‘No Country for Old Women’: Female Aging in Bollywood

Introduction

Since their inception, films have for the most part tried to emphasise that it is essential to be youthful in order to ‘look’ significant on screen. For women, youthfulness lies in the charm of the female body; for men, it is embodied in masculinity that exudes from an amalgam of bodily charm, ‘manliness’ and the power of patriarchy. Like any older woman, aging female actors of Bollywood (as the Hindi film industry located in Mumbai is known), have often experienced what Susan Sontag calls ‘the double standard of aging’: when their bodies age, they also lose their femininity (Sontag, 1972, p. 31). Irrespective of whether an aging female actor acts her age or against her age, her presence on screen always runs the risk of falling prey to the ‘ungenerous gaze’ of the camera. In such a situation, the presence of an older female body has been categorically censured for lowering the aesthetic of a film scene. The wrinkles and disabilities, particularly of older women, could never be taken as a welcome presence in films. ‘The disintegrating ill or dying female body’, instead, ‘provides a model against which spectators can perform a self-assessment, reassuring themselves of their own wholeness by projecting their fears of ageing and death outward’ (Markson, 2003, p. 95). Further, Markson defines ‘[t]he portrayal of the older female body in film’ as ‘a masquerade’. While aging female actors ‘put on a look designed to make known information about the social status and personality of the character being played’ ‘this “look” may or may not resemble the real-life appearance of the individual performers’; the actor, at the same time, is ‘old and subject to the same fears about her own body going to pieces as does the character she plays’ (Markson, 2003, p. 99). Talking about aging actors in Euro-American culture, Swinnen opines that it is ‘the youth-oriented disposition of the Hollywood industry in terms of writing and casting, which makes professional longevity for film stars difficult to achieve’ (Swinnen, 2015, p. 73). So far as European cinema is concerned, it has been as disinterested as Hollywood in giving important roles to elders (Beugnet, 2006; Swinnen, 2015). Problematising this issue further, Swinnen says that female stars are more vulnerable to this kind of invisibility than their male counterparts because their careers hinge on how efficiently their bodies fit in the roles ‘that emphasise beauty and sexuality’ (Swinnen, 2015, p. 73). Beugnet relates this youth-oriented disposition in the moving-image-based works to the complicity between the growing culture of visual abjection and ‘a collective desire to erase the traces’ (Beugnet, 2012, pp. 258–259) of whatever is culturally shameful in the human body with the help of the digital. It is thus important to note that the European cinema, Bollywood and Hollywood have always had cohorts of women actors undergoing midlife transitions and being largely ‘invisible’ due to the predominance of the old–young binary in both academic and popular discourses.

The article has the following two objectives: (a) to provide a critical genealogy of aspects of female aging in the Indian context, which goes back to Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings and Hindi cinema in the colonial era, and (b) to study the representation of older women in postcolonial Bollywood.

Representations of Female Aging in Hindi Films: A Critical Genealogy

In India, the history of Hindi cinema is strongly connected to the history of the Indian nation-state. For the longest time, the voice of Bollywood has been the voice of the nation. In the beginning, there were primarily two kinds of films: first, mythological, and second, literature-based. Mythology and literature are two important sources used in the making of the Indian nation as an imagined community. During Christmas of 1910, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke had the opportunity to watch Life of Christ in Bombay (now Mumbai). Soon after watching the film, Phalke thought of making a film on Hindu gods and goddesses. The immediate vision that he had in his mind was this: ‘While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes, I was mentally visualising the Gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya’ (cited in Gangar, 2006, p. 16). Phalke described the effect of this vision on him in the following words: ‘I was gripped by a strange spell. Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?’ (Gangar, 2006). Phalke was actually seeing in moving pictures the huge possibility of mobilising the masses to inculcate the spirit of Indianness among them. Within three years, the filmmaker made India’s first silent feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913). At the time of its release, the film was presented as ‘an entirely Indian production by Indians’, thus envisaging ‘a new “swadeshi” industry or India’s “own industry”’ (Gangar, 2006) under colonial rule. In later years, Phalke came up with a number of films based on Indian mythology—Lanka Dahan (Lanka under Flames, 1917), Shri Krishna Janma (Birth of Shri Krishna, 1918) and Setu Bandhan (The Making of the Bridge, 1932).

