The Nationalist Imaginary in the Bollywood Sports Film

Even after the liberalising of the Indian economy, the nationalist narrative, has endured, taking new forms. Some scholars have to argued that the post-national trope has been inaugurated in the Hindi film. By looking at a few popular sports films of the last decade and a half, Nissim Manathukkaren interrogates this contention pointing out that the post-national is not yet realized in the sports film genre. The author argues that the sports film by mirroring the limited notion of nationalism that is in sync with the logic of the market, is as yet a disappointment. It papers over the fissures and the complications within the current hegemonic nationalism, but carrying the potential of reimagining it. The author contends that in its intense desire to portray sporting glory as a triumph for the nation, films have tended to underplay individual struggles.

Bollywood in Transition: Chiragdeep’s Reflection of the Film Industry

This case illustrates Bollywood, the Hindi film industry, operating out of Mumbai. As an industry, Bollywood is at crossroads today, trying to create a sustainable business model. The case dives deep into the structure of the industry, the conduct of its existing players and its performance. The case stands out as a means for understanding industry-level competitiveness and the unique profitability patterns. It addresses the concerns of the incumbents of Bollywood and how they can draw lessons from its peer—the Tamil film industry in Chennai—in terms of a regulated sustainable business model.

Dance Musicalization and the Choreomusicking Body

Chapter 1 presents a dance-centered taxonomy of musical numbers, which clarifies how dance promotes agency and authorship. Reconsidering the term “song picturization,” which suggests the primacy of the song as setting the agenda for the visuals, this chapter proposes that in the case of certain dance numbers or famed dancer-actors, a reverse process of “dance musicalization” is at work, in which a desired dance vocabulary precedes and influences the conceptualization of the song. This disruption of given logics of production and authorship spurs the conceptualization of a multi-bodied “choreomusicking body,” which directs our attention to the many on- and off-screen bodies laboring to produce the song-and-dance number, and fundamentally shifts ideological readings of narrative and spectacle in popular Hindi cinema. Employing choreomusicological theory, historical accounts of dancer-actors’ influence on musical composition, and spectatorial responses to the music-dance composite, this chapter proposes new models for theorizing the Hindi film song-and-dance sequence.

Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai (What Is behind the Stardom)?

With her vigorously libidinous dancing, her infamous “jhatkas and matkas,” Madhuri Dixit, the leading Hindi actress of the late 1980s and the 1990s, initiated a whole new movement vocabulary for the Hindi film heroine. Dixit’s moves carried the unmistakable imprint of the choreographer who led her to stardom, Saroj Khan. With her six-decade-long career, Khan constitutes a remarkable, embodied archive of Bombay cinema’s industrial practices in relation to dance performance and choreography. Chapter 5 delves into Khan and Dixit’s co-choreography of a new style of movement, reading choreography as an archival-corporeal system of transmission and transformation that articulates body cultures, industrial systems, and labor networks. A focus on training, rehearsal, and collaboration foregrounds the creative processes in their co-choreography that produced new techniques of the body, which both women continue to build on through richly intermedial careers in film, reality TV dance shows, and on web platforms.

Introduction

The Introduction sets up the primary analytic frameworks of this book, plotting, through the opening example of the spectacular dance number, “Muqabla humse na karo,” issues of labor, collaboration, and technology that film dance activates. Through attention to gesture, movement vocabulary, training, fame, and erasure, this chapter posits the need for a corporeal history of Hindi cinema that is peopled by many laboring bodies. Such a history takes into account acclaimed and invisibilized performers and celebrates a range of dancing women as co-choreographers of female mobility. The Introduction also provides a brief history of dance in pre-playback Hindi film, and a historical account of responses to the cine-corporeal transformations wrought by dance in Indian cinema.