Lata Mangeshkar

Laura Bush

Meena kumari is the talented Indian actress  traditionally known for perfecting the role of the tragedienne in films ,is actually the embodiment of the woman as Essence rather than flesh .In a career spanning three decades ,she chiseled the contours of two role models and created some kind of an ideal in the mind of the viewer .This was the image of the woman as wife and the woman as mother.

She rebels against social and religious injunctions, resorts to alcohol, dances and desperately tries to seduce her husband ,so that he might remain faithful. 

 But all along her profligate ways –drinking and aggressively seducing-were  condemned by her own conscience .Even as she let down her hair and lifted the cup of liquor to her lips, she bemoaned the fact that she was breaking the behavioral code prescribed for good Hindu wives .Yet the fact that these transgressions were perpetrated in order to preserve a Dharma that must be paramount in any woman `s life-a good wife `s dharma-defined her further .Here was a neglected woman who in the sober 1960s ,was throwing herself at a man` s feet in a drunken stupor, aggressively demanding satiation. 

 .But the fact that this act was depicted as a glorious sacrifice ,not only sanctified it, also created a prototype for the sixties Savitri .For if the mythological Savitri could confront the angel of death for her husband` s  well being ,this celluloid Savitri could even compromise her religious sanctimony for the observation of a greater duty. That  of the woman as wife.In Dushman  ,her propriety sets straight the men (Rajesh khanna) who murdered her husband. Khanna   ,an alcoholic ,a womanizer and a truck driver is forced to stay with the window and her family as punishment meted out by the courts .The sentence comes as a godsend .For the window `s virtuousness and unwavering propriety cures him, not only of his profligate ways, but it cleanse his soul too. In Gulzar`s Mere Apne ,the mother –figure weaves her cleansing magic ,not on an individual, but on groups of individuals. The  old woman and her talisman of goodness makes her an oasis of peace in the midst of a city torn apart by gang warfare.

When everything fails to cure the anarchic hoodlums of their overriding lust to kill, plunder and loot  ,it is the mother-figure who manages to purge the city and the humans of their evil.

 Meena kumari represent the concept of traditional womanhood that was divested of all its physical antecedents. If beauty ,not sensuality ,was the defining characteristic of her physicality ,then pain ,not pleasure ,was the predominant emotion which she opted for. Purity was the keynote of this metaphor for melancholia ,where suffering and self –sacrifice became more pleasurable than satiation and self –appeasement.

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