Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai Madhuri Dixit

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Figure 1. Madhuri Dixit performs “Ek do teen” (“One Two

Three”) in Tezaab (Acid, dir. N. Chandra, India, 1988).
Published by Duke University Press

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Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai?/

What Is behind the Stardom?
Madhuri Dixit, the Production
Number, and the Construction
of the Female Star Text in
1990s Hindi Cinema
Usha Iyer
Chandan Arora’s film Main Madhuri Dixit banna chahti hoon! (I

Want to Be Madhuri Dixit!, India, 2003) opens with a young woman,
Chutki (Antara Mali), dancing to the popular Hindi film song
from Tezaab (Acid, dir. N. Chandra, India, 1988), “Ek do teen”
(“One Two Three”). Chutki’s stage show includes two more
dance numbers: “Hum ko aaj kal hai intezaar” (“I Yearn for the
One Who Will Bring Me Love”) from the film Sailaab (Flood, dir.
Deepak Balraj Vij, India, 1990) and “Choli ke peeche kya hai?”
(“What Is behind/inside Your Blouse?”) from the film Khalnayak
(Villain, dir. Subhash Ghai, India, 1993). Anyone familiar with the
Indian mediascape would immediately recognize that the three
popular song-and-dance sequences Chutki performs originally
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featured the leading Hindi film actress of the late 1980s and
1990s, Madhuri Dixit. Chutki’s adulatory mimicry reminds us
of the extent to which Dixit’s star text is defined by her remark-
able song-and-dance sequences. Indeed, tributes to Dixit’s famous
dance numbers at the 2010 Filmfare Awards and on reality dance
shows such as Jhalak dikhhla jaa (Give Us a Glimpse, Sony India,
2006 – 11; Colors, 2012 – ) indicate her pervasive influence on pop-
ular Hindi film dance and indeed over Indian popular culture in
general. Acclaimed as a fine actress and a spectacular dancer, Dix-
it’s thirty-year career is signposted by (in)famous song-and-dance
sequences such as “Ek do teen” in Tezaab, “Dhak dhak karne laga”
(“My Heart Goes Thump Thump”) in Beta (Son, dir. Indra Kumar,
India, 1992), “Choli ke peeche kya hai?” in Khalnayak, “Didi tera
devar deewana” (“Sister, Your Brother-in-Law Is Crazy”) in Hum
aapke hain koun . . . ! (Who Am I to You . . . !, dir. Sooraj Barjatya,
India, 1994), and “Dola re dola” (“My Heart Sways”) in Devdas
(dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, India, 2002). Dixit was hailed (and
sometimes criticized) for introducing a new sensuality to film
dance.1 She was seen as a harbinger of novel, trademark moves
and as the definitive female dancing star of the period, whose
song-and-dance numbers were often bigger draws than the films
themselves.2 Dixit’s dance numbers marked a redefinition of cho-
reographic styles and radical changes in the movement vocabu-
lary of the dancing heroine. In this article, I track the kinesthetic
history of the Dixit star text from Tezaab to her most recent films
and television shows to discuss the role of dance in the figura-
tion of female stardom since the 1990s. A specific focus on this
talented dancer-actress, the architect as well as the product of a
historical moment when film dance became critical in the con-
struction of female stardom, enables the study of a new symbolic
produced by transformations in the existing regimes of represen-
tation of female sexuality.
Neepa Majumdar, Rosie Thomas, and Kaushik Bhowmick,
among others, have delineated the history of female film stardom
in popular Hindi cinema from the 1920s through the 1950s, point-
ing to the intertwined discourses of respectability, religion, race,
class, and bourgeois nationalist codes of ideal womanhood that

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Dance and Female Stardom in 1990s Hindi Cinema • 131
come into play in constructing female stardom.3 Majumdar, in

particular, discusses song sequences as potent star vehicles that,
through music, “performance techniques,” and changes in cos-
tume and setting, “represent the most idealized aspects of star pres-
ence.”4 What remains less explored is the relationship of dance to
film stardom and its role in the construction of the erotic, affective,
and spectacular effects of the Hindi film. By introducing dance
into an analysis of female stardom’s construction, I turn the focus
to the bodies and movement vocabularies of dancer-actresses as
well as to the discourses of consumption, spectacle, and censor-
ship that animate film dance. No discussion of female representa-
tion in post-1950s popular Hindi cinema can ignore the figure of
the vamp. To manage anxieties about the circulation and visual
consumption of on-screen female bodies, from the 1950s through
the 1980s the Hindi film split female presence between the chaste
heroine and the publicly dancing vamp.5 The neat distribution of
virtue and vice between heroine and vamp (which also marked
the moral binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, wife/whore)
is signaled through the names of the characters, the costuming,
the spaces they inhabit, and above all through the dance move-
ments they employ in song-and-dance sequences. While the hero-
ine, as the iconic woman of the nation, predominantly displays
a restrained and modest movement vocabulary, the vamp is the
archetypal performer of the raunchy cabaret dance number that
takes place in a bar or a nightclub. “By the nineties,” observes
Ranjani Mazumdar, citing Dixit’s provocative dance numbers in
Tezaab and Khalnayak, “the earlier binary oppositions, so dear to
the nationalist imaginary, had ceased to hold. The heroine now
occupied the space of the vamp through a process marked by a
public display of desire and an entirely new discourse of sexuality
that threatened the old boundaries.”6 Sangita Gopal attributes this
specifically to the actress’s movement vocabulary: “Dixit’s jhatkas
and matkas (convulsive heaves and swings of the body) . . . defini-
tively completed the blurring of the distinction between heroine
(Indian) and vamp (Western) that had been in progress since
the 1970s.”7
As the inaugurator of a new regime of dancing that had

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long-ranging implications for the construction of female stardom,

Dixit functions as a critical figure in investigating changes in the
Hindi film’s aesthetic, narrative, and industry configurations since
the late 1980s. Through an analysis of dance numbers from three
films featuring the actress — Tezaab, Sangeet (Music, dir. K. Viswa-
nath, India, 1992), and Beta — this article examines the tensions
and alterations provoked in the popular Hindi film narrative by
the dissolution of the heroine/vamp divide and argues that these
refigurations often revolve around dance, which is a critical site for
the negotiation of cultural anxieties regarding female sexuality
in Hindi cinema of the 1990s. While Monika Mehta and Shohini
Ghosh have discussed Dixit’s most controversial song-and-dance
number, “Choli ke peeche kya hai?,” in the context of censorship,
through a specific focus on dance and a typology of song-and-
dance numbers, I investigate how Dixit’s sensuous production
numbers conclusively transform the construction of the female
body on-screen and indeed the very conditions of female stardom
in Hindi cinema.8 Employing a body-space-movement framework
that examines the mobilization of certain movements, gestures,
and spaces of dance, I demonstrate how the collapsing of the cat-
egories of heroine and vamp forces the Hindi film narrative to
produce a variety of strategies that seek to manage this new and
potentially dangerous circulation of the heroine’s body. Through
a discussion of the frequent failure of these narrative strategies to
contain Dixit’s flamboyantly dancing body, I posit that the dancer-
actress engenders a distinctive mode of performance that alters
relations between narrative and spectacle and suggests a differ-
ent model for understanding female agency and the authorship
of star texts.
A Body-Centered T
axonomy of Song-and-Dance Sequences
Scholarship on Indian cinema that focuses on song-and-dance
sequences emphasizes music, mise-en-scène, and the relationship
of the song-and-dance sequence to the narrative.9 Lalitha Gopa-
lan offers an elaborate taxonomy of song-and-dance sequences in
relationship to Mani Ratnam’s films, outlining five ways in which

