Haus of Silk
FRIDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2011 22:45
A poor girl from Andhra Pradesh became an Indian male fantasy icon during the 80s. Shana Maria Verghis checks out what made Silk Smitha a bird of a different feather
Silk Smitha never really died, though they found her lifeless body hanging in her apartment in 1996. The young make-up artist of Andhra origin named Vijayalakshmi got the sobriquet of Silk or “Si-li-ku” for playing a bar girl in her first film, a Tamil flick called Vandi Chakram. She then made it to over 450 films in various South Indian and Hindi films, ending her career at the ripe old age of 35. Her filmography, if one puts it in a social context, was probably that about yet another woman carrying forward a baton that had passed on others in her tribe, who used their sexuality as a power tool.
Take the example of someone today, like a Poonam Pandey, and her attempts at being calendar art. As history proved, it has limits, a short shelf-life, and often traps the very user who has used it for artful seduction. But when it works, at its height, the seducer is transformed into a powerful queen.
As was proven by the men who drooled in droves over dusky, buxom Smitha, now being remembered for posterity in a biopic called The Dirty Picture where Vidya Balan is cast as Vijayalakshmi. Film critic Saibal Chatterjee recalls watching several “Si-li-ku” films during the 80s and remarks, “She was really very big, huh.” This writer was not yet a teenager when the craze began, and saw her first picture of the actress in a centrefold of a Malayalam film weekly that a younger and slightly autistic cousin used to read. My first thought might have been, why is she wearing such a gaudy-looking cabaret costume? The cousin was such an ardent movie fan, that on the walks to Sunday church she would educate us on all the movie stars that were spotted on film posters along the way.
The Malayalam films of the 70s and early 80s, to my memory, were pretty seedy viewing. Unlike the more sophisticated ones, both art house and commercial that were made through the 80s and 90s when the storytelling was quite fantastic, even for a small-budget film. I’d grown up watching pretty educative and informative kinds of entertainment from overseas, and an occasional visit to India unearthed the films of my roots which seemed crude and even scary.
In retrospect, I think this was probably to do with perspective. Indians were probably going through a hard time, then though I guess it’s absurd to generalise. But whatever it was, the way they watched life was often at odds with my view of my surroundings. Today, one actually understands why many directors chose to escape with their audiences to pretty, picturesque happy places. Instead of which they could probably have focused on making the existing place around them more beautiful.
And to my mind, Silk Smitha did not fit the beautiful life category. Without being judgmental about oeuvre, I associate her with weird, illicit things people did in back alleys amidst squalour and vice. And this association is not linked to any sexual fantasy, but with the sad, underbelly of lives in dark.
I suspect it also has to do with my being then, child-innocent, yet growingly aware of corruption. However, many others will have a different take on things, that is not even vaguely related to mine. At the time this girl, Vijayalakshmi, whose mother tried to marry men off when she was still a child, because, a bit like Phoolan Devi, she was exploited by men, from a young age, movies were more muted about sex. Saibal Chatterjee commented, “The role of woman in Indian cinema, even in north India, was split between the vamp and sati-savitri.” It is and still remains the ultimate male fantasy. Though these roles are increasingly coming together in one person, as women assert their sex.
So in the 50s, you had Nadira, Bindu and others. And now Katrina or Kareena play the same part when they do item numbers with suggestive body movements instead of giving that to the “bad girl”. Forget the movies, many men have commented about Katrina’s aamsutra scene with mango juice! “We like to delude ourselves that women are now more liberated,” Chatterjee said, “but if you look at their roles, the majority of them are mostly just pretty decorations still.” It’s a moot point. if you really are an intelligent woman, there is no girl in Indian films today you would actually wish to emulate.
It just heightens the fact that cinema in India, is a hugely male dominated industry. And most of the story-telling and also, voyeurism is targeted at the boys. Si-li-ku’s case history is perfect example.
Though she managed to get respectability when directors like Balu Mahendra zeroed for her, with the movie ‘Moondram Pirai’ remade as ‘Sadma’, she could never caste away her sexy body image. Like others, she probably realised late that it was a Venus flytrap. There are few things more pathetic than aging vamps. But when she had it initially made, she was primarily viewed by young males who wouldn’t watch her films with their families. And remember, this was before net porn, and probably Indian blue movies. What made her stand out in that time, was that for a change, here was someone unashamed about showing her body in full glory. The body was taboo territory in films.
