The Love triangle
has been an integral part of Cinema from its early
days. In India the genre gained its own identity
through seminal films like Andaaz
(1949), Mehboob Khan’s Greek Tragedy
featuring Nargis,
Dilip Kumar
and Raj Kapoor,
Chaudhavi ka Chand (1960), Guru
Dutt’s ‘Muslim Social’ featuring
himself, Waheeda
Rehman and Rehman, and that ultimate mother
of all triangles – Raj Kapoor’s Sangam
(1964).
In the 1950s and 1960s the heyday for the urban
crime thriller inspired by the film noir movement
of Hollywood, one important aspect of the love
triangle was the conflict involving the heroine
and the vamp both fighting for the same man, the
hero (Baazi (1951),
Aar Paar (1954),
Pocketmaar (1956), Kaala Paani (1958),
Phool Aur Patthar (1966) and many more).
This conflict on the surface might just be a clash
of the two facets of a woman – the home-loving
girl next door versus the agressive femme fatale
but on a larger scale we see it is really a conflict
of two ideologies that post-independent India
faced following the years of its freedom –
 The
traditional Indian and the so called modern Western.
The heroine in Hindi Cinema was the ideal ‘Bharatiya
Nari’ dressed in a sari or salwar kameez
- a predictable stereotype who retains her dog
like devotion for her man. She was associated
with the home and offers her man true love, understanding
and nurturing and was the harbinger of so called
traditional Indian values. She viewed marriage
as the pinnacle of achievement expressed itself
in the perverse caricature of a dutiful wife in
Indian cinema. She was expected to operate strictly
within the domain of the home and procreate on
demand. Only motherhood came higher on the filmi
social ladder. Any desire to build a career and
pursue an independent path was punished with humiliation
and defeat. Nargis, Nutan,
Meena Kumari,
Nirupa Roy and Waheeda
Rehman epitomized the one dimensional ideal sacrificing
teary Indian woman in film after film.
 The
vamp on the other hand was the corrupting urban
Western influence that seduced the man often into
the world of moral decadence or crime. She was
always dressed in western attire, smoked and drank
and realized she had an ace up her sleeve: her
body and she sought to advance herself by manipulating
her sexual allure and controlling its value, particularly
when the chips were down. What was interesting
with the vamp was that as an outsider she could
provide truthful insights into society that neither
the hero nor the heroine could. Since no meaningful
sexual relationship was possible between the hero-husband
and heroine-wife, it was the vamp to who the hero
turned to express his sexuality. And this gave
her a multi-dimensional layer. But of course,
her redemption lay in falling in love with the
hero, and when he returned to his wife or true
love, in either pining for him, or taking her
own life, or taking the bullet meant for him,
or giving up her ‘shameful profession’
i.e. returning to traditional values. We see this
frequently in the many roles essayed by popular
vamps down the years – Kuldeep Kaur, Nadira,
Shashikala and of course Helen.
The conflict has been there right since Independence
as India strove to combine modernity with a strong
National ethos in order to promote its own path
of nation building. On one hand even as India
successfully challenged colonial domination, she
accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’
on which colonial domination was based. Modernity
in nation building has focused on economic productivity
and autonomy of the individual contradicting Indian
Traditions which have a strong base in community,
religion and honour.
 In
the 1970s Indian tradition had begun to yield
more and more to Western Modernity, its science
and technology and began to find itself falling
behind. Modernity felt itself to be the superior
twin having pushed Traditionalism on the defensive.
After all Modernity claimed that to be for change
is positive. And as Westernization began to take
over Indian society, the Hindi film heroines like
Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi began getting bolder
and more ‘modern, herself providing the
sex appeal and the modern heroine has outdone
the vamp in this department thereby causing the
latter to disappear from the screen. Yet the heroine
for all her westernization retained her Indian
values or like the earlier vamp had to redeem
herself sometimes with her death for e.g. the
Parveen Babi character in Deewaar (1975).
This has created the conflict of the traditional
versus the modern, earlier well defined between
the two characters of the heroine and the vamp
to battling it out within the character of the
heroine itself as she combines the elements of
her goody self with her new found ‘vampish’
side.
Today with globalization the convergence of consumption,
including cultural consumption and lifestyles,
has reached unprecedented intensity. Increasingly
we buy, eat, wear, watch and listen to the same
things. And most of those who are not part of
this consumer capitalism want to join it and appear
to do so. Tradition, clearly, is at a loss to
counter this. Countries like us struggle to maintain
our cultural identity.
Consequently, the Hindi film heroine like India
today stands at the crossroads. She is a massive
bundle of contradictions; Modern and Global, but
yet pure and traditional! From the 1970s to her
present day status, her confusion today is complete.
Practically every actress who gives interviews
about their roles in forthcoming films mouth the
same inanities,
“She is very much a girl of today.
But her Indian values are intact!”
Even in a so called modern film like Dil
Chahta Hai (2001), both Preity Zinta and Sonali
Kulkarni - the so called representations of the
modern, young woman have nothing to do except
wait to get married and the older woman Dimple
Kapadia who does have a career of her own and
even drinks is made to pay for it by having to
lose her husband and daughter and to die in the
film. Some things never change…
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