This chapter traces a genealogy of gestures, charting a complex course of male dancing from Bhagw... more This chapter traces a genealogy of gestures, charting a complex course of male dancing from Bhagwan to Bachchan with slight detours to Kishore Kumar, Mehmood, Govinda, and LaWhore Vagistan. A corporeal history reveals Bombay cinema’s production of gender through dance, leading us through the spaces for the staging of this ludic queerness that bristles against the comportment and ideals of traditional masculinity and attending to the re-enactment of these moves in public social dancing. I examine how Bhagwan and Bachchan’s communitarian dance numbers project a proletarian utopia that cuts across religious and regional divisions (just as LaWhore Vagistan’s dancing produces a queer utopia that interrogates racial and sexual divides). By tracing the passage of the Bhagwan Dada dance move from the portly Master Bhagwan to the lanky Bachchan, this chapter investigates the role of comic male dancing in producing non-hegemonic masculinities, exploring generic configurations within the popular cinematic idiom, primarily of dance and comedy, that queer gender protocols and embrace a more expansive range of gender performances.
Much of the (rather meager) scholarship on film acting draws from theater-related discourses on e... more Much of the (rather meager) scholarship on film acting draws from theater-related discourses on emoting, voice, and presence, to the extent that a comparison with theater has overdetermined these studies. This chapter explores the critical consequences for theorizations of acting when we read it alongside dancing and corporeal theories of embodiment and impersonation. Theorizing acting through dancing prompts a reconfiguration of standards for acting that are predominantly founded on rubrics of psychological realism, transparency, and face-centered emoting, and shifts our focus to gesture, movement, the occupation of space, and mobilization of cinematic technologies by moving bodies. This focus on dance re-envisions acting as a choreographic phenomenon, investing theories of film performance with corporeal presence, drawing our attention to the thick materiality of laboring, moving bodies. A corporeally grounded theorization of film acting requires an engagement with regimes of training, rehearsal, and production cultures. The chapter draws examples from Hindi cinema of the 1950s to examine how dance training influences acting repertoires, and how this interpretive shift toward movement, gesture, and bodily comportment might alter our understanding of labor, virtuosity, and technique. It engages as well with Indian theories of abhinaya or expression to trace longer histories of acting. A corporeally grounded theory of screen performance affords a conceptual framework that may be extended to other cinemas and other kinds of performing bodies undergirded by movement. When we turn to dance to theorize film acting, we may affirm: “When I think of actors, I think of their bodies.”
This essay mobilizes decolonial theory and praxis, in dialog with other related approaches, to pr... more This essay mobilizes decolonial theory and praxis, in dialog with other related approaches, to propose the framework of a pedagogy of reparations that aims to bear witness to and address the epistemic violence enacted by the hegemonic Euro-American film and media studies canon and curriculum. Spanning conceptual interrogations of the relationships of capital, white supremacy, and the academy, as well as pedagogical and administrative decisions around course offerings, breadth requirements, selection of “foundational” texts, design of theory and methods courses, the essay calls for a collaborative discussion of strategies for repair that may foster the possibility of a genuinely intersectional, decolonial, global imagination for film and media studies. A reparative pedagogy recognizes the relationship between epistemic violence and state violence, and embraces proliferation, relationality, and mutability as key strategies to keep our curricula from being re-colonized into the logics of canon- and empire-building.
In responding to calls for decolonizing and de-imperializing university curricula, our courses ne... more In responding to calls for decolonizing and de-imperializing university curricula, our courses need to foster global understandings of how media engage with the specific histories and workings of categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in order to aspire to a truly internationalist decolonial praxis. A pedagogy that centers film and media geopolitics is critical for unmasking power relations in knowledge production and in the maintenance of a dominant epistemic order. Globalizing the curriculum is essential to decolonizing it. Through reference to one of my courses, “Queer Cinemas around the World,” I reflect on my own recognition of how a critical global lens can move a course like that from the anodyne reform-oriented approach of the “coverage” model of teaching to a reckoning with queer geopolitics in all its unruly, polycentric, dissident proliferations.
