Nargis: The Sequel

The Bombay film industry has been, and continues to be, intertwined uneasily but closely with the gendered and religiously inflected discourse of nationalism and the nation-state; it is continually anxious to establish its legitimacy in the eyes of a state that looks upon it with suspicion as “both paltry and powerful.” ^[45] Nargis was thus doubly liminal as an actress and as a Muslim subject; both identities involved complex negotiations not only within the postcolonial state but also within an industry whose inaugural moment was ineluctably tied to an emergent idiom of cultural nationalism.^[46] We might remember that Dadasaheb Phalke’s inspiration for Rajah Harishchandra was famously prompted by the desire for a mimesis that involved a specifically Indian address:

In 1910 I happened to see the film The Life of Christ in the America-India Picture Palace in Bombay.…That day also marked the foundation in India of an industry which occupied the fifth place in the myriads of big and small professions that exist.…While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes I was mentally visualising the Gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya. I was gripped by a strange spell. I bought another ticket and saw the film again. This time I felt my imagination taking shape on the screen. Could this really happen? Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?…There was no doubt whatsoever about the utility of the profession and its importance as an industry.…This was the period of the Swadeshi movement and there was profuse talking and lecturing on the subject. For me personally, this led to the resignation of my comfortable government job and taking to an independent profession.^[47]

As Somnath Zutshi points out, the mapping of an upper-caste (and northern Indian) Hindu masculine identity onto the space designated the national happens as a matter of course; in this context, Phalke’s association with Tilak and with his (Hindu) nationalist magazine Kesari comes as no surprise.^[48] But what is also worthy of note is the way in which the terrain of the cinema was claimed from the first as the ground upon which the struggle for an Indian nation would be waged: “A whole technology, to say nothing of a major culture industry, could now designate itself as Swadeshi [indigenously Indian].” ^[49] The pre-Independence history of the Bombay cinema is replete with instances of films provoking the wrath of British censors because of their incorporation of (Congress) nationalist icons like spinning wheels, Indian flags, and portraits of leaders such as Gandhi or Nehru, or their rendition of scenes of mutiny, or songs or “dialogues” that could be construed as anticolonial. (Theodore Baskaran has persuasively demonstrated the extent to which South Indian, primarily Tamil, cinema was also invested in nationalist topoi and affiliated with prominent nationalists like Rajaji in the decades preceding Independence.)^[50] In fact, the Bombay industry would claim on more than one occasion to have functioned as a de facto arm of state in generating through affect and consent a national unity in diversity that the postcolonial state had been markedly unsuccessful at achieving through its own institutions.

However, Congress nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s and, indeed, of the post-Independence decades could not but be haunted by the specter of its other, Muslim nationalism and, by sympathetic identification, the figure of the Muslim herself/himself as the sign of that intimate enemy. Faisal Devji’s analysis of the Muslim in the symbolic economy of the Indian nation-state, while implicitly invoking a male subject, obviously has its resonances for pre-Independence Congress nationalism as well as for the Bombay cinema that is locked in an embrace with it: “In the history that the Indian state obsessively re-enacts, the Muslim separatist is nothing more than the original sign of its failure. The Muslim, in other words, represents a fundamental anxiety of nationalism itself: of the nation as something unachieved.” ^[51] This anxiety is most obviously managed in the cinema through a structure of prohibitions and repressions; the industry functioned then (as it still does) under the constraints of censorship protocols which proscribed the representation of subjects that might tend to inflame “communal passions,” a proscription that ensured that “communal passions” or Muslim religiopolitical identities except of an oppressively benevolent variety remained unnamed and unexaminable. (We might remember that M. S. Sathyu’s Garm Hawa [1973] was banned before it went on to win a special award for promoting national integration.) At the same time, as the source of profound psychic anxiety for the (new) nation, Muslimness also had to be exorcised again and again. One common vehicle for the enactment of such exorcisms was the historical film; Sumita Chakravarty is surely right in underscoring the ways in which the Bombay cinema has “not so much addressed the Hindu-Muslim relationship as sublimated it by displacing it onto the canvas of history.…The historical film has been the privileged site of elaboration of the Muslim sensibility.” ^[52] But that this sublimation was only a partial one is evidenced by the ideology of religious identity that informs such “Muslim historicals” (many of which were made by Muslim directors) as Mehboob’s Humayun (1945, starring Nargis, Veena, Ashok Kumar, and Chandramohan) and K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960, starring Dilip Kumar, Madhubala, and Prithviraj Kapoor). Humayun represents Babar, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India, as fervently devoted to the mutual love of his Hindu and Muslim subjects and as a king who accepts a Rajput Hindu princess as his adopted daughter. Given the potency of the myth of the sexually aggressive Muslim male and the violated Hindu woman, it is not surprising that Mehboob cast the Hindu woman as a daughter (rather than a wife), and a spirited one at that; there is, however, a considerable if unspoken erotic charge that binds the princess, the prince Humayun (her adopted brother), and her Hindu lover.^[53] The film, despite its high production values and fine performances by many of its stars, was panned by a range of critics for its historical “inaccuracies” and for its alleged soft-pedaling of Muslim “tyranny” over Hindus. Mehboob was never to make a like film again. K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam was safer in its choice of Akbar, the Mughal ruler most assimilated to a Hindu nationalist sensibility, but it, too, was careful to represent him as religiously eclectic, celebrating Hindu festivals, and utterly dedicated to a polity always already marked as Indian and literalized by the map of a pre-Partition India at the beginning of the film.

