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Moved to Dance: Remix, Rasa, and a

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Pallabi Chakravorty
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INDIVIDUAL ARTICLE
Moved to Dance: Remix, Rasa,
and a New India
Pallabi Chakravorty
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This article looks at Bollywood dance to explore the production of the commodified
bodies of global consumer culture. It focuses on ‘‘embodiment’’ to examine how
dominant sensibilities are altered through changes in dance training and technolo-
gical innovations. I argue that analyzing the dancing body as a locus of experience
and expression shifts the ground from culture as text or discourse (popular in post-
colonial, poststructuralist or choreographic analysis) to embodiment of subjectivity.
‘‘Remix’’ is the term that describes both the new training techniques and the
aesthetics of Indian dances. Since the older boundaries of high and low, classical
and popular are fluid under globalization, ‘‘remix’’ is replacing traditional codes
and aesthetic experiences associated with rasa. I draw on my fieldwork among the
‘‘background dancers’’ in Bollywood films to argue that as consumer culture creates
the dominant mode of cultural expression in India, the only durable form of dance
practice seems to be the practice of consumption.

The times, they are a-changing! For India, these are historic times. Her long-
established and often fiercely guarded traditions are undergoing rapid and
sweeping transformations as she flexes her muscles to compete in a global econ-
omy. The present condition is articulated in the contradictory mission of globaliz-
ing India advocated through narratives of accelerated change, industrialization,
modernization and democratization, while ancestral homeland, sacred places
and preservation of the environment from the onslaught of capitalist develop-
ment keep it entrenched in localized politics. In this momentum of change
towards an ‘‘India Shining,’’ high and low, classical and folk, Indian and Western
cultural forms absorb, influence, co-opt, plagiarize and cannibalize one another.
This unstable condition is expressed in the dance that is being created. In the
contemporary world, the dancing body exists in an intertextual world of media
and migration, within a continuum of subjectivity and objectivity. The scholarly
inquiry on the postmodern body has mostly focused on textualizing the bodily as

PALLABI CHAKRAVORTY teaches in the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College,
Swarthmore, PA. Founder and artistic director of Courtyard Dancers, she is an anthropologist,
dance maker and cultural worker. Her book Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women, and
Modernity in India is the first critical study of Kathak in the context of postcolonialism and
globalization. E-mail: pchakra1@swarthmore.edu

211
 212 P. Chakravorty

a form of discourse. Rather than examining how culture and power are inscribed
in the dancing body, I want to turn to the history of the senses encoded in the
meaning of dance-experience in Indian culture. In order to explore Indian dance
in this present condition I will use the phenomenological concept of embodiment.
I want to revisit the term ‘‘embodiment’’ as an analytical category to examine the
experiential dimensions of culture, history and subjectivity that are centered on
bodily practices.1 My focus here is on Indian dances, both classical and popular
forms. I will draw on overlapping Western and Indian theories of embodiment to
examine their mutual convergence regarding questions of expressivity, experience
and human subjectivity as it relates to the dancing body. My intent here is to search
for a cross-cultural framework for dance or the dancing body that is not merely
external choreographic conventions nor discursive systems of signification. I am
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looking for a framework that speaks to a sensory history of the body that emerges
from a South Asian experience for ‘‘being in the word’’ [Merleau-Ponty 1962].
As a dancer and an anthropologist I am excited to see the rise of the body as a
locus of cultural analysis in interdisciplinary social theory forums. Csordas [1994:
6] argues that this turn to the body in contemporary scholarship reflects the
uneasy postmodern condition of indeterminacy. He further argues that embodi-
ment encapsulates our lived experiences of indeterminacy—where the body can-
not be simply reduced to representation, or objectification of power. Nor can it be
reduced to biology or individual consciousness. Body in social theory emerges as
the ‘‘existential ground of culture,’’ I suggest that the dancing body occupies a
central place in studying processes of existential subjectivity. Marcel Mauss
[1950] had noted this discomfiting subjective-objective grounding of the body,
as it is at the same time the original tool with which humans shape their world
and the original substance out of which the human world is shaped.
Here I will draw on overlapping traditions of ideas and practices in an eclectic
and creative endeavor to examine fundamental changes taking shape in the way
our bodies are experiencing culture and how culture is being shaped by our bodies.
The dancing body in Indian culture is an important place for analyzing the percep-
tual changes taking place in our sensory world, impacting on how we experience
culture, self and subjectivity. Thus embodiment as experience and expression, for
me, is the key to analyzing Indian dance as it transforms from a national narrative
of tradition, culture and gender identity to an emblem of global consumer culture.
This investigation is part of a larger multisited ethnographic project, but for this
article I focus on Bollywood dance and its dancers to map some of these changes.
But why turn to an Indian embodiment when traditions have been shown to be
invented and identities to be fluid and transnational? I am certainly not inter-
ested in perpetuating some kind of Indocentrism. This in turn deals with my
increasing frustration with how certain theories, of course always coming out
of Western academia, claim to speak to all social conditions, regardless of the spe-
cificities of cultural and social experiences of the life-worlds of the people. The
dominance of Eurocentric textualization of all aspects of culture is a case in point.
It also has to do with how Indian dance scholarship has ignored or negotiated
social theory. From being mere descriptions of embodied aesthetics accepted
as unquestioned aspects of nationalist history [see such scholars as Kothari
1989; Massey 2004; Samson 1987], Indian dance is now analyzed in terms of
 Moved to Dance 213

