1. A. S. Panneerselvan, “The MGR Mystique,” Filmfare, 1–15 February 1988, 53. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), from which MGR broke away to form the AIADMK, was of course well known for its close ties with the film world and for its use of films as a vehicle for political propaganda.

2. M. S. S. Pandian, The Image Trap: M. G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1992) is the most sustained account that I know of concerning the reciprocal imbrications of (Tamil) cinema and politics. Shashi Tharoor’s 1991 novel, Show Business (New York: Arcade Publishing), a thinly disguised narrative of the career of Amitabh Bachchan, attempts, though not with particular persuasiveness, to weave the cinema and politics together as mutually implicated in deception.

3. Pandian, Image Trap, 17, 129–39.

4. Chidananda Das Gupta, The Painted Face: Studies in India’s Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1991), 211.

5. Chidananda Das Gupta, “The Painted Face of Politics: The Actor-Politicians of South India,” in Cinema and Cultural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India, and China, ed. Wimal Dissanayake (Lanham, Md., and London: University Press of America, 1988), 135. Much of the information on NTR is derived from this essay and from Das Gupta, Painted Face.

6. In August 1995 NTR was forced out of his chief ministership by a rebel Telugu Desam contingent headed by his son-in-law Chandrababu Naidu. His ouster was attributed to resentment at the growing political influence of his new wife, Lakshmi Parvati. He died in 1996.

7. Mira Reym Binford, “The Two Cinemas of India,” in Film and Politics in the Third World, ed. John J. H. Downing (New York: Praeger, 1987), 147.

8. Farrukh Dhondy, “Keeping Faith: Indian Film and Its World,” Daedalus 114 (Fall 1985): 130.

9. For an account of the negotiations between contradictory forces in the star texts of three “heroines,” Fearless Nadia, Nargis, and Smita Patil, see Behroze Gandhy and Rosie Thomas, “Three Indian Film Stars,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

10. T. J. S. George, The Life and Times of Nargis (New Delhi: Indus/HarperCollins, 1994), 201.

11. The female star of Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana was cautioned, after the spectacular success of that serial, to take up no other (lesser) roles, to dress in certain approved “traditional” ways, and so forth. My thanks to Robert Goldman for reminding me of this.

12. Rosie Thomas, “Sanctity and Scandal: The Mythologization of Mother India,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11, no. 3 (1989): 11–30.

13. Despite his vast popularity with the electorate of Tamil Nadu, MGR never aspired to national office, and, indeed, the principle of Tamil nationalism with which he was aligned existed in a deeply combative relationship with the nationalism of Delhi.

14. George, Life and Times of Nargis, 26.

15. Interview with Nargis, in Indian Cinema Superbazaar, ed. Aruna Vasudev and Philippe Lenglet (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1983), 252.

16. George, Life and Times of Nargis, 45–46.

17. Thomas, “Sanctity and Scandal,” 23.

18. Gautam Kaul, “Review of Wimal Dissanayake and Malti Sahai’s Raj Kapoor: Harmony of Discourses (New Delhi: Vikas, 1988),” India Today, 31 May 1988, 91.

19. George, Life and Times of Nargis, 96. Bunny Reuben, Raj Kapoor, the Fabulous Showman: An Intimate Biography (New Delhi: Indus/HarperCollins, 1995) provides further details about the romance.

20. Bikram Singh, “The Dream Merchant,” Filmfare, 16–30 June 1988, 18.

21. George, Life and Times of Nargis, 127.

22. Interview with K. A. Abbas, in Indian Cinema Superbazaar.

23. Mayo’s Mother India was regarded in some circles as anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim (Sinha, “Reading Mother India ”).

24. B. D. Garga, “The Feel of the Good Earth,” Cinema in India 3 (April-June 1989): 32.

25. George, Life and Times of Nargis, 157.

26. Ibid., 151. See also A. A. Khatib, “Nargis: The Way She Was,” Filmfare, 1–15 June 1981, 12–15.

27. Jogan (Kidar Sharma, dir., 1950), in which she plays a nun whose renunciation cannot be reconciled with the demands of eroticism, is an important exception to this generalization. She played a rural belle in Barsaat (Raj Kapoor, dir., 1949), but became “modernized” by the film’s end. Sudhir Kakar, among others, has described the ways in which the popular cinema stages, even if it does not always reconcile, the stresses of the “transitional sector,” caught between “traditional roles” and “modernization”; these stresses are, according to him, superbly illustrated in the filmic persona of Amitabh Bachchan, and may account for his phenomenal popularity (“Lovers in the Dark,” in Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, by Sudhir Kakar [New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989], 25–41). Ashis Nandy makes a version of the same argument: “Commercial cinema romanticizes and, given half a chance, vulgarizes the problems of the survival sector, but it never rejects as childish or primitive the categories or world-views of those trying to survive the processes of victimization let loose by modern institutions” (Ashis Nandy, “An Intelligent Critic’s Guide to Indian Cinema,” in The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995], 203).

