The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  In February, Krishnamurti sailed for California, which would be his base for the rest of his life. Eugenia went to Bombay to see him off and decided to stay for a while. Her fame as a dancer had preceded her, and the Bombay Theosophists arranged for her to give a recital. In the audience was the Indian film director Bhagwati Prasad Mishra, and he was looking for stars.

  Nineteen thirty was the peak year for India’s silent cinema, which had grown rapidly throughout the 1920s. Indian audiences flocked to mythological stories and adventure fantasias, to social dramas, and even to documentaries about the freedom struggle. Every goodsize city had at least one cinema hall, usually with a special zenana section, for women in purdah. Traveling cinemas brought movies to smaller towns and village fairs. There would be subtitles in four languages—English, Hindi, Urdu, and a regional language such as Gujarati or Marathi. Often someone would read them out loud for those who were illiterate. Musicians accompanied screenings with harmonium, tabla, and sarangi (or violin). Western movies came to India as well, but Indians much preferred local productions. By the mid-1920s, the beginning of India’s intense, vibrant culture of film fandom was in place, and movie stars were the subject of gossip and fascination.

  They were not, however, given much respect. The situation was similar to the one Eugenia’s mother had once faced: acting was viewed as a thoroughly disreputable profession, and certainly no place for a decent Indian lady. One Hindi magazine ran an article with the headline “Film Actors Are All Pimps and Film Actresses Are All Prostitutes.” A piece in Cinema magazine lamented, “It is really a perplexing problem as to why those who entertain us every evening through the medium of the silver screen should be denied social standing.”

  To find actresses, then, directors had to turn either to lower-class dancing girls or to Europeans, Eurasians, and India’s Western-orientated Jews. The most famous of all was Ruby Myers, who went by the name Sulochana and often played sexy, surprisingly modern working girls. A daughter of the Baghdadi Jewish community that migrated to India in the 1800s, she’d been discovered while working as a telephone operator. After the smashing success of her 1925 debut, she acted in five or six films a year and earned more than the British governor of Bombay. Other starlets included Renee Smith, a.k.a. Seeta Devi; Iris Gasper, who went by Sabita Devi; and Patience Cooper. In photos, they look like Indian flappers, with their bobbed hair and bindis, their plucked eyebrows and ornate silver jewelry. Sometimes they’re pictured wearing saris; other times, they don trousers or calf-baring skirts. Like pre-Code American films, India’s silent cinema was racier than what came later; on-screen kissing wasn’t banned until the 1940s.

  To film director Mishra, a free-spirited young European woman with theatrical training would have been quite a find. So he offered Eugenia the lead role in his new film, The Arabian Knight, opposite the dashing young Prithviraj Kapoor, a smoldering Pathan from Peshawar who had come to Bombay two years earlier determined, despite the fury of his policeman father, to make it as a performer. Arriving at Bombay’s Gateway of India in 1928 after a two-day, third-class train trip from home, he’d looked up at the sky and pledged, “God, I have come here to become an actor. If you don’t make me one here, I will cross the seven seas and go to Hollywood.”

  He wouldn’t have to. In 1929, while working as an extra in the film Challenge, Kapoor was spotted by the Jewish starlet Ermeline, who was known as India’s Clara Bow. Entranced by the tall, fair, beautiful man with the heroic physique and crackling charisma, she chose him to star opposite her in her next film, Cinema Girl, which Mishra directed. Kapoor would go on to become a Bollywood legend, the patriarch of Indian cinema’s most famous family. As his biographer put it, “The Nehru-Gandhis and the Kapoors are two dynasties that rule the nation’s popular imagination.”

  At first, Eugenia was skeptical about playing Kapoor’s love interest. The female protagonist was supposed to be the most stunning young woman in Baghdad. Eugenia dressed very well and knew how to carry herself, and she’d always had admirers, but she also knew she wasn’t a great beauty, and she was almost seven years Kapoor’s senior. She told Mishra she didn’t think she could pull off the role. Still, he insisted, and she was willing to be convinced. After all, a resumption of her acting career would have seemed a solution to her most immediate problem: how to survive, alone, in India. The money she’d made selling off her valuables in Riga would have been close to running out, and acting was the only job she’d ever done.