postcolonial narratives of culture and power in works by contemporary dance

scholars [Meduri 1996; Srinivasan 1985; Coorlawala 1994; Chakravorty 1998].
Although these works have been useful in showing the elite nationalist construc-
tion of Indian dance and middle-class sensibilities they mostly ignored embodied
traditional aesthetics. The other trend has been choreographic analysis of
works by elite artists that are read as cultural, national and transnational texts
[Chatterjea 2004; O’Shea 2007]. These approaches have given us ways to talk
about dance and culture that are noteworthy in expanding dance scholarship
but are based on the primacy of representational narratives. They do not take into
account the embodied history of dance based on Indian structures of experience.
Although the modern era has greatly displaced deep experiences such as love,
mysticism structured around rapture, ecstasy, eroticism, separation, suffering
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and longing, these have not been completely erased. The embodied aesthetics
of the feeling states of bhava and rasa [see the Glossary] are integral to under-
standing how the dancing body experiences the sensory world. I suggest that
embodied aesthetics as cultural identity and subjectivity need to be considered
with postcolonial sensibilities, to analyze Indian dance as it transforms from
national tradition to consumer culture. I will begin my exploration by focusing
on the intellectual trends that shape my argument:
. Anthropology of the body and dance;
. Anthropology as nonverbal communication;
. Body as text, choreography as text, writing the body;
. Dance, gender, nation, and post-colonial theory; and
. Embodied aesthetics to commodity aesthetics: rasa to remix.

THE ENTANGLEMENT OF EMBODIMENT, CHOREOGRAPHY AND

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
My point of entry into dance as a cultural phenomenon that belongs in the realm
of social theory began in the theoretical and methodological framework of the
anthropology of visual communication. Although it was firmly established by
such anthropologists as John Blacking that somatic consciousness was different
from linguistic cognition, linguistics was the heuristic device for grappling with
non-verbal modes of communication whether it be film, photography, dance or
theater [Blacking 1977; Hymes 1964; Worth 1981; Birdwhistell 1970; Kaeppler
1991]. Dance as human movement became the framework for dealing with the
‘‘lived body,’’ ‘‘processes,’’ ‘‘functions’’ and ‘‘symbolic systems’’ for dance
anthropology and ethnology of the 1960s and 70s [see Snyder 1990: 167–169 for
an elaboration]. Drid Williams [1991] points out that that nearly all of modem
dance research, whether in anthropology, ethnology or folklore, has been con-
nected with the modern development of linguistics. Mauss [1950] and Douglas
[1973] developed their own analogies for the ‘‘techniques of the body,’’ and
the ‘‘social-physical aspects of the body’’ respectively. In all this intellectual
development, the fundamental epistemological and methodological problems
for analyzing the body remained the same. It was a search for going beyond
interrelated conceptual binaries that stem from the mind-body dichotomy in
 214 P. Chakravorty

Western thought. The difficulty of speaking and writing about the body as a dan-
cing phenomenon continues to be a difficult exercise. Csordas illuminates this
conundrum of pre-objective and objectified body through an example of the colo-
nial encounter. He explains that the indigenous worldview did not make a dis-
tinction between the spirit world and the body. The native speaks out: ‘‘We
always acted in accord with the spirit, what you’ve brought us is the body’’
[Leenhardt 1979: 164, quoted in Csordas 1994: 6].
The centrality of the body in postmodern and poststructural theory over-
comes some of these problematic philosophical underpinnings by analyzing
the body in the representational terms of discourse, text and power [Foucault
1977]. The ‘‘body’’ as a conceptual object of discourse or simply as text on
which culture is inscribed makes it readable like language [Burroughs and
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Ehrenreich 1993; Bordo 1993]. This movement of the body to a place occupied
by a subject, agent or individual in previous Western social thought has
thrown into relief the commodification of the body in late capitalism. The
dematerialization of the body as discourse and the reification of the individual
have also psychologized discourse, argues Turner:

The hypertrophy of commodity production in late capitalism that has created an unprece-
dented emphasis on the plasticity of personal identity, and with it, willy nilly, an emphasis
on the ability of people to produce themselves as social identities, taking over the far
more sociocentric narrowly regimented forms of production of personhood which up till
a few decades ago still inhered in traditional family, community, educational, and class
structures. [Turner 1994: 27]