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he employs musical numbers to negotiate spatial and temporal

discontinuities.10 Gopalan identifies song-and-dance sequences
that regulate spatial disjunctions by propelling the narrative
through multiple diegetic spaces in the space of the song as well
as those that condense or smooth over various events or tempo-
ral shifts in the narrative. A third category, which she terms the
“Indian backstage musical,” features a diegetic audience, and the
coincidence between performance time and real time weaves the
number into the narrative. The fourth and fifth categories con-
cern the integration of the musical number into the narrative,
with some numbers deliberately linked to the narrative and oth-
ers functioning as extradiegetic sequences that abruptly break its
spatial continuity. Given Gopalan’s focus on cinematic “interrup-
tions” as well as Ratnam’s conscious engagement with the ques-
tion of integrating song-and-dance sequences into the narration,
this taxonomy emphasizes the management of the anachronous
song-and-dance sequence in relation to narrative space and time.
I employ and adapt the various typologies that theorize the func-
tion of musical numbers in popular cinema but demonstrate in
particular how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by
cinematic dance forms produce unique constructions of nar-
rative, gender, and stardom.11 Focusing on the dancing body
highlights how dance movements interrupt narrative modes of
being and moving and demonstrates how attention to this physi-
cal interruption or alteration of movement vocabulary is key to
understanding production and reception modalities and econo-
mies. In the narrative, for instance, the performing body has a
certain valence, but in the dance and action sequences of the film
(which typically correspond to the female and male performers
in the film, respectively), the same body is mobilized and dis-
played differently. In these sequences, the body is spectacularized
through choreographed movements, costume, makeup, mise-en-
scène, cinematography, and editing. The regime of performance,
including facial expressions and physical movement, is signifi-
cantly altered as is the mode of reception. Audiences pay much
more attention, suddenly, to limbs and torsos and their movement
through space. This immanence of the star body, of body as body

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rather than as a vehicle for a diegetic character, makes dance and

action sequences central devices in constructing the iconicity of
certain star bodies.12 Calling attention to dance specifically fore-
grounds differences between the narrative and song-and-dance
sequences in terms of movements (walking, sitting, standing, etc.,
in the narrative versus swaying, “running around trees,” and other
forms of dancing in the song-and-dance sequence), spaces (real-
istic versus fantastic spaces, diegetic versus extradiegetic excur-
sions to the Swiss Alps, for instance, as in Silsila [dir. Yash Chopra,
India, 1981]), and bodies (diegetic protagonists versus standalone
dance performers, including vamps, background dancers, and
contemporary “item girls” featured in “item numbers”).13
The taxonomy I propose charts the differences between
song sequences that do not include dance at all, song- and- dance
sequences that may feature various kinds of movement that could be
described as dance, and pure dance sequences that feature no songs.
Within song-and-dance sequences, which are the focus of this essay,
I outline two broad subcategories: the production number and the
narrative number, both featuring physical movements that may be
designated as dance. The narrative number, as the name suggests,
is a song-and-dance sequence that is integrated to varying degrees
with the narrative in terms of the lyrics of the song, the spaces
in which the sequence is performed, the characters performing
it, and, most critically, the movement vocabulary employed by the
characters. In the narrative number, bodily movement is meant to
express inner emotions and may range from languid movements,
like rhythmically swaying or skipping, to intermittent gestural com-
munication and choreographed dance steps. Movements in the
narrative number are more free flowing and not always strictly and
continuously synchronized and coordinated with the melody and
rhythm of the song. Additionally, in narrative numbers, characters
may not be obviously centered on-screen, unlike the proscenium-
like performance space of production numbers. Dixit’s song-and-
dance sequence “Der se aana jaldi jana” (“Your Late Arrival”) in
Khalnayak may be classified as a narrative number. While she per-
forms a few choreographed dance steps and is joined in some seg-
ments of the song by other dancing women, the sequence does not

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feature continuously codified dance movements, and the song is

primarily addressed to the hero, with its semantic content referring
to events in the narrative.
The production number, in contrast, is structured around
a display of one or more dancing bodies, highlighting the experi-
ential rather than the narrational pleasures of the text. Through
the spectacle of dance performance and the mise-en-scène of the
production number, performers’ bodies and the spaces of perfor-
mance are accorded a different aura and representational valence.
In this category, the dancing is obviously choreographed, often
frontally presented to an on-screen audience (of one or more per-
sons), and marked by distinctive moves that are strictly coordinated
with the melody and rhythm of the song.14 The production num-
ber may feature dance performed within the diegesis on a stage or
in private, domestic spaces such as the bedroom. Unlike the self-
enclosed world of the narrative number (which often lends itself
to romantic solos or duets), the production number is marked by
a mode of looking in which the performer explicitly invites and
often returns the gaze of the on-screen audience as well as the
film’s viewers and is thus overtly coded as a performance. The pro-
duction number is markedly set off from the narrative by a system
of visual and aural brackets created by the dramatically altered
movement vocabulary and audiovisual spectacle of a dance per-
formance. Like Busby Berkeley numbers in the American film
musical, the Hindi film production number is marked as a coded
spectacle that often functions as a discrete unit within the narra-
tive and halts the forward movement of the story. Referring to this
kind of song-and-dance sequence as a production number brings
to the fore the economics of the production of spectacular song-
and-dance sequences and foregrounds their entirely constructed
nature. Dixit’s (in)famous dance number in Khalnayak, “Choli ke
peeche kya hai?,” may be categorized as a production number on
account of its rhythmically choreographed frontal performance
to an on-screen audience and the disconnection of the semantic
content of the song from the rest of the narrative.
As this taxonomy makes evident, the mode of perfor-
mance significantly alters as we move from the category of the song

