A Heart of Gold: Pakeezah and the Hindi Courtesan Film

Click on the image of Meena Kumari, above, to link to the ‘Chalte Chalte‘ sequence in Pakeezah (music by by Ghulam Mohammed, lyrics by Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi, Kamal Amrohi, Kaif Bhopali, sung by Lata Mangeshkar).

One of the favourite films of Film Studies For Free‘s author is Kamal Amrohi‘s Pakeezah/Pure Heart (1971), a magnificent Hindi melodrama and one of the most accomplished and beautiful films in the transnational ‘courtesan with a heart of gold‘ film genre.

As one of FSFF‘s favourite scholarly film weblogs is Michael J. Anderson‘s Tativille, you can possibly imagine how delighted it was to find that the centrepiece feature of Indian Auteur‘s third issue is Anderson‘s remarkable essay on Pakeezah. (IndianAuteur is an excellent online journal edited by Nitesh Rohit, Supriya Suri and others).

What better way to celebrate the felicitous conjunction of all of these elements, then, or to encourage FSFF readers to explore them all, than a little list of Friday links to online and freely accessible studies touching on Pakeezah, Kamal Amrohi, Meena Kumari (pictured above) and the Hindi Courtesan Film.

• Michael J. Anderson, ‘Body and Soul: Pakeezah and the Parameters of Classical Indian Cinema’, IndianAuteur, Issue 3, May 2009
• Bart Barendregt, ‘The changing art of seduction: ritual courtship, performing prostitutes, erotic entertainment’, International Institute for Asian Studies, Newsletter 40, Spring 2006
• Anustup Basu, Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema, PhD e-thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2005
• Jolanda Djaimala Boejharat, ‘Indian courtesans: from reality to the silver screen and back again’, International Institute for Asian Studies, Newsletter 40, Spring 2006
• Gregory D Booth, ‘Making a Woman from a Tawaif: Courtesans as Heroes in Hindi Cinema’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 9, 2 (December, 2007): 1-26
• Gregory D Booth, ‘Traditional Content and Narrative Structure in the Hindi Commercial Cinema’, Asian Folklore Studies, Volume 54, 1995: 169-190
• Wendy F. Hsu, ‘Between Narrative and Expressive, Fantasy and Melodrama in Bombay (Bollywood) Film’, Virginia Review of Asian Studies, July 2003
• Anandam P. Kavoori and Christina Joseph, ‘Nagina Conversations with a snake’, from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 86-91
• Coonoor Kripalani, ‘What’s Love Got to Do WIth It? – Bollywood Courtesans & Hollywood Prostitutes’, Inter-Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2002 (Scroll down to Chapter 6)
• Neepa Majumdar, ‘Doubling, stardom, and melodrama in Indian cinema: the “impossible” role of Nargis’, Post Script, June 22 2003
• Vijay Mishra, ‘Bollywood Cinema: A Critical Genealogy’, Asian Studies Institute, 2006
• Aswin Punathambekar, We Are Like This Only: Desis and Hindi Films in the Diaspora, MSc e-thesis, MIT, 2003
• Anjali Ram, ‘Framing the feminine: diasporic readings of gender in popular Indian cinema’, Women’s Studies in Communication, March 22 2002
• Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
• Sangita Shresthova, ‘Strictly Bollywood? Story, Camera and Movement in Hindi Film Dance’, MSc e-thesis, Princeton, 2003
• Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, ‘The Prostitution Questions(s): (Female) Agency, Sexuality and Work’, re/productions: Issue#2, April 1999
• Valentina Vitali, ‘The Families of Hindi Cinema: A Socio-Historical Approach to Film Studies’, Framework, Vol. 42, 2000
• Leda Ward, ‘Images of a Decolonizing India: Bollywood’s Tawai’f and the Postcolonial Muslim’, e-Thesis, Barnard College, Dance Department, Columbia University, Fall 2008