If this is what the films give us, what kinds of evidence might be adduced by what we will call the “life”? There, one looks almost in vain for those places where Nargis’s Muslimness might be manifest. If there is one thing that characterizes such a figure, it is what might be deemed her “cosmopolitanism,” a cosmopolitanism that overwrites the possibility of a Muslim difference and is aligned not only with that of the emerging Indian nation-state and its commitment to a secular modernity so-called but also with a specifically filmic variety of religious marking and unmarking. Unlike a figure like Mehboob, who was famous for the regularity of his prayers and who might be said to have simultaneously showcased his Muslim difference and made repeated and hysterical efforts to establish his good Indianness, she was not overtly religious. Her background in fact marked her out as the interstitial figure representative of a new Indian modernity. Though her mother was a Muslim and her father had officially converted in order to marry her, his conversion is usually treated both as a matter of form and a sign of his magnanimity, as meaningless in one register but meaningful in another.

Nargis entered acting and adulthood at a time when religious identities were being monumentally and violently reconstellated. It is likely that she suffered the impact of this, as did most other Muslims in pre- and post-Partition India. Partition also had its special set of implications for popular Hindi cinema. While it undoubtedly was solidly anchored in Bombay, it had always maintained a commerce with the Punjab (especially Lahore) and Bengal, both of which were torn asunder by the new national configurations. Several people, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh, crossed new and impermeable borders in 1947; stars like Noorjehan and Khurshid left for Pakistan, while Hindu and Sikh counterparts went to India. K. A. Abbas’s autobiography provides an account of the traumas of those Muslims who never left India; Nargis’s biographer says more tersely: “Leading Muslim personalities in Bombay were momentarily alarmed and were looked upon by some with suspicion.” ^[54] An advertisement was to appear in the Times of India in late 1946 under her name, at the time of particularly vicious anti-Muslim riots, pleading for peace: “Nargis awaits the return of peace—with the rest of the city.” ^[55] This understatement seems to be the mode in which an identity never overtly acknowledged as religious can be articulated.

As an actress, Nargis was noted for having moved away, after the commencement of her involvement with Raj Kapoor, from “the Muslim crowd” (including Mehboob), though she made several films with Raj Kapoor’s rival, Dilip Kumar. When involved with Raj Kapoor (and hopeful of being his second wife), she routinely wore the sindoor of the Hindu wife, and it is possible that the relationship may have helped detach her from the signifiers of Muslim identity. When she married the Hindu Sunil Dutt, it was in an Arya Samaj (reformist/revivalist Hindu) ceremony; their children were given Hindu names.

What is one to make of such unmarking, which while voluntary is rarely neutral? I do not wish of course to assert that Muslim identity is something conceived or experienced in the same way by all subjects designated as Muslim nor to accuse Nargis of having abandoned an authentic Muslim identity; but I do wish to speak of this identity (especially the identity of the “good Muslim Indian”) as a persistent, insuperable, and continually negotiated problem. Paola Bacchetta has cogently described the varying place of the Muslim woman in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) fantasies about its own masculine heterosexuality; what is particularly fascinating is her account of the way the Muslim woman often figures as the subject of a (usually unreciprocated) desire for the Hindu nationalist male.^[56] Nargis’s devotion can fruitfully be read through such a lens, which may serve as a grid even for those who are not overtly Hindu nationalists, for Hindu nationalist thought, rather than necessarily contradicting the commonsense of the modern Hindu subject, represents it in radical form. Her legendary status is secured and her transcendence of her Muslimness confirmed through her desire for and devotion to a Hindu male savior. She can atone both for her Muslimness and for her enticement of a married Hindu male by living the Mother India allegory, which not only scripts her as heroically chaste but also—in the extraordinary scene showing an undivided continent reforming in response to her summons to the villagers to return—as a renouncer of Muslim separatism. Rosie Thomas has brilliantly described the appeal of Mother India to Indian audiences in terms of the gossip attaching to the sexual histories of its stars. I wonder whether part of the appeal is not also due to the very fact of Nargis’s Muslimness, this Muslimness functioning as an asset rather than a blot upon her status as ideal Indian woman, precisely because it can be shown to be erasing or overwriting itself in the assumption of the Radha role. If Mother India is, at least partially, an allegory of the repudiation of Muslim difference and of a becoming Hindu, then only a Muslim can assume the iconic position of that maternal figure.