While the films based on stories in Hindu religious texts aimed at catering to the collective aesthetic consciousness, another wave of films explored folktale and history after the introduction of sound, such as Alam Ara (1931), Shirin Farhad (1931), Insan-ya-Shaitan (1933), Prem Pariksha (1934) and Bharat-ki-Beti (1935). These films had imbibed much of their form from the declining Parsi theatre which was founded on the Persian mode of storytelling—dastangoi (in Persian, dastan means story). They inherited from Parsi theatre four basic elements of the dastan tradition—‘razm (warfare), bazm (assembly of singing, dancing and seducing), tilism (magical effect or artifact created by a sorcerer) and aiyyari (chicanery, trickery, disguise)’ (Vasudevan, 2011, p. 37). Interestingly, these dastan elements that appear initially in Parsi theatre and later in Hindi films, had originated from the dastan tradition of 19th century Lucknow (Vasudevan, 2011). ² Dastangoi was at first ‘an oral rather than spectacular form’ of storytelling (Vasudevan, 2011, p. 35). After the dastan tradition moved from Persia to Lucknow, it was ’substantially reinvented’—the transformation led to the emergence of ‘performative types who inhabited a universe driven by a repetitive dynamic, rather than one governed by a transformative conflict resolving logic’ (Vasudevan, 2011). It was these older aesthetic traditions that the courtesans of Lucknow, as Ruth Vanita observes, brought to Bombay and then played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Hindi film industry (Sahani, 2018).

While cinema turned out to be the most effective medium for legitimising and promoting Indian nationalism in Indian popular culture before as well as after India’s independence in 1947, it was the middle-aged women from tawaif ³ backgrounds who, to a great extent, determined how Hindi cinema would look—they taught the amateur actors and singers how to act, dance and sing in cinema. It was the migrant-but-wealthy highly-skilled middle-aged courtesans from Awadh (Fatma Begum, Jaddanbai, etc.) who enriched early Hindi cinema with their skills which encompassed kathak (a classical dance form), mujras (dance performances), the skills of ada (bodily expression), nakhda (feminine tantrum) and sawal-jawab (debate) perfected at qawwalis ⁴ and mushairas. ⁵ They taught actors/actresses how to sing dadras and thumris properly, and the ability to recite Urdu rekhti poetry and dastans (Bhasin, 2019; Thatra, 2016, pp.198–206). That is why Ruth Vanita calls tawaifs the ‘voice[s] of indigenous modernity’ (Vanita, 2017, p. 3), crediting them with an enormous contribution to the making of the aesthetic aspects of the cinema of the new nation. Fatma Begum set up her own film production house, Fatma Film, in 1926, when she was around 35 years old. While her daughters, Sultana and Zubeida, excelled as the heroines of silent cinema, Fatma directed films such as Bulbul-e-Paristan (1926), Heer Ranjha (1928) and Shakuntala (1929). Fatma kept acting in the films of Nanubhai and Homi Master even in her 40s (Rajadhyaksha & Willemen, 1998, p. 95). Jaddanbai, who was born in 1892, set up Sangeet Films in 1936. She wrote the script of Anjuman (1948) when she was in her 50s. Besides, she composed music for the films Talash-e-Haq (1935) and Raja Gopichand (1933) (Rajadhyaksha & Willemen, 1998, p. 110).

