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Journalism of Courage
At the age of 36, Helen plays a dancer in Sholay. This should surprise you much more than it does. Bollywood women have short career spans when compared to men. And the dancers get an even shorter screen-span. Helen had said that she began dancing for the camera when she was 12; this means she was nearly 24 years into her screen career and there she is, giving it her all, oomphing it up in Mehbooba, mehbooba. A cynic might say that she got the role because of her association with Salim of Salim-Javed but what of that? The casting of all the multi-starrers of the time have back stories to them.
But for a moment, consider the three women in Sholay. There’s Basanti the ingénue chatterbox (Hema Malini) without the breath undertow that would mark her dialogue delivery later; Radha in the trench of sorrows (Jaya Bhaduri), and neither had much to offer the camera in terms of eye-candy. It is up to Gabbar (Amjad Khan) to summon up some entertainment for his men and for all of us.
In two sequences, women dance for him: Mehbooba, mehbooba and Jab tak hai jaan, both songs integral to the plot, both songs plagiarised from other older hits in the great tradition of R D Burman. Mehbooba, Mehbooba is what I call a song of misdirection; here the dance is a screen for other activity that moves the story forward. We were at the edge of our seats in the Minerva theatre on Lamington Road in Bombay where we saw the film again and again. The edge of one’s seat is not a great place to think. It never occurred to us to ask why Jai and Veeru didn’t simply shoot Gabbar in the head and then blow up the ammo dump. It never occurred to us to ask why this loss of ammunition seemed to have no impact on the dacoits’ strength. It was pointless to ask questions like that.
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To write this piece, I played the song loud in an office in which I work. As the familiar chords struck up, someone started whistling, then another voice began singing and soon a general raucous chorus broke out. That was what Helen did for us: she invited us to the delight of her dancing.
And yet, a peculiar sadness came over me. It is quite clearly what one might call an item number. Helen has no further role in the plot. She has nothing to do with the moral issues at stake and crime and punishment are always about the righting of the moral order. But then neither do the four biggest stars (Amitabh-Jaya-Dharmendra-Hema). The film is written as a collision course on a sinusoidal curve, the collision being between Gabbar Hari Singh and the Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar). Even when ahimsa is mentioned, it is the Thakur who shoots it down.
And so it is fitting that Helen should be strutting her stuff for the uber-daku of our cinema. I would also like to draw your attention to a moment, when we see one of those glorious legs from hip to toe, stretched out across the ground. Look at the foot as it arches, the toes curved into the dust. It’s a fleeting moment, but it brings back a Leela Naidu story.
During the shooting of The Householder, Shashi Kapoor noticed that his co-star Leela was tapping her foot to show irritation, though her foot was not in the frame. He was impressed, she was not. To her, she had simply been in the moment, in the role. Her foot would tap out her irritation, whether it was in the frame or not.
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And Helen’s toe would draw an arabesque on the mud of Ramgarh whether you noticed it or not. This then the sadness: they don’t make them like that any more.
Jerry Pinto is author of Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb (Penguin)
