her disreputable femininity and offers ideal voyeuristic ‘through a
keyhole’ viewing positions to the spectators. Often framed in middle distance from the
camera, preoccupied with her own body, the white female invokes the colonial memsahib
refreshing colonial fantasies and ideological fixations about white female sexuality (Figure
3(a) and 3(b)).

The emergence of the white female body as a sexual backdrop

Such aesthetic and thematic representations have carried well into contemporary Bombay
cinema. Pyaar ka tarana/Melody of love (Anand 1993), shot in Copenhagen, features the
song ‘Abhi nahin, abhi nahin/Not now, not now’, where an Indian couple break out into
a naïve romantic song over a kiss, even as they cavort on a beach pullulating with
topless white women. Distance from the camera and anonymity in the frame dismisses
the possibility of specificity, and the white woman becomes the generic representation or
universal term for all white women (Figure 4).
‘Cinematic pornography in South Asia is often associated with semi-legal foreign fea-
tures [invariably featuring white women] of the fabled “morning shows”’ (Hoek 2010,
137). Beginning in the 1970s, white female bodies came in for disproportionate represen-
tation in emerging soft-core cinema exhibited in morning shows across suburban India. In
these shows, the subaltern spectator participating in the C-circuit exhibition centres could
‘experience modernity in its most distinctly urban form’ – the early morning shows featur-
ing porn films partaking in ‘the illicit and fleeting pleasures and dangers, [with] the gigantic
posters of half-naked female bodies usually with white women’ (Singh 2008, 257). The
fetish of/for the white woman extends deep into the seamier side of the urban landscape

Figure 3. Corporeal reductionism of white female body is achieved through high and low angle
shots that focus on specific body parts and symbolically disremember the threatening body. A
scene from Purab aur Pacchim/East and the west (Kumar 1970). Courtesy: V.I.P. Films.
 Contemporary South Asia 177

Figure 4. The Indian couple is visible in the foreground, with the topless white women visible in the
background in Pyaar ka tarana/melody of love (Anand 1993). Courtesy: Navketan International
Films.

of brothels where, as Gangoli notes, ‘sex workers whose physical attributes come closest to
the fantasies of male clients in looking “western” (especially “fair” [read white]) are more
popular with clients of different classes’ (Gangoli 2005, 150). A more liberalized import
policy that shaped up in the mid-1980s allowed indigenous private entrepreneurs to
obtain distribution rights of imported films, endow them with amorous titles, and release
them across Indian suburbia with posters featuring white females in various stages of
undress. Films with even pretension to nudity, such as the Czech New Wave filmmaker
Herz’s Magpie in the Wisp/Straka V Hrsti (1983), a ‘stylized, unintelligible film with
naked women’ (Košuličová 2002), and Greenaway’s The cook, the thief, his wife and
her lover (1989), ran to packed C-circuit theatres in India.
In the 1990s, faltering economic affairs led to the opening of the Indian economy,
unleashing among other things ‘a proliferation of the representations of erotics’ (Mankekar
2012, 173) that foregrounded the erotic pleasures of women over domesticized conjugality.
And the white woman, banished to inconsequential sequences in the 1970s and 1980s, res-
urfaced and was accommodated in the item song. Often pictured out of the context of the
domestic home, the item song as a site of engagement with the non-domestic space becomes
the site of engagement with prohibited desire, where the white female or her proxies usurp
male authority and reconfigure female sexuality as the focus, with the white woman as a
point of reference. The item song facilitates the imaginary projection of the latent racial
and sexual fantasies about the white female body, so that when we see the white women
we only see their idealized form, their semi-nude figure as the sum total of their identity.
Actors/performers like the Czech Yana Synkova/Yana Gupta in Dum/The dare (Nivas
2003), the British Lucy Bartholomew in Samay/The Time (Grewal 2003), the half Cauca-
sian Thai singer Tata Young in Dhoom/The blast (Gadhvi 2004), Jelena Jakovljevic, the
Yugoslavian model in Popcorn khao mast ho jao/Eat popcorn, be happy (Sadanand
2004), the Australian Tania Zaetta in Salaam Namaste (Anand 2005), the Puerto Rican
Mayte Garcia in Dus/Ten (Sinha 2005), the Australian Kylie Minogue in Blue (D’souza
2009), the British Florence Brudenell Bruce in Love Aaj Kal/Love These Days (Ali
178 M. A. Mubarki

2009), the Italian Roza Catalano in Ek Second … Jo zindagi badal de/A second that can
change life (Ghosh 2010), Caterina Lopez in Bhindi Bazaar Inc. (Bhatt 2011), the Brazilian
Bruna Abdalah in Desi Boyz (Dhawan 2011), the German Claudia Ciesla in Khiladi 786/
Player 786 (Mohan 2012), the Serbian Natasa Stankovic in Satyagraha/The struggle for
truth (Jha 2013), British models Scarlett Mellish Wilson in Shanghai (Banerjee 2012)
and R … Rajkumar (Deva 2013), and Hazel Crowney in Once upon a time in Mumbai
Dobara/One upon a time in Mumbai again (Luthria 2013), appeared in item songs or
‘dance sequences composed of raunchy movements and risqué lyrics with little relation
to the plotline’ (Roy 2011, 42).
The song ‘Kiss Me Baby’ in Garam Masala/Hot spices (Priyadarshan 2005) momen-
tarily abandons the veil of conventional Bombay cinema’s aesthetics and comes uncomfor-
tably close to the discourse of pornography. In so doing, the song marks a moment of
dangerous ambivalence when, in a scene laden with latent tribadism, a white woman
snakes her fingers through the cleavage of another, even as the male lead ‘Mac’ (Akshay
Kumar) appears oblivious (Figure 5).
Noted erotic films director Jag Mundhra reasons that Hindi film producers pick white
girls who are mostly backpackers from Eastern Europe and former Soviet Republics for
item songs,

because a lot of them have good figures and are willing to expose them. If you need a bikini
shot, not many Indian girls are willing to turn up in a string bikini … most white girls will
not have an issue with that. (Nelson 2010)

Film critic Ashok Rane buttresses the point further that, ‘the audience wants to see actors
who are uninhibited and it comes naturally [my emphasis] to these girls’ (Kumar 2011).

