Abstract
This thesis investigates the emergence of the feminine ideal in pre-independence India by examining the material processes associated with its construction in art and performative traditions from the 1880s to 1945. The received view among scholars is that the feminine ideal promoted by didactic popular culture at the turn of the century emphasized respectability above all. This project questions the adequacy of such a narrative when applied to celebrity images. I argue that while there were significant pressures exerted by Indian nationalism on women, the historical debate needs to be augmented with an assessment of how specific subjects experienced and interacted with shifting and often multiple visions of class, gender, and modernity in the emergent nation.
The project approaches the topic of the feminine ideal in India through a systematic study of proto-celebrity and celebrity figures, in particular, stars with distinctive cultural and ethnic identities, as historical protagonists. Through a series of case studies, the thesis brings in hitherto overlooked visual sources and celebrity images from a range of media, such as painting, prints, advertisements on commodities, and photographs, which were produced and circulated as promotional literature between 1880 and 1945. My discussion focuses primarily on the analysis of female celebrities’ fashionable persona and their identities as non-compliant self-defining subjects actively participating in the public life.
The thesis situates female celebrities, including a female impersonator, as cultural players operating at the intersection of opposing forces—nationalist ideology, bourgeois respectability, and commodity culture. With this approach, the chapters not only avoid the simplistic categorization of female performers framed by the argument of morality and respectability, but also track the emergence of shifting feminine ideals. It argues that certain performers had a degree of self-determination in creative, economic, and romantic matters in their lives. The female film stars, in particular, expressed a nascent vision of a more liberated and independent femininity in which commodity culture played a vital role—a view that is not readily available in the formal history of public performance in India.
By bringing in original yet overlooked archival materials in North Indian languages, such as ephemera, publicity images, and studio records, this project also aims to document the lives, careers, and networks of the pioneering female professionals. Their experiences did not fit the standard historical narrative of Indian nationalism and, as a result, they have remained marginalized from public view and have little presence in the official archives. Ultimately, this thesis aims to bring to light evidence of contradictory values, contesting overlaps between traditional and modern, and processes of appropriation implicated in star images that ultimately served, to some extent, to deconstruct the myth of the feminine ideal.