Dance studies, a new and exciting discipline, takes much of its theoretical
and methodological underpinnings from postmodern and poststructuralist
conceptualizations of the body. Here the body is seen as a technical tool with
intentionality that enumerates political agendas, or a text on which various
politics are inscribed or negotiated. This conceptualization of the body under-
pins the notion of choreography from ballet to modern to postmodern works.
Choreography as a signifying system of power relations underlines the object-
hood of the body. Susan Foster traces the evolution of the term choreography by
charting its path from the notation system of Feuillet to La Mari’s conceptua-
lization of movement, to the contemporary incarnations of choreography in
modern dance. She argues that the fundamentals of choreography associated
with geometric alignment of the body within universal laws of movement con-
ceptualized the body as an instrument of the expressive subject. Accordingly it
externalized, rationalized and objectified bodily experience [Foster 2005]. The
development of choreography as a unified system of scientific laws (such as in
Laban-notation) merged interestingly with structural-functionalist models in
anthropology and found a full-bodied expression in Alan Lomax’s cross-
cultural studies and choreology [1968, also Kealilnohomoku 1991]. However,
the move by poststructuralists to re-conceptualize the body as text or dis-
course foregrounds the axes of power and identity politics that were clearly
lacking in these earlier endeavors to study dance as movement systems. But
how do these theoretical developments, both from anthropology and dance
 Moved to Dance 215

studies, impact on the scholarly development of Indian dance and a new kind
of historiography called postcolonial studies?
The groundbreaking work emerged from scholarship that mostly dealt with
Bharatanatyam [Kersenboom-Story 1987; Srinivasan 1985; Meduri 1996]. My
own work dealt with Kathak as it transformed from nautch to classical dance
in postcolonial India [Chakravorty 2008]. Postcolonial theory made its mark by
challenging the hegemonic narrative of nationalist discourse: it showed how
nationalist discourse followed the grand teleological structure of enlightenment
historicism. Edward Said’s Orientalism [1978] illustrated how representations of
the Orient in European writings (such as literary texts, travelogs, etc.) produced
a particular discourse about the Orient. Through this discourse the colonial
authorities advanced a specific political vision by promoting a set of binary oppo-
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sitions between Europe and the Orient. The postcolonial historiography of Indian
dance was concerned with a representation of the past through discursive analy-
sis that privileged once again the textual or ‘‘objective’’ basis of knowledge pro-
duction, ignoring the expressive and embodied forms that are essential in forging
an aesthetic identity.
What this otherwise critical work ignored was the experiential dimension of
dance as it relates to human subjectivity and agency. Questions of the experien-
tial dimension of the body and its relation to human subjectivity were at the core
of Indian aesthetic theory, a dimension that can be explored through concepts
such as bhava-rasa structures of feeling, heightened during enactments of abhinaya
(emotive dance). The emotions expressed are fundamental ways of knowing the
divine in Bhakti and Sufi practices. I have explored this formation of embodied
subjectivity through dance practice or riyaz elsewhere [Chakravorty 2004].
Coorlawala describes such a rasa moment in the legendary performer Malkavika
Sarukkai’s voice:

In janatavam, Kunti asks Yashoda, ‘‘What deed must you have done that He calls you
mother?’’ When I was doing this piece, there was a moment when I was holding Krishna
here (gestures to her lap); I looked at Krishna—isn’t he beautiful? Then I looked towards
the audience. They were nodding! Yes, nodding! We were seeing Krishna together! It was
as we say anukirtanam (a re-creation, making anew.) The moment with Krishna: it is a pre-
sence at that point of time. It is not always there, nor is it a presence for which you have
rehearsed. It is a kind of first time . . . [Taped pers. comm. with Malavika Sarrukkai, Sept.
8, 2001, Chicago]

Although Coorlawala has written about the experiential dimensions of the

rasa theory within performance contexts, I lament that we have not sufficiently
explored Indian performance practices to inform our postcolonial epistemolo-
gies and methodologies. Rasa as a theory of embodiment is based on connect-
ing to an audience through evoking a collective emotion. It is a theory of
communication that shows that human expressivity and subjectivity are
shaped and shared in relationships with one another and to the material
world [in this context see Ram forthcoming]. An exploration of perceptual
dimensions of our experience then shifts the focus of the body from the epis-
temological primacy of representation to embodied subjectivity.
 216 P. Chakravorty