When one says that Hindi cinema has essentially been a national cinema, it raises a pertinent question: who personifies the Indian nation in Hindi cinema? In India, land or bhumi has always been deemed to be feminine in nature. When the concept of the Indian nation came into prominence, it was generally envisioned as either matribhumi (motherland) or janmabhumi (land of one’s birth). In such a situation, an Indian mother was obviously the chosen metaphor for representing the Indian nation. While the vision of the Indian nation as mother can be traced back to the last decades of the 19th century, when Raja Ravi Varma painted female figures from Hindu mythology, the figure of Mother India eventually took a concrete form with Abanindranath Tagore’s watercolour painting of Bharat Mata (1904–1905). Sumathi Ramaswamy writes that Mother India is occasionally represented as ‘a classical heroine in a fitted bodice and draped garments—a Pan-Indian style that became visible from the late nineteenth century in Ravi Varma’s canvases of female bodies, and in the calendar art that commercialized his many innovations’ (Ramaswamy, 2010, p. 65). Besides, most of the time, ‘as befitted her dominant persona as a homely matron, Mother India is shown demurely clad in a sari in the national style (sometimes called nivi) increasingly associated with the respectable middle-class, upper-caste Hindu woman’ (Ramaswamy, 2010, pp. 65–66). Mother India, on account of her origin from the Hindu iconographic tradition of divine females, is represented as a forever-young woman ‘clad in lush coloured silks and draperies’ (Ramaswamy, 2010, p. 65) possessing ‘filial affect’ (Ramaswamy, 2010, p. 9). Ramaswamy reads the figure of Bharat Mata as a palimpsest that retained features of idealised British femininity and Hinduism’s fierce warrior-goddesses but was self-consciously modelled on the ‘new woman’ of the late-19th-century bhadralok (native bourgeoisie) (Shah, 2011, p. 530).

Evolving Depictions of Aging Women in Hindi Cinema

In the early days of postcolonial India, older women in Hindi cinema were represented as strict matriarchs who took all the decisions of the family and acted as the custodians of the traditional values of home and hearth. She would often disapprove of the opinions and day-to-day attitude of her young educated daughter-in-law, who represented values adverse to the mother-in-law’s authority, and behaved rudely (Pande, 2019, p. 64). Some examples of such harsh mothers-in-law are Shanta (played by Lalita Pawar) in Gharana (1961, directed by S. S. Vasan), and Bhagmati (played again by Lalita Pawar who was typecast) in Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (1970, directed by V. Madhusudan Rao). Maltreating their daughters-in-law, these older women were of the opinion that ‘[a]n educated daughter-in-law [is] perceived as a threat to the authority of her mother-in-law’, for ‘she conform[s] less to the rules of deference expected by the older woman’ (Oldenburg, 2002, p. 38). Interestingly, this motif never completely vanished from Hindi cinema and again gained impetus in the middle of the 1980s. Thus the attachment to her son and fear of losing him to the daughter-in-law was quite evident in Mrs Dhanraj (played by Shashikala) in Ghar Ghar Ki Kahani (1988, directed by Kalpataru) and Mrs Kamla Bhandari (played by Bindu) in Biwi Ho To Aisi (1988, directed by J. K. Bihari, 1988) to name a few.

By the late 1960s, the sociopolitical dynamics in India began to change, as the traditional joint family system began to disintegrate gradually. Urbanisation and migration of younger generations to cities led to the emergence of middle-class nuclear families, where older parents moved from helm to margin. In the Hindi cinema of the1960s, aging mothers-in-law as shown in Sangam (1964), Neel Kamal (1968) and Sara Aakash (1969) dominated the household depending on ‘the reflected glory and authority of her husband—the Great Patriarch’. In the 1970s, the mother (played by Nirupa Roy and Sulochana Latkar) had ‘lost her husband early on in some tragic accident or a family vendetta-related war and turned into a widow in white, leading a celibate life’ and were portrayed as being dependent on her grown-up son (Pande, 2019, p. 67). Also, such mothers had begun ceding authority to the young daughter-in-law who held the potential to modernise the household. It was a matter of time before the evil mother-in-law of yesteryears disappeared altogether from Hindi films.