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sequence to that of the dance sequence, the latter overtly putting

the performing body and its movement on display in a manner not
encountered in the former. It is hardly surprising then that, with
a few exceptions, female performers dominated the production
number until the 1990s.15 While dancing is a desirable or even nec-
essary talent for Hindi film actresses, until recently it had not been
a requirement for male actors, highlighting the tendency to display
and spectacularize the female body through dance in this film cul-
ture. That this is commonplace is evident in film journalist Partha
Chatterjee’s nostalgia for a time when heroes did not engage in
the vigorous “thrust-and-heave” gyrations that mark the films of
the 1990s: “In the good old days, dancing was not considered a
masculine pursuit, and the likes of Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, and
Motilal, of an earlier generation, would have taken exception to the
very suggestion that they did more than a few rudimentary steps
in their films as an accompaniment to the songs they picturised.”16
In other words, male actors may be featured in song sequences
and in narrative numbers with minimal or “rudimentary” dancing,
but the production number especially is the proper domain of the
female performer.17
Collapsing the Heroine/Vamp Divide in “Ek Do Teen”

While Dixit has performed in innumerable narrative and pro-
duction numbers, her fame as a dancer-actress owes much to a
series of production numbers she performed early in her career.
Although she made her acting debut in Abodh (Innocent, dir. Hiren
Nag, India, 1984), it was the production number “Ek do teen” in
Tezaab that launched her as a major star. A review in the film mag-
azine Star and Style epitomizes the popularity of this song-and-
dance sequence:
The “ek do teen char” song has done it. Crowds are thronging to
see Tezaab as if they’re seeing a film after ages. In Bombay, and more
generally, in the whole of Maharashtra, the song . . . became a veritable
rage in the Ganpati and Navratri festivals. Little wonder then that Tezaab
got an opening at the cinemas which no other Anil Kapoor – starrer

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must’ve ever got. The dances of Dixit and Anil Kapoor on this song are
making the cine-goers dance, whistle, shower coins, yell, scream, and
shout with joy.18
The attribution of a film’s success to a Dixit production number

would become common throughout the actress’s career. Mehta
remarks on the effect of her dancing: “Through her spectacular
dance performances, Dixit commandeered screen space in a way
that seriously challenged the position of the male hero. People
frequently entered theaters to watch her dance routines and left
when the story started.”19 “Ek do teen” was seen to mark such a
significant shift in Hindi film dance choreography that the popu-
lar Filmfare Awards instituted an award for best choreography in
1989 that went to Saroj Khan, the choreographer of this sequence.
Indeed, along with the dancing star, Dixit, the choreographer,
Khan, is a central figure in the redefinition of dance moves in
the late 1980s and the 1990s, introducing an earthy and bawdy
movement vocabulary dominated by the heaving of the chest,
pelvic thrusts, and exaggerated swaying of the hips.20 Majumdar
speaks of the “dual star text” produced by the combination of the
on-screen actress’s body and the offscreen voice of the playback
singer.21 Given the pervasive role of Khan’s choreography in the
construction of the Dixit star text, one could conceive of a dual
star text in this instance, combining the choreographic prowess
of Khan with the performance skills of Dixit. Dixit’s body was the
perfect vehicle for Khan’s choreographic vision, and, together, the
dancer-actress and the choreographer who achieved stardom with
“Ek do teen” conceptualized a new female movement vocabulary
in popular Hindi cinema.
“Ek do teen” stands out in an otherwise typical 1980s action
movie, in which the hero, Munna (Anil Kapoor), is on a mission to
avenge his parents’ murder and save the heroine, Mohini (Dixit),
from her greedy father and from the dreaded gangster, Lotiya
Pathan. The ruse for the production number is that Mohini is
forced to dance onstage to pay for her father’s drinking and gam-
bling habits, even though she declares that she does not want to
dance and wants to study instead. The framing of the song within

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a romantic narrative of Mohini’s pining for her lover, along with

the suggestion that the dance spectacle is staged for the audience’s
pleasure against her desire, point to the work the narrative has
to do to justify the staging of a production number with the her-
oine of the film. No such excuses are required when the vamp
performs in a production number. Dixit’s costumes and dance
vocabulary in “Ek do teen” were seen as provocative at the time,
and the number has been generally viewed as the marker of a new
kind of performance aesthetic for the Hindi film heroine.22 The
particular moves — the heaving of the bosom and swaying of the
hips — choreographed by Khan and performed by Dixit became
markers of a new dance idiom for female stars of the period. Dixit’s
reminiscence of her performance in “Ek do teen” is part of the
discourse of “shedding inhibitions” that dominated contemporary
choreographers’ and female stars’ defense against charges of hav-
ing developed a scandalous new dance vocabulary: “Tezaab was an
important film for me in terms of shedding inhibitions, both as an
actor and as a dancer. I knew I was a good dancer, but whenever
I watched myself on screen I always felt I wasn’t giving my best. I
was holding back. . . . Sarojji [Saroj Khan] introduced me to the
language of cinema — how to sway and smile during a step.”23 It is
dance that marks the transition of the Hindi film heroine from the
upright — and uptight — ideal of Indian womanhood to her unin-
hibited, gyrating avatar. In an instrumental interlude in “Ek do
teen,” low-angle shots capture Dixit on her knees, bent backward,
and playing a saxophone in a short, spangled skirt. During this
interlude, the cinematography, costuming, and arrangement of
torso and limbs borrow from the representational history of the
vamp, in that Dixit’s moves resemble those of Hindi cinema’s most
famous and popular vamp, Helen, rather than those of earlier
heroines. Also, like the vamp and unlike the Hindi film heroine,
Dixit’s dance movements are often choreographed on a horizontal
plane in relation to the stage she is dancing on; that is, she crawls,
writhes, and clambers forward and backward on the stage floor.
The space in which the production number is staged additionally
signals the collapsing of the heroine and vamp categories by com-
bining the more conventional production number space of the

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heroine — the stage — with a ramp that projects out of the stage,

calling to mind the vamp’s nightclub setting, which often featured
a bar top, a walkway, or some other linear access to her spectators.
In “Ek do teen,” the ramp allows for low-angle shots of Dixit and
perpendicular access to her dancing body.24 As Dixit dances and
walks on the ramp, the audience, composed almost entirely of men,
looks up at her. The dissolving of the heroine/vamp binary that
“Ek do teen” precipitated was completed by two Dixit production
numbers that followed a few years later: “Dhak dhak karne laga”
and “Choli ke peeche kya hai?” The censorship controversy over
“Choli ke peeche kya hai?,” initiated by a petition filed in the Delhi
High Court demanding the deletion of the production number
from the film, demonstrated that the breaching of the heroine/
vamp divide had very real repercussions for the public reception
of steamy production numbers. There had never been a call for a
ban on similar or more suggestive numbers performed by vamps
like Helen. Subversion was detected only when the sacred body of
the heroine was choreographed as the dominant site of wanton
sexual desire.
Altering Bodies and Spaces to

