Opinion Zeenat Aman: The rebel of the 70s, now on Instagram
Her Instagram stories/posts are a retrospective story-telling of her time, where she has posited herself as the narrator-cum-autobiographer, unfiltered, as she shatters all the lenses that have captured her so far.
While Zeenat Aman urges everybody to look at the many “spectacular” things life has to offer, few know how she never felt empowered despite being the top woman actor of her time and challenging patriarchal conventions. (Photo: Zeenat Aman/ Instagram) Perhaps actor Zeenat Aman never got the recognition she deserved in her younger years — unlike her debut on Instagram. Stereotyped as a glamour girl, she has so far been filtered through many kinds of gazes. For men, she was an object of desire, an enchantress in their collective fantasy. For women, she personified body confidence and positivity, as she carried Western fashion in figure-hugging outfits with a rare confidence and panache. But what many forget is that she was also a cultural touchstone of a defining era of the 70s that bubbled up with ideas of equality, diversity, free-spiritedness, creativity, and dissent. In her own way, she encapsulated the essence of a movement that shaped the contours of a woke world as we know it today.
And so her Instagram stories/posts are a retrospective story-telling of her time, where she has posited herself as the narrator-cum-autobiographer, unfiltered, as she shatters all the lenses that have captured her so far. In that sense, Aman has shown that she is still the rebel of the 70s, speaking the way she was not allowed to in her time. Through Instagram, we have come to know her mind that the mainstream media never bothered to discuss — she completed her graduate studies at the University of California. As Miss India, she had international exposure and won an international pageant title much before the cosmetic industry lavished its crowns on India as it opened up to the world in the 90s. She had been there, done that — but was never celebrated.
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However, she doesn’t go fiery with pent-up hurt or wrongs done to her or bring the house down with forced humour or witticisms. In a world of self-indulgence, she knows how to draw boundaries, engaging you as a generous host of a Saturday garden party, sunny and conversational, but retreating to her dulcet glow with the sunset. She is neither cynical nor dismissive, but keeps it real, walking the edge of her emotional journey down the years. Yet she is graceful, dignified, accommodative, accepting, curious, and has a heart — all things social media isn’t today. In her own way, the septuagenarian Aman is protesting against the established norms of social media, challenging the hate, toxicity, and what she calls “vanity”, rocking it with her 70-year-old frail body — with the freshness and energy of that 70s’ flower power.
So while she urges everybody to look at the many “spectacular” things life has to offer, few know how she never felt empowered despite being the top woman actor of her time and challenging patriarchal conventions. That’s why she posted a clip of her interview with an Australian correspondent, articulating how women had only ornamental roles in the Hindi film industry. Or what it took to rehearse Bollywood dance moves in costume on a shooting floor where she was the only woman. She also brought in the issue of pay parity and the still pathetic representation of older women in cinema worldwide. In real life, Aman had been in abusive relationships, a stifling marriage, and was even a victim of domestic violence that permanently damaged her eye. That’s why the actor in her could relate to the protagonist in B R Chopra’s Insaaf Ka Tarazu (1980), who avenges her rape by murdering the errant because he was let off by the court.
As a scar-faced girl in Satyam Shivam Sundaram, she was accused of commodifying obscenity. Yet Aman’s skin show was a metaphor for the gossamer externality that hides the ugly truth. But few got that. This is why she is bold enough to admit that “I did not and do not find anything obscene about the human body,” taking care to add how Oscar-winning costume designer Bhanu Athaiya had crafted her look with a purpose.
In these times of historical correction over the smallest of things, Aman seeks to open up a narrow worldview and contextualise it in evolutionary terms rather than just putting across her point of view. If she is silver-haired, it’s because she doesn’t want to perpetuate the male idea of youth that she had been forced to conform to all her working life.
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Yet Aman also understands her social media constituency well. So, she appears as an involved mother, referencing her sons, talks about her mother, and celebrates the life that goes on rather than mourn the one that has gone. She is avowedly Indian, be it preferring Indie dogs over pedigreed ones, taking up issues of rural women through her association with PARI and sporting comfortable women’s wear. It is indeed a relief that somebody with Aman’s star power (she has notched up 1,10,000 followers in less than a month without brand endorsement or publicity) never shows off her designer tags, her charmed circle of friends or exotic venues. So far it has been the garden, the wicker chair, the room and a chest of behind the scenes memories that tell the story of women in Hindi cinema as a lived reality.
Yesteryear women actors were boxed in with an expiry date. Aman’s clarity of thought and embracing infectiousness have shown us how even a young and frothy medium like Instagram can make way for women of substance and be influenced by them.
rinku.ghosh@expressindia.com
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