The song-and-dance sequence, on account of being a staple item, a routine 'attraction' in the pop... more The song-and-dance sequence, on account of being a staple item, a routine 'attraction' in the popular cinema of the Indian subcontinent, has been extensively and rigorously theorised in the scholarship on this cinema. The preponderance of song-and-dance sequences across the many film cultures of South Asia has been deeply generative in challenging theories of narrative construction and cohesion, and resultant ideological analyses; postulations about cinematic genre and authorship; canons of realist and experimental cinema; and indeed any attempt to propose a singular ontology of film.
Usha Iyer pays tribute to Saroj Khan, whose six-decade-long career constitutes a remarkable, embo... more Usha Iyer pays tribute to Saroj Khan, whose six-decade-long career constitutes a remarkable, embodied archive of Bombay cinema’s industrial practices.
How do dancing bodies influence the music composed for them? Does the gestural repertoire of the ... more How do dancing bodies influence the music composed for them? Does the gestural repertoire of the on-screen performer impact the musical performance of the playback singer? How might a focus on dance provide new models for theorizing the Hindi film song-and-dance sequence? Through a focus on the dancing body, this article calls for a reconsideration of the process of ‘song picturization,’ a term commonly used in the Bombay film industry to reference the practice of recording the song first and then “adding” visuals to it. Using the example of the dancer-actress, Vyjayanthimala, it argues that in the case of certain dancer-actors, a reverse process of ‘dance musicalization’ may be at work, where the performer’s dance vocabulary and bodily comportment precede and influence the song. A choreomusicological analysis accords equal importance to the ‘sounding body’ of the dancer-actor as to the bodies that produce the film’s music, leading to the conceptualization of film music as produced through a multi-bodied ‘choreomusicking body.’
In this chapter, I inquire into the figure of the tantric in the Hindi horror film, specifically ... more In this chapter, I inquire into the figure of the tantric in the Hindi horror film, specifically in the films directed by the Ramsay brothers, India’s foremost horror film producers from the 1970s to the 1990s, examining in the process, some relationships between cultural memory, religion, folklore, colonialism, Hindi cinema, and horror. Tantrism, as a field of study today, refers to a diverse body of texts, traditions, and practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist communities of South Asia from around the fifth or sixth century AD. However, the abstract category of ‘tantrism’ was created only in the nineteenth century when Western scholars found doctrines and practices that they considered licentious and morally depraved in texts known as tantras. With its advocacy of transgressive rites, tantra was formulated within the colonial discourse as the most extreme, sexual, irrational, and corrupt embodiment of the worst tendencies in the “Indian mind.” In the Hindi horror film of the 1980s and 1990s, the tantric is a recurrent figure, with a customary blurring of the lines between the ‘mystic’ and the ‘monster’, resulting in a depiction of the tantric variously as witch doctor, medium, folk healer, shaman, sorcerer, and black magician. This mixing of categories in the depiction of tantrics is commonly criticized as ahistorical and dismissed as a meaningless trope within a mode of filmmaking – the Hindi horror film – that is itself not considered worthy of analysis. However, I read the construction of the tantric in the Hindi horror movie as illuminating larger socio-historical tensions between tradition, colonialism, modernity, and nationalism, and investigate why, in the mid- to late-Twentieth Century, there suddenly emerge a slew of such representations of the tantric figure in popular Hindi horror cinema. These clues take us through a cultural memory and a history to see how past prejudices have come to constitute present notions of horror in the Indian cultural imaginary. Through this paper, I argue that the ‘disfigurement’ of the tantric can be read as a willful project of history and cultural memory in disavowing a past that is incommensurate with the normative constitution of the modern. (https://books.google.com/books?id=gadEAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254&dq=figurations+in+indian+film&source=bl&ots=vCXqV0D8bE&sig=BdVt1xGJYKtxdfUe867TZ7d0dxM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEIQ6AEwCmoVChMI4JyZsciSyAIViowNCh3Qwg32#v=onepage&q&f=false)
With her vigorously libidinous dancing, Madhuri Dixit, the leading Hindi actress of the late 1980... more With her vigorously libidinous dancing, Madhuri Dixit, the leading Hindi actress of the late 1980s and the 1990s, initiated the consolidation of the brazen vamp and the coy heroine, which in turn led to multiple strategies to contain the subversive energies unleashed by the spectacle of female performance through dance. In this essay, I investigate how Dixit’s sensuous production numbers transform the construction of the female body on screen and indeed the very conditions of female stardom in Hindi cinema. In particular, I analyze dance numbers from three films featuring Dixit – Tezaab, Sangeet (Music, K. Vishwanath, 1992), and Beta (Son, Indra Kumar, 1992) – to investigate how film dance partakes centrally in the crisis of female representation in Hindi cinema of the 1990s.
Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films. Pauline Manley, Mark Evans (eds.). London: Equinox.
Contemporary Bollywood cinema is marked by a proliferation of references to earlier Hindi films. ... more Contemporary Bollywood cinema is marked by a proliferation of references to earlier Hindi films. One of the main forms of intertextuality is through song-and-dance sequences composed of a pastiche of earlier styles of dance, music, and choreography. In this chapter, I analyze three such song sequences – Woh ladki hai kahan (Dil Chahta Hai [2001]), Dhoom tana (Om Shanti Om [2007]), Phir milenge chalte chalte (Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi [2008]) – each of which features protagonists enacting dance styles from different eras of popular Hindi cinema. Analyzing the political economy of the repeated cinematic sign in light of India’s globalizing economy allows for an exploration of the nature of this cinema’s investment in the past. These song sequences seek to establish an affective encounter with a cinematic past, which provokes the question of how films deploy spectacle in relation to history, ideology, and national space.
Arguing that melodramatic representations of history are often more dependent on gesture and music than on narrative, I examine how a history of Hindi cinema is constructed through a remembering of epochal dance moves. By re-enacting the dance moves of the most famous stars down the ages, the spectator-protagonist (played in two of these three songs by Bollywood’s biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan) occupies a series of star bodies, the very history of Hindi film stardom, in fact. I study how the dancing star body acts as a site for performing the tropes of Bollywood cinema, and by extrapolation, of an imagined national identity.
The history of Indian dance as narrated in most twentieth century texts (written by scholars suc... more The history of Indian dance as narrated in most twentieth century texts (written by scholars such as Kapila Vatsyayan and Mohan Khokar, and a number of classical dance practitioners, among others) is restricted to what came to be canonized as “classical dance” forms or classified as “folk dance” by the newly-independent nation’s cultural institutions. This history was founded on a set of exclusions – of traditional, hereditary performers such as devadasis (temple dancers), tawaifs (courtesans), nautch girls, and transgender dancers, as well as the erotic content of most of these dance forms – and turned rather to ancient Sanskrit texts like the Natya Shastra to project an unbroken tradition of “respectable” national cultural forms, a process referred to as “Sanskritization” by later scholars (Coorlawala, Sarkar Munsi). Only since the 1980s and 1990s have discussions of the performance cultures of the tawaifs and devadasis begun to emerge in studies by Avanti Meduri, Amrit Srinivasan and others. Anna Morcom’s Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion is a much-needed addition to Indian dance studies as it shifts the focus to “underground” dance cultures or “low art” forms such as Nautanki, Lavani, bar dancing, and kothi performers (men performing as women). ...
Winner of eight Academy Awards and seven BAFTA Awards among many others, Danny Boyle’s 2008 film,... more Winner of eight Academy Awards and seven BAFTA Awards among many others, Danny Boyle’s 2008 film, Slumdog Millionaire (hereafter, SDM) has been among the most successful – and controversial – films of the last few years. The question of why SDM – described by film critic Robert Koehler as “a really, really minor movie with really, really big problems” (158) –merits an entire volume of critical essays is addressed by the book’s title, which indicates an engagement with the phenomenon of SDM, i.e. with the extra-textual proliferations of this film text. As a phenomenon and a cultural event, SDM provoked intense discussions about cinematic representations of poverty, about who can represent whom and how, about realist versus melodramatic narrative modes, and about the politics of transnational cultural production. Indeed, the intertextual matrix of the film text, its reception, the awards it won, the publicized afterlives of the slum-dwelling child actors, the increased demand for slum tours by foreign tourists, the daily playing of the song Jai Ho at the India-Pakistan border at Wagah, and its adoption as the official campaign song of the Indian National Congress in the 2009 general elections points to various sites of engagement, affiliation, and contestation with respect to SDM.
