If you close your
eyes and think ‘Rekha’, the resultant
image is now two-dimensional. Over the thirty
odd years of her career, Bhanurekha Ganesh has
managed to reverse the trajectory of many other
Bollywood dream girls. She has gone from being
a starlet to being an actress to being a model.
The only difference is that Rekha does not allow
her carefully cultivated mystique to be used to
sell other men’s products. She uses it to
sell the image of herself. (At which point, an
addendum. Rekha did some traditional modelling
assignments including one for Gold Spot. The director?
Shyam Benegal.)
 It
would need a psychoanalyst to decipher exactly
what that image is. Part of it is the mystique
of a beautiful woman, but that is only a recent
phenomenon. When Rekha arrived in Bollywood, in
Saawan Bhadon (1970), she was described
as “fat, dark and pimply”.
She wore a layer of pink pancake that ended at
her chin, leaving her neck brown. This layer did
not completely cover her acne, sometimes brought
on by an adolescent body’s rebellions, sometimes
brought on by a deliberate indulgence in the seafood
to which she knew herself to be allergic. She
wore outrageous clothes, she gave outrageous interviews,
she heaved her over-weight if voluptuous body
through a series of dreadful movies, and for a
while it seemed as if she was destined to be Bollywood
roadkill.
Hold on a moment.
Last week, in preparation for the writing of
this piece, I watched Saawan Bhadon (dir:
Mohan Sehgal), her debut film again - it’s
out on VCD as so many movies are, hurray. Rekha
has nothing going for her. She has not the assurance
of the beautiful woman, she has not the poise
of the city girl, she has not the assistance of
a bevy of voice and diction coaches, spin doctors
and look managers. But what she does have is charm,
the charm of a puppy.
One day later I was watching Mira Nair’s
Kamasutra (1996). Nair told me when I
interviewed her soon after the release of the
film that she would not have made the film if
Rekha had not agreed to play the senior courtesan,
the one trained in the arts of love. I was struck
by Rekha’s complete lack of charm in the
film. It’s as if she deliberately effaced
herself and rebuilt her screen persona and then
allowed it to spill into her life.
Every Bollywood buff knows how that happened.
Amitabh Bachchan
and Rekha are supposed to have met, fallen in
love and she is supposed to have remade herself
into the kind of woman He - as she would refer
to him later - would consider worthy of himself,
the son of a poet and the biggest star of Indian
cinema, ever. There are others who argue that
Rekha did not just transform herself into a woman
worthy of Amitabh; she went as far as trying to
be Amitabh. In Silsila (1981), we see
her eating her soup with her left hand. Some years
after Amitabh performed Mere Angane Mein
in drag for Prakash Mehra's Laawaaris (1981),
Rekha had a similar song Apne Apne Miya pe
Sabko Bada Naaz Hai in J Om Prakash's Apna
Bana Lo (1982). This was framed as a stage
show in which she brought on various husbands
and at the end, walks with the tall one. When
Amitabh took to singing in Mr Natwarlal (1979),
it didn’t take much longer for Rekha to
start her own husky warbling in Kal Sunday
ki Chutti for Lekh Tandon's Agar Tum
Na Hote (1983). Of course, if you look at
the evidence, it does seem as if most of it comes
from an industry eager to milk the rumoured relationship
rather than Rekha’s own doing.
Besides, it is odd that Bachchan seems to have
had the reverse effect on his own wife, who went
from being a star in her own right, an actress
who was feted for her different performances into
a bitter hausfrau with no personal or public life
that does not involve her acquired surname. Could
this be the result of an unconscious patriarchy
at work? Could it be that we do not like the notion
of a woman making something out of the raw material
of herself and wish to ascribe it to her relationship
to a man? Could this be a reflection of the north-south
divide, the way in which we have got used to thinking
of the north as masculine and the south as feminine,
the north as impregnating and the south as fecund?
It might be difficult to get any clear answers.
Neither of the principals in this drama will ever
speak clearly and honestly. Rekha ducks the issue
by talking about men in general, women in general,
with a garnish of the latest psychobabble. Bachchan
simply says that she was a co-star and nothing
ever happened. Jaya Bachchan, and this is where
it becomes difficult to know whether to sympathise
with this ruin of a woman or to laugh at such
a public display of self-deception, said on the
Rendezvous with Simi Garewal, that the
media are to blame for making up the whole thing.
On another episode of the same show, Rekha said
that there had been no affair.