RASA TO REMIX

I begin from the premise that the past Indian national identity was created
through a particular narrative of tradition that drew on aesthetic emotion
(bhava-rasa structures of feeling), deep subjectivity, and a long civilizational line-
age. Various dances were selectively deployed to construct this modern national
identity [Chakravorty 1998, 2004]. These dances were based on a model of dur-
able and reproducible practice (inculcated through terms such as guru, riyaz,
parampara), that created a sense of place or a ‘‘habitus.’’ However, this sense of
embodiment that was achieved through a grounded experiential and emotional
patterning has come unmoored due to economic globalization and the recent
explosion of consumer culture in India. I look at how a particular narrative of tra-
dition that once formed the habitus of Indian dances is now transformed into
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what is popularly termed ‘‘remix.’’2 My larger argument looks at embodiment

as habitus that connected identities to territorial locations has been reconstituted
and de-territorialized. In order to do so, I first look at the relationship between
Bombay film dance and national identity and then look at the changing aesthetic
codes and practices associated with Indian dances. Since film dance has drawn
on existing performance traditions, I analyze the changing perceptions of affect
(associated with traditional Indian aesthetics) and its changing context in relation
to the dancing body in Indian films. Finally I focus on a song and dance sequence
from Dhoom 2, a recent Bollywood ‘‘blockbuster,’’ as a quintessential example of
the cultural phenomenon of ‘‘remix.’’ Overall I argue that Bollywood dance and
the practice of ‘‘remix’’ are perhaps important sites for analyzing embodied
aesthetics that are producing new subjectivities and narratives of nationhood
in India.
‘‘Practice’’ is an important analytical node in dance scholarship. Practice refers
to both social theory and the corporeal actions of the body. Pierre Bourdieu’s con-
ceptualization of ‘‘habitus,’’ drawn from a phenomenological understanding of
practice, has been important in movement scholarship [Farleigh 2000; Bender
2005]. It enabled bodily meaning to be located outside discourses of representa-
tion, in the realm of experience and emotion. It connected meaning to memory
that was not nostalgia but was embodied in a more immediate way. Interestingly,
at the same time, habitus arising from durable and embedded systems of bodily
comportments grounded particular bodies in particular places which evoked
specific aesthetic sensibilities and emotional patterns [Chakravorty 2004]. In
the context of Indian dance forms the cultural rootedness of practice (however
reconstructed, reinvented, transnational and hybrid) is embodied through the
practice of a particular student–teacher relationship derived from gurushishya
parampara and the aesthetics of bhava and rasa [Vatsyayan 1977]. Indian dances
and their embeddedness in traditional systems of knowledge were reformulated
to construct the ‘‘authentic’’ Indian identity of post-independence India
[Chakravorty 1998; Coorlawala 1994; Meduri 1996; among others].
This particular embedded notion of practice produced through a sense of place
and a long civilizational lineage is changing, as a new form of dance practice is
re-articulating and transforming the aesthetics and politics of Indian dances. This
new practice is represented through the term ‘‘remix,’’ where the notion of
 Moved to Dance 217

authentic, stable or durable practice is replaced by a fluid, changeable and

ephemeral one. In this new form of practice (originally created by DJs mixing
various musical tracks to create new hybrid forms), high and low, classical and
folk, Indian and other cultural forms mish-mash to produce endless hybridity.
I argue that remix is the postmodern experience of consumption of pastiche,
where the lines between culture and commodity are blurred [Jameson 1991,
1998; Harvey 1989]. The song and dance sequences in Bollywood capture this
new global Indian modernity, perceptible through a new mediatized, technicized
and commercialized habitus. It is marked by the indeterminacy of the body in
postmodernism as it exists in a flux between the experiential–subjective and
objective continuum.
My goal is to analyze this new de-territorialized form of embodiment, where
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cultural and individual memory are unsettled due to media and migration, as
Appadurai and Breckenridge state [1995], in relation to dance practice. I will
chart this trajectory as it has evolved from traditional notions of practice asso-
ciated with riyaz and affect (derived from bhava-rasa structures of feeling) to con-
sumption of images. My foci here are both ethnographic engagement and
analysis of a specific artifact. The song and dance number I discuss in the last sec-
tion is titled ‘‘Dil Lagaa Na Dil Jala Se Dil Jala Jaayegaa’’ (from the hi-tech thriller
Dhoom 2). By drawing on my fieldwork among dancers and choreographers in
Bombay dance halls and analyzing ‘‘Dil Lagga,’’ I explore the changing relation-
ship between dancing bodies and cultural identity that is reshaping the land-
scape of affect and habitus in contemporary India. Thus remix functions as a
conceptual node to connect the actual everyday practice of the dance to its repre-
sentation in films.