What interests me here is precisely this recessive, displaced quality of the Muslimness in the star persona and, indeed, in the filmography itself: Nargis—unlike her female Muslim compatriots Madhubala and Meena Kumari, for instance—did not appear in any major “Muslim” role.^[57] I am interested in the (absent, ephemeral, discreet) Muslimness of the actress and in the ways in which this barely articulated religious identity might provide a point of entry into questions of Muslim femininity and Indian nationalism. How is Muslim woman represented in the (filmic) space of the nation? Where can one find it, if it is not only or most satisfactorily locatable in Muslim characters and stereotypes or in directors, songwriters, and producers? (The Bombay film industry is well known for the considerable Muslim talent it has attracted.) As Mukul Kesavan confirms, such cataloguing is inadequate to “[encompass] the singular relationship between Hindi films and Muslim-ness.…When I speak of Muslim-ness…and the Hindi cinema, the reference is not only or even mainly to its Muslim personnel nor to its repertoire of ghetto stereotypes, but to a cultural influence that has determined the very nature of this cinema.” ^[58] Kesavan discerningly goes on to locate Muslimness in a nonpersonalized and nontaxonomizing sphere; he locates it in the very grammar (an Urdu, usually demotic but sometimes high-flown, and distinct from the Sanskritized, shuddh [pure] Hindi of All-India Radio) of Bombay cinema. I am, however, more interested in the traffic between star text and religious identity, in the repressions and displacements of Muslimness to the limits of the biography; I am interested, too, in the displacements that are necessitated by Bombay cinema’s exhibition of its own “cosmopolitanism,” a cosmopolitanism that is made deeply anxious by that sense of the abjected, the supplementary, that is Muslimness in Indian identity.

As we have seen, Nargis’s Muslimness seems not to emerge in any obvious way from the legend of her life, which seems to involve if anything a disidentification from the Muslim, tawa’if world of her mother. Her own publicly stated loyalties were powerfully, even hysterically, (Congress) nationalist and statist. At the first Film Seminar organized in 1955 by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, she insisted, far more vehemently than did any of the other participants from the film industry, on the role of cinema as the handmaiden of nation building: “In the new pattern of socialistic society laid down for our country, the emphasis will naturally be on rapid industrial progress, and India will need hundreds of thousands of working heroes and heroines to achieve the goal. The film artistes are duty-bound to portray them on the screen. Today, the film artistes are called upon to play more dynamic roles reflecting the spirit of ‘new’ India.” ^[59] At a later date, and more notoriously, she became embroiled in controversy when, in her opening remarks as a newly appointed member of the Rajya Sabha, she attacked the films of Satyajit Ray as catering to a western taste for Indian poverty: “Why do you think films like Pather Panchali become so popular abroad?…People there want to see India in an abject condition. That is the image they have of our country and a film that confirms that image seems to them authentic.…His [Ray’s] films are not commercially successful. They only win awards.…What I want is that if Mr. Ray projects Indian poverty abroad, he should also show ‘Modern India.’” ^[60] If she sought an identification with any political figure, it was with Indira Gandhi (a personal friend, as her father Nehru had been, though to a less intense degree), whose representation as Durga or as Bharat Mata resonated powerfully with her most important role and her own sense of moral authority. (Several people—most notably Rajeswari Sunder Rajan—have in fact noted the parallels across the lives of Indira and Nargis and the reverberations of both in the script of Mother India—the mythic status, the imperiousness, and the devotion to an ungovernable son.)^[61]

