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Stripped to the bare
essentials
By Shoma A
Chatterji
When Marilyn Monroe was asked, "You
mean you had nothing on?" about modeling in the nude for
a calendar before her screen debut, 
she said with a
straight face, "Of course, the radio was on." Sadly,
Indian filmmakers and stars have neither the ready wit
nor the willingness to offer such intelligent repartee.
That goes for frankness too. They quickly hide behind
empty words like "aesthetics", "commitment"
"credibility" from the hard disk of their vocabulary of
convenience when quizzed about using nudity - partial,
indirect or suggestive, in their films.
By
whatever name it's called, a bit of skin shown works and
producers and directors know that. Last year, Hindi
mainstream cinema bled from a dismal show at the
box-office, but Raaz was a hit. It had a lot of
oomph courtesy Malini Sharma and Bipasha Basu. Though
many filmmakers mouth prudish sentiments and emphasize
good old family values, they don't hesitate to take
advantage of this tendency for voyeuristic pleasure of
the audience by having a heroine's assets liberally
exposed.
Contrary to beliefs that the new-age
sexuality has spawned more body exposure, nudity is not
exactly new to Indian cinema. Decades ago in V
Shantaram's Channi starring the late Ranjana, a
famous actress of Marathi cinema, there was an
abominable scene where a psychopath makes love to the
nude corpse of the heroine. This is called necromancy in
psychological lingo, but the film flopped and the
audience was saved from being witness to this celluloid
perversion.
The story goes that during the shoot
of Raj Kapoor's Satyam Shivam Sundaram, the male
unit members forgot their work the minute Zeenat Aman
walked towards the camera in her itsy-bitsy tightly
wrapped sari and an ethnic choli that
revealed more of her generous cleavage than it
concealed. It's hard to understand how Raj Kapoor was
aiming to establish the "spirituality of music" by
dressing Zeenat in that unnecessarily revealing attire.
On the other side of the scale, there's
prudishness about nudity even when the script calls for
it. Actress Subhra Basu has chosen to go the whole hog
in the recent film Parmapar because the role as a
painter's model demands so. Ironically, while audiences
of foreign films would readily accept it as realistic,
the same audience may wonder at the need of showing the
body beautiful in Indian films.
Rohini
Hattiangady reportedly did a nude scene in Govind
Nihalani's Party. Its premiere on Doordarshan had the
scene clipped. Sarika was persuaded by the late Jalal
Agha to do a nude scene in his film. The scene was shot
but the film was shelved. Padmini Kolhapure did a scene
in the buff in Gehrai, a plagiarized version of The
Exorcist. Padmini was then an adolescent and this could
have spelt ruin for her. But the film flopped and
everything was all right with the world.
On many
occasions, a different kind of body-trouble ensues. Way
back in the 1960s, a beautiful actress called Zahira
played the title role in Call Girl . The posters
of the film displayed her nude back and there was a big
hue and cry about this poster. She insisted this was a
body double and the excuse stuck for all time to come.
All actresses, from Seema Biswas in The Bandit
Queen to Monisha Koirala in Ek Choti Si Love
Story insist that the director used a body double
for the nude scenes. The Monisha story blew up in the
media, where the model who doubled for her vouched for
Monisha's statement.
Shekhar Kapoor's The
Bandit Queen was a box office hit wherever it was
released, but nudity in the form of coercive sex was not
the reason. Ketan Mehta's Maya Memsaab had Deepa
Sahi and Shah Rukh Khan making love in the buff for a
split-second scene which the censors did not bother
about. But when a film glossy went to town about his
"affair" with Deepa, Shah Rukh walked straight into the
editor's office - she was a lady - and bashed her up!
The police hauled him up. This film, too, was a super
flop.
What do today's no-holds-barred skin shows
indicate? Is it a welcome sign of cinema's "coming of
age"? Or is it a desperate attempt by the industry to
regain its hypnotic power over the masses? Ethics and
commerce are no longer a happily married couple. So, the
"aesthetics" argument does not stick. As for Indian
cinema's coming of age, the fashion channels at home and
channels like MGM beaming near-nude bodies swaying
shapely hips down the ramp do not exactly stand the test
of the naivete or the "innocence" of its viewers,
cutting across age, sex, culture and education.
And then of course there is the issue of male
nudity. With Deepak Tijori's Oops! showcasing
beefy men in G-strings slated for release any minute
now, perhaps some questions may be raised, while the
rest will remain unanswered.
(Trans World
Features)
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