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“She was an ‘aside,’” an obituary comments about Tun Tun, “a casual, flippant chuckle thrown in for strictly droll decoration.” And to further underline how inconsequential her roles were to the plots: “She was flooded with a series of bit parts throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. All she had to do was waddle on screen, make ugly faces and vanish before audiences returned to other characters.”1
However unlikely it may seem for an obit, this quite sums up how Tun Tun, who was arguably Bombay cinema's first comedienne, is understood as a figure and a figuration. Tun Tun's case is definitely not an exception in this matter; there is generally a lack of academic scholarship on humor and comic actors in Bombay and Indian cinema. While the melodrama has dominated the academic landscape, scholars have also written extensively about the cinematic genres of action films, masala socials, and horror. The absence of scholarly interest in comic actors is certainly not due to a lack of primary “texts.” Indian cinema has seen a series of extremely prolific and illustrious male and female comedy actors, including Dhirendranath Ganguly, Bhagwan Dada, Meena Shorey, Johnny Walker, Mukri, Tun Tun, and Mehmud, among many others.2 In this context, this essay is about presence as well as absence, excess as well as ephemerality, and endurance as well as erasure, because it is impossible to write about comediennes in Indian cinema without being endlessly caught in these dualities. I obviously do not have the scope and space for filling that gap here, but some critical engagement with the figure and figuration of Tun Tun, I hope, will lead to a broader consideration of comedy in Indian cinema.
As I sat in the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) sifting through old film magazines, advertising materials such as press booklets, and various media reports, Tun Tun became increasingly distant and ungraspable.3 For someone who appeared in almost four hundred films in the Hindi-Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, and Punjabi film industries, Tun Tun's near-absolute absence from the archives of Indian cinema is baffling.4 Even during the years when she was at the peak of her acting career, none of the major film magazines carried any substantial feature on...