28. Bunny Reuben, Mehboob: India’s DeMille (New Delhi: Indus/HarperCollins, 1994), 371.

29. Baburao Patel, review in Filmindia, December 1957, cited in ibid., 266 (emphasis mine).

30. Nargis, Filmfare, 7 June 1957, cited in ibid., 248.

31. Khatib, “Nargis,” 14.

32. Gandhy and Thomas, “Three Indian Film Stars,” 107.

33. Ibid.

34. Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 42.

35. Ibid., 69. See also Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 13.

36. Vijay Mishra, Peter Jeffery, and Brian Shoesmith, “The Actor as Parallel Text in Bombay Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11, no. 3 (1989): 52.

37. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 118.

38. Mishra, Jeffery, and Shoesmith, “Actor as Parallel Text,” 53.

39. Interview with Gulzar, in Indian Cinema Superbazaar, 193–204. Nargis herself was somewhat embittered about the low status of actresses, complaining at the first Film Seminar organized in 1955 by the Sangeet Natak Akademi: “every film artiste in this country, in her heart of hearts, genuinely desires to serve the country and is even prepared to make personal sacrifices towards that end. But…[an] artificial barrier has been created between us and the people by irresponsible criticism of responsible people. They prejudiced the public against film actresses.…It is agreed that we should try to understand the people. But people must also try to understand us” (R. M. Ray, ed. Sangeet Natak Akademi Film Seminar Report 1955 [New Delhi: n.p., 1956], 174).

40. Firoze Rangoonasala, A Pictorial History of Indian Cinema (London: Hamlyn, 1979), 13.

41. For an analysis of the institution of the tawa’if, see Veena Talwar Oldenburg, “Lifestyle as Resistance,” in Contesting Power, ed. Gyan Prakash and Douglas Haynes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). See, too, Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 133–44 (“The City Must Be Clean”).

42. Interview with Nargis, in Indian Cinema Superbazaar, 255.

43. Sushama Shelley, “Raj’s Women,” Filmfare, 16–30 June 1988, 48. See also Ritu Nanda, Raj Kapoor: His Life and His Films (Moscow: Iskusstvo Publishers; Bombay: R. K. Films & Studios, 1991), 51.

44. George, Life and Times of Nargis, 150.

45. Kishore Valicha, “Why Are Popular Films Popular?” Cinema in India 3 (April-June 1989): 34. When I speak of nationalism(s) here, it is of Congress and Hindu nationalisms; despite the significant involvement of Muslims in the Bombay film industry, it has never supported implicitly or explicitly any form of Muslim nationalism.

46. See Pathak and Sunder Rajan, “Shahbano,” for a subtle and exhaustive account of the way in which the working-class Muslim woman can function only as a “palimpsest of identities, now constituted, now erased, by discursive displacements” (p. 268).

47. Somnath Zutshi, “Women, Nation and the Outsider in Contemporary Hindi Cinema,” in Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, ed. Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, and Vivek Dhareshwar (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993), 85–86, citing D. G. Phalke, in Navyug, November 1917.

48. Ibid., 86–88.

49. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian Cinema,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 25–26 (1993): 62. Even Satyajit Ray, that great critic of popular Bombay cinema, insisted that what cinema in India “needs above everything else is a style, an idiom, a sort of iconography of cinema, which would be uniquely and recognisably Indian” (Our Films, Their Films [Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976], 22). Admittedly, his notion of Indianness was fairly distinct from that of the cultural nationalists of Bollywood. Like many scholars of that much-reviled institution, he saw it as hopelessly imitative of Hollywood conventions, though he was keenly appreciative of the eclectic genius of the Bombay film song. For a useful corrective to a reading of Bombay cinema’s lack of “originality” (a corrective that does not gloss over some of the substantive problems—like sexism—of the Bombay film), see Rosie Thomas, “Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity,” Screen 26 (May-August 1985): 116–31.

50. S. Theodore Baskaran, The Message Bearers: Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India, 1880–1945 (Madras: Cre-A, 1981). Baskaran’s understanding of the term nationalism is very inclusive; films about “social reform,” for instance, function quite unproblematically as nationalist films in his reading.

51. Faisal Fatehali Devji, “Hindu/Muslim/Indian,” Public Culture 5 (Fall 1992): 1. See, too, Aamir R. Mufti’s analysis of the way in which Islam in South Asia is narrativized in liberal nationalist discourse as “trauma to the nation” (“Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique,” Social Text 45, 14, no. 4 [1995]: 88). Gyan Pandey’s scrutiny of the refusal/failure of Indian historiography to represent the colossal violence of the Partition and of sectarian riots (in which Muslims have been the main victims) as anything but an “aberration” from national history is of relevance here. See his “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today.” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 27–55.

