May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (32 page)

The fact was that in three and a half years, the only woman I met who had achieved real political stature without the benefit of a man was K. R. Gouri, the minister of industries in the Communist state government of Kerala. Gouri was sixty-seven, a tough, outspoken Marxist who had been drawn into politics with the peasant rebellions against a local maharaja in the 1940s. Although she was the daughter of an influential social reformer who owned a coconut plantation, the family was of a low caste, and Gouri had not been elected on anyone’s coattails. She did, however, have the advantage of living in Kerala, where historically women had been treated with respect. Before independence, there had been a matrilineal system of inheritance among at least one important caste, and in recent years the state had both the highest literacy rate among women and the lowest birth rate. Gouri was an unusually powerful woman whose independence, competence and honesty had given her a massive following among the lower castes. Had it not been for the men in the party leadership, she might have become chief minister after the recent state elections.

Even in Kerala, of course, men and women were far from equal. In 1957, when the Communists first came into power in Kerala, Gouri was made a minister in the new government. But when she fell in love with another government minister and married him, the talk among her colleagues was that the party leadership had hastily arranged for the wedding for propriety’s sake. If Gouri had not married, they said, she would have lost her ministership; the man with whom she was involved, however, would have been permitted to remain on the job. When the Communist party split in 1964, so, too, did the marriage. Worse, there had been no children, a terrible thing for a woman in India. Gouri was viewed by the male members of the local press as bitter and argumentative, made forever miserable by her childless state, and while I resented the sexism in their remarks, I have to say that I found her, for whatever reason, as unpleasant as promised when I caught up with her at her home in the town of Trivandrum one evening. When I arrived as scheduled at eight-thirty, she was absorbed in a popular television show, composed of silly but wholly mesmerizing song-and-dance numbers from Hindi films. Without saying a word, she motioned for me to sit down and watch. I was a fan of the show myself and soon became engrossed in it. When it was over, Gouri
turned from the screen and spoke her first words. “What do you want from me?” she gruffly demanded. The interview went downhill from there, although Gouri did answer my questions. She insisted that her marriage had not been arranged by the party. “We decided we loved each other, so we decided to marry,” she said. “As disciplined party people, we asked for their sanction. The party people were just like my family.” The marriage broke up, she said, “not because of the party but because of personalities. We had some personal differences.”

Whatever the case, the reality for women in Indian politics was the same as for women in politics everywhere: It was a dirty, expensive game run by men. Although the Indian independence movement had theoretically made a place for political women, the fact was that forty years after independence, the men still controlled the party leadership, patronage, money and the selection of candidates for office. The Congress party was probably the worst offender, but K. R. Gouri’s story proved that the Communists, too, were reluctant to allow a woman into the highest level of the hierarchy. It was no surprise that most women, from Indira Gandhi to a first-time candidate for a state legislative assembly seat, needed connections to men. Once in power, they needed unusual reserves of strength. Sheila Dixit, the minister of state for parliamentary affairs, put it succinctly. “The going is rough in politics,” she said. “Most women say the hell with it. They would rather do something else that will give them more security and stability.” Dixit, the daughter-in-law of a powerful man, was one of the few who qualified as a power broker. “I think once we get into it,” she said, speaking of herself but also, I am sure, of Indira Gandhi, “we are forces to be reckoned with.”

OUTSIDE, THE SUMMER MONSOON WAS TURNING BOMBAY INTO AN IMPASSABLE
swamp, but inside, on the set of the Hindi film
Dance Dance
, they were busy making dreams. I had watched all day as one of India’s top actors, a slim-hipped, blow-dried heartthrob, gyrated to a disco beat in a kind of subcontinental
Saturday Night Fever
. His costar was Mandakini, a seventeen-year-old newcomer, who had made her movie debut the year before in a wet sari scene that male audiences and outraged feminists had still not forgotten. But the actress I found more interesting was the “dramatic” female lead, Smita Patil, at that moment stretched out in her dressing room, bored and exhausted. She was thirty years old, one of India’s biggest stars, sensuous and striking, and a favorite of the highbrow art cinema. Yet there she was, at ten on a Sunday night, working on schlock so she could make a living. What was worse, lately her personal life had become more interesting to her fans than her films. The big news was that she was five months pregnant with the child of Raj Babbar, a well-known actor whom she called
her husband. But Babbar, as anybody who read the movie magazines knew, was married to someone else.

