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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  Zeenat Aman: Indian cinema’s first It girl
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Zeenat Aman: Indian cinema’s first It girl

Zeenat broke the conventions and showed good girls could also wear shorts, and good men could fall in love and stay in love with them

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This happened about seven or eight years ago. The Kingfisher Airlines (it still existed!) flight from Mumbai to Delhi had just landed, and passengers (or guests, as Kingfisher termed them) in the business class were getting their carry-on baggage down from the overhead lockers. I had been aware of the people in the row in front of me: an elegant lady in her 50s, her partner,who seemed much younger, and her two teenage sons who doted on their mother, making her listen to the latest music they had downloaded on their iPods, calling the stewardess to address the slightest discomfort she may or may not have been feeling. They were good boys, and their mother a gracious lady.

A man who had been sitting behind me and was now eagerly trying to push his way through to disembark into the rat race, got excited. He was almost a caricature of an investment banker, utterly—perhaps unforgivably—stereotypical in his looks and appearance. He had salt-and-pepper hair, carefully groomed and cut; he was wearing a dark suit with a paisley (with a subtle twist) tie; and he had his light little Sony Vaio laptop strapped on as his life support system (he may have also been carrying a half-finished bottle of Gatorade). That Vaio was surely bursting with PowerPoint presentations on the benefits and downsides of a merger/acquisition, with each slide linked to super-complex Excel worksheets.

He looked like the sort of man who took the Mumbai-Delhi flight in the morning, did his work, had salad for lunch, made it back home by night, wrote a detailed mail to his boss in Singapore on the day’s developments, and then watched a National Geographic programme on puffins (up to his capacity defined by the demands of his to-do list, his personal goals dictated by a pantheon of management gurus), before going to bed.

This man, in his mid-30s, I would guess, called a stewardess and asked, “Is that Zeenat Aman?" She said yes. “Wow, man!" he said, and in front of my eyes (and the stewardess’s), his much-nurtured, carefully crafted million-dollar face rewound to the visage of a nerdy schoolboy—thick glasses, not adept at sports, forced by his parents to write with his right hand when he was a natural left-hander, better at math than his teachers and bullied by the bigger boys for that. All the cloaks he had stitched assiduously and shrouded himself with as masterly strategy and destined vengeance fell apart.

Zeenat Aman!

Wow, man!

Maybe he muffed up that deal he was supposed to crack that day.

Or maybe he swung a better one than his bosses expected.

Zeenat Aman, at that time, was certainly middle-aged, and would have retired from films before our investment banker was allowed by his parents to go watch the movies that he craved.

Clearly, the aura was undiminished.

What makes Zeenat Aman special? She was never—going by the Stardust school of ranking—No. 1 among Hindi film heroines. That mantle, as far as my understanding goes, passed from Hema Malini to Rekha to Sridevi, while Zeenat was still a working lady. No one can accuse her of being a great actress (nor her contemporaries, unless you count Rekha as the repeatedly abandoned tawaif weighed down by a quintal of jewellery). But, I think, more than any actress of her generation, audiences went to the cinemas to watch her. They wanted to see Zeenat.

They went to watch her. Not the film per se.

Obviously, many of them were sex-deprived wankers, but in those pre-liberalization pre-Internet days, you could hardly blame them, could you?

Zeenat Aman barged into my consciousness when I was a child. I got to watch Hare Rama Hare Krishna many years later, a mediocre Dev Anand-directed film, but Dum Maro Dum was inescapable at the time the film was released. It was playing somewhere all the time—on the way to school, on the way back, even wafting from speaker systems celebrating some local festivals while you were in geography class.

And then there was this more subversive little ditty by Usha Uthup—a stroke of genius by R.D. Burman, but confusing and disorienting for pre-teen idle schoolboys—I-I loo-o-ove you, ya dabba dooba ya dabba dooba dooba do. That throaty voice and that tune that totally broke away from everything we had heard before in Hindi cinema had us captivated. So captivated that Dum Maro Dum and I Love You were banned in our homes.

