By T S Sudhir


Thanks to the aggressive and in-the-face promotion of `The Dirty Picture’, the north has discovered Silk.  It would seem Vidya Balan has, perhaps deliberately, not made up her mind on whether to say she is playing Silk Smitha or not. Her version changes with her geographical coordinates. (She told the media in Hyderabad that she is not playing Silk Smitha perhaps because Silk’s brother has sent the filmmakers a legal notice. But on `Big Boss’ she proclaimed she was Silk-on-the-silverscreen). The film’s release date, December 2, coincides with Silk’s birth anniversary, and is a giveaway.



The posters and trailers on TV suggest the obvious. That Silk’s oomph factor and sex appeal have been used excessively to lure at least the male audience to buy the tickets this Friday. Never mind if the consensus on the street is that Vidya can never pout like Silk. But if she, no doubt a consummate actor, and the director, manage to bring out the angst and trauma in Silk’s life, that would be a fitting tribute to the dusky actor, who committed suicide at the age of 35.



Going purely by what one has seen in the trailors and the posters, the portrayal of Emraan Hashmi, Tushaar Kapoor and a caricature-like Naseeruddin Shah, don’t give me much hope. And the fact that it is called `The Dirty Picture’ is an indication that someone has already taken the high moral ground and delivered the verdict that Silk’s story or a story inspired by Silk’s life, is dirty. “The title does not sound good to me,” said a filmmaker who has known Silk Smitha. I sincerely wish this doesn’t get dumped as one of those cheap Madrasi story Hindi films.

Yesterday as we were driving home, we saw billboards of `The Dirty Picture’, with Vidya in a red outfit, in an almost beckoning posture, at more than one traffic intersection of Hyderabad. Uma remarked how sad it was that all her working life, Silk must have been seen as a lob of flesh by men, who would have had only one thought in mind. I had a chat with my friend Sujatha Narayanan, an authority on Tamil films in Chennai, and one of the first things she said was “Silk was never the sleeping around for a role type. She had genuine friendships with her directors.”


Born Vijayalakshmi in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, a combination of circumstances forced her, educated only till class 4, to move away to Chennai, where she was renamed Smitha. Starting off as a touch-up artist to B grade actors, God’s own country, then lusting for the I V Sasi – Seema’s brand of `adult’ Malayalam films gave Smitha her first chance to showcase her wares. A slew of roles in Malayalam films starting with `Inaye Thedi’ saw her getting typecast as an oversexed character, playing the roles of either the cabaret dancer or the vamp. Till `Vandi Chakkaram’ (wheels of a cart) happened in 1980, where Smitha played the role of an arrack shop girl, called Silk. Smitha became Silk Smitha once the film was a hit. Silk did not look back after that as the success of the film helped her get more roles but look back she did, as everyone wanted her to perform the same act on celluloid. Silk was meant to be raunchy, both in name and deed, to the polyester fabric-loving 80s generation.

Columnist Paul Zacharia describes the Silk Smitha phenomenon aptly when he writes : “Her body was her message. With cold dispassion, she placed her body on show knowing fully well the passions it fired in millions of men. She was meeting their secret and shameful need to fantasise in a way that mocked and challenged the hypocrisy that produced it.”

Even though it is convenient to dismiss Silk as a soft porn actress, there is no denying that she did manage to act with several top notch directors of her time. S P Muthuraman was one of them, whose `Sakalakala Vallavan’ had Silk cavorting with Kamal Haasan to `Nethu Raathri Yemma’, one of the biggest hit songs of that time. “She danced very well and would follow the dance master’s instructions properly,” he remembers. “Yes, we gave her the same kind of commercial roles in most films but that was all that was possible with the kind of films made at that time.”

Bharathiraaja was another top director Silk worked with. He cast her in the role of a wife hurt by her husband’s infidelity in `Alaigal Oivathillai’. But one of her finest performances came in Balu Mahendra’s `Moondram Pirai’ (remade in Hindi as Sadma), where she shared the credits with Kamal Haasan and Sridevi. This role of hers as the sexually frustrated wife of an elderly school principal in Ooty, may have paled in terms of pathos to Sridevi’s role, but to the director’s credit, the film gave Silk the chance to emote and be a character rather than just a cardboard item girl to satisfy the libidinal desires of Indian film going men.


As Silk’s popularity grew, few films were made in Tamil and Telugu without a mandatory Silk number. Producers and directors delayed their projects, waiting for her dates. Never mind that she charged 50000 rupees for a song, not a low rate in the eighties. By the mid-eighties, Silk had been part of 200 films, and that number rose to nearly 500 by 1992. Film writer K P Sunil writes, “Her popularity with the masses was such that distributors insisted that she be featured in a film before they would pick it up for distribution.”



It was the same overcrowded calender that proved her undoing. Those who could not afford to wait moved on to lesser known and newer girls who were willing to inspire the frontbenchers to whistle, for a lesser price. Kodambakkam was replete with whispers of how a relationship, and investments in producing films, had taken their toll on Silk’s peace of mind and the weight of her purse. One of the films she produced was called `Silk Silk Silk’, with her in a triple role.

Silk was found hanging from a fan at her home in Saligramam in Chennai in September 1996, leaving behind a suicide note written in Telugu. For a young woman who made that arduous journey from West Godavari to become Kollywood’s sex goddess, one perhaps cannot even imagine the trauma and pain that must been part of that lonely journey that finally ended in a gruesome embrace of death. Reports suggest that the following day, no one turned up even to collect her body from the mortuary.


All her acting career, the audience, and perhaps even a large part of the film fraternity, looked at Silk as a rebel and a sex object. I hope `The Dirty Picture’ goes beyond Silk, the persona on screen, to the real Vijaylakshmi alias Smitha, the person who became Silk to the world. The makers of the film and Vidya Balan owe it to the viewers of Tamil cinema, and Silk’s fans, to do a honest job and not a sleaze cut-and-paste.