Playing the ‘fallen woman’ on screen 

Rani Mukherjee’s saucy sex worker’s part in ‘Saawariya’ has so much heart! Sex workers aren’t meant to be sexy, and certainly not enigmatic, enchanting and poetic, like Nargis in Adaalat, Meena Kumari in Pakeezah and Rekha in Umrao Jaan. These women remained chaste and sublime - qualities defined by the songs and poetry that they sang and their pristine body language.

Times have certainly changed. The ‘fallen woman’ has gone from the sublime Chalte Chalte Yuhi Koi Mil Gaya Tha in ‘Pakeezah’ to the raunchy Bichua Dank Mare in Kalpana Lajmi’s Chingari to the songless, cheerless, airless whorehouse horror of Tabrez Noorani’s Love, Sonia.

Twenty years ago, the late and much-missed Kalpana Lajmi cast Sushmita Sen as a foul-talking streetwalker and declared, “If today I showed my heroine as a virgin-whore, people would laugh at me. I think those times when sex workers had to sob in a corner after being ‘touched’ by a man are long over.”

There was Aishwarya Rai doing a stately tawaif in JP Dutta’s grand fiasco Umrao Jaan. While Sushmita was a volcano in Chingari, Aishwarya was a gently–running stream whose undercurrents are discernible only to those who care to probe deep within the exquisite exterior.

Sush let it all hang out. Ash kept it bridled. Sushmita wasn’t the first feisty woman to play a prostitute so fearlessly. Remember the entire gallery of glorious women actors in Shyam Benegal’s Mandi? From Shabana Azmi as the brothel Madame to Smita Patil as her favourite inmate, to Neena Gupta, Soni Razdan and Ila Arun -- they put up award winning performances. Srijit Mukherjee’s Begum Jaan tried to do a Mandi in this millennium with limited success.

Sex workers aren’t easy to play. Even saying the word ‘randi’ was tough for Shabana Azmi in Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth. And yet, she knocked the lid off the coy-whore prototype in Mandi, Bhavna and Doosri Dulhan.

I vividly remember one sequence in Lekh Tandon’s Doosri Dulhan where Shabana narrated the tale of her induction into the oldest profession in the world. She tells Victor Banerjee how her mother had sold her to a pimp: “Apni sagee maa (my own biological mother), han?”

Like Shabana, Sushmita isn’t fearful of being emotionally naked on screen. To play a prostitute, you need to rip your soul apart and watch the fragments of your consciousness scatter across the universe of a film. Not too many actors can do that. When Sharmila Tagore played a street-walker in Gulzar’s resplendent Mausam, she had a tough time saying cuss-words and acting cheaply seductive. She won National Award for her efforts.

Her shock at being betrayed by her own flesh and blood remained the most palpable moment of expressed hurt for a woman of disrepute…until Sushmita Sen’s incredible performance in Chingari. The recesses of anger and angst, desperation and despondency that she expressed on screen were dismissed by some critics as “over-the-top” acting.

But for an actor to over-act, she first needs to know how to act. There’re so many actors who pass off their lazy languorous non-performances as “spontaneous acting”.

Sushmita in Chingari was a volcano. And a lot of that rage she expresses comes from within her. She has always had this volcanic effect on all her co-stars. If she managed to make Mithun insecure in Chingari, in an earlier film (which I won’t name), she was pitched against a formidable National Award-winning actress. Throughout the making of the film, the reputed actress would take the director to a corner to inquire not about her own lines but her co-star’s.

Kareena Kapoor didn’t. Though she was effervescent in the prostitute’s part in Chameli, somehow her exemplary effort went unrewarded. Could it be because she didn’t completely lose her urban inhibitions?

Namrata Shirodkar had that problem when she played a prostitute in Vaastav. “Every time I had to speak lines like ‘Chal kapde utar’, I would cringe. I told my director Mahesh Manjrekar I won’t do it. Thankfully, he helped me get over my inhibitions.

Every heroine, from Suchitra Sen in Mamta to Manisha Koirala in Market, has at one time or the other excelled as the ‘fallen woman’. The tale of the prostitute and the reformist-hero that Kalpana Lajmi tells in her remarkably enacted Chingari isn’t new to Hindi cinema.

Decades ago, Vyjayanthimala was the prostitute whom Sunil Dutt rehabilitated. The sex worker is no longer a coy, helpless creature of destiny. She stopped being a sob-story when 30 years ago, Rehana Sultan in Chetna and Zeenat Aman in Manoranjan played the self-respecting sex worker to perfection. The ‘fallen woman’ is more than redeemed in our films. Wonder when the quality of her life would improve in real life!