Moreover, it wasn’t the good girl who was the heroine in the film, but the so-called slut, played by Smita herself. And “Sil-ku” gave the slut a lot of power. Women dislike this in general because sexy women can be threatening. Their conditioning has told them to be obedient, sweet and submissive so it is annoying. Because we all know these qualities are a fraction of what they are capable of.
Some women might have been secretly admiring of a Smitha-type of girl. But she was really for the men, who enjoyed her like a visit to a prostitute. Fulfilling a fantasy the domestic goddesses cannot. But after having her, she would be the fallen women. Enjoyable in a secret place. But not in public. But at her peak, when men allowed Smitha to seduce them, it created a virtual one-woman industry. Her power was such at one stage, story goes, when late actor Sivaji Ganeshan was visiting, everyone stood to greet him, except Silk, who sat, leg crossed on thigh. She knew the effect she had.
But like others before and after, her power did not give her enough control over her destiny. And the exploitation that dogged her from girlhood, undid her in the end, leaving her as a rag doll that was squeezed off its stuffings and left to decay in a corner after her use was totally through. Chatterjee reminds that several other starlets at the time also committed suicide after careers of frequent exploitation by various males in the life, and having few alternatives to fall back on. Moralists may sneer. The important issue of power politics is when women give control over themselves and decision making, to others in their lives, like parents, or others, be they male or female.
Near the end of her days, Smita tried to turn producer. It was pretty advanced for Indian woman film stars then and now. But she had let others decide the image they wanted of her for too long. And so it was a helpless end for the erstwhile queen. Today films critics often pass off her films as soft-porn. And who drives the porn industry? Men.
So if it’s well told, the movie to be released could be about the industry more than about Smita’s life. “The material of Silk’s films was not blatantly sexual. So it did manage to get through the censor board,” informed Chatterjee who recalls watching Her Night’s, “a film where Silk Smitha played a woman whose husband cannot satisfy her. So she seeks other men.” In a twisted way, it’s female sexual liberation. But masquerading behind this is yet another male fantasy about a vampish woman with an appetite. Appetite for food is often related to sexual appetite as well as the appetite for life. They were short-lived in Vijayalakshmi’s case. Her clout vanished. She was reduced to a burnt out actress, who could have had a fate of being pushed around, as she needed others to see herself.
FRIDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2011 22:45
PIONEER
A poor girl from Andhra Pradesh became an Indian male fantasy icon during the 80s. Shana Maria Verghis checks out what made Silk Smitha a bird of a different feather
Silk Smitha never really died, though they found her lifeless body hanging in her apartment in 1996. The young make-up artist of Andhra origin named Vijayalakshmi got the sobriquet of Silk or “Si-li-ku” for playing a bar girl in her first film, a Tamil flick called Vandi Chakram. She then made it to over 450 films in various South Indian and Hindi films, ending her career at the ripe old age of 35. Her filmography, if one puts it in a social context, was probably that about yet another woman carrying forward a baton that had passed on others in her tribe, who used their sexuality as a power tool.
Take the example of someone today, like a Poonam Pandey, and her attempts at being calendar art. As history proved, it has limits, a short shelf-life, and often traps the very user who has used it for artful seduction. But when it works, at its height, the seducer is transformed into a powerful queen.
As was proven by the men who drooled in droves over dusky, buxom Smitha, now being remembered for posterity in a biopic called The Dirty Picture where Vidya Balan is cast as Vijayalakshmi. Film critic Saibal Chatterjee recalls watching several “Si-li-ku” films during the 80s and remarks, “She was really very big, huh.” This writer was not yet a teenager when the craze began, and saw her first picture of the actress in a centrefold of a Malayalam film weekly that a younger and slightly autistic cousin used to read. My first thought might have been, why is she wearing such a gaudy-looking cabaret costume? The cousin was such an ardent movie fan, that on the walks to Sunday church she would educate us on all the movie stars that were spotted on film posters along the way.
The Malayalam films of the 70s and early 80s, to my memory, were pretty seedy viewing. Unlike the more sophisticated ones, both art house and commercial that were made through the 80s and 90s when the storytelling was quite fantastic, even for a small-budget film. I’d grown up watching pretty educative and informative kinds of entertainment from overseas, and an occasional visit to India unearthed the films of my roots which seemed crude and even scary.
In retrospect, I think this was probably to do with perspective. Indians were probably going through a hard time, then though I guess it’s absurd to generalise. But whatever it was, the way they watched life was often at odds with my view of my surroundings. Today, one actually understands why many directors chose to escape with their audiences to pretty, picturesque happy places. Instead of which they could probably have focused on making the existing place around them more beautiful.