MIXING FILM DANCE TO THE NARRATIVES OF NATION

Indian dances have been an important feature of Bombay cinema from its incep-
tion. Both arts have been integral to the project of nation building and fostering a
sense of collective national identity [Chakravorty 1998]. I refrain from giving an
account of the vast range of dance scholarship or Indian film scholarship that in
recent years has argued this point. However, what is interesting is that both
cinema and dance have used similar cultural and aesthetic codes for meaning
making, affect and identity construction. Both genres have drawn on mytho-
poetic narratives and traditional aesthetic forms for establishing a deep
sense of cultural identity. Classical and folk dances ranging from Kathak and
Bharatanatyam to Nautanki and Raslila have been the staple of Bombay films.
Sangita Shrestova [2003] has analyzed the peculiar cyclical migration of film
dance from a medium that was influenced by existing performance traditions of
classical and folk to a legitimate form of staged theatrical dance called Bollywood.
Many famous dancers and choreographers have appeared on the silver screen.
They include GopiKishan, Waheeda Rahman, Vaijantimala, Kamalahasan,
Hemamalini and Madhri Dixit. Born out of Parsi theater (which blended the
local idiom with received colonial aesthetic forms), Bombay cinema has been
a fulcrum of creative hybridity [Mishra 2002: 1–33]. It has always grappled
with two competing modes of representation: melodrama and realism. This
 218 P. Chakravorty

negotiation has reflected the larger cultural discourse surrounding tradition and
modernity in India, as both continue to shape the narrative of democracy and
citizenship [Prasad 1998].
If Bombay cinema (and its recent reconstitution as Bollywood) is the sole
model of national unity in India [Chakravorty 1998: 310], then, I argue, the song
and dance sequences are its throbbing, pulsating, technicolored national soul.
The song and dance sequences recently reinvented as ‘‘item numbers’’ offer myr-
iad possibilities of heightened pleasure through emotional and visual drama.
They function as a bridge between past aesthetic codes associated with classical
dances and new ones from MTV, Broadway musicals, music videos, postmodern
structures of choreography. Simply put, Bollywood dances are the quintessential
locus of a complex negotiation between tradition and modernity. They function
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as engines of change for ushering in new understandings of culture, power and

democracy.
Booth traces the changing conventions of song and dance representations in
Bombay cinema:

. . . . The visual images in these scenes have filled Indian theaters with a stylized vocabulary
of dance and gesture ranging from maidenly brushes of the 1940’s Lila Chitnis to the brazen
bump and grind of the 1990’s Madhuri Dixit. Thus, when a song and dance scene appears in
a film (of course, its very appearance is a narrative convention) the conventions inform not
only the musical, visual and kinesthetic content, but also types of meaning one can expect
and the coded elements that will be used to construct that meaning. [Booth 2000: 128]

In the past two decades a paradigm shift has taken place in the musical, visual and
kinesthetic content of the song and dance sequences that have challenged the estab-
lished norms, codes and meanings. The earlier codes were predominantly drawn
from the mytho-poetic semiotic world of Bhakti and Sufi love-mysticism (although
film dances were also influenced by international choreographers such as Uday
Shankar; see Gopal and Moorti [2008]). In Hindi films such as Devdas, Guide, Pyaasa,
Kinara and many others, souls longing for the union with the Divine were re-
imagined in song and dance sequences that expressed a lover’s desire for his
beloved. But these representations of erotic emotions in romantic cinematic spec-
tacles have been replaced by gyrating figures endlessly on display. The latter
roles, once only reserved for ‘‘vamps’’ (played by Helen or Nadira in the past),
are now coveted by lead heroines. As the song and dance sequences have taken
on a new format and movement idiom, they have increasingly been dissociated
from the plot. Consequently more value has been added to their commodity
status. They now create the ‘‘repeat value’’ of a film and circulate as music videos
and item numbers on television channels, iTunes and YouTube, and in the
marketplace. They function like franchise production units, transforming the
notion of cultural production into the notion of a rhizome, where one product
leads to other kinds of merchandise (connected to this is the rise of multiplexes
as production houses). The songs and dances of the earlier times evoked a cul-
tural habitus that was consistent with the embodied aesthetics of the classical
and folk forms that connected to a sense of tradition in the nation. These song
and dance sequences resonated with the ideology of dance practice derived from
 Moved to Dance 219

a particular kind of social organization and a method of knowledge transmission.

Many films incorporated this special training and relationship (gurushishya para-
mpara) directly in their plot. Films such as Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje, Ganga Jamuna,
Sursangam, Shankaravarnam and Umrao Jan show this specific practice-oriented
disciplining of the body in narrating the story of a dancer or a musician.

LOCATING THROUGH ETHNOGRAPHY

To locate these ideological and perceptual shifts of the dancing body in a
grounded cultural context I began my ethnographic research in the dance and
film studios in Bombay. The dance studios are called dance halls: in these studios
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(such as Satyam in Juhu, a Bombay suburb) dancers and choreographers gather

to choreograph and practice item numbers [Figures 1–4]. The cultural landscape
of dance halls in Bombay reflects the new style of dance practice. The dance halls
are impersonal commercial spaces much like the neutral cubic studios in the
Western world; although they are not new in Bombay, many have sprung up
in recent years due to the demands of a new breed of dancers and choreogra-
phers. The tabla player or the musicians and the teacher or guru of a typical dance
context have been replaced by DJs, big stereo systems, the choreographer and her
assistant, and a schedule to keep track of the renters.
The erosion of cultural and aesthetic codes connected to traditional methods of
imparting knowledge of the body was echoed by many dancers and choreogra-
phers in Bollywood. Geeta Kapoor, who has had some Bharatanatyam training,

Figure 1 Dance practice in Begum Habiba’s Studio.

