ABSTRACT
India is going through tumultuous change. In a world where borders are no longer possible, classical Indian and popular film dances coalesce to foreground postmodern hybridity. This essay engages with the intersection of embodiment, practice, dance, film, and cultural identity. The focus is on the popular dance form from Bollywood. Though the term “Bollywood” is new, Bombay films have been around from the 1930s. In recent years, Bollywood’s role in shaping the “national-popular” domain of Indian culture has come under increasing scholarly scrutiny. Scholars such as Ashis Nandy (1998), Madhav Prasad (1998), Mukul Kesavan (1994), Sumita Chakravarty (1993), Ravi Vasudevan (2000), and many others have shown that Hindi films are vital for forging a unified national identity. However, despite the ubiquity of song and dance sequences in Hindi films, there has been little scholarly attention on their cultural importance. Like the films themselves, the song and dance sequences have been important for creating notions of Indian cultural identity or “Indianness” in postcolonial India. This repertory has been an exhaustive mix of Indian dances from classical to folk, with a multitude of forms borrowed from all over the world. In this essay, I argue that the narratives and sensibilities of “Indianness” once circulated through Hindi film song and dance sequences have undergone a significant shift in recent times.