And to my mind, Silk Smitha did not fit the beautiful life category. Without being judgmental about oeuvre, I associate her with weird, illicit things people did in back alleys amidst squalour and vice. And this association is not linked to any sexual fantasy, but with the sad, underbelly of lives in dark.
I suspect it also has to do with my being then, child-innocent, yet growingly aware of corruption. However, many others will have a different take on things, that is not even vaguely related to mine. At the time this girl, Vijayalakshmi, whose mother tried to marry men off when she was still a child, because, a bit like Phoolan Devi, she was exploited by men, from a young age, movies were more muted about sex. Saibal Chatterjee commented, “The role of woman in Indian cinema, even in north India, was split between the vamp and sati-savitri.” It is and still remains the ultimate male fantasy. Though these roles are increasingly coming together in one person, as women assert their sex.
So in the 50s, you had Nadira, Bindu and others. And now Katrina or Kareena play the same part when they do item numbers with suggestive body movements instead of giving that to the “bad girl”. Forget the movies, many men have commented about Katrina’s aamsutra scene with mango juice! “We like to delude ourselves that women are now more liberated,” Chatterjee said, “but if you look at their roles, the majority of them are mostly just pretty decorations still.” It’s a moot point. if you really are an intelligent woman, there is no girl in Indian films today you would actually wish to emulate.
It just heightens the fact that cinema in India, is a hugely male dominated industry. And most of the story-telling and also, voyeurism is targeted at the boys. Si-li-ku’s case history is perfect example.
Though she managed to get respectability when directors like Balu Mahendra zeroed for her, with the movie ‘Moondram Pirai’ remade as ‘Sadma’, she could never caste away her sexy body image. Like others, she probably realised late that it was a Venus flytrap. There are few things more pathetic than aging vamps. But when she had it initially made, she was primarily viewed by young males who wouldn’t watch her films with their families. And remember, this was before net porn, and probably Indian blue movies. What made her stand out in that time, was that for a change, here was someone unashamed about showing her body in full glory. The body was taboo territory in films.
Moreover, it wasn’t the good girl who was the heroine in the film, but the so-called slut, played by Smita herself. And “Sil-ku” gave the slut a lot of power. Women dislike this in general because sexy women can be threatening. Their conditioning has told them to be obedient, sweet and submissive so it is annoying. Because we all know these qualities are a fraction of what they are capable of.
Some women might have been secretly admiring of a Smitha-type of girl. But she was really for the men, who enjoyed her like a visit to a prostitute. Fulfilling a fantasy the domestic goddesses cannot. But after having her, she would be the fallen women. Enjoyable in a secret place. But not in public. But at her peak, when men allowed Smitha to seduce them, it created a virtual one-woman industry. Her power was such at one stage, story goes, when late actor Sivaji Ganeshan was visiting, everyone stood to greet him, except Silk, who sat, leg crossed on thigh. She knew the effect she had.
But like others before and after, her power did not give her enough control over her destiny. And the exploitation that dogged her from girlhood, undid her in the end, leaving her as a rag doll that was squeezed off its stuffings and left to decay in a corner after her use was totally through. Chatterjee reminds that several other starlets at the time also committed suicide after careers of frequent exploitation by various males in the life, and having few alternatives to fall back on. Moralists may sneer. The important issue of power politics is when women give control over themselves and decision making, to others in their lives, like parents, or others, be they male or female.
Near the end of her days, Smita tried to turn producer. It was pretty advanced for Indian woman film stars then and now. But she had let others decide the image they wanted of her for too long. And so it was a helpless end for the erstwhile queen. Today films critics often pass off her films as soft-porn. And who drives the porn industry? Men.
So if it’s well told, the movie to be released could be about the industry more than about Smita’s life. “The material of Silk’s films was not blatantly sexual. So it did manage to get through the censor board,” informed Chatterjee who recalls watching Her Night’s, “a film where Silk Smitha played a woman whose husband cannot satisfy her. So she seeks other men.” In a twisted way, it’s female sexual liberation. But masquerading behind this is yet another male fantasy about a vampish woman with an appetite. Appetite for food is often related to sexual appetite as well as the appetite for life. They were short-lived in Vijayalakshmi’s case. Her clout vanished. She was reduced to a burnt out actress, who could have had a fate of being pushed around, as she needed others to see herself.
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