 220 P. Chakravorty
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Figure 2 Author with Ajay Borado in Film City.

and is now assistant to the eminent choreographer Farah Khan, talked about the
emergence of ‘‘item numbers’’:

In college people asked me to do fashion shows. I got partnered with dancer Javed Jafar. I
worked with Ken Ghosh (the music video director of the hit musical Ishk Vishk Pyar Vyar).

Figure 3 Film City showing the set of Vivah.

 Moved to Dance 221
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Figure 4 Shariq Hall, a dance hall in Andheri West, northern Bombay.

I have done forty or so videos with him. I have been working with Farah Khan as her
assistant from 1994. I have choreographed Arman, Ashoka, Pyar Me Kabhi Kabhi. I also do
a lot of film shows and events. This is the time of the item numbers. Dancers have specific
looks, glamor, they are professionals. We know that dancing is all about having a good
frame of mind and creating a good look. [Bombay, personal communication, 2006]

The dancing girls of Bollywood films (previously known as ‘‘film extras’’) are
now a well-paid professional group with their own union. However, as I roamed
the dance halls and film studios in Bombay from Satyam to Film City, it became
apparent that none of the choreographers and dancers mentioned being taught
by gurus or dance teachers as has been customary among classically trained dan-
cers (although that too is changing as classical training merges with workshops
and dancercise, a topic for another article). The younger dancers could not give
me any specifics about their training. Many said they learned from television and
were not familiar with classical dancers or Bombay film choreographers who
were also classical gurus, such as Lachchu Maharaj, Sitara Devi, Gopi Kishan
or Sohanalal. Classical forms to them were exotic, relics of the past. The training
and dance practice were tailored to the item number at hand. Most successful
choreographers had themselves been dancers in the past and began as assistants
to established choreographers (in a semiformal apprentice system). They and the
dancers spent as much as twelve hours a day in the studios, rehearsing and
putting the choreography together. They also spent hours on the set giving shot
after shot till the director was satisfied. Geeta Kapoor explains:

We don’t have formal dance training schools for Bollywood dances except for Shiamak
Davar. Earlier, people got training in Bharatanatyam, Kathak, folk styles, etc. But you
 222 P. Chakravorty

have to remember that earlier, dancers were fillers in Bombay films. Choreographers
have given the dancers a presence in Bombay films. They make Rs 2,500–3,000 a day.
We have a union. Now young people learn their moves in fashion shows. They also
learn from music videos. Often their first encounter is Bollywood dance numbers on
television. They imitate them.

One dance context where classes seemed personal in the old-fashioned way
was Begum Habiba’s school. This was despite the presence of a DJ, a mirrored
studio, and the tank tops and tights I saw all around me. Here I found Kathak
classes tucked away with other classes such as Western, Bollywood, etc. I was
told by a Bombay film person that Begum Habiba is not commercially successful
and is not on a par with ‘‘real’’ choreographers. The director of Dance Directors
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Association (established in 1975), an umbrella organization that represents the

main choreographers in Bollywood, confided that when a classical dance instruc-
tor who belonged to his association died recently, no one even came to ask about
his absence from classes.
The Bombay cultural habitus, much like the larger dance habitus in India, is in
flux. In Bollywood, the changes are not only encoded in the nature of dance prac-
tice once associated with traditional embodied aesthetics, but in its negotiations
with new editing techniques, computer graphics and an impetus to represent
bodies that are inspired by commodity images. These sculpted dancing figures
very often merge with fashion models as fashion shows and film dance numbers
unite for a common platform to showcase commodities.
The emerging embodied aesthetics of Bollywood dance, dancers and choreogra-
phers is an intertextual field that represents decontextualized bodies in music
videos, fashion shows and films. These bodies are not embedded in any particular
cultural aesthetics. They represent bodies that are floating signifiers of a montage of
images. They reflect the commodity-oriented consumption practices of a global
Indian modernity. But the cultural products coming out of Bollywood are not
homogeneous. Directors such as Suraj Barjatya are interested in creating Bollywood
films that harken back to past notions of culture and tradition in an auto-exoticizing
mode. In the sets of Vivah (a film about the virtues of arranged marriage), in Film
City, the award-winning choreographer Ajai Borade shared his thoughts:

I don’t like the present situation. Choreographers don’t concentrate on lyrics at all. They
just imitate MTV moves. No concept, no situation, just dance for the heck of doing a song
number? No one has discipline. Everyone is after money. I avoid working with such
groups. I look at the script and then I see the situation. I care about the camera angles. I
learned from working fourteen years as an assistant. Now they shoot a music video in
one day. I have a say in designing the sets, costumes, screenplay and the execution of
the song through movements.

