She’s Everything That’s Unpardonable: Hema Malini, Dream Girl on a Motorbike
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- q3q3z
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Indian Film Stars: New Critical Perspectives
- Publisher
- BFI/Bloomsbury
- ISBN
- 9781844578542
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 9000-word essay is the first, and so far only, scholarly engagement with Bollywood’s most significant female star of the 1970s and 1980s, ‘Dream Girl’ Hema Malini, who continues to have a public role as BJP MP for Mathura and Vrindaban. The essay focuses on the moment in the early 1980s when Malini’s star persona was under greatest scrutiny and strain, exploring how its apparently contradictory facets—on the one hand a model ‘traditional Indian woman’ and on the other a rebellious ‘modern’ independent career woman—were negotiated, both within the gossip press of the day and across four big films of the era: Naseeb (Destiny, Manmohan Desai, 1981), Kranti (Revolution, Manoj Kumar, 1981), Jyoti (Light, Pramod Chakravarty, 1981) and Razia Sultan (Kamal Amrohi, 1983). Thomas suggests that the key to Malini’s successful star persona was precisely its ability to encompass apparently contradictory ideals that resonated with key social concerns of the era: she was the perfect female star for post-Nehruvian India of the 1970s and early 1980s. The essay makes an original intervention by arguing that Malini was a far more significant factor in the gradual acceptance of strong, independent women characters within Bombay cinema’s ideal moral universe than has been acknowledged to date. It concludes by asking how and why Malini was able to convert this controversial star persona into political capital for the BJP in 2014, and again in 2019.
The essay draws on detailed fieldwork conducted over several decades, beginning in the early 1980s, when Thomas first interviewed Malini and collected fan ephemera around her star persona, but juxtaposes this with details of Malini’s political career today. This peer-reviewed essay was an invited contribution to the British Film Institute’s first publication on Indian film stars, a key publication which includes other significant scholars in the field.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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