On Glamour

a transcribed excerpt of conversation between Gautam Bhan and Paromita Vohra from Urban Lens Film Festival 2016. Access full conversation here.



Gautam Bhan: You know Paro[mita] one thing I wanted to ask you about is that - what, you said earlier in the point was to emphasize also the point about glamour, right, because I think it's really so important…because somewhere what we're also struggling with: see we from feminism we inherit these two traits of women and minority identity communities right which is the caution that shame, honor, tradition are born on the backs of women, right? and you have the narrative of partition and sexual violence and this constant notion that women are made repositories of moral culture, because of the power of patriarchy in our societies. But here is this other, and I think this is so part of your larger presence in the world with ‘agents of ishq’, with the column on love in the newspaper which is to say that you know, here is an identity associated with the community a minority religious community that in many places could have been a cause of anxiety. but it's actually a marker for pleasure, is a marker for desire. And it's not glamour in the way that women are just objects of male gaze but also ones that are self-fashioning their presence in the cities. So can you talk a little bit more about that notion of pleasure, desire, young people and agents of ishq…

Paromita Vohra: So I think glamour is the most… a very political kind of thing because glamour is a way of saying, “I'm here!” Right, it's like [saying], “You can't decide what I am, I'm going to decide what I am!” at some level. So I do think that - like I like certain kinds of people; people who will be playing in my films are always of a certain kind and I use the word “glamorous” at the shorthand, for what they are, because they all have a way of speaking, a turn of phrase, a way of presenting themselves - which I find very attractive, because they just do not fall into any binaries, right, not political binaries not binaries of gender or social identity or whatever; but they fashion that identity themselves. I don't think that those are the people who actually change the world in some way slowly… Because they give us a suggestion of how we can be; as easily as looking at somebody's clothes and saying - ‘hey, I like how she dresses, I am also going to do that.’ That kind of infecting the world through what you're doing, I think that's a very political thing, and that how politics actually seeds the world every day.

GB: ...and it’s so distinct from glamour as the possession of brand or consumption

PV: Yeah, so the thing is that post Rekha or maybe Madhuri Dixit, glamour has gotten converted into something that is easily consumable. But it actually is not because what glamour means is ‘I know that I am a story, but only I know what that story is. I'm not going to tell you.’ Right? So that control over your own narrative [is different from the one] which people like Rekha and others, who have mystique… Mystique is just really about saying, ‘I'm controlling the narrative.’ Whether you're really controlling it or not is the whole other discussion, but communicating that in all kinds of nonverbal ways is what I think [it’s about] and that's why I think you find it in certain kinds of spaces - like bar dancers, like movie stars of course, and I find it very intriguing how the figure of the Catholic woman actually just by being almost like a lace edging in a film had transmitted all that glamour right? Because all the women the you’re seeing in this film they are just like they are the backup dancers. They are not the people who in the front of the film but they are what actually gave films their glamour in an earlier time. And that glamour has gotten kind of subsumed under a mainstream identity, and we struggle right now to find a new place for that glamour.