Choreograph New Geographies of Desire
Considering how Hindi cinema of the 1990s labors to contain the
subversive potential of the new heroine-vamp sheds light on the
battles fought over the female body and its on-screen representa-
tions during this period. One of the key strategies for differentiat-
ing the new heroine from the erstwhile vamp was to combine the
vamp’s movement vocabulary with the heroine’s expressive reper-
toire. In the 1990s production number that Dixit defines, torso
movements are focused on the breasts, buttocks, and waist, while
facial expression is primarily conveyed through the eyes and the
lips. Dixit’s trademark moves, defined by deflections of the upper
and lower torso, are central to the movement vocabulary that she
and Khan borrow from the vamp. However, also considering the
choreography of Dixit’s facial expressions allows us to examine
how her dancing differs in subtle ways from that of the vamp and

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hence escapes the censure that the vamp’s dance vocabulary is

subjected to. Dixit smiles sweetly throughout her salacious produc-
tion numbers, suggesting her innate innocence, while the facial
repertoire of the vamp includes leering lasciviously, licking her
lips, and keeping her mouth sensuously open as she shimmies and
shakes. These gestural changes designate the difference between
the wanton and dangerous sexuality of the vamp and the inno-
cent, unintended, unreflexive sensuousness of the heroine. In the
case of Dixit, special mention must be made of her smile, which
is seen as one of the highlights of her star body. In an interview,
Khan says of the actress, “Madhuri Dixit is one actress who gets all
the moves right, she moves right, she smiles at the right time.”25
Whereas the vamp’s facial expressions are marked by suggestive
glances and lip biting, Dixit and Khan ensure that Dixit smiles
innocently, “at the right time,” so that her famed smile attenuates
her employment of the torso movements of the vamp. Chatterjee,
otherwise quite stridently censorious of the nineties song-and-
dance sequence, notes of Dixit, “Madhuri’s innocence, vulnerabil-
ity, and girlish sexuality all come out as she slides, writhes, slith-
ers, and shakes to the inane lyrics of ‘Ek do teen.’ ” 26 While all
the movements listed by Chatterjee refer to the torso and limb
movements of the vamp, it is Dixit’s smile that communicates to
him the appropriate attributes of the heroine — innocence, vul-
nerability, and a nonthreatening girlish sexuality. This is evident
again when he compares her production numbers to others of the
period: “Madhuri Dixit, hips swaying seductively, responded with
inviting yet shy eyes to ‘Choli ke peechey kya hai.’ . . . The song, for
all its implied vulgarity, is picturised with a fair degree of crafts-
manship, and is remarkably tame in comparison to the hell-bent-
for-leather efforts of the most successful pair today — Govinda and
Karisma Kapoor, who together have brought the Indian cinema to
the limits of vulgarity” (216).
For Chatterjee, the difference between Govinda’s and
Karisma Kapoor’s pelvic-thrusting gyrations in “Sarkaye lo khatiya”
(“Move Your Cot Closer to Me”) from the film Raja Babu (dir. David
Dhawan, India, 1994) and Dixit’s breast heaving in “Choli ke
peeche kya hai?” lies in Dixit’s “inviting yet shy eyes.” Once again,

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her facial expression, in this case communicating that most hero-

inelike quality of shyness, differentiates her from the vamp and
from the “vulgar” dancing of heroines and heroes that follow her.
The other element that distinguishes Dixit’s production numbers
is her comic facial expressions. Even as she sways and glides volup-
tuously onstage during the “Ek do teen” number, Dixit’s charac-
ter Mohini makes funny faces and winks comically at the audi-
ence. Dixit’s sense of comic timing marks her performance, even
within raunchy production numbers, as natural and spontaneous
and invests her with the subjectivity and agency accorded to the
heroine but rarely to the vamp. In an interview, Dixit remarks,
“Sarojji has the knack for combining body movements with lovely
facial expressions. For the song, ‘Akhiyan milaon,’ she insisted on
a close-up of my facial expressions, which were funny and cute.
When the camera comes this close and you are emoting, you make
a connection with the audience, you hook them. After that, they’re
yours.”27 Dixit’s face tempers the sinuous insinuations of her torso,
her innocent smile replacing the knowing smirk of the vamp, and
thus the libidinously dancing heroine becomes a regular feature
of nineties Hindi cinema.
To further differentiate the heroine’s performance from
that of the vamp, the films emphasize the heroine’s reluctance to
dance in a production number. We have already seen how Tezaab
presents Dixit’s Mohini as an unwilling public performer, thus
recuperating her good-girl/heroine persona. Because of the asso-
ciation of public, professional dancing with traditional dancing
women such as the tawaifs (courtesans) and the devadasis (tem-
ple dancers) — women of the bazaar rather than women of the
home — and the structuring of private and public space along
gendered lines, the figure of the public female dancer has always
been problematic for the narrative and ideological project of
twentieth-century popular Hindi cinema. In three films in which
Dixit plays the part of a professional dancer — Tezaab, Sangeet, and
Devdas — dancing for a paying public is portrayed as reprehensible
and something her character needs to be delivered from (by the
hero, of course). In contrast, the vamp, always a paid, professional
dancer, is usually shown as dancing quite felicitously and of her

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own volition. The other condition in which the heroine performs

the production number is out of a sense of duty. In Khalnayak, for
example, Ganga (Dixit) stages the production number “Choli ke
peeche kya hai?” in order to nab the villain, Ballu, and save her
fiancé Ram’s reputation.28 Unlike the duty-bound heroine, vamps
are rarely depicted as putting on a show for a seemingly higher
purpose. In other words, the heroine has compelling motivations
for her bawdy production numbers, while the vamp is accorded
none. Duty and duress help to explain away the display of the hero-
ine’s dancing body, and a significant amount of narrative time is
invested in establishing that the character played by Dixit is to be
considered a good girl who would not normally perform a provoca-
tive production number on a stage.
Additionally, the salacious production number of the 1990s
marks its variance from the vamp’s performance by altering the
spaces in which the dance is staged. Staging a sexually explicit
dance performance in a private, domestic space (for instance the
bedroom) enshrines it within the discourse of conjugal sexuality,
quite unlike the public display of the vamp’s performing body to a
paying, viewing audience. The vamp is kept out of domestic spaces,
but Dixit freely performs production numbers like “Athra baras
ki kunwari kali thi” (“I Was a Youthful Eighteen-Year-Old Bud”)
at family gatherings in the film Anjaam (Result, dir. Rahul Rawail,
India, 1994). The other strategy for employing the heroine’s body
in sexually brazen production numbers is to restrict these perfor-
mances to the stage, ensuring a clear-cut separation between narra-
tive and performance spaces. This separation of spaces retains the
opposition between virtuous femininity and dangerous sexuality
enacted through the heroine/vamp divide. Accordingly, onstage,
the new heroine may writhe on the floor or sashay among her audi-
ence in skimpy costumes, but in domestic spaces she continues
to be docile, duty bound, and demurely dressed. It is worth not-
ing that a significant number of Dixit’s most famous production
numbers — including “Ek do teen,” “Hum ko aaj kal hai intezaar,”
“Main tumhari hoon” (“I Am Yours”) in the film Sangeet, “Main
Kolhapur se aayi hoon” (“I Have Come from Kolhapur”) in the
film Anjaam, and “Que sera sera” in the film Pukar (dir. Rajkumar