  Most European women acting in Indian films took Indian names. Mishra suggested Indira Devi—Indira after the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the most popular men in India, and Devi because it is the Sanskrit word for “goddess.” She agreed. She was only one letter away from becoming Indra Devi; it would take more than another decade to get there.

  · CHAPTER 6 ·

  IN 1949, the writer, art critic, and longtime Theosophist G. Venkatachalam published a book in Bombay titled, simply, Profiles. It contains sketches, some brief, others several pages long, of the many extraordinary people he met over the years in India. Among them are Gandhi, Nehru, Krishnamurti, and Annie Besant. On the second-to-last page is a paragraph about one “Jean Petersen,” a slight misspelling of Eugenia’s Anglicized name. “Jean is an artist of a sort and thought she could better express herself through dancing as she knew a little of the ballet before she came here,” he writes. “She tried her hand at many things including starring in Indian films. She hobnobbed with Maharajas for a while, and met the Czechoslovakian Strakaty and married him.” Life, writes Venkatachalam, “was one big adventure for her.”

  As Venkatachalam’s words suggest, as the 1930s progressed, Eugenia was a bit of a dilettante. Because of her charm and her aristocratic bearing, she moved easily through fashionable Indian society. Thanks to hosts who were happy to have a scintillating woman around to enliven their gatherings, she often enjoyed a level of opulence that belied her precarious finances. Though she’d come to India to find transcendence, her energy increasingly went into her fizzy social life, until finally she found herself in precisely the role she’d traveled to India to escape. She became defined, first and foremost, as somebody’s wife.

  Eugenia’s Indian cinema career did not last long. Silent films were churned out quickly—few took more than a month—and production on The Arabian Knight was short, pleasant, and uneventful. No copy survives—very few silent Hindi films have been preserved—but there are photos. One shows Prithviraj Kapoor in an Arab headdress dipping his costar back and looking into Eugenia’s eyes as if about to swoop in for a passionate kiss. She’s wearing a gypsy skirt and a long, dark, braided wig. In another photo, she wears a jeweled turban and gazes off into the distance while Kapoor, holding her hand to his heart, stares at her adoringly.

  According to Devi’s memoirs, when the film came out in 1930, a critic declared her the new star of Indian cinema. Perhaps she could have made more films, but the silent era was coming to an end, and the careers of actresses who weren’t fluent in Indian languages would soon wane. Besides, for all but the biggest names, film stardom wasn’t hugely lucrative. During the filming of The Arabian Knight, Eugenia visited Kapoor at home. He lived with his wife and children in central Bombay, in a nearly bare eight-by-twelve-foot room. His salary was just enough to support his family.

  This might be why, shortly after her film’s premiere, Eugenia consented to let a friend set her up with Jan Strakaty, the Czech commercial attaché in Bombay. Strakaty, forty-three, was as polyglot as Eugenia—in addition to Czech, he spoke Italian, German, English, French, and some Arabic he’d picked up during four years in Cairo, where he managed a bank branch. His work revolved around business and economics—consulate records describe him as an “excellent force” in opening India to Czech exports. He had little interest in metaphysics and was disdainful of yoga, but according to Eugenia, he was also broad-minded and unconventional, a supporter of women’s rights who also sympathized with Hindu nationalism. When he asked Eugenia ou
t to the movies, she tested him by choosing an Indian film, thinking that, like most diplomats she knew, he’d refuse to see it. Instead, he went along happily.

  From the start, Eugenia sensed a mutual understanding between them. She believed that they could be close without impinging on each other’s autonomy. They could be useful to each other—he needed a charming companion for the never-ending round of diplomatic parties; she needed financial security and a place in a society with little role for single women. So when, shortly after they met, he asked her to marry him, she said yes.

