The 'silk' route

Her demeanour dazzled the 70mm, her oomph could give Marilyn Monroe run for her money, her sex appeal burnt the screen.The most sought after actress in the southern sphere in the 80’s, whenever she came on screen, they shouted  ‘Silk’ ,a deluge of catcalls followed whistles, the lady who pioneered the ingress of  bold and raunchy escapades in bollywood. Smitha certainly was the queen of soft porn in India.To mark her birth anniversary on the 2^nd of December, the bollywood paying her tribute through the biopic on her life ‘the Dirty Picture’, it’s a matter of great disappointment that the sexy siren of the south was looked or treated as a mere object by the bollywood.She was not dirty in any sense.Though being audacious and sensuous, Silk smitha always had the inherent aesthetic beauty which even some mainstream south Indian actresses lacked.Despite of her crowd pulling abilities and enigmatic screen presence, she was used as a prop by both the bollywood and kollywood.

Reading out various articles and news reports and tabloid surveys about Smitha, I feel that hers was typically mysterious life where her childhood was drenched in poverty and her adolesense squashed by exploitation.Failure in love and illicit relationships with many, her life was devoid of any love and innocence.Struggle was the synonym of her life and it took her years of it to become the lady with the silken touch.Tabloids screamed in the 80’s,’Only sex and Smitha sell in the south’, an audacious epithet considering the times when sex did not have as wide a wingspan in cinema as today.The sobriquet ‘ Silk’ was given to her in the movie Vandi Chakkram( her first Tamil film) and it had the women heaving and the men salivating.The lady, though mostly typecast as an extra as the  provocative, salacious seductress,was a talented actress but her acting prowess was undermined to a large extent.

As ‘the Dirty Picture ‘ hits the screen, I just implore people to go out there and live the like Smitha on the ‘silk’ route.Smitha was more than lust, she was someone to adore as well.

Udit Bhatia

Electronics & Communication Engineering

Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University