The evolution of the mother-in-law impacted the film industry and in time this figure began to lose its black-and-white avatar to reveal shades of grey in representations of the older woman in mainstream cinema. At the end of the 1970s, the mother-in-law regained some part of the ground that she had lost to the daughter-in-law. There were two reasons for this, the immediate one being the rise of directors like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee who departed from melodramatic cinema and tried to extract comedies out of the daily routine of the middle-class cosmopolitan family. Rather than preying on the conflict between modern and traditional values and ways of being, Mukherjee and Chatterjee tried to replenish the worn-out harmony between generations. Another influential factor was the constant political effort being made to portray the aging but educated and quite powerful Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as Mother India. These factors influenced the tendency to depict older women more sympathetically and to restore some of the prestige they had lost or even the praise they deserved. In these comedies,

the mother-in-law (played by an infinitely more sophisticated bunch of aging actors like Dina Pathak, Rohini Hattangadi, Pearl Padamsee and Leela Mishra) began to be portrayed as a stern but lovable disciplinarian, an iron-fisted matriarch, but one whose patina of misogyny was not permanent and would be worn down eventually by a good-natured and mischievous man and young woman, often the daughter-in-law. (Pande, 2019, p. 68)

An interesting example of such a representation is Nirmala Gupta (played by Dina Pathak) in Khoobsurat (1980), directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Nirmala is a matriarch who is a disciplinarian. She loves her family but expects every member of her joint family to follow her rules made for their well-being. Besides, she runs an NGO for the cause of oppressed women. In the beginning of the film, Uma Shankar (S. N. Banerjee) meets his dear friend, Dwarka Prasad Gupta (Ashok Kumar), and Nirmala his wife in their garden. When Nirmala leaves the scene, Uma Shankar says to Dwarka: ‘Agar bhabhi naa hoti, to pataa nahin is ghar kaa kyaa hota. Is ghar ke chaar ladkon ne chaar ghar banaa liyaa hotaa’ (‘Without the presence of sister-in-law, the four sons of the house would have divided it into four new houses’) (Mukherjee, 1980, 12:32–12:40), an encomium testifying to the wisdom and diplomatic skills of older women.

Issues relating to the older generation vis a vis the younger are being successfully presented in films undertaking the task of delving into the viewpoints of elders. In one film, Baghban (2003, directed by Ravi Chopra), an aging couple undergo experiences similar to the tragedy of King Lear. The film in fact marks a major reversal of roles in the Indian family. ‘In a remarkable departure from the standard Hindi film’s desexualisation of parental figures’ (Sen, 2010, p. 163), a retired banker, Raj Malhotra (played by Amitabh Bachchan), shares a romantic relationship with his wife, Pooja (played by Hema Malini). The sons of the couple and their wives decide to divide their filial duties by separating their parents and billeting them with their sons according to a roster. In India, it is widely believed that older parents’ lives centre around their grown-up children (Cohen, 2002; Lamb, 2000; Raja, 2013). Obeying the decision of their children, Raj and Pooja part with each other and take turns to live with their sons’ families. The sons and their wives regularly mistreat the old wife and husband. Raj eventually expresses the pain of parting with the love of his life, his adult children’s cruelty and his sense of alienation in a book that wins a prize and a large sum of money. At the award ceremony, he punishes his children by refusing to acknowledge their presence as the money has brought the couple financial indepen-dence, enabling them to live on their own.

The stigma related to the theme of physical desire and female aging is now gradually being undermined in Bollywood as more Hindi films delving into aging women’s sexuality have been produced in the last decade. In B. A. Pass (2012, directed by Ajay Bahl), the issue of the sexual needs of an older woman is presented more directly. An aging widow (played by Dipti Nawal) yearns for physical intimacy and visits a gigolo, a college-going boy who is trapped in the flesh trade run by an over-ambitious married woman. She however regrets her decision when she sees the boy. She feels guilty for having sexual urges at her age and instantly leaves the room. In one of the short films comprising Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016, directed by Alankrita Shrivastava), the aging Usha (played by Ratna Pathak) satisfies her sexual desires by fantasising that she is Rosie, a character in a book. During the day she is Usha, the celibate aunt, the strict Bua ji who earns her livelihood by running a sweet shop and renting out rooms in her family building, famously called Hawai Mahal. At night, Bua ji drowns in ‘the erotic fantasies of Lipstick Waale Sapne/Lipstick Dreams’ (Ghosh, 2019, p. 336), dreamt by the fictional Rosie. The feigned sexual self of Usha does not remain repressed within her body for a long time: She is attracted to a youngish, good-looking swimming instructor, one of her tenants and falls in love with him. She starts calling him at night without revealing her identity. ‘Taking on the aural and imaginative persona of Rosie’ (Ghosh, 2019, pp. 337–338), Usha would talk often to the object of her love and explore her body and its needs. One day, she is unmasked when her erotic literature is discovered. The young man ‘she had begun to so strongly desire as Rosie chides and unmasks her fantasies in front of her family’ (Ghosh, 2019, p. 338). Usha is publicly shamed. The story ‘reveals that any form of female transgression or desire outside of the social and moral codes of the prevalent patriarchal structure is incomprehensible to the male gaze and collective hegemonic sentiment’ (Ghosh, 2019, p. 337). At the end of the film, Usha responds to her insult in a unique way. She, along with her three female friends, read the erotica aloud sitting in front of Hawai Mahal: she thus subverts the stereotypical association between older woman and asexuality.