But what we got was not the song or the singer or the music director, and certainly not Dev Anand—we saw pictures of this new actress in giant pink sunglasses, and we identified her with the general moral outrage, and we loved her. She was a hippie. She was something else. And hippies, at that time, 1971, were dime a dozen in Calcutta, looking for nirvana or the post-industrial-consumerist society or whatever. They looked quite fascinating, but also wasted—the drugs had addled them and most of them were inarticulate, hardly ever managing a sentence longer than “You know, like, man, far out… Shambhuuuu".

But this was an Indian girl doing a hippie thing, and boy, she had entered forbidden territory and she looked so attractive! (I don’t think the word “sexy" had made its way into my vocabulary yet.) She smacked of the forbidden, but also of freedom and the way things should be.

Zeenat Aman had apparently appeared in two films before Hare Rama Hare Krishna—Hulchul and Hungama—but they sank without a trace, and she was thinking of going back to Germany, where her mother had settled down with her stepfather, when Dev Anand spotted her and convinced her to stay back.

Hare Rama Hare Krishna was released in December 1971. The other hit films of that year, the Internet informs me, were Haathi Mere Saathi (Rajesh Khanna with an elephant and Tanuja), Mera Gaon Mera Desh (a rip-off of the Hollywood movie Shane, remembered today, if at all, for the song Chhor diya jaye, ya maar diya jaye), Dushman (Rajesh Khanna, Mumtaz, totally forgotten), Caravan (Jeetendra, Asha Parekh, notable only for that immortal R.D. Burman-Helen song-and-dance number Piya tu ab to aa jaa) and Amar Prem (remake of a Bengali film based on perhaps the worst novel written by a great Bengali writer, but with wonderful songs, again—astonishingly—composed by R.D. Burman; that must have been some year for him!).

All run-of-the-mill stuff, really. And Zeenat Aman’s character was not the “heroine" of the film—the concept of the “heroine" being quite well-defined as the love interest of the hero. A few bold actresses had, of course, managed to draw attention to themselves in films where they were not the hero’s love—the foremost example would be the young Waheeda Rehman in CID—but these cases were rare. In Hare Rama Hare Krishna, Zeenat Aman’s character was the sister of the hero, with Mumtaz providing the love interest. No one remembers Mumtaz in Hare Rama Hare Krishna. Zeenat Aman was the fulcrum of the film. And she howitzered the audience’s minds.

Then came Yaadon Ki Baaraat (after their success with the old-time-Disneyesque Haathi Mere Saathi, Salim-Javed were trying something bigger, something that matched their ambition and talent), where Zeenat had the lead female role.

I have a confession to make here. I have watched Yaadon Ki Baaraat countless times—or parts of it at least, and I never ever get tired of watching Tariq call out to Zeenat, “O laal kapre wali memsahab", during the song Aapke kamre mein koi rahta hai, and she going up to the stage in a short red dress. And no one from my generation—born in the 1960s—growing up in a certain milieu, can hear two wine glasses tinkling, as Zeenat tinkled, without having our heads summarily intruded by the song Chura liya hai tumne jo dil ko.

I may have been talking too long about her in terms of the songs she appeared in. But I loved—and still love, and shall continue to love—the way she looks in that song, and the white jumpsuit she wears.

What was her appeal? She acted in dozens of films, in many of which the makers were only interested in the fact that she was not perturbed by showing off more of her body than other “heroines".

Throughout her excellently successful career, Hema Malini wore a “skin", body-hugging flesh-coloured shapewear that pretended to be her epidermis, whenever she had to show her arms or her tummy. There is nothing wrong with that at all. But Zeenat, I suppose, couldn’t get the thing about “skin". Why, when you have your own body, and you are perfectly comfortable with it?