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Santoshi, India, 2000) — are isolated as stage performances. When

these performances are staged for a paying audience, Dixit’s char-
acters are absolved of their immorality through the duty or duress
argument. This excuse is obviated when the production number is
staged for a nonpaying audience, for example, at a college festival or
a fund-raising event (spaces that the vamp has never been allowed
to occupy). The relationship of the heroine with the on-screen audi-
ence is also a vital factor in distinguishing her from the vamp. While
traditionally the vamp dances for coarse and callous gangsters, Dix-
it’s characters typically perform for cheering audiences.
Another space in which the heroine can dance like a vamp
is in the hero’s or villain’s fantasies. These dance numbers, very
common in the 1990s song-and-dance repertoire, displace forbid-
den desires onto the space of male fantasy, thus recuperating the
heroine’s salacious dances into the normative frame of the narra-
tive. It is not surprising that, historically, the vamp’s production
numbers were never staged as part of a character’s fantasy; the
vamp’s erotic performance, grounded in the dense materiality of
corporeal experience and concrete spaces, posed no problem for
the Hindi film narrative. Whereas the vamp’s sexuality is very much
of this world, the heroine’s sexuality, even with her new avatar,
needs to be displaced to the realm of imagination. In production
numbers like “Dhak dhak karne laga,” “Main Kolhapur se aayi
hoon,” and “Badan juda hote hain” (“Our Bodies May Be Sepa-
rated”) from the film Koyla (Coal, dir. Rakesh Roshan, India, 1997),
Dixit’s sensual dance moves take place in the fantasies of the heroes
and villains, thus getting around the quandary of having her dance
provocatively while making sure the audience gets its paisa vasool,
or money’s worth.
Splitting Female Presence through Dance Vocabularies

In Sangeet, we encounter another strategy for managing the
heroine-vamp merger — splitting female presence through double
roles, which enact different styles of dancing. In the film, Dixit
plays the older classical dancer, Nirmala, as well as the younger,
blind nautanki dancer, Sangeeta.29 The two characters find out

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only toward the end of the film that they are mother and daugh-
ter, separated after Sangeeta’s birth because Nirmala was unwed.
We are introduced to the blind Sangeeta in the film through the
first song-a nd-dance sequence, the bawdy production number
“Main tumhari hoon,” in which she sings “main tumhari hoon . . .
bas tumhare liye hi kunwari hoon” (I am yours, and have
remained a virgin/unmarried only for you) to an all-male audi-
ence. Sangeeta’s costume, as in many of Dixit’s rustic-style produc-
tion numbers, is designed to show off her raunchy dance moves
and consists of a low-cut, knee-length ghaghra (skirt) revealing her
waist and belly; a short, tight bodice with embroidery outlining
her breasts; and a thin dupatta (a piece of cloth designed to cover
a woman’s blouse or tunic) that she never wears but throws into
the crowd at the beginning of the dance. The production num-
ber opens with a medium close-up of Sangeeta’s waist and breasts
swinging in a classic Dixit-K han movement. She then turns and
sways her buttocks at the audience. After some long shots of her
dancing, we finally get a close-up of her face, as she winks at the
men in the audience and sings “Main tumhari hoon.” Using the
coquettish movement vocabulary of the Marathi folk dance form
of lavani, Dixit bites her little finger and regularly turns her back
to the audience to show off her gyrating hips. Floor movements,
mandatory in the vamp’s erotic dance repertoire, are included
here as Dixit’s Sangeeta rotates on the floor of the stage on one
hand and holds her skirt in the other. When she sings “aag laga
de yeh mehfil mein meri gulabi kaya” (my rosy body will set fire
to this gathering), the sequence cuts from a medium long shot
of her body to a medium close-up of just her breasts and waist
as she outlines her breasts with her thumbs. This editing pattern
is repeated throughout the song, which features many medium
close-ups of Sangeeta’s breasts, waist, and buttocks. The cinema-
tography is dominated by low-a ngle shots of her to emphasize
these torso movements. In the audience, a man draws a sketch of
Sangeeta or, rather, of her torso, with an emphasis on her breasts.
The blind, poor, and innocent Sangeeta is seemingly rescued
from this kind of dancing by the male protagonist, the struggling
folk singer Sethuram Sargamwala ( Jackie Shroff), who tears the

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offending drawing of Sangeeta’s breasts, rushes up to the stage

(conveniently at the end of the number), and covers her torso with
his turban cloth. Later, he convinces her to quit nautanki danc-
ing and move to the unfinished building in which he lives with
his folk music troupe. The next song-and-dance sequence in the
film, “O rabba koi to bataye pyaar hota hai kya” (“Oh Lord, Some-
one Tell Me What Love Means”), is Sethuram’s fantasy number,
in which Sangeeta now dances only for him. She is more soberly
dressed in a classical kathak dance–style costume that reveals no
flesh.30 In this narrative number, both of them sing alternately
(but only Sangeeta dances) of their budding love for each other,
in contrast to her proffering her virginity to the entire audience in
the earlier number. The camera, accordingly, does not linger on
any of her body parts, and instead of the close-ups we saw earlier
of her torso, we are now presented with close-ups of her smiling
face. Soon after, Sethuram introduces Sangeeta to Nirmala and
requests Nirmala to teach her accha naach, or good, decent, gentri-
fied dancing, upon which Nirmala slips into a production number
fantasy involving Sethuram and Sangeeta. The aspirational classi-
cism of this number is evident in the song’s lyrics, “saat suron ke
taar ban gaye tera mera pyaar” (our love is akin to the seven musi-
cal notes), which reference Indian classical music, and also in the
dance and mise-en-scène. In the first stanza, Sangeeta performs a
bharatanatyam-influenced dance with a large statue of Shiva, foun-
tains, and male and female dancers in the background.31 For the
first time in the film’s song-and-dance sequences, we encounter
frequent close-ups of Sangeeta’s feet to show off her footwork.
Over the course of these three song-and-dance sequences,
all of which are designed to showcase Dixit’s talent for executing
various movement vocabularies, Sangeeta’s movements become
more and more decorous, thus demonstrating her schooling in
accha naach. This transition is shown over the course of the three
numbers in the changing close-ups of her torso, her face, and
her feet. Through Dixit’s double role, the film institutes a double
regime of performance, disavowing the raunchy production num-
ber and supposedly identifying with a more respectable idiom. The
film also refers extratextually to the doubling in Dixit’s star text,

