Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s

4. Spectatorial Desires and the Hierarchies of Stardom

93 4. Spectatorial Desires and the Hierarchies of Stardom In the preceding chapters I argued that the dominant cinematic and extra-cinematic discourse on female stardom in 1930s film worked from an implicit structure of oppositions. On one side, there was low-class status aligned with public performance, and implications of sexuality and immorality, while on the other side there was upperclass status linked to a type of modern female identity that combined education, social responsibility, and female propriety. Such a model of normative femininity could propose only a certain type of acceptable female star, emerging from the educated upper classes, and playing roles matching the social norm of domestic virtue in genres such as the social, which allowed and showcased such roles. Yet even as such norms were being debated and refined on-screen and in the pages of magazines and newspapers, the full spectrum of female stars in the 1930s presents a far more unruly picture. In this chapter I consider two competing models of fame and public self-presentation that challenge any notion of a fully homogenized and contained discourse of female stardom. Both models are figured on white or semi-white bodies that either were superseded, as in the case of the cosmopolitan modern woman played by Sulochana in her silent films, or remained on the margins of high-brow star discourse, as in the case of the stunt star Fearless Nadia. Together, Sulochana and Fearless Nadia occupied two extremes in the hierarchy of 1930s Indian star discourse. While Sulochana, by the early 1930s, was reified as the queen of Indian stars, self-evidently and unquestioningly understood as 94 “india has no stars” the most popular Indian star of the silent era, Nadia, by the late 1930s, was equally self-evidently understood as a popular but ultimately marginal actress whose identification with the low-brow stunt genre did not qualify her for the designation of “star.” Moreover, as both actresses were associated with mass audiences, they offer insights into the relation between spectatorship and star culture at this time. Audience responses and the passions of spectators figured only marginally in discussions of stardom in the 1930s, though the cinematic tastes of different classes of audiences were scrutinized in the context of recommendations for the improvement of cinema. As stars who did elicit enthusiastic responses, however, Sulochana and Fearless Nadia offer an opportunity to uncover traces of spectatorial desires that might fall into the category of fandom, even if it was not always named as such. In any history of stardom in Indian cinema, Sulochana is the embodiment of the idea of the star in the earliest years of Indian cinema. While there is no disputing the centrality of Sulochana to the emergent discourse of stardom, I suggest that as early as the 1930s, her silent-era dominance became a discursive idea that rewrote the realities of cinema culture in the late 1920s, and that her popularity was, paradoxically, in inverse relation to the degree to which her star persona engaged central discourses of gender formation in early cinema in India. In the context of cinema’s participation in the wider social discourse of “improvement” and its obsession with “cultured” women, Sulochana’s star persona between 1925 and 1933 occupied an ambiguous space. In her silent films, her star persona initially circulated an image of the “cultured” woman in terms of specifically cosmopolitan rather than national discourses, placing gender identity at the intersection of modernity and fantasies of capitalism , centering on sexuality, fashion, and imaging technologies. Thus, before the concern with respectability redefined female participation in cinema specifically in terms of education and class origins, actresses like Sulochana invited the audience’s fascination through their ease in negotiating the experience and spectacle of cosmopolitan modernity even as they moved among the social, historical, and mythological genres.1 But by the early 1930s, just as she made the transition to sound, Sulochana’s star image was brought into alignment with the dominant discourse of female stardom, with her films literally playing out the trajectory of reform from the cosmopolitan to the national. Where in the 1920s her screen roles placed ideas of stardom at the intersection of modernity, technology, and fantasies of upward social mobility, the talkie remakes of her silent films literally engaged in the discourse of improvement, by placing her in roles that staged her regulation into norms of Hindu womanhood. Spectatorial Desires 95...