Where Nargis’s Muslimness becomes most visible is in what persists as an afterlife and what refuses to stay buried. One important instance of this is the controversy that erupted immediately after her death, as if the mortality of the legend was what permitted a release of the disavowals that the fetishization of Mother India had reined in. Newspaper headlines marked her death as the passing of a legend: “Nargis: So Ends the Legend,” “Last Journey of a Queen,” “End of an Era.” And yet there was something else, an appendage, an excess that seems always to haunt the figure of the “good Indian Muslim.” According to Sunil Dutt, when she died he decided, for sentimental reasons (having to do with her remembrance of her parents in the last months of her life), to give her a Muslim burial rather than a Hindu cremation. There was free public speculation about this; given that Nargis had demonstrated her transcendence of her Muslimness through her films and the example of her life, her return to Islam, even in death, was deeply disturbing, raising questions about the genuineness of her (simulation of) non-Muslimness. If I may borrow a term from queer theory and queer activism, I would describe this as analogous to the outing of public figures at the time of their death; one is reminded inescapably of the trauma to heterosexual identity by the revelation of Rock Hudson’s gayness when he was dying from AIDS.^[62] In the case of Nargis, some reports claimed that she had left instructions to be buried as a Muslim, others that her brother (with the aid of aggressive Muslim mullahs) had insisted on Muslim rites in defiance of the widower’s wishes.^[63] As it was, the incident enhanced Sunil Dutt’s stature as a renouncer (he had married an older woman, he had not insisted on his wife’s renunciation of her religious identity, he had nursed her devotedly in her illness, and he had permitted a Muslim burial); but it also had the interesting effect of Islamicizing him, and of marking him out as the weak Hindu male, the most treacherous of the enemies within.

Sunil Dutt would come in time to be known, especially by the Hindu right, as a Muslim sympathizer. In 1993, when he was involved in providing relief to the victims of Bombay’s vicious anti-Muslim riots (in which the police participated), he was accused by the Shiv Sena (a Hindu rightist group based in western India and powerful in Bombay) of undue partiality to Muslims. There were, according to Dilip Kumar, two attempts on his life, and the family received death threats. Later that year, in April 1993, and then again four months later, his son Sanjay, who was one of the highest-paid leading men in the industry, was arrested and jailed for possession of a smuggled AK–46 and ammunition in the aftermath of bombings in Bombay which are now widely believed to implicate Muslim underworld figures with ties to Pakistan and Dubai. He was believed to have obtained these from a Muslim film-production duo, Hanif-Samir, who were arrested for gun running in the Bombay blast case. He was imprisoned briefly, then released on temporary bail, allowing him to wrap up work on a film, Khalnayak (directed by Subhash Ghai, 1993), which went on to become a great success; by a curious coincidence, he played the role of a notorious terrorist and political assassin in that film. As in the case of his mother with Mother India, he began to be identified in fairly literal ways with (what was retrospectively recognized as) an important role; newspapers and magazines began to describe the new breed of violent Hindi films as inseparable from the violence of their (criminal, Muslim) backers. Hindu rightist groups campaigned against his films and those of his father. Sanjay was rearrested under the notorious Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) and charged with conspiracy and sedition in the Bombay blast case, instead of being charged under the milder Arms Act. In October 1994 he was denied bail, on the grounds that (under TADA) the very possession of prohibited weapons constituted proof of terrorist intent.^[64]

The Hindu right saw in Sanjay the lineaments of his Muslim mother (and his “Muslim-loving” father). Nargis’s Muslimness, then, was never fully exorcised from the star legend; but the subtext that was more or less curbed in her lifetime was to take the form of an interesting displacement. She continues in some registers to be revered as a legend, with Doordarshan recently holding a retrospective of her films, but she also figures at the same time as a species of monstrous mother, as her husband and her son come to occupy the place of her Otherness. The fact that Sanjay was a spoiled and recklessly self-indulgent young man, who had been his mother’s darling, has given for some people a certain credence to the substitution. The fact, moreover, of his visibility and popularity—he was the second only to Amitabh among male stars in Bombay—is fully congruous with the sense of the Muslim as the familiar enemy; thus the Muslim is not one of us, and the Muslim is, terrifyingly, one of us.