The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology is divided into four sections that present different ways of framing SDM ...
The field of film studies has, over the last two decades, witnessed the rise of the “cinematic ci... more The field of film studies has, over the last two decades, witnessed the rise of the “cinematic city” paradigm with key texts like Giuliana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, David Clarke’s edited anthology, The Cinematic City, and Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice’s collection, Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Studies in a Global Context arguing for the foundational imbrication of the cinema and the city, both products and progenitors of twentieth-century modernity. Theorizations of the cinema-city nexus emphasize the similarities in the sensorial, haptic fascination of the cultural form of cinema and the social organization of the city for the spectator-flâneur/flâneuse. The flickering images of the cinema are seen to be consonant with “the experiences offered by the flickering, virtual presence of the city” (Clarke 10). The World Film Locations series published by Intellect Books aims to contribute to this growing field that explores the relations between space and place in cinematic texts and the cities they depict and inhabit. The series includes edited volumes on Tokyo, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Istanbul, and Dublin, among others. The volume being reviewed here focuses on the preeminent cinematic city of popular Indian cinema – Bombay. ...
In
Dancing Women
Usha Iyer takes her readers through a fascinating journey ofHindi film dance and... more In Dancing Women Usha Iyer takes her readers through a fascinating journey ofHindi film dance and its corporeal histories; she centres her analysis on femalecultural labour in the Bombay film industry. Her approach differs from mostscholarly work on labour and the media, which focuses predominantly on mode ofproduction. For this reason, Iyer’s corporeal reading of dance form in Hindicinema initiates an important intervention in the area of cultural labour studies.
Functioning as a synthesis of the historical forces leading to the evolution of flm dance techniq... more Functioning as a synthesis of the historical forces leading to the evolution of flm dance technique and aesthetics, as well as the changing landscapes of the purpose of dance in Indian cinema, Usha Iyer’s book spans the movements and creative labor of the leading lady, the background dancers, the choreographer andthe invisible labor. Placing social history alongside flm, while correlating to other performance cultures, migrations, and technologies that infuence on-screen dance making as well as audience responses, Usha Iyer emphasizes the undercurrents of inter-connected and related networks that produce new forms of mobility.
This chapter traces a genealogy of gestures, charting a complex course of male dancing from Bhagw... more This chapter traces a genealogy of gestures, charting a complex course of male dancing from Bhagwan to Bachchan with slight detours to Kishore Kumar, Mehmood, Govinda, and LaWhore Vagistan. A corporeal history reveals Bombay cinema’s production of gender through dance, leading us through the spaces for the staging of this ludic queerness that bristles against the comportment and ideals of traditional masculinity and attending to the re-enactment of these moves in public social dancing. I examine how Bhagwan and Bachchan’s communitarian dance numbers project a proletarian utopia that cuts across religious and regional divisions (just as LaWhore Vagistan’s dancing produces a queer utopia that interrogates racial and sexual divides). By tracing the passage of the Bhagwan Dada dance move from the portly Master Bhagwan to the lanky Bachchan, this chapter investigates the role of comic male dancing in producing non-hegemonic masculinities, exploring generic configurations within the popular cinematic idiom, primarily of dance and comedy, that queer gender protocols and embrace a more expansive range of gender performances.