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in that she is a classically trained dancer famous for her risqué

production numbers. In her analysis of the double roles embodied
by stars, Majumdar observes, “The spectacular and performative
pleasures offered by the double exposure of the star body [allow]
a showcasing of the star’s ability to incarnate different identities.”32
The Sangeeta figure refers to the aspect of Dixit’s star text defined
by her libidinous dancing and her revealing costumes, while the
modestly dressed, deglamorized, classical-dance-promoting Nir-
mala evokes Dixit’s training and proficiency in the classical dance
form of kathak. In addition to showcasing both kinds of dancing
that Dixit is famous for, the double figuration also allows for vari-
ous strategies of identification and disavowal. The narrative’s drive
to justify Sangeeta’s lustful dancing in “Main tumhari hoon” is evi-
dent in its construction of her character as a blind, impoverished,
and more o r less orphaned girl (the duress argument) even as it
devotes significant resources to produce the number, betraying its
actual investment in spectacularizing Dixit’s dancing body.
A different type of doubling occurs in the “dance-off,” a
production number starring two accomplished dancers. A com-
mon attraction in films with dancer-actresses, the dance-off is fea-
tured in two Dixit films, Dil to pagal hai (The Heart Is Crazy, dir. Yash
Chopra, India, 1997) and Devdas. Dil to pagal hai’s vigorous dance-
off, set to instrumental music, pits two professional dancers against
each other — the Westernized, jazz/modern-dancing, brazen Nisha
(Karisma Kapoor) and the kathak-trained, demure Pooja (Dixit).
Nisha’s dancing is energetic and competent, but Rahul (Shah Rukh
Khan), the director of the musical theater troupe, tells her that
Pooja is the superior dancer since she is more natural and grace-
ful and “she dances only for herself.” Nisha’s dancing is marked by
rapid footwork, hectic spins, and back bends, while Pooja’s dancing
is imbued with an expressive quality, and frequent close-ups show
us Pooja’s talent for conveying emotions through facial expressions.
This dance-off thus narrativizes the acclaimed qualities of Dixit’s
dancing versus those of younger, less expressive actresses. In Dev-
das, the friendship between the female principals Paro (Aishwarya
Rai) and Chandramukhi (Dixit) is eulogized with an elaborately
choreographed production number, “Dola re dola.” While this is

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not a competitive dance-off and functions more to supply the spec-

tacle of two leading female stars dancing together, Dixit is figured
as the elder stateswoman of film dance, leading the much younger
Rai through the intricate movements of the sequence.
Many a Slip ’twixt the Heart and the Breast —

Splitting Female Presence between the Production
Number and the Narrative
An analysis of the production number “Dhak dhak karne laga”
from the film Beta reveals a frequent slippage between heart and
breast, which in turn highlights a system of dichotomous tropes
and devices designed to manage the deeply contradictory opera-
tions undertaken by the production number and the film narra-
tive. Some of these dichotomies include the split between narra-
tive and song-a nd-dance sequence, music and dance, playback
singer and on-screen dancer, heroine and vamp, and the romantic
and erotic drives of the dance number. The song opens with the
male protagonist, Raju (Anil Kapoor), staring at a photograph
of Saraswati (Dixit), a young woman whom he has just met, and
moves into the realm of Raju’s fantasy in which Saraswati whirls in
an orange satin sarong-sari and embroidered bustier (a sexed-up
version of the traditional sari). The camera circles around her in
a tracking movement, capturing Saraswati as if from Raju’s point
of view. The setting is a wooded grotto with a waterfall, trees, and
creepers, with some stairs for Raju and Saraswati to strut on and
heave against, a patch of sand for Saraswati to crawl on as she
dances, and some hay for both of them to roll in during the num-
ber. In effect, the mise-en-scène is of a piece with the choreogra-
phy. The song opens with Raju holding Saraswati’s arms back as
they are framed in profile so we can see her heaving bosom. She
starts off the song, singing “dhak dhak karne laga, ho mora jiyara
darne laga” (my heart goes thump thump and begins to be afraid)
while undulating her hips and waist and thrusting her bosom
back and forth. A high-angle shot from behind Raju’s shoulder
calls attention to Saraswati’s breasts. The slippage between heart
and breasts is thus made visible through the dance moves and

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camera placement, even as the lyrics speak of the dil, or heart,

and make no mention of breasts. Indeed, heard by itself, the song
could refer solely to the wild beating of the heart common in a
new romance.33 Given the dance moves, though, it is not surpris-
ing that the lines “dhak dhak karne laga” are never sung by Raju.
We are to assume that not only is he impervious to the mixture of
excitement and fear accompanying love and sex but that it would
also be improper for him to heave his chest.
The work that the nineties production number has to do
to cover up its intent to titillate is evident in this sequence through
the contrast between the song — including lyrics, music, and choice
of playback singer — and the dance. The split between heart in the
song and breast in the dance is symptomatic of the simultaneous
separation and folding of love and lust and the romantic and the
erotic in popular Hindi cinema. The lyrics struggle to recuperate
the romantic even as the dance is constructed as a sensual fantasy,
so that while “Dhak dhak karne laga” has an unmistakable erotic
charge transmitted predominantly through dance moves in addi-
tion to phrases like “saiyan baiyan chhod na, kachchi kaliya tod
na” (let go of my hands, dear, do not pluck my tender buds), these
elements are tempered with the more conventional romantic lan-
guage of film song, in this case, about the characters’ commitment
to their rishta (relationship). Raju’s response to Saraswati’s “dhak
dhak” chorus is “dil se dil mil gaya, mujhse kaisi yeh haya” (when
our hearts have met, why the need for this modesty), attempting
through his reference to their hearts (this time as purely the loci
of romantic feeling) to suture the fissure between the romantic
and the erotic and provide the excuse of imminent conjugality for
this fantasy. The instrumental music interludes are also designed
to reconcile the opposing strains of the “dhak dhak” sequence as
Raju, along with the film’s viewers, watches Saraswati dancing —
backlit in one shot so that her entire silhouette is visible through
her sarong, crawling on the sand in another shot with the cam-
era placed behind her to emphasize her buttocks. A soulful flute
track plays over the suggestive shot – reverse shot sequences of Raju
watching and Saraswati dancing, as if to attenuate this moment
of salacious voyeurism through a conventional romantic idiom.

