Namitha, the siren from Surat who reduces south Indian men to slavering wrecks

She may not have had a single significant lead role in a film in her nine-year-long career. She may not even excite a flicker of critical disdain from reviewers when they do deign to comment on the films she’s in. Yet, every time another photograph of Namitha gets uploaded onto her Facebook fan page, or another fan-concocted video of her rhythmically swaying lurex-clad rear makes it onto YouTube, you can hardly think for the tremendous din of reptilian hissing and slavering that ensues.

Here’s a sample of the lewd chorus incited by a photograph posted on her fan page, a freeze-frame of her dancing, mouth open in a come-hither moue, with her ample curves billowing gently out of a red bandeau top (to be prefaced with one capacious sic): ‘sexy darling i love u baby’. ‘oho’. ‘Red Beauty’. ‘every Indian need such a woman.’ ‘you are killing me with that red color Namitha. be careful dear becuase I may have done unexpectable things now…’ Her fan page attracts 28,094 ‘likes’, and an average photo on it, about 70 likes and twice as many comments. Compare that with Trisha Krishnan, who has been a leading lady for significantly longer (in female actor years), and in as many films as Namitha has flounced through. Trisha’s page attracts about a seventeenth of the fans, and inspires a far less fevered, far more respectful kind of commentary; more on the lines of ‘I love you da’.

Unfortunately, being the object of steaming-hot adulation on internet real estate such as ‘Spicy Navel Gallery’, ‘(Arm) Pit Magic’ or ‘Thunder Thighs’ doesn’t translate into roles in the sort of films that win national awards. Neither does it attract parts that are not inversely proportional to her ‘exposed’ hips—which famously single-track-minded director and actor SJ Suryah paid homage to in a scene in the 2006 Tamil and Telugu dud Vyapari. In it, he lands up in a gym where she is working out in a pair of tiny pink shorts, and then proceeds to unwind—and keeps unwinding—a tape measure around her pelvis, nearly chomping down on it in insensate lust. He finally drops the tape, and is sweetly advised to measure with his hands, at which point a song ensues. This clip from a forgettable film has immortalised it on YouTube, where it’s attracted a million-and-a-half views since it was uploaded in 2007. Internet adulation has other ‘unexpectable’ rewards, such as Namitha being declared the 8th most Googled name in India in 2008; Katrina Kaif was 6th.

Though some might say that both their histrionic abilities are just about even, Namitha’s staple frisk-and-forget roles—at most, as fleetingly memorable moll or oomphy but insignificant other—couldn’t be further away from Kaif’s willowy central love interest. Unlike those who’ve floundered and been instantly forgotten in roles of a similar calibre, however, Namitha has a distinctive presence in the Telugu, Kannada and Tamil industry about ten years after her Miss Surat win in 1998, her Miss India near-miss (she was 4th runner up in 2001, the year Celina Jaitley won), and her move down south. Though only two films of her career total of 40 (or 50, as she claims) have been hits, she stands out for her arresting 6 foot frame, and her startlingly rich contralto makes the coy wittering of other leading ladies sound like crickets in the background.

When I met her in her favourite five-star-hotel last month in Chennai, she was flamboyantly late. She was dressed in her customary style of extravagant sultriness; in a shiny leopard-print top and tight black trousers. In her red satin heels, she towered over me, her diminutive “best friend” Raji (whose father NK Vishwanathan directed the 2009 Namitha-starrer Jaganmohini) and a previously glum security guard who lit up with joy when she sauntered past him through the metal detector.

“Unfortunately, I have a glamour image,” she says, nursing an iced tea. “So I’m used to the online comments. It is what it is. I get into their fantasies. It was disturbing in the beginning, but now I’ve developed a hard skin.” Her family back in her hometown Surat hasn’t, though. She leans forward, and says, with a conspiratorial smile, “I’ll tell you a funny story. I did one film, Aai. I went to the theatre with my brother and father—he’s a textile businessman. The song Arjuna Arjuna was playing.” She pauses, allowing me to picture her clad in a sopping sari, attempting a pole-dance against a tree by a waterfall for the delectation of a (mostly) bare-chested Sarath Kumar. “My dad is like…” she says, narrowing her eyes and glaring, “and left the theatre. Later, he didn’t yell at me, he just said he cannot see certain stuff [I do].”

