The Greatest Show on Earth by Jerry Pinto

Author:Jerry Pinto [Pinto Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353052393
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Sharaab nahin hoon magar ek nasha hoon

Main saare zamaane ke gham ki dawaa hoon.

(Alcohol I am not, but I am an intoxication

I am the cure of all the sorrows of the world.)

—Lyrics from Helen’s song in

Adhikaar (1971)

I must have danced my way through more than a thousand films

in various languages, including Marwari and Bhojpuri.

—Helen, to Filmfare, on receiving a

Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998

With the exception of a few very silly films (Aap Beeti, Maya, Khoon Khoon, Jab Andhera Hota Hai), Helen’s name on the marquee meant that she was going to dance, which in turn generally meant a song. Not always, again, for there were some dances without songs as well (Hulchul, The Great Gambler). These sequences were primarily intended as eye candy but that was not the only function they performed.

The song in Hindi cinema has been paid much attention, most of it dismissive. It is regarded as a holdover from older art forms such as folk theatre and the Raas Leela and thus excused on the basis of its antiquity. It is scorned for its lack of realism, decried even by its exponents as ‘running around trees’. However, a more reasonable way of looking at the song would be to see it as unreal in the rational sense—no hundred-piece orchestra plays when two people fall in love, nor can a woman walking through a cemetery be audible to everyone simultaneously in a huge mansion—but certainly not meaningless in its symbolic reality.

Helen’s songs generally are described as cabarets. Historians of dance and other forms of public entertainment might cavil at the use of this term. For cabaret was born on 18 November 1881, when Rudolphe Salis opened his ‘Chat Noir’, a cabaret artistique, on Montmartre, Paris. His intention: ‘We will satirize political events, enlighten mankind, confront it with its stupidity, cure those creeps of their ill-temper …’ The original purpose of cabaret, therefore, was to shock the middle class (epater les bourgeois). It was more than a bunch of ladies showing off their frilly pantalettes or lack thereof. Skits were performed that lampooned authority; there were also other ‘acts’, from contortionists to sword-swallowers to magicians. It was vaudeville with its underwear showing, a variety programme that teetered on the verge of being explicit, while never actually getting there. The frisson arose out of that unfulfilled promise.

Helen understood that. In The Britannica Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema, she says, ‘ … cabaret doesn’t mean just wriggling your body as people think—it’s narration in dance. Paris nightclubs like Foley’s and the Crazy Horse had these great cabarets.’ Indeed, this was what she did in her best cabarets—Aa jaan-e-jaan from Intequam, Piya tu ab to aa ja from Caravan or Aaj ki raat koi aane ko hai from Anamika—where a narrative is contained within the ambit of the song.

However, the word cabaret in the context of Indian cinema has come to mean a sexually suggestive dance performed by a woman for an audience that is either actually shown or is evident in the film.

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