Much of the (rather meager) scholarship on film acting draws from theater-related discourses on e... more Much of the (rather meager) scholarship on film acting draws from theater-related discourses on emoting, voice, and presence, to the extent that a comparison with theater has overdetermined these studies. This chapter explores the critical consequences for theorizations of acting when we read it alongside dancing and corporeal theories of embodiment and impersonation. Theorizing acting through dancing prompts a reconfiguration of standards for acting that are predominantly founded on rubrics of psychological realism, transparency, and face-centered emoting, and shifts our focus to gesture, movement, the occupation of space, and mobilization of cinematic technologies by moving bodies. This focus on dance re-envisions acting as a choreographic phenomenon, investing theories of film performance with corporeal presence, drawing our attention to the thick materiality of laboring, moving bodies. A corporeally grounded theorization of film acting requires an engagement with regimes of training, rehearsal, and production cultures. The chapter draws examples from Hindi cinema of the 1950s to examine how dance training influences acting repertoires, and how this interpretive shift toward movement, gesture, and bodily comportment might alter our understanding of labor, virtuosity, and technique. It engages as well with Indian theories of abhinaya or expression to trace longer histories of acting. A corporeally grounded theory of screen performance affords a conceptual framework that may be extended to other cinemas and other kinds of performing bodies undergirded by movement. When we turn to dance to theorize film acting, we may affirm: “When I think of actors, I think of their bodies.”
This essay mobilizes decolonial theory and praxis, in dialog with other related approaches, to pr... more This essay mobilizes decolonial theory and praxis, in dialog with other related approaches, to propose the framework of a pedagogy of reparations that aims to bear witness to and address the epistemic violence enacted by the hegemonic Euro-American film and media studies canon and curriculum. Spanning conceptual interrogations of the relationships of capital, white supremacy, and the academy, as well as pedagogical and administrative decisions around course offerings, breadth requirements, selection of “foundational” texts, design of theory and methods courses, the essay calls for a collaborative discussion of strategies for repair that may foster the possibility of a genuinely intersectional, decolonial, global imagination for film and media studies. A reparative pedagogy recognizes the relationship between epistemic violence and state violence, and embraces proliferation, relationality, and mutability as key strategies to keep our curricula from being re-colonized into the logics of canon- and empire-building.
In responding to calls for decolonizing and de-imperializing university curricula, our courses ne... more In responding to calls for decolonizing and de-imperializing university curricula, our courses need to foster global understandings of how media engage with the specific histories and workings of categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in order to aspire to a truly internationalist decolonial praxis. A pedagogy that centers film and media geopolitics is critical for unmasking power relations in knowledge production and in the maintenance of a dominant epistemic order. Globalizing the curriculum is essential to decolonizing it. Through reference to one of my courses, “Queer Cinemas around the World,” I reflect on my own recognition of how a critical global lens can move a course like that from the anodyne reform-oriented approach of the “coverage” model of teaching to a reckoning with queer geopolitics in all its unruly, polycentric, dissident proliferations.
The song-and-dance sequence, on account of being a staple item, a routine 'attraction' in the pop... more The song-and-dance sequence, on account of being a staple item, a routine 'attraction' in the popular cinema of the Indian subcontinent, has been extensively and rigorously theorised in the scholarship on this cinema. The preponderance of song-and-dance sequences across the many film cultures of South Asia has been deeply generative in challenging theories of narrative construction and cohesion, and resultant ideological analyses; postulations about cinematic genre and authorship; canons of realist and experimental cinema; and indeed any attempt to propose a singular ontology of film.
Usha Iyer pays tribute to Saroj Khan, whose six-decade-long career constitutes a remarkable, embo... more Usha Iyer pays tribute to Saroj Khan, whose six-decade-long career constitutes a remarkable, embodied archive of Bombay cinema’s industrial practices.
How do dancing bodies influence the music composed for them? Does the gestural repertoire of the ... more How do dancing bodies influence the music composed for them? Does the gestural repertoire of the on-screen performer impact the musical performance of the playback singer? How might a focus on dance provide new models for theorizing the Hindi film song-and-dance sequence? Through a focus on the dancing body, this article calls for a reconsideration of the process of ‘song picturization,’ a term commonly used in the Bombay film industry to reference the practice of recording the song first and then “adding” visuals to it. Using the example of the dancer-actress, Vyjayanthimala, it argues that in the case of certain dancer-actors, a reverse process of ‘dance musicalization’ may be at work, where the performer’s dance vocabulary and bodily comportment precede and influence the song. A choreomusicological analysis accords equal importance to the ‘sounding body’ of the dancer-actor as to the bodies that produce the film’s music, leading to the conceptualization of film music as produced through a multi-bodied ‘choreomusicking body.’
