ART-INDIA: Popular Entertainment Weds Art

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Mitu Varma

NEW DELHI, May 28 1996 (IPS) - Can Hollywood’s Marylin Monroe or Bollywood’s Meena Kumari be part of an artist’s vision and means to interpret the world around them?

More precisely: can the seeming chasm between popular entertainment and art be bridged, so that popular icons become tools of the artistic oeuvre without appearing overtly pretentious or avante garde?

It is an experiment which has been tried with varying degrees of success from time to time. In India, the most famous recent example is of the country’s best-known artist, Maqbul Fida Hussain, painting an entire series on the reigning Bollywood box office queen, Madhuri Dixit, the epitome of Indian womanhood.

Most critics dismissed it as an old man’s obsession with a beautiful star though he himself kept saying he thought there should be no dichotomy between popular culture, and his was an attempt to bring the two closer.

Last month, the Eicher Gallery in New Delhi tried a similar experiment as an important part of a sensitively crafted exhibition ‘Of Women Icons/Stars/Feasts’.

In the section on ‘Stars’, artist Sheba Chhachhi has used a multi-media installation as an exploratory device to probe the psyche of the quintessential tragedienne of the Indian screen and its reigning deity during the 50s and 60s — Meena Kumari Naaz.

Titled ‘A Box of Shards/The Mermaids Mirror’, the exhibition, according to Pooja Sood, the director of the gallery, seeks to explore the ‘icon’ of femininity. That the actress herself is a reasonably good Urdu poetess is an added bonus as her emotional verses provide valuable insights into her persona.

The exhibition includes a collection of posters of her important films that depict the different images she portrayed on screen. The archetypal self-sacrificing wife and mother, the emerging new woman against the backdrop of social change and the anguished sufferer of the ills of feudalism, urbanisation and poverty are some of these.

“Meena Kumari straddled both these worlds but sustained her on- screen mystique with an off-screen dramatic persona that fed the myth of her cinematic persona,” says an introductory note to the exhibition.

While viewing the posters, the actresses’ mellifluous voice can be heard reciting her own verse: ‘You have the right/to name me as you will … A flame/a flower/a footprint in the sand/You have the right/to name me as you will”

Further inside the gallery in a darkened room subdued lights focus on a huge white poster of the beautiful actress. Surrounding it are shards of glass — some broken mirrors, anklets, broken goblets and a broken doll. Scattered among these are biographical fragments of her life inscribed on the glass pieces.

A child star who began working from the age of four, the actress died relatively young of liver cirrhosis, penniless and an alcoholic after surmounting the heights of fame and capturing the popular imagination as a tragic heroine par excellence.

The glass pieces bring to mind the most dramatic scene in one of her last films, which became a huge success after she died. ‘Pakeeza’ or ‘The Pure One’ saw Meena Kumari as an unhappy courtesan. Called to perform at her beloved’s betrothal, the suffering heroine breaks an exquisite chandelier and dances on the shards of glass till the white sheets laid out for the occasion are covered in red blood.

On the gallery wall are some of her quotes. In one she says, “I have lived too long with the Meena’s of other people’s imaginations — the fans, the publicists, the newspaper columnist, scenario writers, directors, the public — that I now wonder whether there will ever emerge from the innermost thoughts of my own being a single integrated personality instead of a mosaic of many fragments.

“I wonder whether I will ever be able to recognise my true self and pointing say — there is the person who really is Meena Kumari.”

The tragic, romantic heroine, the sensitive poetess, the flesh and blood beauty with millions of admirers and many lovers, the heartbroken, penniless alcoholic — which one is the real Meena Kumari? All these and some more, the exhibition seems to suggest.

“… this work offers an entry into her story — both outer and inner, and creates a space within which we can look at this figure as she lives in our memories, our psyches and the popular imagination,” claims the introductory brochure.

The exhibition does provide interesting insights into the feminine psyche. It explores the thought processes, explains the troubled imagination of the ultimate romantic, tragic woman in popular memory.

But what seems to be lacking is more biographical details and important information about Meena Kumari’s body of work both as an actress and a poetess.

While this may have been deliberately avoided to make the exhibition appear as a general exploration of the female consciousness, the brief encounter with the fascinating woman is enough to leave visitors thirsting for more.

ART-INDIA: Popular Entertainment Weds Art

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Mitu Varma

NEW DELHI, May 27 1996 (IPS) - Can Hollywood’s Marylin Monroe or Bollywood’s Meena Kumari be part of an artist’s vision and means to interpret the world around them?
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