One recent example of an older woman debunking this stereotype is Fatima Begum (played by the 87-year-old Farrukh Jafar) in Gulabo-Sitabo (2020, directed by Shoojit Sircar). The protagonist, who is in her 90s, is the owner of Fatima Mahal, an old dilapidated mansion in Lucknow. She is married to Chunnan ‘Mirza’ Nawab, an old man 17 years younger than herself. Throughout the film, Mirza is desperate to sell Fatima Mahal. Also, he keeps selling items of antique value in the mansion. After she finds her husband ‘unbearable’, Fatima Begum elopes with Abdul Rehman, her old lover who is settled in London. She also sells the mansion to Abdul in exchange for a rupee so that the heritage building can be preserved. At the end of the film, Fatima and her lover return to the mansion to celebrate her 95th birthday. Fatima thus not only breaks the long-standing stereotypical association between old age and desire but also succeeds in moving out of a marriage that had turned out to be a burden. Besides, she remains successful in protecting her mansion from falling prey to Mirza’s treachery. All in all, a film that is celebratory on all levels.

Older Women in Character Roles in Hindi Cinema

In the 1990s, Shyam Benegal came up with films like Mammo (1994), Sardari Begum (1996) and Zubeidaa (2001). These films, considered a trilogy on account of being part of ‘a running storyline of the family of Riyaz, a writer, and his mother, Zubeidaa, grandmother, Fayazi, and grand-aunt Mahmuda Begum (Mammo)’ (Chopra, 2021, p. 95), are unique in the sense that they problematise the position of aging gendered bodies (mainly Muslim women) in the wake of Partition and the emergence of a new nation-state. Mammo (1994) is a tale of two older Muslim women who also happen to be sisters and live in Mumbai together. One, Mahmuda Begum aka Mammo, (played by Farida Jalal) has come to Mumbai from Lahore after she has been deserted by her husband. Mammo was married off to a Pakistani man by her father who chose to migrate to Pakistan. Unlike her two sisters who married Indian men, Mammo stays in India as a refugee and has to make the rounds of the police station for the renewal of her temporary visa. Her sister, Fayazi (played by Surekha Sikri), holds the responsibility of bringing up her 14-year-old grandson, Riyaz, ‘after his abandonment by his uncaring father, who remarried all too soon once his actress mother, Zubeidaa, Fayazi’s daughter, had passed away’ (Chopra, 2021, p. 99). Fayazi and Mammo are forced to lead ‘a modest, hardscrabble life’ as ‘their third sister and her husband have sold off their old home and kept the proceeds’ (Chopra, 2021, p. 99). The film underscores the fact that Partition and the postcolonial status of the Indian nation-state impacted women quite differently than men. The difference of impact depended upon the various intersections on which these bodies were positioned, made up of the inequalities of age, religion, gender, caste and class. The female Muslim elders in Mammo in fact ‘by virtue of their complicated location on Indian social peripheries’ (Chopra, 2021, p. 3) help Benegal ‘bring a “local”, intersectional, feminism to the screen’ (Chopra, 2021, p. 3).

