An archive of expressions: On Saroj Khan

My Mirror column for July 5:

The late Saroj Khan created a new kind of dancing body on the Hindi film screen, but she also embodied a link to a history of dance – and of cinema. 

(Images courtesy Ahmedabad Mirror, taken by the photographer Dayanita Singh in the early 1990s)

Saroj Khan, who died on Friday aged 71, has been described in obituaries as a “veteran Bollywood choreographer”. That is an identity she certainly owned. But it doesn’t capture the breadth and depth of her connection to the Hindi film industry, or indeed her role in creating the field she dominated for so long.

Born Nirmala Nagpal in 1948, Khan began as a child actor. Her origin story, which she relates in Nidhi Tuli’s superb 2012 Public Service Broadcasting Trust documentary The Saroj Khan Story (free on YouTube), was as filmi as she clearly was herself. As a toddler, she would dance with her own shadow on the wall. The doctor her worried mother consulted had connections with moviedom, and proposed that a dancing child might be a bankable asset. Her parents, Partition migrants from Karachi, needed the money. The screen name Saroj was to avoid social censure.

Tuli’s film is richly layered, tapping into the enchantment of cinema but never losing sight of its trials. Terrific stories compress several registers of film history. My favourite is one in which Saroj and child star Baby Naaz come down from Maganlal Dresswalla’s shop in their infant Radha-Krishna costumes (for the 1953 film Aagosh), and an old couple bow down to them in devotion. Khan takes a childish delight in the memory. But when we watch her sending her grandchildren off to school, their boringly normal childhood contrasts sharply with hers. “We have an age na, where we are not required as a child star, neither grown-up. That was my age at 10, I was lost,” she tells Tuli. For Khan, 10 was an age of decision-making: “Good friends were there, they told me, why don’t you become a group dancer?” Her dancer friend Sheela laughs at how she’d help Saroj escape punishment for her frequent lateness. A schoolgirlish memory, and yet the two little girls putting on makeup under the Filmistan stairs were at work, not at school. At stake was a job, and a family of five with no other income.

What makes Saroj Khan’s narrative powerful, of course, is that her skill and dedication transformed her from the anonymous girl at the edge of the screen to the one directing the performance. Her life also feels like a link to a fast-receding past, as rich as it was messy. Noticing that she was talented enough to pick up the heroine’s moves, the legendary dance director B Sohanlal made her his assistant. If that gloriously open-ended world allowed a 12-year-old group dancer to become assistant to her 43-year-old boss, it also allowed him to ‘marry’ her at 13. Saroj became a mother at 14. She remained Sohanlal’s assistant from 1962 to 1973, having another child with him before finally parting ways, and remarrying in 1975.

In interviews, Khan described vividly how she learnt that she could not just execute Sohanlal’s directions, but compose her own. Half a century has passed, but each word and gesture was a bodily memory. Khan’s talent was acknowledged by everyone from Vyjayanthimala, the great dancing star of the 1950s and ’60s, to the many directors who had seen her in action. Still, there was nothing automatic about her progress up the ranks in an industry in which only men became dance-directors. Her future in the industry was so insecure that during her years with Sohanlal, she did a nursing course and worked at KEM Hospital, learnt typing to be a receptionist at Glaxo, and even “became a make-up man”, as she puts it, inadvertently pointing to another sphere then exclusively male.

It was after years of C-grade films that Khan finally found acclaim, with dance numbers picturised on Sridevi, in films like Mr. India (1987) and Chandni (1989), and on Madhuri Dixit, in a series of films beginning with Tezaab (1988). Famously, the Filmfare Awards instituted an award for choreography, giving the first honour to Saroj Khan for Tezaab. Kangana Ranaut, paying tribute to Saroj Khan’s contribution to that cinematic era, has been quoted as saying: “Back then when you speak about a superstar actress, you meant a dancer actress. You didn’t mean anything else.” Ranaut is right, but what she doesn’t say is that Saroj Khan was part of the transformation that created the dancer actress. Dance had been part of Hindi cinema from the start, but barring a few (largely South Indian) actresses with classical training, the heroine didn't need to dance. The vamp was enough. But watching Helen had been a guilty pleasure, watching Madhuri was increasingly not.

Paromita Vohra, in a brilliant essay in the book tiltpauseshift: Dance Ecologies in India, has argued that ‘Ek Do Teen’ marks a turning point in the history of Hindi film dance because “a clear heroine figure [appeared for the first time] in a dance that is chiefly sexy, and presented sexiness with a robust, bodily series of steps”. Saroj Khan’s visibility – she went on to win eight Filmfare awards and three National awards for choreography – made Hindi film viewers see that “the body of the dancing heroine contained also the body of the choreographer”. “In doing this,” writes Vohra, “she gathered the ghosts of many forgotten worlds of dance – which had found their way into the darkened corners of Bollywood studios as dance teachers, musicians and extras – into her being, bringing these worlds to a professional place again.”

The history of dance in 20th century India was a history of invisibilisation. A national culture 'cleansed' of its links to tawaifs and devadasis demanded the erasure of sexualness from Indian-style dance, at least on screen. Saroj Khan, beginning as the short-haired Westernised dancer, eventually became an archive of sensual Indian dance on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Jul 2020.

