The importance of being Leela Naidu

Leela: A Patchwork Life
Leela Naidu with Jerry Pinto
Penguin Viking
180 pages
Rs450

Thanks to the mass media, the last hundred years have seen an explosion of female beauty. Every woman you seen on screen is good-looking. Even the ones that are not. Some of them are natural-born beauties. Many are artificially enhanced beauties with doctored noses, filled up lips, and a socialist redistribution of body fat. And there are those who manage to pass themselves off as beautiful through the sheer force of their PR machinery.

That great treasury of information on beautiful women, Wikipedia, lists 58 winners of the Miss India pageant alone. Leela Naidu happens to be one of those 58, having won the title in 1954. Like today’s winners routinely do, she too moved from beauty pageant winning to film acting.

Her first film, Anuradha, released in 1960, when she was 20 years old. Her last, Electric Moon, was in 1992. For the record, when Leela entered the Hindi film industry, her contemporaries were Nargis, Madhubala, Meena Kumari and Waheeda Rehman. All four of them enjoyed full-fledged careers. They acted in enough films (at least 50 each) to be able to capture the popular imagination and stay there. Leela, despite every advantage of birth, beauty, talent and connections, did just eight films in a career spanning 32 years. It is widely believed that she did not ‘fulfil her potential’. But is that a fair comment to make?

Leela: A Patchwork Life offers a partial answer to this question. This is not an autobiography. It is a collection of anecdotes, narrated by Leela, which illuminates aspects of her life and personality. As she writes, “…this book is about what matters to a certain Leela Naidu.”

Leela, undoubtedly, had a great start. Her father was a nuclear physicist who served as scientific adviser to UNESCO. Her mother was a French Indologist. She grew up in Europe, went to an elite school in Switzerland, and in her teens, took acting lessons from the great Jean Renoir.

In the prime of her beauty and youth, when she had just made a splash in Hindi cinema, she was chosen by Vogue magazine as one of the five most beautiful women in the world. David Lean wanted to cast her as Tonya in Dr Zhivago. Salvador Dali used her as a model for the Madonna. Satyajit Ray wanted to make a film with her and Marlon Brando. And a smitten Raj Kapoor wanted to sign her up for four films. “Raj Kapoor told me that he wanted me to do four films with him. I was supposed to sign a contract and I would be the next RK discovery.” And here’s the thing: she turned him down. 

Her career in commercial Hindi cinema ended barely a couple of years after it had begun. Baaghi (1964) was her last appearance in a mainstream film. Later in life, she made documentary films, worked as editor of Society magazine, translated the French playwright Eugene Ionesco, dubbed Hong Kong action movies, and accompanied husband Dom Moraes on his travels, working as an unpaid secretary. In between, she also made a “potty film” for JRD Tata — on how to use the loo on a plane.

Evidently, if Leela Naidu was beautiful, that was not all she was. The mystique of her beauty probably has less to do with her DNA than with the kind of person she was. And the kind of person she was has everything to do with the values that, in retrospect, one can deduce from her life choices. Especially her decision to give Bollywood the go by.

In a chapter titled, ‘Have you stopped acting?’ Naidu recounts the famous exchange in Sunset Boulevard, “where William Holden as Joe Gillis says, ‘You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.’ Swanson, as Norma Desmond retorts, without missing a beat, ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’” Mainstream Hindi cinema simply did not have the kind of roles that could accommodate Leela’s talent without doing violence to her sensibility. When she died last year, an obituary referred to her as the “Aishwarya Rai of her time.” But unlike the Aishwarya Rai of our time, Leela’s stubborn refusal to yoke her beauty to the gilded chariot of ambition meant that she would not pander to popular fantasy. It ensured that she would never scale the heights of a Madhubala or a Waheeda Rehman. But it also set her free, and allowed her to remain true to the values she held dear — an essential quality without which beauty is but an empty shell.

“Everyone, it seemed, had a Leela Naidu story,” writes Jerry Pinto in his Foreword. Here is a story that sort of explains why she would not have lasted in Bollywood even if she’d sincerely tried.
“On the sets of Anuradha, a spot boy fell from the gangplank high above us and fractured both his legs,” Naidu writes. “The crew seemed willing to continue as if nothing much had happened. I was appalled at this and went on strike. I refused to shoot until the poor man was taken to the hospital. They bundled him off the sets but I wanted to see the case paper and I wanted an assurance from the producer that he would pay the medical bills before I would start again.”

Again, on the sets of Anuradha, which was her first film, by the way, when she found that only she had been assigned a chair to sit and the extras had nowhere to sit, she refused to sit on her chair. Somehow one finds it hard to think of any contemporary Miss India-turned-Bollywood star going on strike and taking on her producer to fight for the rights of a spot boy or an ‘extra’.
One of the most moving passages in the book is the one about her efforts to make a documentary on the sub-human working conditions in Asansol coal mines. In another chapter, she talks about her struggle to find resettlement land for a group of Dalit farmers after their land was illegally usurped by the upper caste land mafia.

Beauty brings with it a lot of power. It is cultural capital that can be invested for financial gain, for influence, and to acquire further cultural capital through, say, a career in the movies. Not surprisingly, therefore, being beautiful often brings with it a sense of entitlement that makes you believe that you are special, or at any rate on a plane higher than lesser mortals, such as the unbeautiful, the spot boys, and the ‘extras’.

Leela Naidu did not do even half as many films as any of the assembly line beauties of today. And whatever she may have lost in unattained glory, by not bowing to the imperatives of pragmatism, she retained something more precious — her individuality. And it is this that lends her beauty a quality of grace and humanity that can never be acquired through hours spent in the gym or in front of the mirror. It is an ideal of beauty that encompasses simple things such as standing up for what you believe in. In an entertainment industry that believes in very little apart from the virtues of money-making, that is perhaps too much to ask. But then, whoever said it is easy being a Leela Naidu.