Sadly, he won’t have cause to return to the theatre anytime soon. In Namitha’s decade-long stint in Tamil, Telugu and (briefly) Malayalam cinema, she’s had roles that only get discussed in terms of ‘boldness’ of costume, and generosity of ‘skin show’. Which brings us to the inevitable question: how has she managed to survive in the industry with a range that one waggish critic pronounced was ‘from one side of the screen to the other’?

The kind of sensational headlines she inspires provide one clue. ‘Python gets kissed by Namitha!’ ‘Fan attempts to kidnap Namitha’. ‘Fan club builds temple for Namitha’. ‘Namitha clears suicide rumour with kiss’. “There are lots of myths about her, like there used to be about Silk Smitha,” agrees Sreedhar Pillai, a longtime critic and correspondent based in Chennai. He observes that the local Tamil media’s portrayal of Namitha helps her “strike a chord with the audience” and allows her to “keep herself in the news and maintain a buzz” despite not having a single role in a Tamil film since the M Karunanidhi-authored film Ilaignan last year. “She’s not tasted success like Silk did,” he adds, “but she’s very friendly with the journos; she calls them machaan. She cultivates them very well.” Besides, Pillai says, she made a stirring impression on them, particularly in the beginning. “In the early days, she used to dress as she was in the movies. She’s a 6-footer, so it was a bit of a shocker.”

Which explains another sensational headline from 2008: ‘Hot debate in TN assembly on actresses’. The debate in question arose when a minister with the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) denounced the outfits that Namitha wore on Manada Mayilada, a reality dance show on Kalaignar TV, as “obscene”. Take those skimpy outfits away, though, and there’s no Namitha, or rather, not nearly enough of her. “Her image is very much slotted,” says Pillai. “She can only play the oomph girl in small-budget films, and that’s her best point. South Indian men like their heroines to be bulky and fleshy. Size zero, they don’t bother with it!”

Tamil film historian and character actor Mohan Raman partly blames Namitha’s height for slotting her into a class of roles as stifling and tiny as the average bustier she sports. “She’s got an imposing Amazonian structure. Which hero will stand with her?” he asks. “They can’t stretch to 6’2” overnight.” He has first-hand experience of appearing with her onscreen in the 2007 Naan Avan Ilai. “It was a court scene,” he recalls. “She was in the witness box and I was standing on the floor. You can imagine where my eyes were,” he adds, with a mock-chagrined shake of his head.

The other part of the blame, Raman says, goes to the type of films that came to dominate the industry from the late 1970s: featuring angry young men who became ‘superstars’. “In the 60s, social dramas used to have a vast canvas of characters, like The Last Supper, with each character being given equal importance,” explains Raman. “But from the last years of MGR and Sivaji (Ganesan)’s career, films started relying on the hero’s star power and dominance. Slowly, the background began to fade, and everything around the hero started to look fuzzy.” Or palely pretty, like the heroine, or something shimmering past in a brief sensual jolt, like the vamp or secondary female lead. Those roles continued to diminish through Kamal Haasan’s and Rajinikanth’s pre-eminence through the 1980s and 1990s, right up to today, with leading ladies undertaking ‘item numbers’ to maximise their own screen time.

Vamps aren’t the only ones with shrinking roles, Raman points out. With ardent mobs expecting every new superstar-vehicle to be a snappy line-slinging, cigarette-spinning spectacle, even Rajinikanth can’t ‘afford’ to do the interesting, nuanced roles he used to do in the 1980s. “When the superstar Rajinikanth has put the actor Rajinikanth in cold storage,” he says, “what’ll happen to poor Namitha? Likewise, Namitha the body beautiful has completely swamped whatever histrionic talents were inside her. Fans just want her to dish out more of the same stuff.”

Which is why, he says, she’s seen in “sexploitative SJ Suryah films” and the kinds of B-grade fare that ultimately exists to have raunchy ‘bits’ inserted into it during late-night shows in village theatres. Despite that fate, Namitha has found another niche she triumphantly inhabits—launching stores in small towns, which fetches her money, mobs and headlines. Raman says that resigning herself to this sex bomb fate is a “bold and painful conclusion” she’s come to, but nevertheless a role she plays with jovial aplomb. “The process must’ve been painful,” Raman says, “to know, ‘I can do this, act, but all these guys want to do is take a tape measure round my bust line, and I want cars, a house, assets, so I might as well embrace the inevitable and enjoy it’. Without that, we might have had another Silk.”