In this chapter, I inquire into the figure of the tantric in the Hindi horror film, specifically ... more In this chapter, I inquire into the figure of the tantric in the Hindi horror film, specifically in the films directed by the Ramsay brothers, India’s foremost horror film producers from the 1970s to the 1990s, examining in the process, some relationships between cultural memory, religion, folklore, colonialism, Hindi cinema, and horror. Tantrism, as a field of study today, refers to a diverse body of texts, traditions, and practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist communities of South Asia from around the fifth or sixth century AD. However, the abstract category of ‘tantrism’ was created only in the nineteenth century when Western scholars found doctrines and practices that they considered licentious and morally depraved in texts known as tantras. With its advocacy of transgressive rites, tantra was formulated within the colonial discourse as the most extreme, sexual, irrational, and corrupt embodiment of the worst tendencies in the “Indian mind.” In the Hindi horror film of the 1980s and 1990s, the tantric is a recurrent figure, with a customary blurring of the lines between the ‘mystic’ and the ‘monster’, resulting in a depiction of the tantric variously as witch doctor, medium, folk healer, shaman, sorcerer, and black magician. This mixing of categories in the depiction of tantrics is commonly criticized as ahistorical and dismissed as a meaningless trope within a mode of filmmaking – the Hindi horror film – that is itself not considered worthy of analysis. However, I read the construction of the tantric in the Hindi horror movie as illuminating larger socio-historical tensions between tradition, colonialism, modernity, and nationalism, and investigate why, in the mid- to late-Twentieth Century, there suddenly emerge a slew of such representations of the tantric figure in popular Hindi horror cinema. These clues take us through a cultural memory and a history to see how past prejudices have come to constitute present notions of horror in the Indian cultural imaginary. Through this paper, I argue that the ‘disfigurement’ of the tantric can be read as a willful project of history and cultural memory in disavowing a past that is incommensurate with the normative constitution of the modern. (https://books.google.com/books?id=gadEAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254&dq=figurations+in+indian+film&source=bl&ots=vCXqV0D8bE&sig=BdVt1xGJYKtxdfUe867TZ7d0dxM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEIQ6AEwCmoVChMI4JyZsciSyAIViowNCh3Qwg32#v=onepage&q&f=false)
With her vigorously libidinous dancing, Madhuri Dixit, the leading Hindi actress of the late 1980... more With her vigorously libidinous dancing, Madhuri Dixit, the leading Hindi actress of the late 1980s and the 1990s, initiated the consolidation of the brazen vamp and the coy heroine, which in turn led to multiple strategies to contain the subversive energies unleashed by the spectacle of female performance through dance. In this essay, I investigate how Dixit’s sensuous production numbers transform the construction of the female body on screen and indeed the very conditions of female stardom in Hindi cinema. In particular, I analyze dance numbers from three films featuring Dixit – Tezaab, Sangeet (Music, K. Vishwanath, 1992), and Beta (Son, Indra Kumar, 1992) – to investigate how film dance partakes centrally in the crisis of female representation in Hindi cinema of the 1990s.
Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic World of Dance Films. Pauline Manley, Mark Evans (eds.). London: Equinox.
Contemporary Bollywood cinema is marked by a proliferation of references to earlier Hindi films. ... more Contemporary Bollywood cinema is marked by a proliferation of references to earlier Hindi films. One of the main forms of intertextuality is through song-and-dance sequences composed of a pastiche of earlier styles of dance, music, and choreography. In this chapter, I analyze three such song sequences – Woh ladki hai kahan (Dil Chahta Hai [2001]), Dhoom tana (Om Shanti Om [2007]), Phir milenge chalte chalte (Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi [2008]) – each of which features protagonists enacting dance styles from different eras of popular Hindi cinema. Analyzing the political economy of the repeated cinematic sign in light of India’s globalizing economy allows for an exploration of the nature of this cinema’s investment in the past. These song sequences seek to establish an affective encounter with a cinematic past, which provokes the question of how films deploy spectacle in relation to history, ideology, and national space.
