The Indian Cinema owes a deep debt of gratitude to the 
Baghdadi Jewish community for its women among all the communities in India were the first to act in films, at a great risk to their reputation, at a time when the participation of women in performing arts was a taboo. During the silent era, most of India’s film stars were Jewish. But they, except a few, could not continue with their successful careers, once the talkies were introduced as they were incapable of delivering dialogues in Hindi because of their Anglicized upbringing.
Baghdadi Jewish community for its women among all the communities in India were the first to act in films, at a great risk to their reputation, at a time when the participation of women in performing arts was a taboo. During the silent era, most of India’s film stars were Jewish. But they, except a few, could not continue with their successful careers, once the talkies were introduced as they were incapable of delivering dialogues in Hindi because of their Anglicized upbringing.
In this photo-essay, first published on Café Dissensus in December 2014 under the title “Indian Jews in Cinema”, Kenneth X. Robbins draws our attention to the Jewish contributions to Indian cinema. It has been reproduced in full with the permission of the Editors at Café Dissensus.
The great actress Sulochana was recently commemorated on an Indian stamp. Since a number of Indian Jews performed and worked in the movie industry, I have decided to follow up the recently published Jews and the Indian National Art Project and Western Jews in India with a volume dealing with this subject. The illustrations are from my ever-growing archival collection.
This article is written to encourage people to email me at rajanawab@comcast.net with information, ideas, documents, and movie memorabilia. As with the previous two volumes, the conclusions will surely emerge after the work is collated.
The study of Jewish artists, art scholars, art critics, and architects in South Asia had confirmed the words of Hermann Goetz: “Part of the most representative artists of every nation prove to be foreigners or semi-foreigners, or at least people with very strong family or cultural links with other countries”. Many of the Jews involved in the Indian art world were Western Jews, but almost no non-Indian Jews played prominent roles in the Indian movie industry. Art can be seen without recognizing his image, but an actor must be seen in a film and must be convincing as an Indian.
The actors were mostly Baghdadi Jewish women and the rest were from the Bene Israel community, not the Cochini community. That community was small, did not speak Hindi or Urdu, and lived far from the film making cities of Bombay and Calcutta. A single Baghdadi family contributed greatly to Indian films, by giving us the actress-producer Pramila (Esther Victoria Abraham), her sister the actress Romila (Sophie Abraham), and her cousin the starlet Rose (Rose Musleah). Pramila’s son Haider Ali is an actor, who is best known as the co-writer of the blockbuster film Jodhaa Akbar.
Baghdadi Jewish actresses were known by single Western names (Lillian, Rose), Hindu names (Arati Devi, Pramila, Sulochana) or Muslim names (Firoza Begum, Nadira) rather than the ones identifying them as Jews. Lillian’s birth name was Lillian Ezra.
In India, the Bene Israel often referred to themselves in two ways. They used one or two “Biblical” names or “Biblical” names followed by a “Maharashtrian” surname identifying their ancestral Konkani village. In the movies, they were billed as David or David Abraham rather than David Abraham Cheulkar or Joseph David rather than Joseph David Penkar.
Simply identifying Jews has not been easy. Asha Bhende (once Lily Ezekiel) and Pearl Padamsee (whose mother was a Baghdadi Jew) are actresses who have used the last names of their non-Jewish husbands. Asha Bhende was also a prominent academic, whose works include Demographic and Socio Economic Characteristics of Jews in India.
Actresses like Zeenat Amat and Helen were not Jewish as some think. The backgrounds of Azurie, Leela Chitnis, Patience Cooper, Ermeline, Rinku Jaiswal, Kitty Kelly, Kamlesh Kumari, and Sabita Devi are contested even today and I seek more information about them. Was Vimala, whose birth name was Marcia Solomon and who is never mentioned in the discourse on Jewish actresses, Jewish?
The image from a movie of a Jewish women dancing before Arab Muslims? The actress Helen was not Jewish.
Is this just a lack of information or does it relate to what Priti Ramamurthy called the “interracial origins, and fluid minority religious affiliations” of Anglo-Indian and Baghdadi actresses”? As small minority groups, Diaspora Jews have had to deal with ever-changing political currents and life experiences beyond their own communities. Therefore, it is not surprising to find Jewish actresses in parts dealing with the redefinition of gender roles in a modernizing India dealing with colonial hegemony and the need to integrate many very diverse communities into an emerging national narrative.
On the Indian stage, female parts were acted by men and no respectable woman was seen. As Ramamurthy put it, “racial differentiation was both the condition for women to enter a disreputable profession and the condition for reworking it.” In some cases, Anglo-Indian and Baghdadi Jewish actresses may have been favored for their lighter skin tones.