The scenario of the overfond mother whose indulgence (temporarily) spoils the son is a common one in the Bombay cinema, and in the eyes of many it seems to have been played out with uncanny literalism in the Nargis-Sanjay Dutt story. She is known to have been passionately fond of him, indulging him and lying for him in defiance of her husband’s call for stricter discipline, and she is believed by many to have facilitated his addiction to a variety of drugs, including heroin. I should point out that even outside the context of the charges he currently faces, Sanjay is conspicuous as his mother’s son. His audiences, it is said, see him as carrying an aura of tragedy and vulnerability because of his mother’s early death, an aura that belies the macho violence of his roles.^[65] But the very prematurity of her death is also the sign of a refusal to die; she features as a contagion from beyond the grave, an unquiet specter inhabiting both the renegade Hindu husband and the violent, weak minded, and affectionate son. In this context, Sanjay’s long and very public history of addiction makes him available as an easily pathologizable figure. The fact of his describing himself as always vulnerable to temptation (“It’s a sickness that can’t be cured”) provides a rationalization for the stigmatization.^[66] His addiction functions as an analog to, and perhaps the support for, the taint of his Muslimness.

It must be noted that, apart from the prosecutors and the Hindu right, he is believed to be innocent of the conspiracy charges, though he is believed to have had mob connections. An article in the respected fortnightly India Today also links the acquisition of the weapon to questions of religious identity. It conjectures that the frantic calls for help the Dutts received from besieged Muslims during the riots may have led Sanjay to this step, especially as the Hanif-Samir team began to frequent his home at this juncture.^[67] He has become, unwittingly, a representative figure, not only of the enemy within but also of an entire industry’s alleged subservience to Muslim mafiosi based in Dubai. The very word Dubai resonates powerfully in the Indian context, given the numbers of Muslim Indians who have gone there (and to other countries in the Persian Gulf) in recent decades as guest workers and returned to India comparatively wealthy and occasionally with a sharpened sense of religious affiliation. This is articulated in ways both subtle and obvious with the growing sense of Bollywood’s thralldom to organized crime, especially Muslim organized crime; the trips made by famous major and minor stars to Dubai, and their reputed liaisons with alleged underworld figures, are seen as evidence of their subjection to these illicit, antinational influences.^[68] Sanjay’s apprehension led to considerable nervousness in the industry, nervousness that sometimes took the form of appeasing Bal Thackeray, the head of the Shiv Sena. It also became the occasion for the imposition of a number of demands by the Hindu rightist Bharatiya Janata Party in Bombay on the Film Makers’ Combine: these included suspending producers and actors accused of antinational activities from trade bodies and new films and respecting “the Hindu way of life, culture and values.” ^[69]

And while his arrest has been instrumental in increasing criticism of TADA, I would argue that the very fact of his arrest and imprisonment without bail (along with hundreds of alleged coconspirators), despite his being the son of a Congress (I) member of Parliament, at a time when the party was in power at the state and at the federal level, is something of a testimony to the fact that suspicions of his Muslimness do not emanate solely from the Hindu right. TADA is in fact notorious for having been applied with extreme rigor to religious minorities, especially Muslims and Sikhs, and has been vociferously criticized by religious minorities and the Human Rights Commission. TADA does not clarify the nature of terrorist activity, encompassing acts violent and nonviolent, private and public, and places upon the accused the burden of proving their innocence;^[70] in this regard it functions in ways that are already familiar to religious minorities, casting them as the abjected who must compulsively yet unsuccessfully keep enacting their good citizenship. At the moment Sanjay is out on bail and has resumed his acting career, thanks to the intervention of Thackeray. This is not testimony to the waning of Hindu fundamentalist zeal. Rather, it speaks to the power of the RSS chief, who can manifest his potency perhaps even more persuasively by withholding punishment than by inflicting it.

This is a sequel, not yet completed, to the life of Nargis. Even after death, she remains, as good Muslimness remains in the Indian polity and in Indian/Hindu public culture, as a phantasm, a ghost that lives and moves uncannily in our midst, not quite tangible and never fully exorcisable. Her career—in life and after it—illustrates in fascinating ways how disturbing and enigmatic a figure of (gendered) trouble the good Muslim is for Indianness. (The “bad Muslim,” as a figure who insists on forms of religiously based separatism and retains the obvious signifiers of Muslim identity, is a far easier entity to respond to or manage.) As we have seen, the industry itself has showcased Muslim talent—in acting, direction, writing, and music—in a very substantial way; many Muslim actors and actresses have entered the imaginary of a movie-going public in the most spectacular ways. The good Muslim, then, is not simply a phobic object, to be responded to with punitive laws and pogroms and other forms of bigotry; s/he is also, and at the same time, the object of love and identification. Above all, s/he is a figure of unhappy intimacy who, despite manifold repressions and conversions, returns repeatedly and inauspiciously to haunt the wholeness of an Indian (Hindu) psyche/polity. (Post)colonial Hindu/Indian identity must simultaneously disavow and be consumed with the intimate enemies that it can scarcely distinguish from itself.