The Cardboard Queen: Aishwarya Rai and the Rise of the Lady Vamp

Abstract

Indian girls coming of age in the mid-1990s only had two girls they emulated: Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen, both known as beauties but with brains (The syntactical “but” is crucial, especially in an Indian context, specifically on the subcontinent and not restricted to Indian communities abroad or the diaspora and its hagiographical concerns with the portrayal of women in Indian media again specifically cinema). Beauty, in Indian terms at least, does not go with brains. No. Not ever. In this chapter, the idea of Indian womanhood is examined against the avatar of one of popular culture’s best and most lucrative exports of the last two decades, Aishwarya Rai. I argue that over the last two decades or so, there emerges an evolution of a specific phenomenon within the wider framework, which might be called the Ash Complex. What this essay explores is that significant, overarching phenomenon, which may be said to have implications for the wider female population of a large subsection of Indian society, including, but not limited to, women involved in film-making at several levels, both on- and off-screen in Indian films in contemporary “Bollywood” (At the risk of digression, this term is not one chosen by insiders, but rather imposed on a phenomenal Indian industry that churns out over twelve hundred viable films every calendar year. The Hindi film industry, or its commercial popular wing, has come to be identifiable in the West, primarily by non-Hindi-speaking Western audiences and even academics (see, Rachel Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti among others) as a throwaway term casually spawned. It is regarded as something of a misnomer by industry insiders, who perhaps resent the direct reference to, and perhaps subservience to the construct of Hollywood. This latter appellation is also considered by those in LA and the American film industry as a misnomer, but widely used by the rest of the world as a convenient term to club an entire range of disparate, unique film-makers, into, a veritable club. As old as the debate itself, one is tempted to ask, what’s the fuss, as an insider some five centuries ago asked “what’s in a name?”). And it is a complex picture that emerges. The beast that is Bollywood is created from such raw ingredients, adding in a well-educated Aishwarya [a well-spoken talented young woman, on course to complete a sought-after architectural degree], a resplendent representative for Indian womanhood. Her stardom has come at a price though, one which will be minimally examined within the context of star creation, rather than within the context of the peripheral personal existence of an Indian star on the rise. Throughout this essay, it must be borne in mind that cinema in India, specifically Hindi cinema, has created a new cultural ethos, which unifies the Indian male and female mindsets. It virtually creates another reality that the Indian audiences relate to. This alternate reality has been referred to in many ways as an academic construct, but is perhaps best articulated by industry insider Javed Akhtar, “There is one more state in this country, and that is Hindi cinema. And so Hindi cinema also has its own culture…quite different from Indian culture, but it’s not alien to us, we understand it” (Kabir in Talking films: conversations on Hindi cinema with Javed Akhtar. OUP, New Delhi, 1999: 35).