Penguin-India has recently published Jerry Pinto’s book Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb. Helen is a very good example of a book that is fun to read because you know that the writer is also having fun; in this particular case, the argument extends also to the book’s subject because one point that Pinto has made is that Helen succeeded as a Bollywood dancer while her latter-day imitators didn’t because they aren’t having as much fun. There is another reason why I like reading Jerry Pinto (and also others like Naresh Fernandes and Kai Friese): as in the following passage from the book, he is able to evoke wonderfully and with irrepressible wit a piece of my past:

Looking back, it seems odd that Helen had such a hold on my generation. I grew up in the seventies — the decade when Helen’s career was already in decline — and like most middle-class boys, I was allowed one film a month at the theatres by parents suspicious of its moral and aesthetic values (in that order). Helen could not invade my space through television, either. Hindi films had exactly four hours a week on the air. There was the three-hour pre-censored film on Sundays, the half hour of uninterrupted film songs that was Chhaayageet and another half hour of a film interview, Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan, conducted by a bubbly, harmless child-star-turned-character-artiste, Tabassum. This was all the government would allow on Doordarshan by way of bread and circuses. The rest of the time, we were ‘educated’ on such improving topics as the use of copper sulphate on the farms of the hinterland or we watched kabaddi tournaments played in deserted stadia.

Check out Pinto’s interview with Lindsay Pereira, where he describes, without ever straining it, the way in which the minorities in India have shaped what is often seen only as an expression of popular or majority culture:

Q: Helen often served as a ready stereotype. She was usually present to depict the immorality of a Western or, more often than not, a Christian woman. Is that what attracted you to her story? Could you connect with that story at any level?
A: Lily (or more often Lilly), Rosie, Kitty, Suzie…they were the good time girls, the ones who smoked cigarettes, danced in clubs, had a good time and paid for it by dying in the end.
As a Roman Catholic boy who watched Hindi cinema, I think I could always see that Catholics of any description were seen as outsiders in commercial Hindi cinema.
In the book, I argue that this was simply a question of who went to see Hindi cinema and who didn’t. While Bollywood was willing to make secular gestures by representing Muslims as positive characters, Parsis and Catholics could easily be caricatured because they were ‘Westernised’ — they did not watch Hindi cinema. In that sense, therefore, yes, I felt that I was an outsider who was looking at another outsider.

Here is Jaiarjun Singh’s review “Celluloid Thermonuclear Device.” Also see a more informal version of the same review here.

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