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

1. The Split Discourse of Indian Stardom

17 1. The Split Discourse of Indian Stardom In our country the feelings in the star’s heart remain in the heart. —Ibrahim Haji Mohammad Mistri, “America’s Arrogant Stars,” Rangbhoomi, 24 June 1933, 9–12 (quote on 11; my translation) In the 1932 annual Puja issue of the English-language film weekly, Filmland, director Charu Roy complains that in nearly fifteen to twenty years of filmmaking in Bengal, “there was never a film whose market value was mainly due to its feature player.” This, he says, is unlike Hollywood, where “generally we find that the public cares more for the featuring star than for the producing company.” He unfavorably compares Bengali cinema’s inability to profit from its stars not only to Hollywood but also, more immediately, to Bombay cinema. Even though he says that “most of us [in Bengal] have [a] great aversion for Bombay pictures for cheap stunts,” he cannot help but name Bombay’s “successful ” stars and their films in order to demonstrate his point about the state of Bengali cinema.1 By the end of the decade, the need to create an Indian cinematic identity still continued to be seen in terms of the absence of, or the need to redefine, Indian stars. In 1937 the Bombay magazine filmindia made exactly the same point as Charu Roy and about the very same performers who had appeared in his list of successful Bombay stars: Sulochana, Gohar, Sabita Devi, and Durga Khote.2 As in Charu Roy’s article, the filmindia author, Baburao Patel, negatively defined India’s stars in relation to Hollywood stars who functioned as the exemplary 18 “india has no stars” products of a rationally ordered and efficiently operating star system. In both of these articles, as in a host of others from the same decade voicing similar concerns, there is the sense that stardom is always the already understood, instantly available concept whose best examples are inevitably Hollywood names. Film stardom or, more broadly speaking, cinematic and mass-mediated modes of circulation of fame, similarly drew simultaneously from Hollywood and diverse local practices. As a practice of celebrity, stardom belongs in a longer history of fame in India, understood both as forms of public presentation of the self and as modes of circulation and exchange of knowledge about individuals. But while sharing in a longer history of fame, cinematic stardom also marks a rupture of sorts because of radical forms of intimacy and distance associated with the new medium that changed the very terms by which individual selves were circulated in the public sphere. While stars were closer and more “present” in terms of sheer scale, if one were to compare the size of human figures on stage and on screen, they no longer shared a physical space with their audience. Thus, shaped by mechanical reproduction and its attendant proliferation of images of the self, film stardom entered a much wider sphere of cultural practice that now included an anonymous mass audience and reconfigured the relation between public and private identities. Working from the argument that the discourse of stardom in India was deeply divided between the dual imperatives of matching a Hollywood -style discourse and responding to Indian cultural needs and constraints , this chapter situates “stardom” in a broader history of fame, examining non- or precinematic forms of celebrity in India that were akin to the dynamics of film stardom as understood in its Hollywood context.3 Earlier contexts of fame explain the link between the social genre and the emergence of “stars” in Indian cinema. At the same time, a dual discourse on Hollywood and Indian stars circulated in Indian film magazines of the 1930s, emphasizing different ways of managing gossip and private information. The cultural apparatus of Hollywood cinema that accompanied the technology of filmmaking included the institution of stardom in all its aspects. From the format of film magazines to the look of stars and star photographs, the entire mise-en-scène of stardom as practiced in Hollywood became a ready-made model of stardom, which was widely discussed and circulated in film magazines. Yet there was a deep contradiction between the impulse to discuss Indian stars in Hollywood terms (hence the use of titles like “the Indian Douglas Fairbanks”) and the reality of a very different set of constraints and desires pertaining to the reception of Indian celebrities, involving issues such as the Split Discourse...