Dancing Women Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema

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, sexuality, 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, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

Introduction: A Corporeal History of Hindi Film Dance

1. Dance Musicalization and the Choreomusicking Body
Corporealizing Theoretical Frameworks of Film Music and Dance

2. Choreographing Architectures of Public Intimacy
A Spatio-Corporeal Analysis of Hindi Film Dance

3. Corporealizing Colonial Modernities
Sadhona Bose and Azurie as Co-choreographers of New Mobilities in the 1930s and 1940s

4. From the Cabaret Number to the Melodrama of Dance Reform
The Folded Corporeal Histories of the Dancer-Actress in the 1950s and 1960s

5. Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai (What is Behind the Stardom)?
Saroj Khan and Madhuri Dixit as Co-Choreographers of 90s' Bollywood Femininity

Epilogue: Modalities of Movement

Index