“When we got involved, he never promised to leave his wife,” Patil told me calmly. “However difficult it was for me to accept certain facts, I still had to.” I was talking to her in twenty-minute segments between shots. Despite the seeming contradictions in her personal life, Patil was one of the more intelligent actresses in Bombay, college-educated, with a feminist conscience and an awareness of the world beyond the studio gates.

For the day’s scenes, Patil’s costume designer had managed to create a dress that hid her growing stomach, but the strain of standing in front of the camera for hours in high-heeled pumps was evident in her face. “My back,” she said, grimacing. She was sitting on her bed, feet propped up on a pillow, with a front section of her hair in an electric roller. She nibbled at a piece of toast covered with an unappetizing mound of melted cheese and tried to fend off a director’s assistant who came in to tell her they needed close-ups. “Close-ups?” she said, horrified. “When I’m looking like a dead cat?” The room, a mess of costumes and makeup, smelled stale. From this vantage point, her life did not appear to be a glamorous one, although it had led to the kinds of entanglements for which Patil was now famous. “Women who work in this industry have no time for any kind of normal life,” she said. “You’re working ten or twelve hours a day with different men all the time. You’re constantly demanded to emote, and it tends to become a very high-strung existence emotionally, which leads into your personal involvements. The line is very thin.”

In between her comments, the director’s assistant walked in with Patil’s lines for an upcoming scene. They had just been written on the set, which was standard procedure for Indian films. Patil had only a vague idea of the story line, but this was not a matter for concern. She knew that
Dance Dance
was essentially about a brother-and-sister song-and-dance act and that she played the sister, who got raped. It was not the sort of plot that would have impressed her feminist friends, but Patil had already done a half dozen rape scenes in her career—a modest number in an industry that regularly spiced up its films with battered women for the heroes to rescue. “Because, you see, the man has to be the savior,” Patil said sarcastically. “It’s all for the sake of the man. The women have to continue being beaten.” The rest of
Dance Dance
was a mystery to her. “If you ask me, I honestly don’t know what happens,” she said, shrugging. “It’s a normal Hindi film.”

Smita Patil worked in what was without question the largest and nuttiest film industry in the world. Every year, the Indian “dream factory” churned out close to nine hundred feature films, almost all of them frothy romances and bloody shoot-’em-ups, in Hindi and other regional languages, for an annual paying audience of no fewer than five billion. That was five times the number of people who saw the 230 feature films produced in 1988 in the United States. And even though Bombay, like Hollywood, had been hurt by video piracy and television, the dream factory remained in full production. This was one of the great ironies of an industry that always appeared on the edge of collapse. India’s literate upper classes had for years avoided the lowbrow entertainment of Hindi films in the country’s run-down cinema halls, and by the late 1980s, more movies were failing than ever before. And yet more movies were being made than ever before. This of course made no sense. A theory in the industry, virtually impossible to prove, was that accountants altered the books so that the films seemed to lose money, enabling producers to avoid the high Indian taxes on profits. Certainly the stars were notorious for receiving “black money,” or cash fees paid under the table. Whatever the case, real-estate speculators, diamond merchants and expatriate Indians continued to finance new films with enormous sums of money from outside the industry. Like the tycoon in America who buys the local baseball team for the prestige and the chance to make friends with the players, the investor in Indian films was not completely rational. The glamour of Bombay was hard for many investors to resist, and they seemed willing to gamble that lush, big-screen movies would survive by offering escape in a country where most people struggled through impoverished lives on the edge of survival.