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The song also attempts to tame the dance vocabulary through

the choice of playback singer, and the sequence is marked by a
singer/dancer split — the playback singer for the voluptuously danc-
ing Dixit is Anuradha Paudwal, famed for her so-called sweet and
innocent voice and devout renditions of bhajans, or devotional
Hindu songs.34 Through these maneuvers, then, the song endeav-
ors to mitigate the blatantly lascivious display of Saraswati’s body
in the dance, and attempts to promote the discourse of the dil
to mask the bawdy, bodily emphasis on the breast that the dance
celebrates.
The tension between displaying and containing the female
dancing body is demonstrated in three song-and-dance sequences
in Beta that relate to three stages in the development of the cen-
tral heterosexual romance in the film. Saraswati’s risqué, bosom-
heaving dance in “Dhak dhak karne laga” is explained away as
Raju’s fantasy. Tellingly, while the next song-and-dance sequence in
the film, “Koyal si teri boli” (“Your Cuckoo-Like Voice”), also takes
place in the realm of Raju’s fantasy and features once again solo
sections of Saraswati dancing, her costumes and dance moves are
less sexualized than in “Dhak dhak karne laga.” The mise-en-scène
and choreography are more typical of a conventional romantic nar-
rative number, perhaps because Raju is now seated with Saraswati
(not alone and free to fantasize with her photograph in hand, as
before) after rescuing her from the rapist villain. The fetishiza-
tion of Saraswati’s body is commensurate with her function in the
heterosexual romance. The closer she comes to being figured as a
lover and wife in the narrative, the less overtly sexualized her per-
forming body becomes in the song-and-dance sequence. Indeed,
we have quite an altered figuration of Saraswati by the time we
get to the third song-and-dance sequence of the film, a celebra-
tory postcoital number following her marriage to Raju, in which a
group of female farm workers demand to know, “Saiyanji se chupke
hui kya teri baat?” (What secret conversation were you having with
your lover?). In an inversion of the song/dance dichotomy in “Dhak
dhak karne laga,” here, the song brims with sexual symbolism —
bees deflowering buds, a parrot dipping its beak into Saraswati’s
mouth, and so forth — while the fully clad and newly married Saras-

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wati dances coyly, toning down the sexual innuendo in the lyr-
ics. Since we now see the real Saraswati and not Raju’s masturba-
tory projections of her, and since she is now a married woman in
the narrative, her dancing is appropriately bashful. The gestural
vocabulary of the dances mirrors the narrative progression of the
romance by transitioning the heroine from a titillating figure to
one who is increasingly demure, featuring domesticated gestures
as she moves from single to conjugal status. It should come as no
surprise that Dixit’s renowned sensuous production numbers — “Ek
do teen,” “Hum ko aaj kal hai intezaar,” “Dhak dhak karne laga,”
“Main tumhari hoon,” and “Choli ke peeche kya hai?,” among
others — are performed by her unmarried characters. Marriage
heralds the retirement of this avatar of the new heroine from the
production number and her domestication within tepid narrative
numbers. Significantly, as we shall see, extratextually, marriage and
motherhood did not reproduce these restraints on Dixit’s move-
ment vocabulary in her later career, as she continued to feature in
production numbers, albeit of a less raunchy nature.
Sustaining Stardom through Dance

While Dixit won the Filmfare award for best actress for Beta,
the film’s place in popular cultural memory and in her star text
is secured by the “Dhak dhak karne laga” dance number. Also,
while Sangeet flopped at the box office, the only song-and-dance
sequence in the film that became popular and is still remembered
is the bawdy “Main tumhari hoon,” highlighting the frequent fail-
ure of the nineties Hindi film narrative’s attempts to contain Dix-
it’s dancing body. Further, it is specifically in her production num-
bers rather than in her narrative numbers (which seek to confine
her dancing to a romantic situation) that Dixit’s flamboyantly
dancing body exceeds the narrative’s attempts at confinement.
Adrienne McLean, in her discussion of screen dance, remarks,
“There is often a sense of professional pride and display of abil-
ity in the dance performances, not just an external manifestation
of internal feelings exclusive to heterosexual romance.”35 Thus,
despite the production number’s fetishistic display of Dixit’s body,

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the sheer energy and luminescence of her performance compli-

cate the to-be-looked-at-ness of the female body.36 Focusing on
the physicality of movement that dance entails allows for a read-
ing of Dixit’s solo production numbers as enabling her to exceed
narrative repression and emerge as an active communicating sub-
ject. Mehta observes in her analysis of “Choli ke peeche kya hai?”
that although the song “is a visual feast and invites a voyeuristic
gaze, this spectacle works with rather than against the narra-
tive’s agenda (i.e., capturing the criminal); in fact, it is pivotal to
the story.”37 While calling attention to the diegetic function of the
song-and-dance sequence is important for complicating the the-
ory of the gaze in film spectatorship, I suggest that even in pro-
duction numbers that seem to have no evident diegetic value,
the very act of dancing can complicate Laura Mulvey’s argument
about passive and fetishized showgirls that are reassuring objects
of the male gaze.38 Mehta suggests interrogating the reduction
of female characters’ relationship to the image to the process of
fetishization by paying attention to “the female body’s ability to
speak through gesture and movement.”39 McLean argues that
dancing in particular can never be fully recuperated by narrative
closure, as the very presence of a dancer on-screen betrays “the
essential duality, the distance between, narrative and spectacle,”
since “dance cannot be a fictional treatment of itself in perfor-
mance. To dance, one has to be able to do it, not merely to suggest
it.”40 On-screen, then, dance is a mode of performance that can
reveal in a flash the distance between the real-life authority of a
virtuoso performer like Dixit and the narrative-bound fictional
characters she plays, thus preventing a reduction of the leaping,
swinging, shimmying Dixit to a mere fetishistic image.
Dance continues to play a central role in Dixit’s star text,
as her recent films demonstrate, and, indeed, her continued fame
as a dancer-actress opens up and challenges conventional trajecto-
ries of female stars’ careers in Hindi cinema. Her so-called come-
back film, Aaja nachle (Come, Dance!, dir. Anil Mehta, India, 2007),
was produced after a five-year hiatus during which she got mar-
ried, relocated to the US, and had two children. The film is clearly
designed as a vehicle for her dancing talents in that it has extratex-