Note: Linking here to two of my previous pieces on the history of dance in India: a feature essay on tawaifs and how dance was taken from them -- 'Bring on the Dancing Girls' -- and a review of Anna Morcom's book Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys: The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance 

Nanda: Not So Simple

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

The late actress Nanda is usually remembered for her girlish innocence. But that wasn't all there was to her.

Nanda's death in March this year was mourned by the industry. But as in life, so in death: she didn't really get the critical attention she deserved. 

Nanda was that rare actress whom the usually inflexible Hindi film industry allowed to graduate from one slot to another, embracing her first as a child artiste (in films like Mandir [1948], Angaarey, Jaggu [1952] and Jagriti, then as the younger sister (in V. Shantaram's Toofan Aur Diya [1956], Bhabhi [1957], Dulhan [1958], Chhoti Behen [1959] and Kala Bazaar [1960]) and finally as a romantic heroine (after Dev Anand kept a promise made during Kala Bazaar and cast her as his heroine in Hum Dono [1961]).

Despite this, there is a Nanda stereotype. We think of her as the achchhi ladki, the simple girl who could be coyly romantic but not sensual. The childlike innocence that had worked for Baby Nanda segued seamlessly into chhoti behen roles (younger sisters have always been infantilised by Hindi cinema) and seemingly clung to her even as she transitioned into playing romantic leads. Her good girl image was also a result of the sharply moral heroine-vamp divide that characterised the era. The heroine had to exemplify 'Indianness'; the vamp was 'Western', if not racially then culturally. The heroine's non-threatening sexuality meant being virginal, and putting her charms on display only for the hero. This was in stark contrast to the vamp's open display of desire (invariably unfulfilled), which in conjunction with her other sins -- smoking, drinking and alcohol – had, of course, to be punished.

One of my favourite Nanda appearances is in an unusually sophisticated version of the good girl-bad girl narrative: Teen Devian [1965]. Nanda plays the wholesome middle class girl, literally the girl next door, but her rivals are not cabaret dancers – a category the audience knows can never succeed with a hero -- but liberated memsahibs. Both Simi the well-connected socialite and Kalpana the famous actress flirt outrageously with our music-shop-salesman-turned-poet. Whereas with Nanda, it is Dev who flirts and Nanda who coyly accepts his overtures. Though perhaps this is not quite true either. In an adorable and surprising early scene, on their first coffee date, Dev asks to see Nanda's hardworking secretarial fingers. “Is this just an excuse to hold my hand?” asks Nanda. “Aur agar kahoon haan?” says the unflappable Dev. “Then I will oblige you,” says Nanda in English.

In the more mainstream Gumnaam (1965) and The Train (1970), Nanda's good girl Indianness is produced at least partially by being pitted against our most memorable vamp: Helen. Usually the heroine and the vamp never share the same space, it being a given that the vamp's netherworld of lowlit restaurants and hotel bars is not one in which a respectable Indian woman would ever find herself.

But both Gumnaam and The Train are slightly unusual in this respect. In Gumnaam (a pretty awful cannibalising of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None), Nanda and Helen, bearing the religiously-marked names Miss Asha and Miss Kitty, appear in the same frame quite early on. They are both on the fateful plane ride that will seal the fate of its ten passengers. Of course, Nanda wears white, and Helen red. Then, though both swiftly acquire boyfriends among the men they're marooned with, they keep their distance from each other. The bad girl spends most of her time with a drunken Pran, the good girl with a constipated-looking Manoj Kumar. But having put this effort into keeping them apart, the filmmakers decided some frisson would arise from having them bond. So we get Helen, who has spent many scenes before this refusing to drink with Pran, deciding to get drunk -- with Nanda! And they have a blast, until Nanda is violently shaken back to reality by Manoj Kumar, who being Mr. Bharat cannot be expected to enjoy himself. What I thought was fascinating was MK's sarcastic heroine-shaming dialogue, uttered in full hearing range of the vamp: “Ab bhi tum mein aur Kitty mein thoda sa fark baaki hai”.

In The Train [1970], which like Gumnaam was a murder mystery, cabaret dancer Helen (Lily) is the rotten apple, and Nanda (Nita) the misjudged goody-goody one. So Helen gets to throatily proposition Rajesh Khanna, while Nanda only gets to lie with his head in her lap. But then Nita gets a job as a hotel receptionist, letting her into the same space as Lily. And then the film does something truly unexpected: it gives us a glimpse of the 'bad' Nanda. Instead of the saree-clad version with a long choti, we suddenly see a 'Westernised' Nanda with a stylish haircut, the hushed voice and swaying derriere now those of a seductress in a murderous plot.

It seems to me that Nanda's overt innocence was precisely what enabled directors to use her to play on this “fark” between the heroine and vamp -- clearly thrilling male audiences but being careful to eventually re-establish moral order so as not to alarm them.

But remarkably, Nanda didn't stop there. In order to see where this fascinating trajectory took her, watch Yash Chopra's Ittefaq. The vamp-virgin divide is hopefully gone forever, but Nanda needs to be given some posthumous credit for having crossed the line when she did.

Published in the Mumbai Mirror.