A full-bodied treatment of a story of physical passion – and such stories, great ones even, are not lacking in our literature – is unthinkable on the Indian screen … The scenes of lovemaking in Indian films have therefore been reduced to a formula of clasping hands, longing looks, and vapid, supposedly amorous verbal exchanges – not to speak of love duets sung against artificial romantic backdrops. It is the dead weight of ultra-Victorian moral conventions which reduces the best of directors to taking refuge in these devices.
– Satyajit Ray, "The Odds against Us", Our Films, Their Films
To Ray's catalogue of those techniques used by Indian film directors to portray "physical passion", one may add a recent inclusion: the fetish for lingering on the woman's uncovered back. Women have long had an indirect relation to culture, as the Muse has traditionally been female. "Men are erotically stimulated by the opposite sex; painting was male; the nude became a female nude," noted feminist scholar Shulamith Firestone, while talking about the representation of heterosexual desire in art. Such sentiment is echoed by the British art critic John Berger: "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at … The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female."
The obsession with images of women's bodies, in Southasia in general and in India in particular, can be construed as a form of voyeurism in which women are distanced, even kept powerless. But why this tendency of the camera in Indian films and television commercials to focus on the woman's back? Quite simply, the back is the front's other. While the woman's front, with all its various devices of mothering, is exactly what males lack, the back is everything that the front is not. With its apparent unisexuality, the back would appear to be a most unlikely place for 'provocation'. Nonetheless, as plenty of evidence on the ground can attest to, this is exactly what has taken place in India.
"The presence of woman," says the feminist theorist Laura Mulvey, "is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation." In popular Indian culture, particularly in Hindi films, this attitude is particularly apparent. In the film Beta, for instance, a passionate Madhuri Dixit coos "Dhak dhak karne laga" (Dhak dhak goes my heart), dhak being the aural mimicry of a heart in passionate turmoil. While doing so, Dixit shows the audience her back. With its outward thrusts, an apparent mimicry of the beating heart, the back stands in for what cannot be seen – and particularly for what cannot be shown. The back becomes the uncovered front, and in the ensuing politics of representation, becomes the camera's voyeuristic ally. Significantly, this fetishism exists outside the linear time of the narrative, during the songs and so-called item numbers.