Manoranjan—1974 film defied moral police. Zeenat Aman played an independent sex worker

Bright outfits, exaggerated comic scenes, and the lack of long-drawn emotional moments make Manoranjan entertaining. But it was a box office failure.

Zeenat Aman in Manoranjan | Credit: Netflix

It was the short red dress that Zeenat Aman wore in Manoranjan that had the moral brigade frothing and foaming. More than 50 years after the movie was released to a chorus of outrage, the actor stands by her character Nisha.

“She was no damsel in distress,” Aman wrote in an Instagram post with photos of stills and posters of the movie that was Shammi Kapoor’s directorial debut. “The moral police have been a steady companion through my career,” Aman wrote while defending her feisty, fearless role as a sex worker in the film.

And she rightly pointed out in her post, the movie defied the conventions of its time. Manoranjan is the official remake of Billy Wilder’s 1963 comedy Irma la Douce (Irma the Sweet) starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.

In India, Manoranjan, despite its farcical plot, dared to show sex workers as intelligent, independent women—not Jezebels that we paint them out to be. What’s more, the three Mangeshkar sisters–Lata, Asha, and Usha—come together to sing Dulhan Maike Chali.  It played as women were being herded into a police van and taken to jail.

There’s corruption, greed, lust and other ‘deadly sins’ in the film. But they’re all eclipsed by Nisha’s strong personality. The movie defied the moral police—and in a way, still does today—by daring to show a straight-laced policeman falling in love with a sex worker. And what a joyous, caper-filled love it is.

It’s little wonder, then, that Zeenat Aman reminded us of Nisha.

“.. she was unapologetic about how she earns a living. This was a character I could have fun with: sexually liberated, financially independent, and fully capable of locking horns with and turning down, any man,” she wrote on Instagram.

Of course, Manoranjan got an ‘A’ certificate from the censor board.

Genius of the film 

Manoranjan’s plot is straightforward, and that’s the charm. Newly-appointed idealistic police constable Ratan (Sanjeev Kumar) is assigned to patrol the red-light area of Manoranjan Street where he meets Nisha. He’s outraged when he sees sex workers soliciting customers publicly and arranges a raid on a hotel.

Unfortunately for him, one of the people caught in the raid turns out to be a senior officer, who is a regular in the area. Ratan is framed on corruption charges and removed from the force. He’s drawn to Manoranjan Street—the place where his neatly organised life unravelled. Nisha offers him a place in her home.

But Ratan, whom Nisha starts calling Sheru after he manages to fight her abusive pimp, does not want her to continue sex work. In that, he is a traditional male. It’s accepted that a man would not want his partner to earn money this way. So much so that the Oscar-winning movie Poor Things (2023) was an aberration. A lot of viewers couldn’t understand how Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef) chose to live with and love Bella (Emma Stone) despite her sexual proclivities.

In a comic display of the saviour complex in Manoranjan, Ratan adopts the persona of a nawab, who pays Nisha weekly so that she no longer needs to offer her services to other men. He takes up odd jobs during the day to hide the truth.

But Nisha is fiercely proud of her financial independence. She rebuffs his well-meaning offers. She chooses to be a sex worker even after Ratan offers her his love and the promise of a ‘respectable’ life.

The genius of the film is that it simultaneously satirises the social norms that hangs masculine self-worth on the narrow ability to financially support a family, while showing how men have deep-seated saviour complexes.

Nisha and Ratan

Nisha’s character was miles ahead of her time. Despite a history of depicting sex workers and courtesans, Bollywood tended to default to either portraying them as immoral seductresses or beaten down, broken women with a tragic backstory.

Manoranjan threw all the drama out of the window.

Aman’s performance in Dev Anand’s Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971) as an estranged and troubled young girl had garnered attention. And Manoranjan offered her the opportunity to explore her range of acting. Her identity as a ‘bold’ actor was solidified much later in Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978).

In Manoranjan Street, sex is not taboo—it’s all in a day’s work. Despite violent pimps and police checks, there is no constant pathos—a welcome change in the depiction of sex work. Brightly coloured outfits, exaggerated comic scenes, and the lack of long-drawn emotional moments make the movie entertaining.

Through Ratan’s views about the profession, and his need to ‘save’ Nisha from the ‘dishonest’ work, the film critiques society’s outlook toward sex. But it does not take itself too seriously.

Kumar’s Ratan was the perfect foil to Aman’s Nisha. By the time the movie came out, he had established himself as a ‘serious actor’ with films like Parichay (1972) and Koshish (1972). With Manoranjan, he got a chance to do something entirely frivolous and fun.

Initially, Shammi Kapoor wanted to star in the film, before realising that he was too old to be paired opposite Aman. So, director Kapoor played the role of the sutradhar or stage manager Dhoop Chaon in the movie. He is seen telling his immediate audience on a train to Nagpur why Mumbai is better than Europe, and the story of Manoranjan Street.

After Aman’s walk down the memory lane, actor Anil Kapoor, director Tanuja Chandra and TV personality Archa Puran Singh shared their memories of watching Manoranjan.

“Loved the film, the song picturisations, and performances … screening of the film/picture ka pehla trial show was at the iconic RK Studios auditorium with friends and families of the warm, gracious and generous Krishna Aunty/Mrs Raj Kapoor,” Anil Kapoor wrote in the comments section.

By the 2000s, sex comedies were seen as a ticket to commercial success with films like Indra Kumar’s Masti (2004), which had two more instalments, and the critically acclaimed Hunterrr (2015).

But when Manoranjan came out in 1974, it was a box office failure.

(Edited by Ratan Priya)