Arguing that melodramatic representations of history are often more dependent on gesture and music than on narrative, I examine how a history of Hindi cinema is constructed through a remembering of epochal dance moves. By re-enacting the dance moves of the most famous stars down the ages, the spectator-protagonist (played in two of these three songs by Bollywood’s biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan) occupies a series of star bodies, the very history of Hindi film stardom, in fact. I study how the dancing star body acts as a site for performing the tropes of Bollywood cinema, and by extrapolation, of an imagined national identity.
The history of Indian dance as narrated in most twentieth century texts (written by scholars suc... more The history of Indian dance as narrated in most twentieth century texts (written by scholars such as Kapila Vatsyayan and Mohan Khokar, and a number of classical dance practitioners, among others) is restricted to what came to be canonized as “classical dance” forms or classified as “folk dance” by the newly-independent nation’s cultural institutions. This history was founded on a set of exclusions – of traditional, hereditary performers such as devadasis (temple dancers), tawaifs (courtesans), nautch girls, and transgender dancers, as well as the erotic content of most of these dance forms – and turned rather to ancient Sanskrit texts like the Natya Shastra to project an unbroken tradition of “respectable” national cultural forms, a process referred to as “Sanskritization” by later scholars (Coorlawala, Sarkar Munsi). Only since the 1980s and 1990s have discussions of the performance cultures of the tawaifs and devadasis begun to emerge in studies by Avanti Meduri, Amrit Srinivasan and others. Anna Morcom’s Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion is a much-needed addition to Indian dance studies as it shifts the focus to “underground” dance cultures or “low art” forms such as Nautanki, Lavani, bar dancing, and kothi performers (men performing as women). ...
Winner of eight Academy Awards and seven BAFTA Awards among many others, Danny Boyle’s 2008 film,... more Winner of eight Academy Awards and seven BAFTA Awards among many others, Danny Boyle’s 2008 film, Slumdog Millionaire (hereafter, SDM) has been among the most successful – and controversial – films of the last few years. The question of why SDM – described by film critic Robert Koehler as “a really, really minor movie with really, really big problems” (158) –merits an entire volume of critical essays is addressed by the book’s title, which indicates an engagement with the phenomenon of SDM, i.e. with the extra-textual proliferations of this film text. As a phenomenon and a cultural event, SDM provoked intense discussions about cinematic representations of poverty, about who can represent whom and how, about realist versus melodramatic narrative modes, and about the politics of transnational cultural production. Indeed, the intertextual matrix of the film text, its reception, the awards it won, the publicized afterlives of the slum-dwelling child actors, the increased demand for slum tours by foreign tourists, the daily playing of the song Jai Ho at the India-Pakistan border at Wagah, and its adoption as the official campaign song of the Indian National Congress in the 2009 general elections points to various sites of engagement, affiliation, and contestation with respect to SDM.
The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology is divided into four sections that present different ways of framing SDM ...
The field of film studies has, over the last two decades, witnessed the rise of the “cinematic ci... more The field of film studies has, over the last two decades, witnessed the rise of the “cinematic city” paradigm with key texts like Giuliana Bruno’s Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, David Clarke’s edited anthology, The Cinematic City, and Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice’s collection, Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Studies in a Global Context arguing for the foundational imbrication of the cinema and the city, both products and progenitors of twentieth-century modernity. Theorizations of the cinema-city nexus emphasize the similarities in the sensorial, haptic fascination of the cultural form of cinema and the social organization of the city for the spectator-flâneur/flâneuse. The flickering images of the cinema are seen to be consonant with “the experiences offered by the flickering, virtual presence of the city” (Clarke 10). The World Film Locations series published by Intellect Books aims to contribute to this growing field that explores the relations between space and place in cinematic texts and the cities they depict and inhabit. The series includes edited volumes on Tokyo, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Istanbul, and Dublin, among others. The volume being reviewed here focuses on the preeminent cinematic city of popular Indian cinema – Bombay. ...
