Gumnaam

Sometimes the trailer says it all: "A Terrible Study in Suspense!" It may well have been one of India's first suspense thrillers, but the effort of combining "A Smile and a Thrill" and "A Laugh and a Chill" was clearly more than the story could bear. It is a musical comedy horror noir, with an abusive relationship, some slut-shaming, some blatant racism, and a Hitler joke. I love Agatha Christie. I love Hindi-language cinema. I should have loved Gumnaam (1965)! I did not. It was as weird as the day is long, and offensive to boot.

I can't say I was surprised by the weird factor- I found the film via Ghost World (2001) (or rather, an article about Ghost World cross-referenced to Bollywood and American cinema); "Jaan Phechan Ho", sung by the inimitable Mohammed Rafi, is included in the film. "Jaan Phechan Ho" has since become a favorite among South Asian Studies students- it is an interesting cross-over point between Hollywood and Bollywood film, as well as fantastic fun. In Ghost World, "Jaan Phechan Ho" is used to illustrate the alienation of the main characters, who watch “Jaan Phechan Ho” and dance along, completely unable to decipher what is going on but fascinated by the strangeness of it all. Unfortunately, I feel that way about the music throughout the entire film. The song-and-dance routines are alienating. This is a film based on Christie’s And Then There Were None, so by the end everyone is dead. And there is still singing, dancing, and romance on beaches. Ironically given its role in Ghost World, “Jaan Phechan Ho” is better integrated into the plot than any of the other songs, and the title song, which is meant to be creepy, is arguably the most melodic and least disturbing song on the soundtrack.

Interestingly, this is the first film I have reviewed which included a vamp, one of the highly sexualized item-number girls of 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s Hindi cinema. Gumnaam's vamp Kitty is portrayed by Helen, one of Hindi cinema's most famous vamps- for good reason. She was tremendously talented.

Short for vampire, vamps were the sultry, liminal, Westernized, doomed objects of desire in Hindi cinema before economic liberalization changed tastes and expectations in the 1990s. Vamps, denizens of dance halls, bars, cabarets, and bedrooms, were the only female characters allowed to drink, smoke, flirt, dance provocatively, rendezvous, work outside the home, laugh with their mouths open, make passes, and talk back. Indeed, these behaviors marked vamps as vamps. Whereas heroines were worthy of heart-breaking adoration or marrying in the end, vamps were for sewing wild oats.

When heroines crossed the line into vamp-like behavior, as Asha (Nanda) does when she drinks with Kitty (Helen)- the hero usually reacted with disgust and violence. In our case, our hero Anand (Manoj Kumar), himself a police inspector, physically assaults the woman he claims to love because she responds to the stress of six murders and threats to her own life by having a drink with a girlfriend. And not only does he remain the hero, the two end up together. Kitty's ending is even more gruesome. 

The lines which divide the roles of Virgin and Magdelene in Hindi cinema have been blurred over the past twenty years, although this has reflected not so much the lessening as the convolution and change of social expectations of women and their sexuality. When Heer in Rockstar (2011) goes drinking, dancing, and to a blue film in Delhi before her wedding- everything she wants to do before she marries and becomes a good Indian wife- she is acting out the dual role of vamp and heroine. Heer is no longer exclusively virtuous or exclusively provocative, exclusively domestic or exclusively undomesticated. Rather, Heer must balance being fun (but not too much fun), provocative (but not too provocative), being wild (but not for long). Although Heer is a more fully-realized character than many of the vamps who came before her, she is nevertheless pushed and pulled by male ideas about a desirable woman- fun (but not too much fun), provocative (but not too provocative), wild (but not for long). Whereas two female bodies were once called upon to personify male fantasies, today's heroines are required to navigate the push of domesticity and pull of sexuality and embody everyone's fantasies simultaneously.

Every vamp's fun came at a price: vamps tended to die in red bridal saris before ever becoming good Hindu brides. This is true in both Dewaar (1975) and The Dirty Picture (2011), so clearly the trope has sticking power. Their bridal saris symbolize the desire for Indian domesticity (because after all, what else could a woman want but marriage?), but vamps are all ultimately doomed by their sins, their wishes (?) unfulfilled and dreams of happiness thwarted by their expressions of sexuality. True to trope, Kitty becomes engaged and is then murdered. She happens to have been murdered in a bathing costume so that her bare, dead legs can be ogled to full effect.

For further reading about vamps, and Bollywood more broadly, please see the fascinating: "From Villain to Traditional Housewife!: The Politics of Globalization and Women's Sexuality in the 'New' Indian Media" by Padma P. Govindan and Bisakha Dutta  in Global Bollywood, edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar, 180-202. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Film: Gumnaam (1965)

Director: Raja Nawathe

Writer: Dhruva Chatterjee

Country: India

Runtime: 151 minutes
Language: Hindi