While mothers are represented as self-sacrificing and renouncing, aging tawaifs are shown as either golden hearted or evil. Nevertheless, there are some Bollywood films in which aging tawaifs function as central characters and plots are woven around them. One of the exceptions to the stock portrayal of aging tawaifs in Bollywood is Sardari Begum. For the delineation of the chief protagonist, Benegal mixes the element of old age with the life experience of a performing artist. Sardari Begum is about an aging thumri singer (played by Kirron Kher) who runs off from home at a young age to learn the art of singing thumris from Iddanbai, ‘a songstress-courtesan’ (Needham, 2013, p 62). She loses her life during a communal riot. When Tehzeeb Abbasi (played by Rajina Raj Bisaria), an investigative journalist, asks a policeman questions regarding the unfortunate death of Sardari Begum, the latter refers to it as the killing of ‘a mere songstress courtesan’. The policeman’s opinion on the death of Sardari as an incident not worth condemning (just because she had been a singer and a tawaif) emphasises the invisibility and low status of Sardari Begum and her ilk in Indian society. Tehzeeb however decides to move beyond the cause of Sardari’s death and shows interest in the young Sardari’s daring act of rebellion in her youth against her family in choosing to become a thumri singer. The most interesting moment during Tehzeeb’s enquiry into the life of Sardari (perhaps the most promising aspect of the film) arrives when she comes to know that Sardari was her father Jabbar’s sister and that it was Sardari who had funded her education at her father’s request. Sardari even refused to take back from Jabbar the money she spent on Tehzeeb insisting that between a sister and a brother there was no question of a loan. Jabbar eventually dismisses his sister as an unrealistic, impractical and overambitious woman, but Tehzeeb heaps praises on her aunt’s sense of independence and her decision to choose music, which she loved most, as her career.

In Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema, Vanita likens ‘the course of a courtesan character’s life to that of the typical male hero’ (Vanita, 2017, pp. 42–43) in terms of their power to forge their own territories of intimacies and social contacts. Reviewing her book, Cowaloosur states that Vanita is trying to establish that ‘[i]t is the bold tawaif who best embodies a nation whose networks of kinship and friendship are chosen, rather than imposed and inherited—unlike, say, the figure of the destitute mother’ (Cowaloosur, 2020, p. 1). One important but sad implication of the autonomy of a tawaif to choose her kin and friends is that Indian society never allowed tawaifs to make their place in either the familial domain or the mainstream of Indian society, thereby leaving them stranded between the two. In Dancing with the Nation, Vanita tries to unsettle this forced historical presence of tawaifs at the demarcation line between home and the world, relying on the subversions that the tawaifs of Hindi films could create with their sociocultural and sexual freedoms, within the ‘spiritual’ and ’material’ domains of the Indian nation-state (Chatterjee, 1993, p. 6). This is shown in Devdas in all three versions (1935, directed by Pramathesh Chandra Barua; 1955, directed by Bimal Roy; 2002, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali), Umrao Jaan (1981, directed by Muzzafar Ali) and Tawaif (1985, directed by B. R. Chopra)), as well as in two Partition films, Begum Jaan (2017, directed by Srijit Mukherji) and Kalank (2019, Abhishek Verman).

Ruth Vanita’s attempt to invoke courtesans as the centre of the national imaginary actually lays bare the need to make the case for multiple other human intersectionalities ⁶ which exist between the nationalistic domains of janana ⁷ and mardana. One of these intesectionalities ⁸ belongs to older tawaifs featured in Hindi cinema. Pakeezah (1972, directed by Kamal Amrohi) is a film that delineates in detail the everyday life of tawaifs. In it, Sahibjaan (played by Meena Kumari), one of the most famous tawaifs of Lucknow, is brought up by her mother’s sister, Nawabjaan (played by Veena). In the beginning of the film, some young courtesans provoke an older tawaif to dance and then make fun of her inability to dance properly on account of her physical decline. Throughout the film, the young tawaifs are shown expressing anxiety about the time when their physical beauty would fade. They feel insecure when they think of their old age. Even the patrons of the tawaifs stop caring about them when they begin losing the charm of their bodies. In order to spare their lives from the pangs of old age, they buy property and treasure their wealth as much as possible.

