In Tune With The Body

Several film theorists have remarked that carefully constructed visuals of women’s faces – indeed, their entire bodies — have frequently been mobilized to augment the spectacle of cinema. Women’s faces have thus engineered the financial success of more than a thousand films, launching them successfully in a competitive marketplace.

While theorists and critics have found several ways in which to unpack the politics of cinema’s depiction of women’s bodies, very few have paid attention to the politics of the representation of their voices. Fewer still have mapped the relationship between the visual and sonic landscapes of femininity in cinema. Seldom do we see detailed investigations of how women’s voices are pictured on screen.

The collection of film ephemera at MAP affords an opportunity to unpack the politics of the images of singing women in early post-Independence Hindi cinema.

Feminist film theorist Kaja Silverman, in her theoretically nuanced study of the representation of women’s voices in cinema, points out that classical Hollywood cinema is deeply invested in the myth that a beautiful female body must be synchronized with a beautiful voice.

Silverman’s assertion holds true even within the topos of Indian cinema: it operates on the mandate the quality of women’s voices must synchronize with the nature of their bodies.

Since Hindi cinema of the late 1940s and 1950s placed a heavy premium on female chastity and virtuousness, the voices of these actresses as they sang were also required to sound pure and sweet. Consequently, these films are replete with visuals of beautiful and virginal women crooning sweetly.

Several historians of Indian cinema have traced the dominant definition of the sweet Indian female voice to the style established by the prolific and well-loved Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar.

As Pavitra Sundar notes, several actor-singers like Noorjehan migrated to Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947, which opened up greater space for Mangeshkar within the arena of playback singing. Sundar finds that Mangeshkar’s “strong grounding in classical Hindustani music” had the effect of bolstering public opinion regarding her vocal precision: the purity of her voice translated into an assumption regarding the “purity” of character. Consequently, Mangeshkar dominated the soundscapes of Indian films for five decades starting from the late 1940s, with her voice coming to define ideal Indian femininity for years to come.

Thus, the resonance is significant when Mangeshkar’s practiced and “pure” vocals spring forth from the bodies of virginal or chaste female characters in Hindi cinema, such as the righteous and long-suffering princess Mrinalla from Patrani (1956), and the resolutely moral Vidya (Nargis) in Shree 420 (1955).

Neepa Majumdar notes that Mangeshkar’s public personality was often compared with 16th century Indian mystic poet Meerabai, who sang of her passionate love and devotion for the Hindu deity Krishna. This comparison was inspired not only due to the fact that Mangeshkar recorded the bhajans sung by the saint, and was widely seen as the only singer who could do these poems justice, but also because discourses circulating around the singer emphasized her unmarried status, devotion to music, and the austerity of her lifestyle. This comparison resonates most literally in the visuals of Shanno (Nutan) in Kanhaiya (1959).

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The notion of a “pure” female voice, which sings with careful enunciation and adolescent sweetness, interacted frequently with marginalized and oppressed female bodies.

When female characters belonging to communities that have been historically ostracized and exploited were paired with these “pure” voices, they came to be seen as embodying conventional and mainstream ideas of “purity”. This also contributed to the erasure of culturally-specific languages and identities.

This perceived “purity” of the female voice rescues her character from being maligned while visuals underline the sexuality of her body.

This mechanism has been put into work particularly in Hindi films like Mughal-E-Azam (1960), Khilona (1970) and Pakeezah (1972), which centered on courtesans: while the women performed their sexuality with their bodies, their voices remained chaste, allowing them to be cast as virtuous victims of fate.

In Paakezah, for instance, courtesan Sahibjaan (Meena Kumari) sings in Mangeshkar’s chaste voice, which allows her to be cast as a long-suffering and unfortunate victim of circumstances as she performs her sexuality before a crowd of men.

The separation between a "pure" voice and sexualised body becomes differently evident when the visuals of a woman weeping are accompanied with a voice that does not reveal any of the vulnerability or unpleasantness of her emotions. The uninterrupted smoothness of her voice allows for the raw edges of her grief to be smoothed into a beautiful image that might resonate with masculine fantasies.

In several instances, the exaggerated femininity of the playback voice find reflection in the gestures and movements by the actresses. The performance of their gender ricochets from voice into visuals, each amplifying the other.

This effect is on ample display in songs such as Dil Lootne Vale Jaadugar from Madari (1959) where women communicate with delicate hand gestures and sideways glances while a sweet and pure voice emanates from their bodies.

Women’s singing voices, and the accompanying performance of their gender, also highlight masculine hegemonies in the politics of looking and listening. While women perform for men routinely in these films, it is extremely rare for men to perform their gender for women. Men are depicted singing and dancing only for authority figures such as kings or queens, or for other men.

Male performers, on the rare occasions in which they appear, also tell stories through their bodies in this manner. However, the rigidly prescriptive norms regarding respectable body language for women restrict the range of stories that women can narrate through their gestures, actions and voices.

For instance, in a song such as Do Aankhein Janaani from Daal Mein Kala (1964), comedian, singer and actor Kishore Kumar is able to romp around performing physical and vocal comedy while escaping charges of ostentatiousness. On the other hand, his female co-star’s body and voice are required to adhere to norms of feminine respectability and elegance.

Vocal and bodily movements are thus synchronized: a moment of pause in one engenders a halt in the former.

Since the poses that punctuate women’s voices and highlight their bodies are designed to be spectacular, they find their way into promotional film still and lobby cards.

So invested is mainstream narrative cinema in the idea of the synchronization of the female voice and body, that the idea of a disembodied female voice is often coded as a threat.

In several Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Mahal (1949) and Bees Saal Baad (1962), male protagonists are haunted by the sounds of singing women whose bodies they cannot see. They are able to rest only when they are able to attach a body, however ghostly and ephemeral, to the voice that they hear.

Apart from the resonance between the quality of the voice and the desirability of the body, there is a decided synchronization between the subjects that women choose to sing about, and the ways in which they present their bodies.

Women most frequently sing about their love for men, and while they are thus engaged, they are decked out in glamorous attire. Their bodies transmit their desirability while they vocalize their desire for a man.

On the other hand, when women are singing in their maternal roles, pining for their children or attempting to express their love for their offspring, they are seldom dressed up.

Occasionally, though, women’s voices are able to add a layer of meaning that have the potential to alter the meanings of the visuals instead of merely bouncing off and reinforcing them. Women are able to claim agency, in a limited way, through the vocalization of their feelings.

In Dahej (1950), for instance, Chanda (Jayshree) expresses both her desire for consummation and stance towards consent by pushing back against her husband’s ardour on their wedding night with the song Ambua Ki Daari Pe Bole Re Koyaliya.

In Halaku (1956), two women sing and dance to seduce a despotic ruler into drinking poison. They have him completely taken in by their voices and bodies until he is alerted by a sharp courtier.

Visuals of the singing woman in these films are caught in a range of different paradoxes that are emblematic of a newly independent nation that is attempting to reconcile tradition with modernity: while the voice pulls and tugs towards one pole, the visuals are drawn to another. Consequently, even when women sing about love and desire, they are often emplaced within nature, among leaves, flowers and trees. Their location is meant to be an added layer of meaning that hints at their innocence and proximity to cultural roots.

As this exhibition demonstrates, the woman of early post-Independence Hindi cinema sings in the service of an idea of ideal femininity that is anchored in nationhood, while simultaneously constructs the notion of elegance and gendered identity in independent India. These visuals are testament to the British artist David Burrows’s assertion that we never merely sing to people: we sing for them, and are sung by them.