Aamir Khan dressed as a woman in the new commercial for Coca-Cola brings back memories of all our leading men who have dared to dress in drag.

Khan himself had created quite a flutter - and I don't mean just the false eyelashes - when in Ashutosh Gowariker's "Baazi" in 1995 he had dressed in drag for a dance number.

Khan had spoken about how difficult the whole process of getting into a woman's garb had been but that was apparently not difficult enough to put him off the womanly disguise for good! In the new cola ad, Khan plays a woman with a coy confidence - a measure of his commitment and confidence to carry off any role unabashedly.

Close on his heels comes Ashutosh Rana as the true-life eunuch politician Shabnam. This isn't the first time that Rana is getting into drag. In Tanuja Chandra's "Sangharsh", which catapulted him to heinous fame, Rana had dressed up as a woman to outwit the law.

"But in 'Shabnam Mousi' there's no charade on screen. It's a full-fledged character in feminine garb and I truly enjoyed playing this character," explained the committed actor.

For Bollywood's early male super-heroes, playing a woman even in jest was just not a possibility.

One couldn't imagine the screen legends of the golden era like Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor or Dev Anand, though female superstars like Padmini in "Mera Naam Joker" and Saira Banu in "Victoria 203" had no qualms about masquerading as men.

The first leading man to get into drag was the 1960s' pin up boy Biswajeet. In Manmohan Desai's espionage thriller "Kismat", he disguised himself as a woman to sing "Kajra mohabbat wala" in Asha Bhosle's voice. His co-star Babita masqueraded as a man and sang in Shamshad Begum's voice.

It was a first - and certainly not a last. In Narendra Bedi's 1975 comedy "Raffoo Chakkar" - a remake of Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" - Rishi Kapoor and Paintal were fabulous in drag.

In 1981, the reigning superstar Amitabh Bcahchan created a stir when in Prakash Mehra's "Lawaris" he got into drag to enact the popular "Mere angein mein" number.

Critics lashed out at him for his allegedly unbecoming conduct. But as he patiently pointed out, a complete entertainer was one who didn't flinch under the most excruciating circumstances.

The mighty Kamal Haasan realized the truth behind Bachchan's truism when in the celebrated "Chachi 420" he disguised himself as a woman to play nanny to his own daughter.

Kamal Haasan's drag act, inspired by Robin Williams in "Mrs Doubtfire", is the most outstanding example of an Indian actor playing a woman. The actor didn't merely play a woman. He got into the skin of his character to actually create a believable woman.

The voice wasn't dubbed and the gait wasn't exaggerated. Every nuance and gesture was just right. Every flutter of the eyelash and the heaving of the bosom denoted a woman's poise rather than a man impersonating a woman.

Govinda too tried to do a "Mrs Doubtfire" in "Aunty No 1" with disastrous results. In Amol Palekar's little-seen "Daayra", Nirmal Pandey and Sonali Kulkarni played two cross-dressers whose destinies cross and uncross in a gender-bending crisscross.

Pandey's performance, though convincing, never got beyond the art-house circuit.

Way back in 1913, when Indian cinema started, Dadasahib Phalke had to cast men in women's roles because of social taboos which forbade the female gender from facing the camera.

Today, when sexual options are far more liberally exercised, it takes an Aamir Khan or a Kamal Haasan to enter the comfort zone of challenging histrionics though the dark areas of emotional and sexual expression.