Whiteness in Mumbai films

Western Whiteness is new to Indian films. While some actresses, such as Alice Patten (Rang De Basanti) and Antonia Bernath (Kisna) have played a few significant roles, most are relegated to being backup or item song dancers, writes Shakuntala Rao

Sulochana, Nadira and Helen (bottom), often portrayed as Anglo-Indians, combined their sex appeal with seeming alien cultural norms.

The proliferation of White Western women in Bollywood films has been gradual. While Indianised Whiteness had always existed (where heroines were expected to be lighter-skinned than most Indians), Western Whiteness is new to Indian films. While some actresses, such as Alice Patten (Rang De Basanti) and Antonia Bernath (Kisna), have gotten a few meaty roles, most are relegated to being backup or item song dancers, or to cater to the libidinous interest of the heros. No matter how they appear on screen, they are characterised by their sexual excess.

In Mumbai films, actresses like Sulochana, Nadira and Helen historically straddled between the exotic, erotic and Whiteness, often portrayed as Anglo-Indians, combined their sex appeal with seeming alien cultural norms. The push of globalisation has taken the White exotic/erotic image further. Whiteness continues to be exotic/erotic even as the films have relocated to spaces where, theoretically, Whiteness is the norm. An entire film can take place in Canada, Australia or the US with the White women—most frequently a blonde—appearing only to attract the sexual attention of the Indian hero. Take a film like Yash Chopra’s Nikki N Neal, where the hero Neal (played by the non-talent Uday Chopra) is constantly propositioned by one White woman after another. He appears on the screen with these women in various levels of undress; his dialogues with them are limited to "Hello baby" or "Give me a kiss". These women are all "floozies" who are sexually promiscuous and willing to strip at the slightest pretext.

"The history of colonialism gave us the concept of the memsahib," writes Indrani Sen in her book Women and Empire: Representations in the writing of British India, "whose beauty and virtue had to be protected from the barbaric masculinity of the native men." Bollywood’s revenge is to turn the memsahib into a slut where her bikini top is the focus of cinematic gaze.

What is interesting about these representations is the absence of White western men. They appear infrequently on the screen and when they do, they disappear after awarding the Indian heros with "million dollar contracts" for obscure business transactions. They rarely seem to be the object of affection of either White or Indian women. So, while White women’s sexual presence is exaggerated, these films eliminate the "threat" and competition from the White man.

These films are reminiscent of Hollywood’s success in the 1930s and 1940s, which came with the representation of exotic locales and peoples. The question of realism was never at issue, or an interest in portraying foreign societies authentically, but the films were engaged in the quest for the picturesque. Violent, comical or merely amorphous, the native men and women were portrayed as inferior to Americans— and marginal to the story. Who can forget Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s 1942 classic, Casablanca, a film set in Morocco but without a single Moroccan character that was not a bumbling waiter or a street urchin?

Fifty years later, Bollywood weaves its own post-colonial fantasy. Now the memsahib is the object of Indian male’s sexual desires (just as the colonialists feared) and the sahib has been written out of the script.