Haute to be hot

(Some more of the same....)

First you saw a leg – from a stiletto-sheathed foot up a glitter-circled ankle along a shapely calf to a slim thigh, all swathed in gossamer-fine fishnet or lightly-tinted silk. Then you saw her slim waist, the voluptuous bosom and cascading curls. Then, her face: the lips glistening with brilliant colour, the flushed cheekbones sloping up to cat eyes heavily lined with smoky glitter. Meet the vamp. The woman who ruled audiences who flocked to see her sexy shimmy in masala productions from Bollywood. The companion who was rarely a lady and, if she once had been, she was now fallen a long way down from her pedestal. Today she is a rare bird, one who has lost her plumage and the attractions of her exposed cleavage. The archetypal Hindi movie vamp has lost her place in the Bollywood pantheon.

But all is not lost. The bad girls of Indian cinema have not vanished forever. They have just coalesced their identities with the rather better behaved ones, who show shades of grey in very normal, everyday, well-accepted characterizations. The only real difference: once upon a glorious time they had few redeeming features and almost always died before the end of the film; today, they repent and are thus redeemed.

Many years ago, when villains were ugly, mean and always met a final and nasty end, they were accompanied by a scantily-clad woman who didn’t have to shoot or stab or otherwise damage the good guys physically, but had access to far more powerful weapons – their sex appeal, showcased with costumes that exposed and emphasized even as it branded her a ‘bad girl’. She drank, she smoked, she danced in bars, she slept with the villain and, if needed, with anyone else as well. She rarely wore saris, preferring low cut, high-slit, glittery-sequinned gowns. And she was called Rosy, or Lily or, in one memorable performance, Shabnam.

The vamp perhaps made her debut in Hindi cinema as the female villain, the woman who made the heroine’s life miserable and did her best to win over the hero by foul means rather than fair. She soon became a dancing girl, with ‘item number’ to her credit. In fact, often, the dance number was thrown willy-nilly into a film to showcase the shape and sex appeal of the actress who was willing to shed her clothes and her ambitions rather than for any actual need that the plot may have had. The first memorable actress of this genre was probably Cuckoo, who followed in the slinky footsteps of Kuldeep Kaur and Azoori, who were not as well known. In 1945 and Hindi cinema was inhibited and a lot more chauvinistic than it is now. Women did not star in films and certainly did now show off their shoulders and legs (shocking then). Cuckoo was first seen in movies like Pehli Nazar and Mujrim, then in almost every ‘talkie’ made.

And then came Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi in 1958. It starred Kishore Kumar and Madhubala and was perhaps best known for the song Ek ladki bheegi bhaagi si. And then there was a mujra, Hum tumhare hai zara, with two dancers. One was Cuckoo, who had been in the business for 13 years. The other was somewhat younger, beautiful, graceful and fated to become the biggest name in vamp history: Helen. She burst into solo fame with Mera naam hai chin chin choo a few months later, in Howrah Bridge, beckoning viewers with her almond eyes from behind a Chinese fan. And even as she seduced her way into the hero’s life and the audience’s hearts, she became more than just an item girl. She had her own story line and was often a misunderstood woman with a heart of gold under all the glitz and vampish glamour. She sang and danced and under all that tinsel gaiety was a heart of gold that was slowly breaking – her little brother needed surgery or her evil stepmother has driven her out of the house to find her own way in the world. And the hero always knew…at least at the end, when she was dying.

Around the same time that Helen was making her memorable mark came Bindu claiming in Kati Patang that Mera naam hai Shabnam, closely followed by luminaries like Aroona Irani (now seen mostly in the television world) and Padma Khanna (Johny Mera Naam), with women like Silk Smitha and Nylon Nalini ruling the south and making occasional forays into Bollywood. In the early 1950s Nadira sang Mud mud ke na dekh and, some years later, Ajit did his villainous thing with Mona Darling (Bindu in Zanjeer), the pucca gangster’s moll who simpered and swung her hips and vanished before the denouement.

And then there were the truly bad ones, more wicked aunts and stepmothers and heads of families rather than dancing girls. These nasties were played by the likes of Lalita Pawar, Leela Mishra, Manorama and Shashikala, and sharpened their canines on unsuspecting and bholi-bhali heroines who never seemed to have the courage to stand up to them and fight, not until the last few scenes when their husbands, their children or their gods were injured and needy. Even as some of these women characters survive today, in rather more sophisticated avatars, wearing red lipstick and Manish Malhotra-style chiffons, their graceful and hip-swinging kin do not.