Brown gaze on brown flesh

The West did not introduce the erotic into India; ‘diverse genealogies of the erotics have
always coexisted in Indian public cultures’ (Mankekar 2012, 175). The erotic sentiments
of shringar rasa in Natyasastra and the Kamasutra are discourses that predate the

Figure 5. The song kiss me baby in Garam Masala/hot spices (Priyadarshan 2005) features a white
female on white female, even as the male lead Mac (Akshay Kumar) look oblivious. Courtesy: Venus
Records & Tapes.
 Contemporary South Asia 179

encounter with the West. So, if Hindi cinema also offers aplenty examples wherein the
brown females too undergo fetishization, how is it different from the objectification of
the white woman?
In their ethnographic study of the Indian male, film viewers Derne and Jadwin noted
that national identity played an important role in manoeuvring the voyeuristic gaze, and
Indian male viewers ‘do not make all women the object of the gaze’ (2007, 47). Their
study noted that, ‘anxious about their Indianess … [Indian male viewers] distinguish
between Westernized women whom they see as legitimate objects of the gaze and distinc-
tively Indian women whom they believe deserve to be protected from it’ (Derne and Jadwin
2007, 55). Correspondingly, ‘men’s taste in a heroine is similarly consistent with their pre-
ference for modest, traditional women who prefer themselves [not to be] looked at’ (Derne
and Jadwin 2007, 54).
Discernible deviations also become apparent in the ways the camera encourages Indian
male spectatorship to assume different spectatorial positions when framing white and
brown female bodies. Hindi cinema often employs narrative digressions and aesthetic
devices to absolve the Hindi female lead of any complicity in her own objectification
through ‘song in dream’ sequences, and/or junctures that employ a range of excuses and
compelling circumstances that mark the Hindi film heroine’s ‘pin-up with a purpose’
moment. In item songs like ‘Hawa Hawaii’ from Mr. India (Kapur 1987), ‘Choli Ke
Peeche Kya Hai/What’s behind the blouse, in Khalnayak/The villain (Ghai 1993), and
‘Tu Cheez Badi Hai Mast Mast/You are a hot thing’ in Mohra/The pawn (Rai 1994), the
Hindi cinema’s female leads invite the voyeuristic gaze through public performances, but
only to supplement the law and bust criminal gangs. Erotically charged songs like ‘Dhak
Dhak Karne Laga/My heart started beating’ in Beta/The son (Kumar 1992), and ‘Tu
Mere Saamne/You in front of my eyes’ in Darr/The fear (Chopra 1993), take place in the
male lead’s imagination. The heroine, who is not consciously part of the dream sequence,
cannot be purposively seductive or flirtatious. This puts the onus of the voyeuristic gaze
back on the fantasizing mind that is stripping her. Indian actresses also appear more mod-
estly dressed compared to Caucasian female dancers, as in the song ‘Maahi Ve/O Beloved’
in Kaante/The thorns (Gupta 2005), where the Indian Lisa (Malaika Arora), despite croon-
ing in a disreputable joint in the company of sparsely dressed Caucasian female strippers,
appears, as one film critic noted, ‘the most overdressed bar girl in Los Angeles’ (Joseph
2002).
Positive images can be as beguiling as degrading ones, and if there are instances of the
annihilation of the ‘Other’, at the other end of the spectrum are moments of assimilation and
recuperation, of converting the white woman into a replica of the Hindu woman. Miss Eli-
zabeth Russell (Rachel Shelley) in Lagaan/The Tax (Gowariker 2001), Lady Catherine
(Antonia Bernath) in Kisna: The warrior poet (Ghai 2005), Sue McKinley (Alice Patten)
in Rang De Basanti/Colour me yellow (Mehra 2006) and Lady Angela Fraser (Lisa
Lazarus) in Veer/The brave (Sharma 2009) are all white women who have been sheared
of all oppositional elements: the famed western wayward sexuality, concupiscence, lack
of family values, individualism, and in turn endowed with deified ‘Hindu’ qualities of
family values, sexual modesty, and nurturing capabilities. Fearless Nadia was bearing
out the imprint of nationalist myths within the discursive practices of Hindi cinema, produ-
cing a ‘presentist’ cinema that has denuded all the historical imprints through generic trans-
formation, except for the sexual identity of the white woman that circulates to this day. Thus
the white woman, despite her chequered presence, remains a historically contingent discur-
sive formation, situated in a complex interaction between the discourses of colonialism and
traditional normative femininity. Therefore, even on occasions where the Caucasian female
180 M. A. Mubarki

is not present in the narrative, Hindi cinema’s ‘transiently sexed up’ leading ladies, vamps,
westernized Indian females and gangster’s molls, are merely ‘manning the desk’ for the
white woman in her absence.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
1. I use the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ to denote a person of mixed European and Asian descent.
2. I borrow the term from Priti Ramamurthy. For more on this, see Ramamurthy (2006).

ORCiD
Meraj Ahmed Mubarki http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8028-9881

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