Borade, who still cares about context in choreographing for item numbers was
stating an interesting fact about the new practice and representation of bodies
in dance today. I often found during my fieldwork that choreographers and
dancers were working on a song, unaware of the title of the film, the script or
the story-line. They were given the song by the director of the film, and the
 Moved to Dance 223

choreographer put the moves to the song while a DJ played, stopped and
replayed the music. The dancing bodies were instruments on which movements
were crafted using cut-and-paste techniques; therefore various movements were
uprooted from specific contexts and remixed. The next step involved editing the
film that was produced after intense rehearsing with the choreographer and his
or her assistant. The ultimate product was polished in the hands of the director,
in collaboration with the choreographer. Rapid and jerky editing techniques rein-
forced the compressed and fragmentary time and space narratives of postmoder-
nity. The obvious disjuncture that we experience as an audience between film
narrative and the song-and-dance sequences in many Bollywood films is a pro-
duct of this practice.
This realm of practice creates a habitus where the script or the lyrics are not
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important; content and context are immaterial; the spectacle of the dance
sequence is complete in itself. It further reinforces the idea that the meaning or
affect connected to any kind of cultural memory is a mere sensation; hence music
and dance numbers are visual images and fleeting sensations. This aesthetic sen-
sibility reflects another kind of disjuncture within the habitus of Bollywood—the
one between bodily action and embodied subjectivity. Thus habitus as durable
systems of bodily comportments that once embedded particular bodies in parti-
cular places, connecting them to a specific cultural identity, is unmoored from
such cultural specificity. Jameson [1991] and others have noted this absence of
overarching narrative in postmodern culture as an end of the coherent self-
centered subject based on feelings and emotions. Mazzarella writes:

The more ‘‘culture’’ itself becomes commodified (the argument goes) the more total is the
abstracting rule of exchange value. Signifiers that used to be anchored in particular socio-
historical locations increasingly float free of such local referents; instead, they function as
tokens in a more or less self-referential, electronically mediated global. [Mazzarella 2003: 39]

This argument is further extended to exemplify the lack of embodied experi-

ences and deep subjectivity under global capitalism. On a more fundamental
level it is connected with the ‘‘crisis of the quotidian’’ [Wolputte 2004: 260].
Accordingly, the former habituations and daily routines that gave structure
and continuity to experience are constantly interrupted through travel, violence
or multi-tasking. Postmodernists call it the crisis of memory. Embodied practices
such as riyaz in dance training created such connections to the past as I have
noted elsewhere [Chakravorty 2004].

DHOOM 2 AND THE AESTHETICS OF ASPIRATION

In the last two decades due to globalization of media, new technology and the
democratization of consumption, a decontexualized visual field of images has
replaced an earlier embodied cultural identity. Rather, embodiment has changed
from an earlier kind of rasa associated primarily with erotic desire in dance (such
as sringara rasa, encapsulated in cher char in the song and dance) to a desire to
consume. Bollywood choreographers have created some stunning images of
 224 P. Chakravorty

