Remembering the Cabaret

The cabaret sequence was air-dropped into Indian films without any real reason for its existence. To be sure, there were a few odd restaurants having the equivalent of a floor show in a handful of towns, but it was hardly as if the cabaret was in any way a part of the real or even imagined life of an Indian in the 60s.?

When it came to the cabaret, it was if we were happy to accept as matter-of-fact truth, a representation that could not have been farther from reality. The idea of a young woman in revealing western clothes slithering sinuously as she went from table to table while couples decorously went about having their dinner was not an everyday experience in India.?

The classic depiction had a dancer, who was also a character in the film and not just a token presence as became the case in more recent movies, usually with a name like Rita 0r Suzie or Rosie. The cabaret was aways a performance in a film; it was explicitly an act of fantasy within the fantasy called a Hindi film, so as to underline that it lay outside the pale of societal norms. The film song on the other hand, despite being as fantastic and unreal a depiction, was deemed to be within the acceptable social construct. That’s how?sanskaricouples behaved- by signing songs aching with chaste desire across valleys.

The early pioneers in this area were Cuckoo and Helen, both safely Anglo-Indian. The need to keep the cabaret sequence within the bounds of society while locating it at an identifiable distance was served using ‘outsiders’ who were not quite outside. The action took place inside a restaurant or a night club with formally attired people- no masses of lecherous men heaving with lust as became the norm later. An above-board exhibition of sexuality over soup and salad.?

Unabashedly sexual, the cabaret song undoubtedly was. There was no pretence, no poetic mooning about aanchal and zulfein, much more about the business end of things-?reshmi ujala hai makhmali andhera, piya tu ab to aaja?with its?tan ki jwala thandi ho jaye, aise gale laga le, that sort of thing.?

All the display of desire was on part of the woman. She was the social deviant, brimming over with sexual energy, directing it at the hero. The protocol followed was for the hero to take on an air of bemused indifference as if he was totally unmoved by what was happening. His role was to be impervious to the evocation of frank desire and to reject the woman’s advances while continuing to enjoy the spectacle on offer. As a colleague of mine put it, the woman performed for the man but he performed his gentlemanliness for the audience- it was as if it was the man who is in some kind of?purdah, given his need to visibly stay within socially decreed bounds. Underneath this performance lurked a larger fear- 0f uninhibited female sexuality.?

The cabaret imbued the woman with sexual agency. She lived her life on her terms, smoking, drinking wearing what she wanted and generally having a good time. Unlike the heroine who was bound up in a surfeit of social expectations, the cabaret dancer, often the vamp could give us a taste of what of freedom could like- although it was framed explicitly using a lens of strong disapproval.

In a society where acknowledgement of desire and the sexual instinct was repressed, the cabaret became an outlet that came accompanied by many safety features. And while the vamp usually met with an unhappy end, either by going to prison or more heroically perishing in her attempt to save the hero after whom she had pined, what she allowed for had nothing to do with the fate her character met.?

Often, we tend to think of what happens to a character as a kind of ‘moral of the story’. Women who are sexually expressive and live life on their own terms come to a bad end, suggesting that the reason why this trope is used is to reinforce conventional social values. While this is not untrue, this is only part of the story. What such depictions do is to gradually insinuate apparently deviant behaviour as part of our imagined landscape of reality. The ability to represent female desire, no matter what its cinematic outcome was by itself a step forward. The Overton window, the frame that determines what is socially acceptable, shifts.

The cabaret dancer’s freedom was quite unlike that of her courtesan counterpart. The mujra attracted a male gaze directed at her was far more commanding, for the unlike the cabaret who evoked fear through her expressive sexuality, the courtesan in films operated within a much tighter social frame. While many scholars have argued that the courtesan in real life did not always constitute a tragic and passive figure, the cinematic depiction as exemplified by the mujra made no such allowances.?

The passing of the cabaret sequence has a lot to do with the fact that sexual expressiveness began to take on a more mainstream role in cinema and the need to construct a fantasy theatre like the night club began to recede. More significantly perhaps was the fact that in the 70s and the 80s heroines began to do what the vamp was needed for earlier.?

The item song that had become a mandatory part of recent cinema follows the arc the cabaret but is fundamentally different. Here again the sexual instinct is located in the woman, but the settings are far from being decorous and the male reaction is often that of frenzied lust rather than coy indifference. The item song is a complex form that requires its own examination but the only similarity it shares with the cabaret is that it creates room for the evocation of desire in films, an area which on the whole, continues to be??represented awkwardly.?

(This is a version of an article that has appeared previously in the Times of India)