Spare a thought for Bipasa Basu. "For her maiden foray into Hindi films, slim-as-a-reed model Bipasa Basu has been asked to gain weight by directors...."1 Contrast this with Kate Winslet's observation in Film Review: "Society towards women and how women look or should look is completely screwed up now. The great advantage now is that women are now allowed to have big boobs. All women want big boobs, so it's like, finally they are realising that we're supposed to have boobs. And beneath the large boobs we're supposed to have stick-thin bodies. This is driving me crazy."2
In South Asia, the ideal feminine beauty has always been, as the Indian poet Dom Moraes put it,
Ample of breast, your sexual avatar3
with all the extra kilos that involves. Consequently, the South Asian actress has never had to experience the neurosis of which Kate Winslet complains. The local audience expects a moderately – and uniformly - 'plump' heroine. Why the demand for fat here and for stick-thin bodies there?
The representation of the female form over the centuries in the West has evolved.. One of the first images that comes to mind is Rubens' Bathsheba at the Fountain (or perhaps Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath). To quote from the book of Samuel: "And it came to pass at an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and inquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?"4 Well, David desired Bathsheba and sent her husband to battle so that he would be killed. Rubens' painting captures the moment when David looked down on Bathsheba and desired her to the exclusion of everything else. And Bathsheba is a fleshy woman in the painting, her physical charm overflowing the canvas. Or take Dominique Ingres' The Odalisque. She is an ample woman, looking over her shoulder, and exposing to the viewer her substantial derriere.
It is only when we come to the realism of Jean Francois Millet, for instance, that we start looking at the European female as she really was. Or take Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters. Men and women there are equally lean – lean and hungry. And the Impressionists made it a point to record everything they saw as they saw it – including women. Gone, then, are the generous backsides and the massive hips. We see the working class woman of Europe as she really was. Skinny.
Today, things have been turned around. Katarzyna Kozyra, a Polish artist, slipped a camera into her handbag and shot pictures of women in a bathhouse. The pictures were, as The Economist put it, "curiously reminiscent of Rembrandt".5 The women were heavy, not the slim-as-a-reed models on the catwalks. In America, more than one-fifth of the population is obese. In 1999, 20% of Britons were obese, compared with 7% in 1980!6 When Rubens was painting, only the elite could afford to be overweight – or obese.
According to National Geography senor writer, Cathy Newman, "eating disorders are primarily a disease of women". She quotes Emily Kravinsky, medical director at the Renfrew Center in Philadelphia, as saying: "...the distance between the cultural idea of what we would like to look like and the reality of what we actually look like is becoming wider. If Marilyn Monroe walked into Weight Watchers today, no one would bat an eye. They'd sign her up".7
The ideal has always rejected the real. And the masses have always represented the latter. European art gradually shifted away from the ideal to the real, and the dimension of woman underwent a transformation. But while artists insisted on seeing things as they are, most people wanted a new ideal – a rejection of the real. The cleavage gave way to the collarbone.
So far, so clear. In the developed world, the average woman is overweight, so the average actress and model is skin-and-bones. But Bipasa Basu above is Indian. And the average Indian woman is far from obese. That her transition to the big screen should require the addition of extra kilos cannot come as a surprise. After all, the average Indian man – and woman, for that matter – does not want reality reflected on the silver screen, just like his/her American counterpart. But how do we explain the figure on the catwalk? For explain her we must, since the ideal of feminine beauty in the Indian subcontinent still clings to that outlined centuries ago in The RatiRahasya (Secrets of Love):
She in whom the following signs and symptoms appear is called a Padmini. Her face is pleasing as the full moon; her body, well clothed with flesh, is soft as the Shiras or mustard flower, her skin is fine, tender and fair as the yellow lotus, never dark colored. Her eyes are bright and beautiful as the orbs of the fawn, well cut, and with reddish corners. Her bosom is hard, full and high; she has a good neck; her nose is straight and lovely, and three folds or wrinkles cross her middle - about the umbilical region.8
In fact every one of the italicised features are to be found on the person of the exquisite Bipasa Basu in her film debut in Ajnabee (2001). But, to repeat, how do we explain the figure on the catwalk?
Since 1990, slimming centres have proliferated in South Asia. That their proliferation should coincide with the onset of globalization in these parts might strike the fanciful as more than a coincidence. And fancy would be correct here. For, although Indians and Bangladeshis have lived for decades with the images of western actresses – slim-as-a-reed – still, we have never encountered them in advertisements for the product at the same time as the product itself (although in Fiji, according to Dr. Anne Becker, three years after the introduction of TV, 15 per cent of the girls she was studying had tried vomiting in order to lose weight9). That is to say, Cindy Crawford and the Omega watch have never occurred simultaneously; Star TV and 'the bazooka' had never met before. The desirable product and the desirable body then somehow got confused. Result: a series of Indian girls winning beauty pageants throughout the world. For India has always had its beauty contest, only it used to be called "Bollywood".