dance through new digital technology, costumes, sets and dance techniques.
Bollywood song-and-dance sequences have pushed commodification of images
to new aesthetic heights.
Remix as cultural practice ultimately represents a desire to consume, a desire
represented through the hyper-visualization of commodity images also called
‘‘commodity aesthetics’’ [Haug 1986]. Bollywood dance, I argue, is a potent
engine for producing this kind of desire. Bollywood dance enables the dancer
and the viewer alike to produce themselves as individual consumers discon-
nected from their social class, family or community. I have discussed elsewhere
how the recent film Devdas creates a pleasure of seduction through a visual
overload of commodity aesthetics. In this new consumerist phase of Indian
modernity I show how erotic desire that was part of the bhava=rasa aesthetics
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of Indian music and dance is transformed into desire for commodity in the
song-and-dance sequences [Chakravorty 2008]. In Dhoom 2 we find a further
crystallization of commodity images through the creation of yet another kind
of ‘‘aesthetics of distinction.’’ This aesthetic is that of the global, cosmopolitan
Indian who has no citizenship, nor any familial ties. The commodity images
inspired by the film are akin to ‘‘aspirational images’’ that create the impulse
to consume or buy a product. This concept can also extend to valuing a certain
lifestyle or geographical area. Mazzarella explains: ‘‘The statement that objects
or images may be ‘aspirational’ implies that an orientation toward such objects
or images indicates a desire for personal transformation, in line with a widely
diffused and thus generally recognized index of advancement. Aspirational
qualities appear, on the face of it, to be inherent properties’’ [2003: 102]. Thus
the marketing theorist Davis Aaker writes: ‘‘The brand [NikeTM] is very aspira-
tional in the sense that wearing Nike represents what the users aspire to be like
rather than their current self-image’’ [Aaker 1995: 514–550]. Aspirational quali-
ties are moreover associated not only with particular brands but also with
whole quasi-geographical imaginaries.
This form of aspirational desire of a new generation of Indians, I argue, is writ
large on the canvas of Dhoom 2. This high-tech thriller is a mega-hit sequel to the
mega-hit Dhoom. It is an extraordinary visual extravaganza even by Bollywood
standards. This cop-and-robber film stars Hrithik Roshan, Aishwariya Rai,
Abhishek Bachchan and Bipasa Basu. The story spans several continents from
Africa to Asia to South America. Hrithik Roshan is an international thief who
plans to steal a priceless artifact in Bombay. Aishwariya Rai is a wannabe master
thief who falls for Hrithik. This is the basic story-line, with a cop (Abishek
Bachchan) always being outwitted by the thief Hrithik. Both Hrithik and
Aishwariya exude the cosmopolitan aura of Western fashion models with their
perfect bodies, stylish accessories, tanned looks and golden hair highlights.
Hrithik sports Pepe jeans, drives Suzuki bikes and is the quintessential American
hero, whereas Ash, as she is popularly known, wears leather boots, micro-
miniskirts and bikini tops, reminding us of the MTV queen Britney Spears.
The song and dance sequence ‘‘Dil Lagaa Na Dil Jala Se Dil Jal Jaayegaa’’ opens
with a Samba festival in Brazil. After a few stunning Capoeira moves, the audience
is confronted with the dazzling moves, sculpted body and youthful exuberance of
Hrithik. Displaying his narcissistic musculature, Hrithik glides, grinds, jumps and
 Moved to Dance 225

sways. Aishwariya in a white miniskirt and a bikini top exhibits her slender body
and bare legs more fearlessly than her male counterpart. The digital effects in the
sequence are spliced with elaborate costumes of the carnival, creating a colorful
montage. The shots keep moving from one image to another, creating a dizzying
array of images. What results is a techno-Indo-American aesthetic that is neither
bounded by geographical boundaries nor by any ethnic identity. Note that the
lyrics of the song itself are in Hinglish (a mixture of English and Hindi). With its
bold images (leather, metal, acrobatic bodies) and international brand endorse-
ment such as SuzukiTM bikes and PepeTM jeans, Dhoom 2 delivers the promise of
liberation from geographical boundaries and bounded aesthetics by creating
‘‘aspirational commodity aesthetics’’ of social distinction. A distinction created
through the value of looking Euro-American, maintaining a Euro-American life-
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style by driving Suzukis and sporting Pepe jeans and micro-minis. Dhoom 2 sig-
nifies a new Indian membership in the transnational and transcendental world
of commodity images that is both global and Indian.

CONCLUSION

This article explores embodiment as a theoretical lens for rethinking how identi-
ties and subjectivities are crafted through dance and the dancing body. It begins
with an investigation of embodiment through the intellectual frameworks of
anthropology, dance studies and postcolonial theory. More specifically it contex-
tualizes the experiential in Indian dance within social theory. As Bollywood
dance emerges as the dominant form for many dance practitioners in India
and the diaspora, choreography, remix and fusion become buzzwords that sweep
across national borders.
The article has focused on Bollywood dance to explore the perceptual changes that
are producing the technicized, mediatized bodies of a global consumer culture. The
influences of the ‘‘commodity aesthetics’’ circulated through Bollywood are not con-
fined to Bollywood dance, but are impacting on classical, folk and contemporary
avant-garde forms. I argue that the body as a locus of experience and expression
shifts the ground from culture as text or discourse to embodiment of subjectivity.
Moreover, the focus on embodiment can explore how dominant sensibilities are pro-
duced that shape discourses of power. I have used embodiment and its relation to
habitus and practice to analyze contemporary cultural identity in India. I have also
shown how particular practices such as are found in Bollywood dance halls ulti-
mately connect to narratives of desire and social distinction in Bollywood films.
My goal has been to write not about the dancing bodies in India, nor for them,
but to articulate from them as India forges a new global modernity.

NOTES
1. A range of dance scholarship by Sally Ness [1992], Barbara Browning [1995], Sondra
Farleigh [2000], and Marta Savigliano [1995] has explored embodiment from various
perspectives.
 226 P. Chakravorty

2. Wikipedia describes Remix as a hybridizing process combining fragments of various

works. Although associated with music, it can be applied to visual or video arts, and
even things further afield.

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GLOSSARY

Abhinaya emotive dance

Bhava/rasa raw emotion, aesthetic emotion, taste
Cher char flirtation
Guru teacher
Parampara tradition
Riaz practice, training
Sringara rasa erotic emotion
Tabla a pair of tunable drums