Photo: Hindustan Times
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Photo: Hindustan Times

My next Zeenat moment happened—I had still, totally unreasonably, not reached my teens—when there was a big uproar in the colony in Calcutta where we used to live. A young man—he must have been 19 or 20—had gone missing and the parents were in a state. He had left his house in the morning without sharing any particular objective with his family, and many hours had passed. He had not come back. The parents went hysterical in public, a crowd gathered, much advice was shouted, muttered and discussed (this was, of course, par for the course in Calcutta). The police—completely disinterested, because they knew how 99% of these cases work out—were called in.

At around seven in the evening, the prodigal son returned, to be startled out of his mind at the sight of the throng that was baying for his blood, and weeping for it too. The public mood oscillated between a need for retribution and a surrender to much-delayed relief. He explained his long disappearance. He had gone to watch a film. He had stood in the queue which turned unruly after some time, he had fought through the mob, managed to get a ticket for the show that was the one after the noontime show he had planned to watch, and enjoyed the film. The film was Manoranjan. Translated into English: Entertainment.

I watched Manoranjan many years later, when I was in my late 20s. Directed by Shammi Kapoor, it is supposed to be a remake of the Billy Wilder film Irma La Douce (which I have not seen), about a sweet sex worker and a policeman who is in love with her. Today, a Mahesh Bhatt-produced film on the same theme would hardly get any media coverage beyond what the film’s publicity budget, quality or box office success deserves. But in 1974, Manoranjan was big news. And it was all about Zeenat Aman. There was nothing else about the film that anyone was interested in talking about.

And what everyone was talking about was that Zeenat had stripped down to her bra and panties in some scene in the film.

I remember wondering—and I still wonder—what the big brouhaha was about. Sharmila Tagore had appeared in a bikini in Filmfare many years before. Every Hindi film at that point of time had a “cabaret" number or a vamp who went around ridiculously underclothed. What was the difference between a two-piece swimsuit and undergarments that every woman wears? But, apparently, there was a big difference—and Zeenat Aman had crossed some line drawn somewhere, at some time, by somebody, or bodies.

The 1970s were perhaps the worst decade for post-Independence India. Indira Gandhi was on a rampage, cynically corrupting every arm of the state, fooling the people with the disgustingly sham and self-serving idea of “socialism" which was only aimed at keeping the vast majority of our countrymen poor. When that didn’t work, she imposed the Emergency and jailed everyone in sight. What is never mentioned about those dark Emergency days is that Hollywood films were either banned or censored to meaninglessness. All we got were Soviet films.

(The lady herself, Indira Gandhi, would watch American movies at her home—special screenings, just for the prime minister. Trust me, I have eyewitnesses.)

She was thrown out by the Indian people in 1977, but what we got in her stead was a jumble of long-frustrated men, all of whom wanted to be top dog. That government collapsed in three years, but what characterized the decade was the wholly dishonest puritanism that the state imposed on us.

Kissing, the most natural and—let me use that word—secular of all human interactions, was not allowed to be shown in Indian movies. As the lips came close to locking, the director cut away to shots of birds, bees and flowers. The remains of the day still remain. So, we have cheap mainstream media tom-tomming Emraan Hashmi—with a certain amount of tut-tut dishonest lewdness—as the “serial kisser", because there is a presumption that he will kiss his “heroine" on the lips in every movie.

Why not? Why shouldn’t Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan or Aamir Khan do it also? Why shouldn’t Deepika Padukone or Katrina Kaif or Vidya Balan?

In that era of sanctimonious patriarchy, Zeenat Aman stood alone among our film stars.

She was sexy, and she knew that being sexy was no crime.

Of course, she flaunted it, and the market demanded it from her, and she knew that. No one went to watch her films for her acting, they went to watch her. And yes, she took off more clothes more times than any other film star of her generation. Even today, when Kareena Kapoor works on reducing her weight to appear in a bikini in Tashan, or Deepika Padukone wears a two-piece swimsuit in some film, the media goes high-octane. Zeenat Aman did it regularly, with aplomb and without making a fuss about it. She shed almost all her clothes in many films—Heera Panna, Great Gambler, Qurbani, Dostana, etc.