  The wedding, as Devi recounted decades later, was a comedy of errors. An enormous storm was tearing through Bombay as they headed toward the civil registry for the low-key ceremony. The howling rain echoed through the magistrate’s office, muffling his words. Strakaty was partly deaf thanks to an injury he’d sustained as a soldier during World War I, and kept mishearing.

  “Are you ready to marry Miss Jane Peterson?” the judge asked him.

  Strakaty thought the judge was asking him if he wanted the ceremony to be held in an Indian language. “Is there any alternative?” he replied. The little wedding party exploded in laughter. Eugenia struggled to stifle her own giggles.

  “Do you promise to ensure the interests of your future spouse, as is stipulated in the civil marriage laws?” the judge continued.

  “I believe that will be very difficult,” Eugenia’s fiancé answered, thinking he’d been asked to produce some Czech documents.

  At this, Eugenia laughed so hard she started shaking. Thinking she was upset, an alarmed Strakaty turned to her and said, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, my love!”

  In the end, the judge decided to credit the delighted look on Strakaty’s face over his words, and he pronounced the two man and wife. They left immediately for a honeymoon in Europe, and as Devi later wrote in her memoirs, “in that manner I began my life as a spouse and ended my artistic path.”

  She would not flourish in her new role, though that wasn’t immediately obvious. Returning to Bombay, Eugenia moved into Strakaty’s attractive diplomatic residence. The two of them got along well, not least because Jo, as Eugenia called her new husband, appreciated her independence. He was happy to pass the time playing chess or listening to classical music while she went out dancing with friends her own age. She kept herself in great shape with daily swimming and horseback riding, and studied classical Indian dance with Enakshi Rama Rau, one of the first educated Indian women to appear in Bollywood movies.

  Yet the nights full of official parties and dinners were stultifying. When Eugenia wore saris to diplomatic functions, she was met with sneers and snide comments. Often she’d listen, appalled, as various members of the British Raj declaimed with smug certainty on the impossibility of Indian independence.

  Having come all the way to India seeking adventure and liberation, Eugenia suddenly found herself with a life that was mundane, conventional, and empty. British diplomatic society in India was famously staid and platitudinous; driven equally by contempt and terror of India, members of the Raj struggled to maintain an exaggerated version of English propriety. Their lives revolved around dinners, social calls, sports, and the British clubs, where night after night expatriates gathered for desultory rounds of drinking, games, and gossip.

  The burden of propriety, not surprisingly, fell particularly hard on women. In the 1920s, a professor’s wife, newly arrived in the country, was warned by an older woman, “Don’t try and be too clever in India. It doesn’t go down.” Women tended to dress even more conservatively than they would have at home, refusing on principle to make any concession to the enervating heat. Eugenia stood out in her saris or raffish trousers. People gossiped about her friendships with Indians, particularly the nationalists she’d met through Theosophy. One friend even warned her that the police were keeping an eye on her. She ignored such cautions. Diplomatic society posed the real danger to her; her Indian friends helped to keep her sane.

  Eugenia was never particularly political, but she felt strongly about Indian independence. She saw how, for Indians, living under a foreign power involved daily insults, even to the aristocrats and celebrated professionals she moved among. A friend of hers was kicked out of his first-class train compartment when an Englishman decided that riding in the same car with an Indian was beneath him. Alongside such routine humiliations was more profound political repression. Indian nationalist leaders were constantly in and out of prison. Police routinely shot at unarmed protesters or charged at them with bamboo lathis.

  One of Eugenia’s close friends was Sarojini Naidu, a huge-hearted poet, activist, and leading figure in the Congress Party. Naidu, two decades older than Eugenia, shared her disdain for asceticism. In Bombay, she would camp out at the opulent Taj Hotel, a domed palace on the waterfront, beside the Gateway to India. There, she entertained lavishly: “Her rooms at the hotel were always crowded with visitors of all sorts, from the princes to the paupers, and she played the hostess in the most princely way,” writes one admirer. She was at once fiercely devoted to Gandhi and insouciant toward him; she called him “our Mickey Mouse” or “our ugly angel.”

