Familiar Outsiders
It was a Jewish telephone operator, Ruby Myers, who rose to become the first superstar of Indian silent cinema. Renamed Sulo— chana, she was presented as a glamorous icon on Hollywood lines, billed above the title like Garbo and Dietrich. Others followed her lead in the talkie era: Rose Musleah, dubbed the best- dressed woman in the industry by Filmindia, and her cousin Pramila, who went on to become the first Miss India. Later in the fifties, there was Nadira, the archetypal Bollywood vamp with her arched brows and lips poised perpetually between a pout and a sneer.
These remarkable women— along with one male actor, David— are the stars of Shalom Bollywood, a recent documentary on the Jewish presence in Indian cinema. Director Danny BenMoshe believes that as Baghdadi Jews from a trading community, Sulochana and her ilk had a cosmopolitan outlook that served them well in their careers. “They came from households where women were empowered,” he explains. “Ulti mately, it was their values and lifestyles that helped them become stars.”
Jewish actresses were comfortable in their own skins and you could see it on screen. BenMoshe includes a clip of a swimsuit- clad Pramila in his film, and there are production stills of Rose too in similar attire, posing against Art Deco backdrops in the 1936 film Hamari Betiyan ( aka Our Darling Daughters). “I think these stars showed a confidence as women, to do what they wanted with their bodies in a public space,” says Ben- Moshe. “They represented the art of the possible... that there are no boundaries.”
Though they were outsiders, Jewish performers found it easy to blend in. Unlike the all- too- white Fearless Nadia, they were ethnically ambiguous, their otherness concealed further behind Hindu or Muslim names. In an era of cultural nationalism, when filmdom was beginning to shun ‘ un- Indian’ screen kisses and white chorus lines, the Jewish girls escaped such branding and were readily embraced by audiences. Nor was there any trace of anti- Semitic feeling, despite Filmindia’s frequent references to Sulochana or Rose as ‘ that Jew girl’. During World War II, when European Jewry was being annihilated by the Nazis, the star of India’s biggest hit ( Khazanchi,
1941) was a Jewish actress, Rachel Cohen, aka Ramola. “India offered the Jews a freedom they couldn’t find anywhere else,” notes Ben- Moshe. “That’s pretty special.”