Bollywood For Beginners: Part 7

Note: This series was originally posted to my Bollywood blogspot blog and represents the cumulation of the wisdom of a decade or so spent in the Bollywood trenches. It would have last been edited in about 2014.

Bollywood for Beginners 7

Bollywood Character Archetype: The Vamp

If heroines are like shooting stars, twinkling briefly, demurely in the spotlight, vamps are supernovas, demanding the audience's attention in an explosion of what can politely only be called oomph. With their brazen attitudes, revealing outfits, and oomph, vamps were the funhouse image of the traditional heroine but the role has sadly fallen out of favor as Bollywood heroines strip down to more and more revealing outfits--and are less and less willing to cede the “sexy” tag to female competition. But before the heroine become so sexualized, it was the vamp who put her adult sexuality on display for the audience. Vamps didn’t trade in the coquettish and virginal charm of the heroine, they were temptresses, extremely confident in their sexuality and usually projecting enough exaggerated feminine charm to be able to compete on Ru Paul’s Drag Race. When these women teased the heroes with sex, there was no question that they would and could deliver eagerly. 

While the vamp and heroine were sometimes shoved into a Madonna/Whore dichotomy by lazy scriptwriters, the vamp wasn’t always a bad girl, though she was always sexy. By definition, a vamp was never going to get the hero but sometimes she got a happy ending with the hero’s comic sidekick or a noble death. Filmmaker O.P. Ralhan, for example, was always one to give a vamp a fair shake and some screen time. In his excellent Talash (“The Search,” 1969), the vamp gets her own tragic backstory, as well as a real romance and in his Paapi (“The Sinner,” 1977), the vamp and heroine actually become good friends.

But if even they weren’t necessarily the good-girl and bad-girl, in the very early days of Bollywood, vamps were the opposite of the wholesome heroines in one very important way: vamps were not coded as Indian. The reasons for this are rooted in the colonial experience and the fight for independence. The noble Indian woman had been one of the symbols of the independence movement (the Oscar-winning film Mother India, 1958, is perhaps the most famous example) and if vamps were fair skinned and “exotic”, the men of India didn’t have to risk fantasizing over the noble, elevated Indian woman. Actresses like Helen, who was half-French, half-Burmese or Nadira, an Iraqi Jew, were tapped to play the Westernized Miss Rubys and Miss Kittys, while homespun heroines played Sana, Pooja, and Asha. With vamps, filmmakers could add razzle-dazzle while also protecting the moral values of the new nation. It wasn’t until 1970 that the first major Hindu vamp, Bindu, was introduced.

Heroines wore traditional outfits like saris and salwaar-kameez and kept fully covered from collar bone to ankle; vamps wore spangly tights and miniskirts or elaborate, brightly colored evening dresses and accessorized with peacock feathers, glitter, and blond wigs. Heroines pined stoically (sometimes through song) for the heroes to realize their true feelings while vamps actively seduced. A heroine might do something bad for the sake of her family--like infiltrate a gang of thieves--but vamps had the freedom to do bad things for selfish romance desire or for personal profit. But, ironically, perhaps, for the moral guardians, vamps from that early era are much more fondly remembered than the heroines they lost to. Audiences grew to love these vamps over the span of their careers. Helen, considered the best of the best, vamped her way through three generations of heroes before turning to character roles. She performed one of her most famous item songs, "Yeh Mera Dil” from Don (1978) when she was about 40 years old. Virginity is lost early but sensuality knows no age limits--or gender limits. Helen received fan mail from both men and women.

The vamp is sometimes--but not always--responsible for the item number, a song-and-dance showstopper like Helen’s “Yeh Mera Dil.” But when there is no vamp (or the actress playing her isn’t a dancer) filmmakers turn to “item girls”, who saunter into a film for one song and leave. Unlike vamps, item girls are still very much in use today, so it’s worth spending a few words on them. The easiest way to understand item girls is like the guest spots that bands sometimes do on TV shows. Audiences and even the characters within a film will know the item girls, just like when Uncle Jesse calls up the Beach Boys to come play a song on Full House, and the characters and audience all know the Beach Boys. And just like the Beach Boys never stick around to see how DJ and Stephanie resolve a fight, item girls are similarly unconcerned with the plot of the film.

These days, while item girls are still very much in vogue, the vamp only rarely makes an appearance and when she does it’s usually as the bitchy and high maintenance third point of a romantic triangle. The high-quality vamping petered out during the 1980s but Miss Ruby and Miss Kitty of days gone by are still alive in the imagination--and on YouTube.