But Zeenat Aman always remained Zeenat—modern, Westernized, liberated, sophisticated. She was the woman who had seen the world, studied abroad, and was unfettered by the sexist hypocrisy that ruled our popular culture. Her hips did not lie. Priyanka Chopra spent a lot more energy shaking her booty in Khaike paan Benaraswala in Farhan Akhtar’s remake of Don than Zeenat did in the original. Watch both versions of the song. Zeenat is miles ahead, with a casual economical sexiness that can only come purely naturally.

Photo: Hindustan Times

And she was lovable. Anyone who has watched Qurbani at a certain point of his life would have to have a heart sculpted from granite to come away from the film without falling in love with her. Of course, director Feroz Khan showed off her body at the slightest excuse, but her glowing smile and wonderfully alive eyes quite literally lit up the screen. She was magic.

At which point, we have to come to that low watermark of sexploitation, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, an atrocity that Raj Kapoor committed, shamelessly showing the finger to all logic, decency and aesthetic sense. There was absolutely no reason why Zeenat Aman’s character wore hardly any clothes throughout the film, and when she did wear some clothes, her blouses had been minimized to the extent that the bottom of her breasts were popping out. The film itself is intolerably bad, and Kapoor managed to achieve what would have seemed superhuman to anyone with less lust—he made Zeenat’s sexiness unattractive, by pushing it into your face relentlessly for three hours.

Sex appeal is born from hints, glimpses, provocation, expectation, surprise. In Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Raj Kapoor robbed Zeenat Aman of all that and just thrust her body all over the screen till you wanted to look away in embarrassment. (The English title of the film is Love Sublime. A more appropriate moniker would have been Lechery Unlimited.)

But Zeenat survived. Satyam Shivam Sundaram was released in 1978, and she continued her reign as a successful actress for another decade. What, however, is not spoken about is her lasting impact on Indian mainstream cinema. In her time, she was quite unique and broke new ground without acting coy or falsely abashed. She smashed the clichés and brought a boldness to the screen that had traditionally been a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, hush-hush feature of the film industry.

Hindi films had always used women’s bodies to get lusty men into the theatres, but usually coated with some pious pretention. Weather, for instance, had been an useful excuse for decades. It rained and saris got wet. Storms came and the winds nearly tore clothes away from bodies. Otherwise, it was always the villains’ molls who were given the job of dressing sexy. Zeenat Aman broke the conventions and showed that good girls could also wear shorts, and good men could fall in love and stay in love with them.

She brought female sexuality to the Indian screen with an honesty and frankness that had never been seen before. She did not need the artifice of rain. The hypocrisy that had traditionally characterized our films was unknown to her. She appeared, she glittered, she conquered hearts. And she had style and sophistication, quite unmatched at the time when she was in her heyday, and which appears even more impressive when we watch her movies today, with the bounteous benefit of hindsight.

Fashion comes and goes, but style is permanent. Zeenat Aman had that—a certain something that she carried as part of her, whether she was in the role of a medieval princess or a middle-class college girl. She presaged the modern urban Indian woman.

What if? is a game historians enjoy playing. What if Robert Clive’s small band of men had lost at Plassey? What if Hitler had pushed his forces to decimate the fleeing and helpless British at Dunkirk? What if Sachin Tendulkar’s parents had insisted that he paid more attention to his studies than his cricket?

Similarly, a question can be asked: What if Zeenat Aman had not caught Dev Anand’s eye and gone back to Germany after two failed films? One can confidently say that the story of Indian cinema would have been quite different.

Sandipan Deb is editorial director of Swarajyamag.com.

Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com.

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Published: 27 Jun 2015, 11:35 PM IST
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