Most readers of this journal are familiar with the robust fan following Amitabh Bachchan has secured over the years. When he was ill, fans maintained an extended vigil outside the hospital where he was being treated; some even sacrificed their lives to ensure his health. Similarly, there are numerous stories that attest to Tamil film star M. G. Ramachandran's fan following as well as South Indian actor Rajinikanth's global popularity. We would be hard-pressed, however, to provide an equally compelling account of enduring stardom for Indian female actors. Neepa Majumdar's book offers such a corrective analysis, filling in some crucial gaps in accounts of early Indian cinema history. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! helps to rewrite female star personas and female stardom back into narratives of early Indian cinema; the book simultaneously helps us to understand how the female star persona was different from her male counterparts and the constitutive elements that prevented these women from securing an enduring spot in fan culture.
The book offers a series of complex arguments and makes a number of interventions in existing cinema studies scholarship. On one level, it offers an account of female stardom in early Indian cinema, between 1930 and 1950. She restores to the historical account the achievements and popularity of stars such as Sulochana, Durga Khote, Devika Rani, and Fearless Nadia. Stardom in the early years is a capacious term that can include disparate figures such as the stunt-action figure as well as the “traditional,” cultured woman. In addition, Majumdar devotes a chapter to the figure of Nargis and another one to the key role Lata Mangeshkar's disembodied voice played in securing a star's status. In enumerating the star trajectory of the individual female actors, Majumdar underscores the socio-historical context within which one must locate them. Thereby her book narrates the different routes to stardom individual actors mobilized. By recovering these different women's experiences in a male-dominated industry the book evokes a key principle of a feminist project.
On a second level, Majumdar's textured account illustrates the rich outcomes one can obtain by analyzing Indian cinema on its own terms. A central argument Majumdar forwards is the need to provincialize Hollywood. She develops a theoretical and methodological framework that is attentive to and emerges from within the particularities of the Indian cinema industry. She argues convincingly against translocating Hollywood-based understandings of the star system within the Indian context. Majumdar contends that Hollywood-style stardom was accommodated within the Indian experience of entertainment.
The nature of the Indian film star, especially that of the female actor, is radically different from its Western counterpart. Discourses about Indian stars, even gossip, resolutely eschewed revelations about the private lives of actors. Instead, Indian stardom was constructed around the object of cinema itself; it was a discourse of surfaces rather than about the interiorized lives of individual actors. If in other parts of the world female stars became the central site for working through anxieties about modernity, the Indian version was parsed differently. The Indian star functioned as a rhetorical practice rather than as an economic practice. Majumdar's study thus materializes the concept of a vernacular modernity.
By turning to extra-textual material, the author illustrates the significant ways in which female film actors were simultaneously the object of fascination and moral censure, taking on the burden of a more generalized anxiety regarding female participation and visibility in the public sphere. The title of the book is illustrative of this structure of feeling. In the late-colonial context, it was de rigueur for female stars to assert their difference from their audiences; they had to underscore their status as modern, educated women.
On a third level, the book offers an instructive account of how to conduct historical research even when the primary archive is absent. Majumdar employs a peripheral optic, turning to magazines, newspaper accounts, short stories, publicity materials and other material culture artifacts that are central to the cinematic experience. She is thus able to excavate information about the early Indian film industry although the films and some of the primary texts themselves exist no longer.
This multi-pronged approach to an analysis of Indian cinema offers rich theoretical insights and allows the general reader gain more insight to individual star personas. The feminist interventions the book makes are significant. The heteronormativity of the star figures makes sense within the timeframe Majumdar considers. New research is required to understand how this hegemonic model was interrupted by transgressive star personas. The popularity of a campy figure such as Helen during the 1960s or the fading away of a robust female star since the 1970s is worth investigation. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! offers a model by which future scholarship could proceed; it is informed by theoretical insights from the Hollywood model and destabilizes it.
