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ABSTRACT
All dancing bodies are created and/or crafted; they are bodies that speak; and bodies that prepare to occupy public realms. These bodies are prepared and trained, either intentionally or unintentionally. There could be a differentiation of dancers on the basis of whether (s)he is a dancer by choice, by necessity, or by imposition. But whatever is the path for anyone to become a dancer, he or she first becomes a body during the time of the initiation process and then a dancer. This paper contextualizes these basic facts within the specific empirical examples of (1) dancers trained in a specific Indian dance form, largely considered a hobby or a leisure activity and (2) professional dancers, who have chosen or been forced to dance to earn a living. It also brings, in contrast, untrained women’s bodies that have created a history of choreographed protest events through acts of community dissent in public presence, as witnessed in the recent women’s protests all over India. Through a range of different relations with the concepts of labour, effort, deviance, dedication, precarity and resistance, the paper asserts that all bodies in public spaces are under scrutiny and none of the above categories escape that surveillance.
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This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Sarkar Munsi, “Natyashastra: Emerging (Gender) Codes and the Woman Dancer,” 165–184.
2. Ibid., 183.
3. The Sanskrit word Parampara is translated as ‘tradition’ in English.
4. In Sanskrit, the word Sadhana is used in the context of dance and music to mean ‘dedication to an aim’.
5. Deshpande, “Hegemonic Spatial Strategies,” 168–169.
6. Ibid., 170.
7. Srinivasan, “Reform and revival,” 1869–1876; and Banerji, “Dance and the Distributed Bodies,” 7–39.
8. Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Manipuri, Odissi, Kathak, Mohini Attam, Kuchipudi, were recognized as classical dances over the second part of the twentieth century, and Sattriya was recognized as a classical dance in 2000.
9. Banerji, Nrityagram, 2016.
10. Foster. Valuing Dance: Commodities in Motion, 52.
11. Brara, “The Item Number: Cinesexuality in Bollywood and Social Life,” 67.
12. Songs such as Malaika Arora and Shahrukh Khan’s item number ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ (from the film Dil Se, 1998) and Shilpa Shetty’s ‘Mein aayi hoon U.P Bihar lootne’ (Shool, 1999), Ashwarya Rai’s Kajra re (Bunty aur Babli, 2005), Sheela Ki Jawani (Tees Maar Khan, 2010), Malaika Arora’ Munni Badnaam Hui (Dabangg, 2010), Katrina Kaif’s Chikni Chameli (Agneepath, 2011), Sunny Leone and Shahrukh Khan’s Laila Main Laila (Raes, 2017), Nora Fatehi’s Saki Saki (Batla House, 2019) are a few of the large number of item numbers that have allowed me to frame this analysis.
13. Brara, “The Item Number: Cinesexuality in Bollywood and Social Life,” 67–74.
14. Nijhawan, “Excusing the female dancer: Tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing, South Asian Popular Culture,” 99–112.
15. Nijhawan, “The item girl: tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing,” 137–157.
16. Jha, “Sexism through Song: A Feminist Analysis of Bollywood Item Songs,” 25–30.
17. Kumar, “Item Number/Item Girl.” 338–341.
18. Iyer, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema.
19. Ghosh, “Depiction of Women as Item Girls: A Content Analysis of Famous Hindi Film Songs, 2010–2019.” 31–44.
20. Brara, “The Item Number: Cinesexuality in Bollywood and Social Life,” 68.
21. Sarkar Munsi, “Buy One Get one Free.”
22. Ibid., 176.
23. Ibid., 176.
24. Bollywood has changed in the twenty first century, but the image of the ideal dancing body projected for adding surplus value to the films seems to be as rigid as in the classical dances.
25. Iyer, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, 5.
26. Item numbers according to Nijhawan are “… are big-budget dance sequences in Bollywood and arresting examples of how bodies of dancing women in Bollywood, with fusion of traditional and contemporary dance genres construct new sites of sexual desire and identity in India”. On this see Nijhawan’s “Excusing the Female Dancer: Tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing, South Asian Popular Culture,” 99.
27. Shresthova, “Swaying to an Indian Beat,” 91–101.; Bharucha, “Utopia in Bollywood,” 801–804; and Nijhawan, “Excusing the Female Dancer: Tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing, South Asian Popular Culture,” 99–112.
28. Shresthova, “Swaying to an Indian Beat,” 96.
29. Brara, 71.
30. Harvey, “Accumulation by Dispossession,” 66.
31. Nijhawan. “Excusing the female dancer: Tradition and transgression in Bollywood dancing,” 106–107.
32. Arangetram is the debut solo performance on stage by young dancers to mark the successful completion of their training in classical dances such as Bharatanatyam.
33. Devi, “Fundamental Human Rights for the Nautch Girls of Purulia,” 4. Devi quotes Subodh Basu Roy to emphasize the exploitative dance profession of Nachni as a comparatively rare form of commodification and unusual gender based oppression within the normative social organizations commonly found among Adivasi communities of eastern India.
34. Ibid., 4–5.
35. See Ghosh, Sarkar & Manna, “The “Nachni” – Marginalised Second Sex: A Few Case Studies selected from Purulia District, West Bengal,” 250 − 260.
37. Ibid.
38. Susan Foster’s methodology suggests a departure from the straight forward performance studies methodology, seeing these protests as a performance. On this see Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” 396–397.
39. Ibid. 397.
40. India has had many organized protests, such as the Salt March (12 March to 6 April 1930) led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
41. Sinha Roy, “Which women are we celebrating this Republic Day.”
42. In her article Padmanabhan writes about reclaiming the national flag of India, by citizen subjects who are being threatened. Guru, “Egalitarianism and the Social Sciences in India,” 9.
43. See the first section of the essay on classical dancers.
44. See section on item numbers.
45. See the section on the nachni women performers.
46. Guru, “Egalitarianism and the Social Sciences in India,” 9.
47. Baudrillard, 279.
48. Ibid., 281.
49. See note 47, 282.
50. Rai, 271.