  Eugenia recalled visiting Naidu at the Taj one day in 1930. The floor was a riot of bundles and cheap suitcases, and members of the Indian National Congress bustled in and out. “Akka,” said Eugenia, using a South Indian term for older sister, “What is all this baggage?” Naidu responded that she was planning on speaking at a meeting the next day and would surely be arrested, and thus was packing for prison. Sure enough, she was jailed for several months in 1930, and then again in 1932, though she was eventually released due to her failing health.

  From time to time, Eugenia would herself go to meetings of the Indian National Congress. When she heard that Jawaharlal Nehru was going to be addressing a mass gathering in Bombay, she had to be there.

  Nehru, then in his early forties, was Gandhi’s oft-imprisoned protégé. The Cambridge-educated son of Kashmiri Brahmins, he was a gorgeous man—something surely not lost on Eugenia—with chiseled features and melting brown eyes. Unlike Gandhi, he was a secularist and an agnostic; he believed that religion was one of India’s chief burdens. As a teenager, Nehru had been a Theosophist, inspired by a tutor who had been hired on the recommendation of Annie Besant, a family friend. Besant herself performed his initiation ceremony, and he attended the Theosophical convention in Benares. As he grew older, though, he became contemptuous of his boyhood mysticism. His faith was socialism and anti-imperialism. He was an unlikely tribune for a land as spirit-soaked as India, but he was an electrifying speaker and a brave and brilliant activist. Crowds adored him.

  “The young ones among us swore by the vigor of his intellect, the freshness of his outlook, and the radiance of his youth,” one Indian politician recalled. “The older folk nodded to one another, wondering at the wise head he carried on his young shoulders; and admiring women agreed with both.”

  Eugenia was one of those admiring women. Seeing Nehru speak, she was captivated. Not long after, she had the opportunity to meet him when she was invited for dinner at the home of a mutual friend, Jamnadas Dwarkadas, a wealthy Bombay cotton merchant and prominent Theosophist. At another friend’s suggestion, she performed a dance for Nehru, and afterward her hosts seated her beside him, on a low Indian divan. Eugenia plied him with questions about how he had developed the spiritual fortitude to take on the British Empire and to survive his many stays in prison. He told her that, more than anything, what had saved him when he was locked up was yoga.

  It turned out that despite his secularism, Nehru had come to swear by hatha yoga’s physical and mental benefits. When Eugenia met him, he’d recently been released after his fifth prison term. Incarcerated, he found it a constant struggle to maintain both his health and his spirit. “The object of jail appears to be first to remove such traces of humanity as a man might possess and then to subdue even the animal element in him so that ultimately he might become the perfect vegetable!” he wrote to his sis
ter Nan. “Soil-bound, cut off from the world and its activity, nothing to look forward to, blind obedience the only ‘virtue’…” Amid the squalor, degradation, and hideous boredom of prison, practicing asana helped him maintain his strength and equilibrium. Every morning, he’d spend five or ten minutes in shirshasana, or headstand, a practice he maintained for much of his life. “It’s a complete reversal of the normal situation,” he told one journalist. “The body is forced to adapt itself to new conditions.”

  Later he would write about yoga in The Discovery of India, penned during another imprisonment. “The Yoga system of Patanjali is essentially a method for the discipline of the body and the mind leading up to psychic and spiritual training,” he writes. He praised yoga’s experimental, empirical nature—it is, he writes, “a method for finding things out for oneself rather than a preconceived metaphysical theory of reality or of the universe.”

  Always a rationalist, Nehru was particularly interested in the physical side of yoga, which had only recently emerged from long obscurity and disrepute. Like many of his contemporaries, he saw it in the context of Indian nationalism, as a superior indigenous type of physical culture. “This old and typical Indian method of preserving bodily fitness is rather remarkable when one compares it with the more usual methods involving rushing about, jerks, hops, and jumps which leave one panting, out of breath, and tired out,” he writes. Indians engaged in sports and pastimes such as wrestling, swimming, fencing, and riding, but “the old asana method is perhaps more typical of India and seems to fit in with the spirit of her philosophy.”