Advertisers have long been familiar with the technique called "depth advertising". The term itself became famous – or infamous – with the book The Hidden Persuaders.10 The book uncovered how every discipline, and especially psychology, was being used to make people buy more, since logical persuasion was useless for products were identical. Therefore, the appeal had to be made, not to the rational, but to the irrational side of the consumer. And what was more irrational than anxiety? Hidden fears were systematically preyed upon by advertisers in the western world. Now, it is just possible that what is at work in women's minds when they see western images being used to sell products is the picture of The Desirable Woman. The Desirable Woman competes for her husband's attention, just as the desirable product competes for his cash. (The element of depth, here, was probably an accident – one doubts if slimming centers were deliberately pushing slim models atop cars!) In Bangladesh today, luxury car exhibitions inevitably display vehicles with a pair of models hanging inanely around. Or take the Auto Expo 2000. The annual automobile fair at Delhi's Pragati Maidan employs some of the city's leading female models as hostesses. At the Piaggio stall, for instance, the glamorous Joey Matthews and Miss India-World 1998 Annie Thomas provided the embellishment to the vehicles.11 The vehicles, of course, are every man's desire. But what about the lady in the pillion? The nearest slimming centre will help fend off the competition.
For the first time, we have begun to use local women to sell things.
The elite-mass division was not a product of globalisation – it has always existed. What greater market-orientation has done is to target products - including movies - more closely to specific groups. The difference between a film and an Omega wristwatch or a washing machine is that the former can embody values, while the latter do not. Bipasa Basu has to gain weight for the silver screen because there she is closer to the masses, the 'real India'; as a model, she need not pay them any heed: it is only the elite who watch. And yet there are actresses who are able to make their slender waistlines a unique selling point even in movies, since the movie market is becoming as fragmented as the product market. Aishwarya Rai is as slim on screen as she was when beauty queen! She caters to the upper end of the market – the non-resident Indians and resident elite – while at the bottom end, in films like Dacait, actresses must be big and busty!
The representation of women's bodies, then, has undergone a transformation in India. In C-grade films, heroines are still plump, revealing the reality of an undernourished mass. However, in A-grade films, there has been a tendency for heroines to be as slim as their western counterparts. This is due to globalisation.
Anil Kapoor says: "Earlier we used to be scared about whether a film would run in the B and C class centres in India. Now who cares about that Rs.50-60 lakh? The overseas market can fetch crores and they want sensible, good films".
Good question. Who cares about that Rs. 50 – 60 lakh? Well, most of India apparently. In early 2000, the C-grade blockbuster Munnibai (of which Dacait is one of the many replicas), produced and directed by Kanti Shah, sold for Rs. 10 lakh a territory, and went on to gross 1 crore12 across India. Since then, a host of similar movies – starring Mithun Chakravarty and, more recently, Dharmendra – have cashed in. These movies cost Rs.10-30 lakh, so small distributors who cannot afford big titles find them accessible.13And, as one would expect, the heroines in these movies are large, overweight women – the antithesis of the average Indian female. In Bangladesh, where the two classes have never gone to the same movie theatre together, the popular heroine is similarly well endowed.
Indeed, in the India of the Nehru dynasty, there was a consensus as to how heavy an Indian woman should be. In the blockbuster Inquilab (1984), Sri Devi – then at the height of her fame - conformed absolutely to the standard of beauty set out above in The RatiRahasya. It was the same story with Jaya Bhaduri and Hema Malini in the seminal film, Sholay (1975). What happened in India was that a superficial tie – the Nehru dynasty – had been holding the classes together. The tie loosened. In Bangladesh, there never had been a tie.
As Harvard anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah has observed: "In India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, the attempt to realise the nation-state on a Western European model has virtually failed. The nation-state conception has not taken deep roots in South Asia or generated a wide-spread and robust participatory 'public culture' that celebrates it in widely meaningful ceremonies, festivals, and rituals".14
The national imagination in South Asia has openly split along class lines (and other lines, as well). The representation of the female form suffers from the same national schizophrenia.
Notes:
1 India Today, January 24, 2000, p 74
2 Film Review, Special 2000 – 2001 Preview, p 33
3 Dom Moraes, "John Nobody", The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, eds. Richard Ellman and Robert O. Clair (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), p 1369
4 II Samuel 11: 2,3
5 The Economist, February 3 2001, p 94
6 The Economist, December 15 2001, p. 84
7 The Enigma of Beauty, National Geographic, January 2000, p. 116
8 Quoted in Sir Richard Burton's Preface to The Kama Sutra
9 The Enigma of Beauty, p. 113
10 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (London: Penguin Books, 1963)
11 India Today, January 24, 2000, p 74
12 100,000 rupees = 1 lakh; 1,000,000 rupees = 1 crore
13 India Today, November 20th, 2000, p 68
14 Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1996), p 264
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