On White Girls in Bollywood

Indian cinema has had a long flirtation with the gori, the white woman. White girls appear as item dancers in many Bollywood numbers and have the licence to wear skimpy clothes and perform raunchy dance moves because they not bound by Indian notions of propriety. The hero may have a romantic dalliance with a white girl but end up falling in love with an Indian heroine (the gori having been safely confined within the parameters of being a narrative device by this point). There were numerous white women in Bollywood movies of the 1950’s and 1960’s, who played exotic temptresses or item dancers. The most famous of these was Helen, an actress and dancer of Anglo-Indian and Burmese descent, who appeared in countless movies from the 1950’s onwards.

‘As a film maker you have used your Indian woman to define the positive moral pole of the universe. You now need a negative pole. This is where the other comes in’ writes Indian journalist Jerry Pinto (author of ‘Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb’

The white woman in Bollywood can be a foil, a seductress, a plot device, or eye candy. She is rarely a character in her own right, although there are a few notable exceptions. I got to thinking about the topic and have come up with a countdown of the top ten gori appearances in Bollywood:

10) Rang de Basanti –Alice Patten plays a film-maker struggling to shoot a movie about an Indian uprising against the British colonizers. She speaks halting, heavily accented Hindi and even dances a bit. Patten is affable, but even at her most emotional moments comes across like a prim head girl from the Home Counties and is dwarfed by the massive presence of co-star Amir Khan. A rather bloodless performance, but ten house points for effort.

9)  Salaam-e-Ishq: in one of the movie’s many sub-plots, blonde American Stephanie  travels to India to search frantically for her Indian boyfriend who is about to be married off by his family somewhere in deepest Punjab to a girl of their choosing. When she arrives at the airport in Delhi she meets a chunky Indian taxi driver, played by Govinda, and they fall in love, playing out the fantasies of semi-employed, sexually frustrated Indian males everywhere.

8 Love Aaj Kal: Saif Ali Khan hooks up a blonde, perpetually surprised looking airhead in London after he decides to end his relationship with his desi girlfriend when she moves to Delhi to pursue a career restoring frescos. Needless to say it doesn’t last, but this doesn’t matter because she doesn’t have a personality and being white is presumed to be dispensable.

7 Love Aaj Kal: On the flip side, we also see a caucasian actress plays an Indian character in this movie. Brazilian Giselli Montiero gives a more-Indian-than-Indian performance as a Punjabi girl, Harleen Kaur.

6) Kites: Mexican actress Barbara Mori is currently the talk of Bollywood after sparks flew between her and co-star Hrithik Roshan on the set of their forthcoming movie Kites. Hrithik’s marriage to interior designer Sussanne Roshan was reported to be in trouble after his rumoured hook-up with Mori. I’ve yet to see the movie myself but this seems to me to be a classic case of the white woman being the forbidden, sexy other.

5) Lagaan: Rachel Shelley plays a British woman in colonial India who teaches a bunch of farmers how to play cricket in order to win a symbolic match against the Brits. Shelley does something that most white women in Bollywood films fail to do – to establish themselves as a character in her own right rather than being just a cipher or a projection of the audience’s fantasies. A sterling performance, but a shame about her cringe-worthy appearance in the song ‘O Re Chori’, complete with red roses and doves.

4) Blue: Kylie Minogue performs item number ‘I wanna Chiggy-Wiggy with you’, looking visibly uncomfortable next to sleazy Akshay Kumar.

3) Katrina Kaif: Technically this doesn’t count as Katrina is half Kashmiri, but the British-raised actress had to have her films dubbed into Hindi until fairly recently because of her weak grasp of the language. Now she has established herself as one of the highest-paid actresses in Bollywood, and everyone has now forgotten that she grew up in East Finchley.

2) Thandavam: Any self-respecting white girl who has studied at SOAS has a story about how they once had a walk-on part in an Indian movie, and I am no different. I once had a speaking part in a Malayalam language movie Thandavam, starring Mohan Lal. I played a backpacker in distress who had to be rescued by the tubby Keralan heart-throb when a marauding baddie came to ‘eve tease’ me and my gori friends. Lal quickly sorted the situation out by putting his knowledge of ‘traditional Keralan martial arts’ into practice and sending the baddie flying through the air into a cart of marigolds. A lot of screaming, a lot of bad dancing and a lot of fake rain. On balance, a lot of fun, but not one of the Ajnabee’s more ladylike moments. Sexy, dangerous phoren girl I was not, on this occasion.

That's me on the left, at the tender age of 18

1) The one and only Helen. All of the other goris pale into insignificance  in comparison (no pun intended). This video shows one of her finest moments, doing an ‘exotic’ dance for the entertainment of the bad guys in Sholay, one of the most successful Hindi movies of all time