Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but I did not like Heeramandi. Anyone interested in the histories of performance in South Asia, or indeed in coherent storytelling, would probably have major problems with it, which I do. But I found myself seeking out the song that introduces Bibbo (Aditi Rao Hydari) in an elaborate sequence that nods faintly at Madhubala’s iconic ‘Mohe Panghat Pe’ in Mughal-e-Azam.
Heeramandi is full of little nods like that; the terraces with simultaneous performances evoke Pakeezah, as does that first scene introducing Alamzeb, with her hair fanned out and soaking, while she is engrossed in reading (unfortunately Sharmin Segal, playing Alam, has less charm than one hair on Meena Kumari’s head).
Aside from the songs directly taken from older repertoires, like Amir Khusrau’s ‘Sakal Ban’, and the wonderful thumri ‘Lagat Karejwa Mein Chot’ (connoisseurs will immediately remember Saba Dewan’s iconic film, The Other Song), I find the rest of the album quite insipid. But there’s a frisson about Bibbo’s introductory song. Certainly part of it is the beautiful vocal performance by Barnali Chattopadhyay, throatily evoking a Bollywood lite version of the ‘tawaif voice’ (aka the not-Lata voice, but that’s not a conversation I will go into at this point).
Partly I was charmed, against my will, by the lyrics, which have grown on me since I first came upon the song. There’s a certain impossibility in translating the opening lines – Saiyaan / hatto jao / tum bade ‘woh’ ho. Saiyaan, hatto jao (My love/go away) replays a familiar trope; the heroine is resisting her lover’s advances, but we are meant to read the mood as playful. She holds the agency (in a very limited way), because as the feminine beloved she is meant to be both irresistibly sexy and overcome with her own modesty, at the same time. Where, then, is this limited agency? It is in the performance itself; where she can seduce by subterfuge, her desire only allowed expression in an oblique way. I will say more in a minute, but let’s go back to the really thorny line – tum bade ‘woh’ ho – for people who don’t speak Hindi or Urdu, I would translate it something along the lines of you are very “like that” if I was being quite literal about it, which of course one can’t. ‘Woh’ is a euphemism here; she’s characterising him as naughty or lustful.
The rest of the lines play on familiar nayika aesthetics, particularly from songs about Radha and Krishna – she’s afraid of the questions her mother-in-law, sister-in-law and friends will ask about where she spent the night. The papiha (cuckoo), that familiar trope, is evoked – since ancient times, various birds have been accused of revealing lovers’ secrets in Indian poetry and music – and here it is no different, for in the morning the bird will reveal all (read linked poem from the 7th c. Amarushataka, in which the heroine has to put a ruby in the parrot’s beak because the nuisance of a bird is recreating intimate sounds). The end result is a performance of feminine modesty – she will be overcome with shame, she says. The eyes, smile and dancing suggest the opposite of the literal meaning of the words; for weeks now I have had Instagram posts pop up commenting about Hydari’s ‘gajagamini’ walk (a gait resembling an elephant’s, again from Indian cultural history, specifically dance history and practice).
For me it is the scene right before the walk that is more telling; she picks up a rose, seems to offer it to him, takes it away, and then throws it to him. Her love and her desire will not be won so easily, nor given away, but she will seem to ‘give in’ when she wants. These are elaborate games of flirtation, power and eros that millions of lovers know. But here they are happening in a specific cultural context, a performance by the now over-represented breathtakingly beautiful cinematic tawaif.
Despite myself, there’s something immediately delicious and evocative about the song, and perhaps in that it has been successful in linking hands with ‘Mohe Panghat Pe’, which is after all another song in which the singer complains about attention from her lover while performing her seductive delight at it. It is the yes yes no no push-pull dynamic of a very particular kind which can be slippery and very dangerous as soon as it escapes the realm of fantasy. But in fantasy too, repeated so often, powerful as it is, it can be interrogated.
It got me thinking about the question of sex and the woman’s desire in Bombay songs. I’m not looking at any literature about this yet, and I am sure there are reams of it. But anyone who’s grown up with Bollywood knows exactly what I mean, the eroticism that infuses, eddies around, spills out of so many, so many, so many songs. I have often joked that I simply cannot fall in love with anyone who doesn’t understand the Dil Se soundtrack.
I think about all of the shades of this desire, from Abhimaan, in which her desire is for a child with her husband (nanha sa gul khilega angna / sooni baiyan sajegi sajna - a little flower shall blossom in our home /my lonely arm will be decorated, my love), to Ijazat, in which she finds joy in craving for her emotionally unavailable man’s love (pyasi hoon main pyasi rehne do - I am unquenched/let me remain unquenched). There are the unabashed invitations of aao na, gale lagalo na (come and take me in your arms), and baahon mein chale aao (walk into my arms), and aao huzoor tumko sitaron mein le chaloon (come, sir, let me take you to the stars). I like these songs best when they’re soaking in feminine desire, whatever shade it takes.
To jump to more recent decades, I love Rekha Bharadwaj’s smoky voice in Namak (the salt of your love on my tongue) and Beedo (the tempting food on someone else's plate), and Mallika Sherawat and Aishwarya Rai’s gorgeous performances in Mayya and Kajrare. But I hate the parts of these songs where the male spectator is privileged, where his silly voice or their ridiculous choruses take over. They make my skin crawl in the same way the men salaciously asking “phir kya hua? (what happened next?)” in (the original) Jhumka Gira Re. I wonder how much more I would love these songs if these parts did not exist, or existed differently.
I asked a friend recently what she thought the sexiest Bombay song was. She landed on ‘Hai Rama’ from Rangeela. When I last watched that video it was with my best friend in Delhi, where we took pleasure in the stunning Puriya Dhanashree while screaming at Jackie Shroff to get off beautiful Urmila Matondkar. I complained once again that I wished ‘Jiya Jale’ from my beloved Dil Se soundtrack had been sung by someone else. Still, like both of these songs, ‘Hatto Jao’ evokes from me a visceral reaction of eros, shaped as it has been by years submerged in these histories and aesthetics. When she sings saiyaan like that, desire grabs me by the throat and doesn’t let go.
The singer-scholar Vidya Rao (who happens to be Hydari’s mother), has written about how the performance of thumri itself – while taking place in a patriarchal and feudal context – has the potential to be subversive. Not for the first time, I consider the idea of excess when I think about Rekha Bhardwaj singing jo bhi kaha us chandrabhan ne/phat se ho gayi raaji re/bansuri jaisi baaji re (whatever he said, I readily agreed to/I rang out like a flute), when I return to the queer possibilities of Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai (What’s behind your blouse?) and Kajra Mohabbat Wala (The kohl of love), the sensual vocabulary of the monsoon in Tip Tip Barsa Pani. This is the same way I celebrate the Bombay sexy feminine song – the desire that oozes out beyond false protestations of modesty and shame. The playfulness that bursts through, that cannot be contained. The attempts to contain it which have failed and continue to fail. The song which, for all of the years, she has been singing, yearning and yearning for her lover’s touch.