Jewish Aunties--Nadira Aapa and the Jews of Bollywood

• In Event: Gender and Performance Studies

Abstract

This paper will study the “Diaspora of Hope,” a term coined by Yael Silliman, a scholar of Indo-Judaic studies. Silliman views the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora in India as resilient trading communities who built networks on land and water, through various migratory and trading paths across what she calls “Jewish Asia.” Building on Silliman’s work, I focus on the enduring networks of Baghdadi Jewish women through non-natal and non-familial solidarities, kinships, and worldmaking, specifically within performing communities in Bombay between the 1920s and the 1950s.

Nadira or Florence Ezekiel (1932-2006), was one of the last Baghdadi Jewish actresses on the Indian screen (Bollywood). In official archives, Nadira is described through flattened stereotypes of “vamp,” “seductress,” and as a failed actress who dies alone. This chapter challenges the patriarchal modes of ascribing Nadira as a failure. Instead, the paper offers an attentive celebration of the aspects that made Nadira "fail."

I argue Nadira’s “failed” performances of gender demonstrate the workings of both disciplining and refusing non-normative practices of femininity. I argue that the racialized and gendered performance of “sexual deviancy” on screen is a surreptitious method of training femininity under colonial and imperial legacies. Through Nadira's spectacular on-screen and quotidian off-screen life, I study how femininity is disciplined on racialized bodies.

The stereotypical portrayal of Nadira as the whip-wielding, horseback-riding vamp, defies and threatens the demure and silenced good Indian woman. Looking at Nadira’s oral histories, newspaper, and visual archives, I analyze the dangers of compliance to a singular feminine aesthetic in service to the heteropatriarchal and colonial powers conforming to the notion of Indian middle-class respectability.

I imagine Nadira as creating solidarities – through the commonly Anglicized Indian/South Asian “aunty,” the Urdu “aapa,” and the Hebrew “dodah.” Drawing from Kareem Khubchanadani’s Auntologies, I reimagine India’s cinematic histories through the formations of aesthetic solidarities and affinities, through the comforts and intimacies offered within the feminine aesthetics of the South Asian aunty.

Author

• Manjari Mukherjee