What women want

Zeenath Zahara's second piece, 'College girls and our glamour boys!', stung men in particular

In the final months of 1940, as the world warred, a small filmic revolt broke out on the pages of a popular Indian fan magazine. A young writer did the unthinkable, taking up the work of making known what women her age wanted from the moving pictures. “College girls think aloud in private”, the monthly FilmIndia sensationally headlined her first piece which appeared in September that year. “Startling secrets revealed for the first time.”

The author was one “Miss Zeenath Zahara”. A student of BA (Hons), read the byline, making her 18 to 20 years old then. In the photo that accompanied the articles, she stared consciously away from the camera. Her neatly parted hair looked disturbed on one side as if by an unsuspected gust during the moment of clicking. She had the severe and unemotional face appropriate for a critic. 

“Producers are continually being kept in touch with what men want,” Zahara reasoned. “But it is of equal importance for them to know what the demands of the other sex are on them.” She arrived at what themes cine-going college girls preferred, from questioning and counter-questioning a number of them, and described this over three pages. No interviewees were named, however, because that was hardly the point. The reporting was enhanced with opinion. Her words crisp, the tone accusatory towards neglectful filmmakers.

Young women abhor thrillers, she declared. The stunt pictures being churned out were “not inspiring”, “repulsive” even. While Zahara’s contemporaries showed enthusiasm in the presence of elders for mythological films like Tukaram and Sant Tulsidas, only a small number ever went to see them. Among the historical movies of the time, they preferred ones that set out to do more than merely chronicle facts. “The past should be made to rise before the eyes of spectators as a living, pulsating reality to guide the present,” she said, naming Sohrab Modi’s Pukar (1939) as a title which came near achieving that brief.

The unanimous favourite with the girls, she wrote, were “socials”, a word used in that era to mean films featuring contemporary characters and dress. But good socials like Franz Osten’s Bhabhi (1938), AR Kardar’s Thokar and V Shantaram’s Aadmi from 1939 — “which portrayed life in all its stark and grim reality” — were lamentably in the minority. She reported that directors “set out to give both instruction and entertainment, and end by giving neither”. The producers she admired for their “courage in repeating these mistakes over and over again”. 

Her second piece, “College girls and our glamour boys!”, carried in November that year, stung men in particular. The nature of female camaraderie and desires comes through in it. Rather than a wider survey, she drew from conversations had with friends while relaxing in a garden or someone’s home on a Sunday afternoon. They evaluated male stars of the day for twinkles in the eye, scars on the face, acquisitions in weight. To a lesser degree, Zahara included critiques of their acting too. Ashok Kumar was suited for diminutive roles rather than dominant ones, which were best left to Prithviraj Kapoor. 

Her emphasis on an actor’s appearance may seem brusque but it was also retributive. FilmIndia had been otherwise guilty of defining women stars by looks, while introducing male peers by education and intellect. To his credit, the editor Baburao Patel did invite young Zahara to write alongside celebrity contributors like Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. Her views do not uniformly meet today’s standards of propriety — she criticised one of her respondents for labelling the protagonist of a film, We Three, “a prostitute” because she begets a child without marriage, but offered no judgement when another called stunt star Nadia “manly in bearing”. Yet, by representing women’s vantages in these matters, Zahara upended the prevailing fanzine style.

Zeenath Zahara

For some months over 1941, men wrote to the publication, irked. “May I, for sake of curiosity, know why Miss Zeenath Zahara particularly dislikes Ashok Kumar?” a certain 

T Sreeramulu asked the editor. Patel argued that Zeenath, being a woman, “enjoys the privilege of entertaining likes and dislikes”, adding with biting flourish, “but does she really dislike Ashok? She merely describes him.” 

Another, Surendra P Singh (also BA Hons) from Patna, ventured a peevish rebuttal,"Collegians cock the eye at our glamour girls”, that June. “We need film heroines just as much as college girls need film heroes but for this we have not to meet together in a shady grove on a Sunday afternoon.” He proceeds to be underwhelmed by everyone from Kanan Devi who was too mischievous on screen to be seen as “loyal”, to Leela Chitnis, who loses his fancy for being a mother offscreen. 

What became of Zeenath Zahara? It is not clear whether she ever wrote for FilmIndia or other publications again. Did she remain in India? What did she think of later screen idols? What would she make of the fact that some Indian producers still have trouble learning from mistakes? Or that even today discussions on the future of filmdom are steered by “manels”?