In
Dancing Women
Usha Iyer takes her readers through a fascinating journey ofHindi film dance and... more In Dancing Women Usha Iyer takes her readers through a fascinating journey ofHindi film dance and its corporeal histories; she centres her analysis on femalecultural labour in the Bombay film industry. Her approach differs from mostscholarly work on labour and the media, which focuses predominantly on mode ofproduction. For this reason, Iyer’s corporeal reading of dance form in Hindicinema initiates an important intervention in the area of cultural labour studies.
Functioning as a synthesis of the historical forces leading to the evolution of flm dance techniq... more Functioning as a synthesis of the historical forces leading to the evolution of flm dance technique and aesthetics, as well as the changing landscapes of the purpose of dance in Indian cinema, Usha Iyer’s book spans the movements and creative labor of the leading lady, the background dancers, the choreographer andthe invisible labor. Placing social history alongside flm, while correlating to other performance cultures, migrations, and technologies that infuence on-screen dance making as well as audience responses, Usha Iyer emphasizes the undercurrents of inter-connected and related networks that produce new forms of mobility.
Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of S... more Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia’s most popular cultural forms—cinema and dance—historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the “women’s question” via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, i...
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relationships of capital, white supremacy, and the academy, as well as pedagogical and administrative decisions around course offerings, breadth requirements, selection of “foundational” texts, design of theory and methods courses, the essay calls for a collaborative discussion of strategies for repair that may foster the possibility of a genuinely intersectional, decolonial, global imagination for film and media studies. A reparative pedagogy recognizes the relationship between epistemic violence and state violence, and embraces proliferation, relationality, and mutability as key strategies to keep our curricula from being re-colonized into the logics of canon- and empire-building.
Arguing that melodramatic representations of history are often more dependent on gesture and music than on narrative, I examine how a history of Hindi cinema is constructed through a remembering of epochal dance moves. By re-enacting the dance moves of the most famous stars down the ages, the spectator-protagonist (played in two of these three songs by Bollywood’s biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan) occupies a series of star bodies, the very history of Hindi film stardom, in fact. I study how the dancing star body acts as a site for performing the tropes of Bollywood cinema, and by extrapolation, of an imagined national identity.
The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology is divided into four sections that present different ways of framing SDM ...
Dancing Women
Usha Iyer takes her readers through a fascinating journey ofHindi film dance and its corporeal histories; she centres her analysis on femalecultural labour in the Bombay film industry. Her approach differs from mostscholarly work on labour and the media, which focuses predominantly on mode ofproduction. For this reason, Iyer’s corporeal reading of dance form in Hindicinema initiates an important intervention in the area of cultural labour studies.
relationships of capital, white supremacy, and the academy, as well as pedagogical and administrative decisions around course offerings, breadth requirements, selection of “foundational” texts, design of theory and methods courses, the essay calls for a collaborative discussion of strategies for repair that may foster the possibility of a genuinely intersectional, decolonial, global imagination for film and media studies. A reparative pedagogy recognizes the relationship between epistemic violence and state violence, and embraces proliferation, relationality, and mutability as key strategies to keep our curricula from being re-colonized into the logics of canon- and empire-building.
Arguing that melodramatic representations of history are often more dependent on gesture and music than on narrative, I examine how a history of Hindi cinema is constructed through a remembering of epochal dance moves. By re-enacting the dance moves of the most famous stars down the ages, the spectator-protagonist (played in two of these three songs by Bollywood’s biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan) occupies a series of star bodies, the very history of Hindi film stardom, in fact. I study how the dancing star body acts as a site for performing the tropes of Bollywood cinema, and by extrapolation, of an imagined national identity.
The Slumdog Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology is divided into four sections that present different ways of framing SDM ...
Dancing Women
Usha Iyer takes her readers through a fascinating journey ofHindi film dance and its corporeal histories; she centres her analysis on femalecultural labour in the Bombay film industry. Her approach differs from mostscholarly work on labour and the media, which focuses predominantly on mode ofproduction. For this reason, Iyer’s corporeal reading of dance form in Hindicinema initiates an important intervention in the area of cultural labour studies.