Notes Toward Sighting/Citing/Siting Women in Hindi Cinema of the 1950s and 60s
Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

A commonplace understanding of mainstream Indian and other cinemas is that they are inhospitable, even hostile, to women: indeed, cinema itself is frequently seen as objectifying women through and for a voyeuristic male gaze, representing them through images and roles that conform to patriarchal authority, thereby denying them autonomy and agency. This essay, which focuses on the Hindi cinema of the 1950s and 60s—two post-independence decades that oversaw a spate of womencentered films enacted by charismatic, immensely popular female actors like Meena Kumari, Madhubala, Nargis, Nutan, and Waheeda Rehman—does not deny these aspects of popular Indian cinema so much as argue for a more differentiated and nuanced understanding of it. Drawing on a comment by Moinak Biswas made in another context, it suggests that when films make women and their presumed concerns and interests central to the film’s narrative, including in its rhetoric and presentation, they can “often open up a whole field of experience and desire that cannot be entirely accommodated within the patriarchal ideological framework of the film.”

In terms of the political, social and cultural contexts relevant to these two decades immediately following India’s independence, it’s important to remember that they follow a long period of reforms undertaken on behalf of women’s emancipation from oppressive practices like widow remarriage, the age of consent, and women’s lack of access to literacy, succession rights, and so on. Imbued with political, social and cultural complexities inflecting women’s negotiations with (patriarchal) social interdictions, especially those regarding their sexualityand the extent and limits of their autonomy and agency, these decades also participate inconstructions of national identity and the roles assigned to women and men therein. Analogously, the films of the 50s and 60s both reflect and intervene in these negotiations, offering their own take on them, engaging critically with social and cultural discourses and their accompanying ideologies, endorsing, but also challenging them, thereby etching the lineaments of an alternate public sphere.With respect to the womencentered films from 1950s and 60s, I suggest that whereas the “woman question” in the late 19th C was framed as a problem for reform by men, these films attempt to track changes—however mediated and negotiated—in such framing, undertaken sometimes by women themselves, in terms of constituting both object (image, exteriority) and subject (self, interiority).

Among propositions from the extensive, rich and varied body of scholarly analysis on the nature, significance, subjects and objects of social reform projects preceding India’s independence that are important for a reassessment of Hindi films from the 1950s and 60s, the following are particularly relevant for the kinds of analysis I pursue:

• Despite women being sites (rather than instigators and subjects) for ideas of tradition and modernity being elaborated to construct an Indian national identity, the debates relating to social reforms concerned with these do nevertheless, as Tanika and Sumit Sarkar note, “take us into the zone of women’s own interventions in the public sphere”— interventions that were deliberate as well as the unintended products of the reforms undertaken on their behalf and/or constituted the uncontrollable “excess” that flowed from such attempts at reforms.

• Again, according to Tanika and Sumit Sarkar, women’s concerns as reflected in writing by and about their life-worlds are distinct from those of the men, critically foregrounding views on women’s entitlements or lack thereof, drawing attention to the oppressions and slights to which they were subjected on a routine basis.

In terms of the political, social and cultural contexts relevant to these two decades immediately following India’s independence, it’s important to remember that they follow a long period of reforms undertaken on behalf of women’s emancipation from oppressive practices like widow remarriage, the age of consent, and women’s lack of access to literacy, succession rights, and so on.