My Mirror column for July 5:
Tuli’s film is richly layered, tapping into the enchantment of cinema but never losing sight of its trials. Terrific stories compress several registers of film history. My favourite is one in which Saroj and child star Baby Naaz come down from Maganlal Dresswalla’s shop in their infant Radha-Krishna costumes (for the 1953 film Aagosh), and an old couple bow down to them in devotion. Khan takes a childish delight in the memory. But when we watch her sending her grandchildren off to school, their boringly normal childhood contrasts sharply with hers. “We have an age na, where we are not required as a child star, neither grown-up. That was my age at 10, I was lost,” she tells Tuli. For Khan, 10 was an age of decision-making: “Good friends were there, they told me, why don’t you become a group dancer?” Her dancer friend Sheela laughs at how she’d help Saroj escape punishment for her frequent lateness. A schoolgirlish memory, and yet the two little girls putting on makeup under the Filmistan stairs were at work, not at school. At stake was a job, and a family of five with no other income.
In interviews, Khan described vividly how she learnt that she could not just execute Sohanlal’s directions, but compose her own. Half a century has passed, but each word and gesture was a bodily memory. Khan’s talent was acknowledged by everyone from Vyjayanthimala, the great dancing star of the 1950s and ’60s, to the many directors who had seen her in action. Still, there was nothing automatic about her progress up the ranks in an industry in which only men became dance-directors. Her future in the industry was so insecure that during her years with Sohanlal, she did a nursing course and worked at KEM Hospital, learnt typing to be a receptionist at Glaxo, and even “became a make-up man”, as she puts it, inadvertently pointing to another sphere then exclusively male.
The late Saroj Khan created a new kind
of dancing body on the Hindi film screen, but she also embodied a
link to a history of dance – and of cinema.
 |
| (Images courtesy Ahmedabad Mirror, taken by the photographer Dayanita Singh in the early 1990s) |
Saroj Khan, who died on Friday aged 71,
has been described in obituaries as a “veteran Bollywood
choreographer”. That is an identity she certainly owned. But it
doesn’t capture the breadth and depth of her connection to the
Hindi film industry, or indeed her role in creating the field she
dominated for so long.
Born Nirmala Nagpal in 1948, Khan began
as a child actor. Her origin story, which she relates in Nidhi Tuli’s
superb 2012 Public Service Broadcasting Trust documentary The Saroj Khan Story (free on YouTube), was as filmi as
she clearly was herself. As a toddler, she would dance with her own
shadow on the wall. The doctor her worried mother consulted had
connections with moviedom, and proposed that a dancing child might be
a bankable asset. Her parents, Partition migrants from Karachi,
needed the money. The screen name Saroj was to avoid social censure.
Tuli’s film is richly layered, tapping into the enchantment of cinema but never losing sight of its trials. Terrific stories compress several registers of film history. My favourite is one in which Saroj and child star Baby Naaz come down from Maganlal Dresswalla’s shop in their infant Radha-Krishna costumes (for the 1953 film Aagosh), and an old couple bow down to them in devotion. Khan takes a childish delight in the memory. But when we watch her sending her grandchildren off to school, their boringly normal childhood contrasts sharply with hers. “We have an age na, where we are not required as a child star, neither grown-up. That was my age at 10, I was lost,” she tells Tuli. For Khan, 10 was an age of decision-making: “Good friends were there, they told me, why don’t you become a group dancer?” Her dancer friend Sheela laughs at how she’d help Saroj escape punishment for her frequent lateness. A schoolgirlish memory, and yet the two little girls putting on makeup under the Filmistan stairs were at work, not at school. At stake was a job, and a family of five with no other income.
What makes Saroj Khan’s narrative
powerful, of course, is that her skill and dedication transformed her
from the anonymous girl at the edge of the screen to the one
directing the performance. Her life also feels like a link to a
fast-receding past, as rich as it was messy. Noticing that she was
talented enough to pick up the heroine’s moves, the legendary dance
director B Sohanlal made her his assistant. If that gloriously
open-ended world allowed a 12-year-old group dancer to become
assistant to her 43-year-old boss, it also allowed him to ‘marry’
her at 13. Saroj became a mother at 14. She remained Sohanlal’s
assistant from 1962 to 1973, having another child with him before
finally parting ways, and remarrying in 1975.
In interviews, Khan described vividly how she learnt that she could not just execute Sohanlal’s directions, but compose her own. Half a century has passed, but each word and gesture was a bodily memory. Khan’s talent was acknowledged by everyone from Vyjayanthimala, the great dancing star of the 1950s and ’60s, to the many directors who had seen her in action. Still, there was nothing automatic about her progress up the ranks in an industry in which only men became dance-directors. Her future in the industry was so insecure that during her years with Sohanlal, she did a nursing course and worked at KEM Hospital, learnt typing to be a receptionist at Glaxo, and even “became a make-up man”, as she puts it, inadvertently pointing to another sphere then exclusively male.
It was after years of C-grade films
that Khan finally found acclaim, with dance numbers picturised on
Sridevi, in films like Mr. India (1987) and Chandni (1989), and on
Madhuri Dixit, in a series of films beginning with Tezaab (1988).
Famously, the Filmfare Awards instituted an award for choreography,
giving the first honour to Saroj Khan for Tezaab. Kangana Ranaut,
paying tribute to Saroj Khan’s contribution to that cinematic era,
has been quoted as saying: “Back then when you speak about a
superstar actress, you meant a dancer actress. You didn’t mean
anything else.” Ranaut is right, but what she doesn’t say is that
Saroj Khan was part of the transformation that created the dancer
actress. Dance had been part of Hindi cinema from the start, but
barring a few (largely South Indian) actresses with classical
training, the heroine didn't need to dance. The vamp was enough. But
watching Helen had been a guilty pleasure, watching Madhuri was
increasingly not.
Paromita Vohra, in a brilliant essay in
the book tiltpauseshift: Dance Ecologies in India, has argued
that ‘Ek Do Teen’ marks a turning point in the history of Hindi
film dance because “a clear heroine figure [appeared for the first
time] in a dance that is chiefly sexy, and presented sexiness with a
robust, bodily series of steps”. Saroj Khan’s visibility – she
went on to win eight Filmfare awards and three National awards for
choreography – made Hindi film viewers see that “the body of the
dancing heroine contained also the body of the choreographer”. “In
doing this,” writes Vohra, “she gathered the ghosts of many
forgotten worlds of dance – which had found their way into the
darkened corners of Bollywood studios as dance teachers, musicians
and extras – into her being, bringing these worlds to a
professional place again.”
The history of dance in 20th century
India was a history of invisibilisation. A national culture
'cleansed' of its links to tawaifs and devadasis demanded the erasure
of sexualness from Indian-style dance, at least on screen. Saroj
Khan, beginning as the short-haired Westernised dancer, eventually
became an archive of sensual Indian dance on screen.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5 Jul 2020.
Note: Linking here to two of my previous pieces on the history of dance in India: a feature essay on tawaifs and how dance was taken from them -- 'Bring on the Dancing Girls' -- and a review of Anna Morcom's book Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys: The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance
Note: Linking here to two of my previous pieces on the history of dance in India: a feature essay on tawaifs and how dance was taken from them -- 'Bring on the Dancing Girls' -- and a review of Anna Morcom's book Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys: The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance
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