52. Chakravarty, National Identity, 165.

53. My thanks to Aditya Behl for reminding me of the competing myths of desire, aggression, and fetishization that circulate on the field of the Hindu-Muslim encounter in India.

54. George, Life and Times of Nargis, 57.

55. K. N. Subramaniam and Ratnakar Tripathy, comps., Flashback: Cinema in the Times of India (Bombay: Times of India, 1990), 160.

56. See Paola Bacchetta, “Communal Property/Sexual Property: On Representations of Muslim Women in a Hindu Nationalist Discourse,” in Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India, ed. Zoya Hasan (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), for a fascinating account of the Hindu nationalist male fantasy of the Muslim woman’s desire for him. For a full account of the RSS, see Walter K. Anderson and Shridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987).

57. The fullest filmography of Nargis that I have found is in The Life and Times of Nargis, the biography by T. J. S. George, though it does not include a few films in which Nargis (who had not yet assumed her famous screen name) had appeared as a child actress. Her first “adult” Muslim role appears to have been in Mehboob’s Humayun (1945), in which she played Humayun’s lady-love Hamida Banu, but this role is distinctly smaller than those of Ashok Kumar, Veena, and Chandramohan. Her other “Muslim” role is as the bad sister Mohinibai (who is a tawa’if, and in this sense marked as Muslim, despite the name) in Anhonee (1952). She was slated to play Anarkali in K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960)—a role eventually played by Madhubala—but was apparently unable to fulfill this contract on account of Raj Kapoor’s disapproval.

58. Mukul Kesavan, “Urdu, Awadh and the Tawaif: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema,” in Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India, ed. Zoya Hasan (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), 244–45.

59. R. M. Ray, Sangeet Natak Akademi Film Seminar Report 1955, 173–74.

60. Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 327. This response to Ray does not, however, mean that she was invariably dedicated to sloganeering for the nation-state. In an interview preceding by a year or so her comments on Ray, she was more critical of the nation-state and of its failure to respond to criticism or satire with anything other than censorship: “Sometimes our Government is very harsh on us. Suppose you want to make a farce, a political situation today. Let somebody take an idea and make a farce on this, but our politicians have not learnt to laugh at themselves.…In this country you can’t laugh at the police, you can’t laugh at the armed forces, you can’t laugh at politicians” (Interview with Nargis, in Indian Cinema Superbazaar, 256).

61. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan has brilliantly demonstrated the ways in which Indira Gandhi tapped into the idiom of feminine and maternal power (of the kind memorably illustrated in Mother India) in order to consolidate her hold on the Indian polity and to deflect the patriarchal anxieties induced by the spectacle of a female head of state. The image she most assiduously cultivated was that of the mother of the nation, enacting a noble renunciation on behalf of her children/subjects and invested with irrefutable moral and political authority because of that renunciation. See Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1993). Biographers and political commentators have commented on the uneasy blend in her of the desire for a democratic self-image and the increasing conviction that she alone could lead the country. She was in fact routinely hailed as an embodiment of the goddess Durga, mostly notably after her brilliant victory in Bangladesh over Pakistan; she did nothing to discourage such associations and, in fact, was enraged when in later years the journalist Khushwant Singh likened her estranged daughter-in-law Maneka Gandhi to the goddess. Such a casting of the female head of state as Durga assumed iconic, indeed legendary, proportions during the Emergency of 1975–1977. The slogan “India is Indira, and Indira is India” appeared everywhere, and the well-known painter M. F. Husain painted a triptych depicting Indira as a triumphant Durga on a tiger. That she might have found the role of powerful goddess somewhat outside her control (even though it was very flattering) is evidenced in her remark to the philosopher J. Krishnamurti that the Emergency was a tiger she could not dismount. For more on the iconicity of Indira Gandhi, see the following: Inder Malhotra, Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989); Ashis Nandy, “Indira Gandhi and the Culture of Indian Politics,” in At the Edge of Psychology; Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi: An Intimate Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992 [1988]); and Raj Thapar, All These Years: A Memoir (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992).

62. See Richard Meyer, “Rock Hudson’s Body,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991) for an account of the heterosexual responses to the news of Hudson’s gayness.

63. George, Life and Times of Nargis, 191.

64. Manoj Mitta, “TADA: Relentless Terror,” India Today, 15 October 1994, 111.

65. M. Rahman and Lekha Rattanani, “Sanjay Dutt: A Fatal Attraction,” India Today, 15 May 1993, 72.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid.

68. M. Rahman and Arun Katiyar, “Bombay Film Industry: Underworld Connections,” India Today, 15 May 1993; and Jeet Thayil, “From Reel to Real in ‘Bollywood,’” Asiaweek [reprinted in World Press Review, October 1994, 45].

69. M. Rahman, “Sanjay Dutt: It’s Not Over Yet,” India Today, 31 May 1993, 67.

70. Harinder Baweja, “TADA: An Act of Terror,” India Today, 15 September 1994.