The industry was a good story in itself, but I was more curious about the actresses. They were the country’s goddesses, appearing in lurid color, twenty times their actual size, on movie billboards in big cities and small towns all across India. Naturally they pouted regularly in the film magazines that they were not getting sufficiently serious roles to show off their talents. They seemed as self-absorbed, volatile and diverting as actresses anywhere. They were also among the most successful women in India, with the money and power, I thought, to break the rules and set their own agendas at a very young age. The actress Farha, for example, was only eighteen, but she had a bigger income than most business executives in India, swore like a camel driver and had an explosive, well-documented romance with a young director.
“Why do I love and hate so intensely that I want to either kill myself or him?” she asked
Movie
magazine one month. “I am now determined to make his life one big hell.” Behind the gates of Bombay’s Film City, a sprawling production lot of rolling hills and picturesque lakes, I found a less tempestuous Farha, dancing with a young costar in a soft-focus garden shot as technicians worked the fog machines. Farha, who, like most actresses in Bombay, used only one name, had already played the part of a woman who discovered that her husband had another wife and a set of children. Her character did what any proper Hindi film heroine would do in such a situation, which was to commit suicide out of shame. But Farha told me she had different ideas. “I would have killed him,” she said.

Within the industry, however, it was the actors who were considered the big stars and commanded the large fees because they pulled in the audiences. The actresses merely played backup roles to the men. “Women are not looked upon naturally, as having faults and complexity,” complained Deepa Sahai, a serious actress who had made a name for herself in a television series about several families caught up in the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. “Even if a woman has walked out on her husband, it’s always because he has gotten involved with another woman. She never has any ambitions of her own. She’s reacting to betrayal rather than her own aspirations.”

Yet the secondary roles of the actresses were a powerful influence on the standards of behavior for women in the country. Although I sometimes thought the feminists were overreacting when they complained about the portrayal of women in commercial Indian films, in essence they were right. On-screen, the actresses were the guardians of the country’s conservative traditions, often playing women who were raped because they had committed such suggestive acts as working in nightclubs or wearing Western clothes. Only the good girls in saris lived happily ever after with husbands and children. “The cinema tells us that women who wear pants and play tennis are wicked,” said India’s leading film critic, Chidananda Das Gupta. “It tells us they may ride in a motorcar, but inside, they mustn’t change.”

During the ten days I spent one summer talking to Bombay’s actresses about their careers, costars and love affairs, I learned that most of them, like Farha, led a schizophrenic existence. Offscreen, in the beach cottages and high rises of Bombay’s film colony, Indian actresses were part of a culture that collided head-on with the conservative values of “Mother India” presented on film. Here there were love
affairs, love triangles, love children, love nests. This was the real entertainment the stars provided for the fans, all of it breathlessly reported by the film magazines each month,
KIMI DUMPED
! announced the cover of
Cine Blitz
one summer,
JAYAPRADA WEDS HER LOVER!
gasped
Star & Style
. Every star in every article lamented that she just wanted to be happy, but this was an elusive goal since even in Bombay divorce and living together were still cause for shame. So the film colony managed by making its own rules. One recent trend, as in the case of Smita Patil, was the husband with two “wives.” The pioneer of the custom was Hema Malini, once known as the Ice Maiden of the industry, who decided, just before giving birth to her lover’s child, that she had “married” him in the eyes of God and that his other wife was acceptable to her. “It’s not legally all right,” she admitted to me. “But in my conscience, I married him and then had the baby.” We were talking in the living room of her suburban Bombay home, an expanse of marble, mirrors, servants and guards. Her “husband” was Dharmendra, the Indian he-man, who divided his time between his wife and her. “At least I’m open,” Hema Malini said. “I’m not saying, ‘We’re just friends.’ ”