The problems of the aging tawaif, considered to be a threat to the family order andsociety’s moral values even after losing her youthfulness, are suggested towards the end of Amar Prem (1972, directed by Shakti Samanta), where Pushpa (played by Sharmila Tagore), the retired prostitute, bears the stigma of her past in her old age. She ends up working as a maid in a tea shop and is abused by her employer for failing to discharge her duties properly. In the film, Durga, the Hindu goddess of power, seems to be a recurring metaphor for Mother India. The metaphor appears for the first time in the film ‘when a drunkard tries to burst in on a sex worker called Durga who is nursing her sick child’ (Vanita, 2019, p. 121). Towards the end of the film, when men abuse the old Pushpa referring to her past, Anand, a former lover and now an old man himself, and Nandu a municipal engineer who had been given much love by Pushpa when he was a child, come to her rescue. Anand and Nandu publicly compare Pushpa to Goddess Durga. The comparison is however overwhelmed by the embodiment of Pushpa as a frail poor aging prostitute and vanishes as soon as the film ends. ‘Nandu takes her home on Durga Puja day, the film closing with images of her and of ten-armed Durga being simultaneously carried through the streets’ (Vanita, 2019, p. 121). Here, the foregrounding of the 10-armed Durga has a particular function: the concurrence of the image of the 10-armed Goddess and that of Pushpa aims at making the spectators realise the incredible power of kindness and compassion inherent in a woman irrespective of her age and social identity.

In the figure of the aging tawaif there is scope for aging actresses to make a mark. An example of an aging courtesan with a golden heart is Husaini, a middle-aged tawaif in Umrao Jaan (1981). Husaini has been in love with a Maulvi for a long time. The Maulvi often visits her kotha (salon). When Husaini sees him eating alone in the kitchen, she teases him saying ‘Why would you wait for me? After all I am not your wedded wife (nikah bibi)?’ (Vanita, 2017, p. 145). Madhuri Dikshit, a not-so-young actress, played the role of Bahaar Begum in Kalank (2019, directed by Abhishek Verman). The most recent instance of a kind aging courtesan can be found in A Suitable Boy (2020, directed by Mira Nair), a web-series in this story, Maan Kapoor (played by Ishaan Khattar), a young man, feels attracted towards a good-hearted middle-aged courtesan, Saeeda Bai (played by Tabu).

Hindi Films and Agism

Most Hindi films focus on the love between a handsome young chivalrous male and a beautiful shy young woman but very often young heroines are romanced by aging male actors old enough to be their fathers. Aging female actors find themselves out of work as heroines very much earlier (‘they age very fast’) than their male counterparts who have a longer shelf life as ‘heroes’ before they graduate to character roles. A female actor in her late 30s is considered ineligible to work in a leading role and is forced into the role of a middle-aged mother. In the 1970s and 1980s, actresses like Sulochana, Nirupa Roy and Reema Lagoo, ‘Bollywood’s quintessential mothers’, were featured as mothers of ‘actors as old as or even older than them’ (Mohanty, 2019). Even leading actresses like Sharmila Tagore, Rakhee Gulzar and Shabana Azmi had to vacate their positions for younger actresses when they were only in their late 30s. Rakhee Gulzar who was Amitabh Bachchan’s heroine in many films during the 1970s and 1980s played his mother in Shakti (1982) following which her career as a leading lady effectively ended. While aging actors like Utpal Dutt, Ashok Kumar, Om Prakash, David Abraham and A. K. Hangal survived in the industry by accepting character roles, fewer older women find such work except as mothers and minor relatives. The discrimination against actresses of mature age in Bollywood thus upholds Sontag’s dictum on female aging. Nevertheless in recent times there have been trends against such prejudices, particularly in films that focus on issues rather than romance. Some roles have been written for older women with some success and appreciation from audiences. In the last 10 years, Neena Gupta for one has gone beyond performing the roles of the evil mother-in-law or the widowed melodramatic meek mother. In Badhaai Ho (2018, directed by Amit Ravindernath Sharma,), Neena plays the role of a woman who has a child late in life, embarrassing her 25-year-old son, husband and mother-in-law. In Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhaan (2020, directed by Hitesh Kewalya), she played the mother of a young gay man. In such films, aging actresses play roles suitable to their age.

