Sideways on a Scooter by Miranda Kennedy Page A

officially illegal, many stars and directors self-censor displays of passion to avoid angering India’s vocal and powerful Hindu conservatives. As a result, Shah Rukh Khan has never once delivered a movie lip kiss—much to the chagrin of fans such as Geeta and me. He’s just as careful about maintaining a culturally acceptable, wholesome persona offscreen. Like 1950s Hollywood studio stars, SRK is a symbol of manhood—although unproven rumors about his sexuality persist.
    It follows that Bollywood starlets are expected to be emblems of chastity, though this struck me as especially incongruous in today’s sexualized Bollywood. I thought it strange to see heroines dance suggestively in hot pants and bustiers even as they acted the parts of virginal characters. On TV shows such as the popular Saturday night program
Koffee with Karan
, starlets regularly disavow affiliations with various actors. The host of the program, Karan Johar, is further proof of Bollywood’s double standard about sex: He’s stylish, good looking, and significantly unmarried, and theories abound about his romantic life.
    “What toss!” the otherwise uncynical Geeta would jeer when she heard top Bollywood actresses disavow that they’d ever had romantic relationships. In spite of the industry’s famously chaste image, gossip shows and magazines spin vicious stories. One of Bollywood’s top actresses, Aishwarya Rai—or Ash, as everyone in India calls her—was long pursued by the media. She waited until she was thirty-three to marry, and even that didn’t quiet the rumors about her character. Although that’s late for a normal Indian girl, it’s acceptable in Bollywood, since wedlock traditionally signals the end of an actress’s career.Industry wisdom has it that audiences do not find it believable to watch a married woman play a virgin, and, of course, audiences want to continue to watch their top stars for as long as they can. The restriction applies to male actors, too: When SRK first started getting cast in Mumbai, producers suggested he keep his marriage a secret so as not to spoil his budding career as a romantic hero. After Ash was arranged into a marriage with the son of Amitabh Bachchan, she did continue acting—unlike previous generations of Bollywood starlets—but found herself offered more matronly roles. She even went so far as to start wearing flesh suits under her saris when she performed. Hiding the real skin of her arms and stomach was a sign of respect to her husband and her in-laws.
    In spite of all this, Indian audiences were changing. With only-slightly-edited reruns of
Sex and the City
now on Indian cable, some Bollywood producers worried about keeping up. They started producing a wave of sexy films. The first and riskiest of these was
Khwahish
(Desire), in which the lead actress, Mallika Sherawat, delivered seventeen carefully counted kisses, spawning a new mini-industry in editorials and op-eds opining the loss of morality in the new India. But although it was predicted that the movie would be career suicide for an aspiring starlet, the opposite happened: It shot Mallika to stardom. The theaters were packed with gleeful boys having the most sexual experience of their lives; nary a man in India under the age of sixty missed the film.
    Mallika took her image as a bombshell seductress-vamp and inhabited it with full force, dressing seductively for every public appearance. She took to the stage in a red miniskirt for the hundredth performance of Eve Ensler’s
The Vagina Monologues
in Mumbai. During interviews, rather than fluttering her eyelids modestly at the camera, as do Ash and the other pious virgin types, she makes suggestive comments about her “male friends.” Mallika will never be cast as the innocent girl in a moralistic coming-of-age blockbuster—Bollywood audiences definitely wouldn’t find that believable—but she doesn’t need such roles. She’s proved that it’s possible, even in Bollywood, to be