 But
here is something that should be of interest to
those who believe that there could have been no
Rekha-as-we-now-know-her had there been no Amitabh-the-transformative-agent.
Here is a piece of cinematic evidence. Her best
performances have been in Manick Chatterjee's
Ghar (1978), as the married woman who
is raped; in Shyam Benegal's Kalyug (1981),
as one of the women caught in the crossfire of
a boardroom battle, in Girish Karnad's Utsav
(1985), as the courtesan Vasantsena from
Banabhatta’s Mrichhakatika; and
as Umrao Jaan in Muzaffar Ali's Umrao Jaan
(1981) and as the naughty middle-class girl,
an updated Guddi as it were, in Hrishida's
Khubsoorat (1980).
None of these films had Amitabh Bachchan.
Hold on a moment, again.
This is supposed to be an essay on Rekha the
actor. And yet it seems to have got bogged down
in Rekha the person. But it is difficult to separate
the two.Right now, Rekha has star emeritus status
in the industry. She has had a run of dreadful
luck at the box office. Her last release, Bachke
Rehna (2006) had a 51-year-old Rekha and
Mallika Sherawat as an aunt and niece pair of
con women and it bombed badly at the box office,
Indian reviewers, never bothered about issues
like ageism, spoke slightingly of Rekha not acting
her age and dressing like a young girl. How did
she get here?
Rekha was the love child of Gemini
Ganesh and Pushpavalli, with whom the leading
star had an affair long enough to produce two
children, Bhanurekha and her sister, Radha. She
remembers her childhood as idyllic:
“I was pulled out of the ninth class
and made to work when I was fourteen. At that
time, it made no sense. I was the pampered child
of the family, always given everything I wanted
and ten rupees pocket money a day. It seemed to
me that we were happy and certainly well off,
I was not to know how much in debt my mother was,
till much later. So, the idea of working in films
did not appeal to me at all. I used to refuse
to go to the sets and occasionally my brother
beat me up.” - Bombay magazine, (7
January, 1986)
This is the familiar story of the child star.
It is also a chilling story, if one puts the hints
that Rekha has dropped over the years together,
the suggestions of exploitation and cruelty. For
instance, on the sets of what should have been
her first film but which was released almost a
decade later, Anjana Safar (1979)
(renamed Do Shikari), Biswajeet kissed
Rekha for the cameras. He did so without warning,
following the director’s instructions. Raja
Nawathe who was the cameraman, was so uncomfortable
about shooting a kiss that he focussed the camera
and then looked away and forgot to say 'cut'.
The resultant kiss made it to the Asian edition
of Life magazine and made Rekha into a sex symbol.
She played to the gallery as well, speaking with
a candour that seems to have been misunderstood.
“Pre-marital sex is very natural. And
all those prudes who say that a single woman should
only have sex on her suhaag raat are talking bull,”
she told Stardust (September 1972). “It
is sheer fluke that I have not got pregnant so
far,” she told the same magazine (April
1979).
It is interesting to compare the complete lack
of public response to these statements to the
brouhaha over Khushboo’s remarks nearly
30 years later. In the seventies, Rekha was giggled
at or mocked but no one ever thought of attacking
her for being a sexual presence. Today, things
are very different.
For many years, it seemed as if Rekha would only
be interviewed to talk about the men she married
or the men she slept with or the men she is supposed
to have slept with. She married Vinod Mehra, dated
Kiran Kumar, and then met Amitabh Bachchan.
Which came first? The role of Umrao Jaan, that
she almost refused to finish because she claimed
Ali had not paid her the agreed fee? Or the liaison
with Bachchan? Did the identification with the
role of the courtesan begin there or did it end
there? Many of her films, the ones by which she
will be remembered, have Rekha playing a high-class
prostitute. In almost all these films, she dies
(Daasi, Muqaddar ka Sikandar (1978))
or she is condemned to a life of lovelessness
(Umrao Jaan). One could conjecture endlessly,
about the marriage to Mukesh Aggarwal, who later
killed himself, about her relationship with Farzana
who dresses as if she were an Amitabh Bachchan
clone from the seventies.
It is difficult to tell but the two-dimensional
image that springs to mind, Rekha with lots of
lip-gloss and perfect make-up that image trembles
for a moment.
Jerry Pinto is the author of Helen; The
Life and Times of an H-Bomb (Penguin India). He
is working with Leela Naidu on her autobiography.
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