A furore was unexpectedly set off recently when two young actresses (Taapsee Pannu and Bhumi Pednekar) were cast as old women in Saand Ki Aankh (2018). The film was about two grandmothers who challenge their extremely patriarchal surroundings to take part in shooting compe titions. Many older actresses like Soni Razdan, Neena Gupta and Seema Pahwa protested against the casting of these two young women as older women. Saand Ki Aankh was not at all the first example of age-inappropriate casting in Hindi films. However, it was arguably the first time that senior female actors of Bollywood publicly lashed out at the casting of much younger women to play older women (Mohanty, 2019).

In her essay, ‘Aging and the Scandal of Anachronism’, Mary Russo explores the positive side of a younger actress’s representation of an aging character. According to Russo, ‘acting against one’s age’ also means: ‘not conforming to normative ideas of age-appropriate behaviour’ (quoted in Chivers, 2011, p. 41). Young actresses have played older women successfully in some Bollywood films, even going on a diet to put on weight to suit the middle-aged character as Shabana Azmi did for her role in Benegal’s Mandi.

Conclusion

Irrespective of whether an aging actress acts her age or not, her presence on screen always runs the risk of falling prey to the ‘ungenerous gaze’ of the camera. This is why Chivers says that ‘women have more reasons than men have to conceal the visible signs of aging’ (Chivers, 2011, p. 16). Producers in Bollywood are extremely sensitive to the requirements of the male gaze, and aging female stars are placed much earlier on the shelf than male stars. Additionally, and apart from the issue of women’s youth and beauty in films there are few cinematic works which have contemplated using the voices of aging women (Kulkarni, 2016) as the omniscient voice narrating a Hindi film while the baritone voice of Amitabh Bachchan as a narrator or voice-over is often chosen (from Bawarchi [1972] to Begum Jaan [2017]) (Gopal, 2010, p. 31; Gopinath & Sundar, 2020, p. 5; Sen, 2010, p. 157) and generously praised.

With the entry of a number of new younger directors aging actresses have started receiving central roles in Hindi films. They have made this happen by bringing to the centre of the screen ‘“extraordinary” old age’ (Chivers, 2011, p. 61). The cinematic representation of extraordinary old age implies that ‘the meanings attributed to extraordinary [aging] bodies’ does not exist in physical decline, ‘but in social relationships in which one group is legitimated by possessing valued physical characteristics and maintains its ascendancy and its self-identity’ (Thomson, 1997, p. 7). One important example of this recent phenomenon is Masaba and Masaba, a web-series that has allowed Neena Gupta to represent the various dimensions of her real-life relation with her fashion-designer daughter, Masaba, on screen. In the last three decades, the introduction of strong older female characters such as Mammo, Sardari Begum, Usha and Fatima Begum strongly indicates that aging female characters could soon be able to acquire a central position in the tales that Bollywood tells. In Bengali cinema, a close neighbour of Hindi cinema, too, the same kind of change has been recently brought to the fore by films like Rajkahini (2015, directed by Srijit Mukherji), Jonaki (2018, directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta) and Shonar Pahar (2018, directed by Parambrata Chatterjee). Rajkahini, the original of Begum Jaan, tells the story of a middle-aged tawaif who is adamant in not deserting her brothel situated exactly on the border demarcating India from Pakistan. Jonaki dwells on the theme of female desire and old age, whereas Shonar Pahar is the story of an old ailing mother (played by Tanuja) whose son (played by Jisshu Sengupta) and daughter-in-law (played by Arunima Ghosh) decides to leave her behind in their old home under the care of a maid and live in a separate apartment in the same city. These more recent films demonstrate that aging actresses are increasingly able to perform character roles that are central to the action and story, a trend that would exploit their talent and not always bend to the popular demand for yo2ung beauties to gaze upon.