Perhaps one of the last potential vamps to be seen in an original film, not a remake, was Navneet Nishan in Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke, where she played the wannabe lady-love of the hero, Aamir Khan. She didn’t success, but ended up retreating from the scene with egg on her face, literally.
Doom came for the filmi vamps with a new generation of heroine willing to take off as many clothes and shake as shapely a bosom, all while playing a central role as the main lead – or the one that the hero walks into the sunset with, at least. She came in the sensuous form of actors like Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi, doing their thing to the peppy music of Bappi Lahiri and company. They wore short skirts and low necked blouses, smoked and drank, and even kissed – or almost, since the trees and flowers hid the actual deed – their leading men. They sang in nightclubs (Jawani jaaneman is still heard in its remix version in discotheques today), drove their own cars and made no excuses for being ‘liberated’ and ‘hip’, westernized and not willing to be a squeaky sidekick to a macho and often manically slapstick hero, be it Amitabh Bachchan or Vinod Khanna. Real trouble followed. The vamp gradually faded into a minor appearance as a secretary or a scheming acquaintance or even a policewoman or detective in disguise. Police officer Madhuri Dixit in Khalnayak wiggled her way through Choli ke peeche, while Juhi Chawla managed to hide her real self behind the minimal cover of a miniskirt in Bol Radha Bol as Tony’s ‘girl’. They danced, they sang, they managed to fool the protagonist and get their work done, all just before they were exposed for whatever they really were.

But soon even that slim pretence of vampishness disappeared. The heroine took over the role of sexy siren with panache, seducing the hero, the villain, the audience and the box office. Sridevi danced in the rain with an on-off Anil Kapoor in a very wet sari in Mr India, while Karisma Kapoor cavorted on a string cot with Govinda in Raja Babu. And stars started making special appearances in films they otherwise had no role in, just to make an impact, titillate the viewers and, presumably, raise their own ratings. These became known as ‘item songs’, like Sushmita Sen in Nayak shook her booty singing Shakalaka baby, Shilpa Shetty decided to loot UP and Bihar in Shool and Aishwarya Rai did her skin thing in Ishq kameena in Shakti, stealing a lot of heroine Karisma Kapoor’s thunder in the process. Nobody thought any less of the caliber of the actor when she did these; in fact, the item number generally pulled in audiences that would otherwise have avoided going to see the films.

And more than just the songs and the sexy stints, the stars often took over the vampish characters as well. Once upon a time, Sushmita Sen would have been the bad lady for having taken Salman Khan away from his virtuous wife in Biwi No 1, but in the film she was the misunderstood girlfriend who found a nice man for herself once the hero decided to prefer his wife. Priyanka Chopra in Aitraaz did come to a nasty end, but had great fun on the way, seducing her lover, aborting his child, marrying a millionaire, ruling over the former lover at work, trying to seduce him once more and finding opposition in the shape of male virtue backed by wifely strength this time. Kareena Kapoor wore a gold frock and sang Yeh mera dil to a deceptive Shah Rukh Khan, but that was a remake of an old film called Don and doesn’t really count as an instance of vampishness and anyway she was a police connection. Complicated? That’s a vamp’s life!

Today even the word has lost its chutzpah. The ‘vamp’ is now the modern woman and comes in the most delightful shape as a main lead in Bollywood productions. Consider Mallika Sherawat, who reinvented herself after a non-successful chapter as Reema Lamba. She found her niche – and a happy one for her, too – as a seductive siren in films like Khwahish and Murder, and now continues to slink her way through movies like Pyaar Ke Side Effects and Ugly Aur Pagli, wearing tiny skirts, flaunting her curves and confident in her sexy image, enough for people to consider her a decent actor. Heroines from the aforementioned Priyanka Chopra to the much-vaunted Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Bipasha Basu, Rani Mukherjee, Kareena Kapoor, Katrina Kaif and others have all the trappings of vamp-dom, from the revealing clothes to the pout, the out-there cleavage and the hip swing, the songs, the in-your-face characterizations and the attentions of every non-familial male in the cast. But they are not vamps.

Today, no one really is.





The hero drives his new BMW to a rendezvous with his beloved. As he stops outside the hotel, tossing his car keys to the valet, he does not see two men staring at him from a Jeep parked beyond the lush planters near the entrance. “Let Mona deal with him now,” says one to the other, watching the hero run up the steps and through the big glass doors. Inside the nightclub, ‘Mona’ shimmies around the dance floor in a sliver of gold sequins, her darkly shadowed eyes alert for the hero to come in. As he enters, Mona starts singing, her body moving sexily to the beat.

The first item number was perhaps germane to the masala Hindi movie which included a gratuitous song and dance sequence in its formulaic script. It added something that pushed the story forward in some way. But, as it became a big selling point with the audiences, it became a few minutes of pure entertainment, with little, if any, connection to the actual script. Khallas, from Company, had a scantily-clad Isha Koppikkar gyrating in a mob of sweaty men for no particular reason. Rakhi Sawant earned her movie stripes not from a decent role in Main Hoon Na, but for an ‘item number’, as it soon became known, in Joru Ka Ghulam, and for Mohabbat hai mirchi in Chura Liya Hai Tumne. Others like Sambhavna Seth, Nandini Jumani and Negar Khan followed the same road.

Gradually, the ‘item girl’ acquired a veneer of respectability, many stars performing and winning accolades and fans. From Madhuri Dixit’s Ek do teen act in Tezaab to Urmila Matondkar in Chamma chamma (China Gate) and Shilpa Shetty (Maine Aai UP Bihar Lootne from Shool), to more recent versions with Kareena Kapoor’s It’s rockin’ (Yeh Kya Love Story Hai) and now the oh-so-classy Katrina Kaif in Blue, the item number is haute stuff.