The Bombay Girl
By Supriya Nair
The 'Bombay Girl' always seemed more visible than she really was. A decade ago, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, authors of a path-breaking book about women in public space called Why Loiter? found that at peak hours at Churchgate station, less than a third of the observable population was female. Yet for a long time, she was a spectre dominating the imagination of Indians both within and outside the metropolis, and nowhere was she more real than in the minds of living, breathing, working Bombay Girls.
Sometimes, a woman is defined by the clothes she wears to work, and this is as good as any starting point to describe the Bombay Girl, who was always a worker. In the 1950s, as a high-spirited, socially useful member of modern Indian society, she appeared in Hindi cinema as a journalist or teacher, a club entertainer, sometimes even a social worker. These women, played by Madhubala, Nargis or Nutan, made the glossy washable saris tumbling out of Bombay's still-chattering mills look sheeny and sophisticated. Worn with modest, structured blouses, they performed the chief function a woman's clothes were required to perform in Nehru's India. They allowed the woman to take advantage of her newly granted freedom to be outside her home, while protecting her five-thousand-year-old virtue.