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tual resonances with Dixit’s life and comes across as a paean to her
and to popular Hindi film dance. In the film, Dia Srivastav (Dixit),
New York City resident and dance trainer, returns to her hometown
in India to revive the dance academy where she learned her skills.
Whereas in her earlier films Dixit danced to seduce the hero or
trick the villain, here she dances and choreographs performances
to rejuvenate an entire community and ostensibly even preserve a
national tradition. As the principal protagonist and sole star in the
film, and particularly in her role as choreographer within the dieg-
esis, Dixit articulates her lasting power and agency within the Bom-
bay film industry. For the first time, she not only performs but also
creates; she has moved from being the disciple to becoming the
guru and teacher. This is in keeping with her more recently being
celebrated on TV shows and in award ceremonies as the leading
exponent of popular Hindi film dance. Dedh ishqiya (dir. Abhishek
Chaubey, India, 2014), released seven years after Aaja nachle, con-
tinues the Dixit-as-dance-guru figuration when it concludes with
the sensuous noblewoman, Begum Para (Dixit), eloping with her
maid and opening a dance school for young girls, a safe haven for
dancing bodies swirling in a homoerotic world of female desire,
away from the prying eyes of the male protagonists. In Gulaab Gang
(dir. Soumik Sen, India, 2014), Rajjo (Dixit) is the fierce leader of
a group of female vigilante activists in a village in central India. In
this film, Dixit’s dancing body is also choreographed to showcase
dynamic action sequences in which she bounds across obstacles
and leaps over trucks to land hefty punches on the corrupt men of
the village. These roles are a far cry from those reserved by popular
Hindi cinema for older, married actresses in their forties. Rather
than play benign and marginal mothers or sisters-in-law, Dixit is
the lead actor and central protagonist in all these films, strikingly
unencumbered by the narrative and representational demands of
heterosexual romance. Her fame as a dancer-actress produces a
different star text than that of her contemporaries like Juhi Chawla
or Manisha Koirala, with Dixit’s spectacular dancing body proving
difficult to fit into the maternal mold reserved for older actresses
and resisting declining into character actor oblivion. The kinetic

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dynamism of Dixit’s dancing body (along with her considerable

acting prowess of course) allows her to script an entirely new text
for the female star in her forties. Even as her earlier dance num-
bers are endlessly commemorated, she refuses to be ossified and
performs the item number “Ghagra” (“Skirt”) in Yeh jawaani hai dee-
wani (This Youth Is Crazy, dir. Ayan Mukherjee, India, 2013), flirta-
tiously swirling her skirts at Ranbir Kapoor, the current heartthrob
and youth icon, younger than her by fifteen years.
In the two decades since Dixit’s racy production numbers
in Beta, Khalnayak, and other films, the Hindi film heroine’s dance
vocabulary has permanently altered to include the dance moves
that Dixit made so popular. The Hindi film narrative no longer
labors to justify these dance numbers, as evidenced in the item
number. From initiating the bridging of the heroine/vamp divide
in “Ek do teen” in 1988, to performing an item number herself
in Yeh jawaani hai deewani, a kinesthetic history of Dixit’s career
over these twenty-five years encapsulates and has indeed produced
radical changes in popular Hindi cinema’s representation of
dancing bodies, especially those of its lead actresses and of female
protagonists in general. As the celebrity judge on the hugely popular
television dance show Jhalak dikhhla jaa since 2010, Dixit has been
anointed as the prima donna of Hindi film dance, extending her
stardom into the realms of television and the Internet (with her
official website and Facebook page featuring her dance training
videos and interactive coaching tools in an “Online Gamified
Dance Academy”).41 With trademark moves — a coquettish raise
of the eyebrow, a wanton toss of her head — or instructions to the
show’s participants on how to perfect that subtle swing of the hip
in “Hum ko aaj kal hai intezaar” from Sailaab (while advising them
to “always smile as you sway”), Dixit activates spectatorial memories
of her dancing on television sets every night. Indeed, the question
“Stardom ke peeche kya hai?” (What is behind the stardom?)
requires no prevarication in the case of the Dixit star text.

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Notes
I have drawn on sections of my dissertation in writing this article. For

critical readings and suggestions, I wish to thank Neepa Majumdar,
Lalitha Gopalan, Ranjani Mazumdar, Marcia Landy, and Lucy
Fischer.
The title of this essay, “Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai/What Is behind

the Stardom?,” is an allusion to Madhuri Dixit’s controversial song-
and-dance sequence, “Choli ke peeche kya hai?” (“What Is behind/
inside Your Blouse?), from the film Khalnayak (Villain, dir. Subhash
Ghai, India, 1993) and indicates as well my own interrogation of the
role of film dance in female stardom.
1. “Choli ke peeche kya hai?” sparked a censorship controversy

in 1993, and a petition was filed in the Delhi High Court
demanding the deletion of the number from Khalnayak and a
ban of audiocassette sales on account of its suggestive lyrics and
dance moves. See Bhawana Somaaya, Jigna Kothari, and Supriya
Madangarli, Mother Maiden Mistress: Women in Hindi Cinema
1950 – 2010 (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2012); Shahid
Khan, “Khalnayak Movie Review,” Planet Bollywood, www
.planetbollywood.com/displayReview.php?id=041206024436
(accessed 15 May 2013).
2. Karan Bali, “Madhuri Dixit: A Profile,” Upperstall, li261-173

.members.linode.com/people/madhuri-dixit (accessed 13 June
2013); Sukanya Verma, “The Power of Madhuri,” Rediff.com,
specials.rediff.com/movies/2007/may/15sld1.htm (accessed
1 September 2013).
3. Neepa Majumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom

and Cinema in India, 1930s – 1950s (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2009); Rosie Thomas, Bombay before Bollywood: Film City
Fantasies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013);
Kaushik Bhowmick, “The Emergence of the Bombay Film
Industry, 1913 – 1936” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 2001).
4. Majumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!, 175.
5. For discussions of the heroine and vamp figures, see Ranjani

Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2007); Asha Kasbekar, “Hidden Pleasures:
Negotiating the Myth of the Female Ideal in Popular Hindi

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Cinema,” in Pleasure and the Nation, ed. Rachel Dwyer and

Christopher Pinney (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001),
286 – 308; Jerry Pinto, Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb
(New Delhi: Penguin, 2006); Anustup Basu, “ ‘The Face That
Launched a Thousand Ships’: Helen and Public Femininity in
Hindi Film,” in Figurations in Indian Film, ed. Anustup Basu and
Meheli Sen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 139 – 57.
6. Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema, 90.

7. Sangita Gopal, Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood
Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 41.
8. Monika Mehta, Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Shohini Ghosh, “Queer
Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television and Queer Sexuality
in India,” in Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian
Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2001),
207 – 21; Shohini Ghosh, “The Troubled Existence of Sex and
Sexuality: Feminists Engage with Censorship,” in Writing the
Women’s Movement: A Reader, ed. Mala Khullar (Delhi: Zubaan/
Kali for Women, 2006), 482 – 514.
9. Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in

Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: British Film Institute,
2002); Gopal, Conjugations; and Anna Morcom, Hindi Film Songs
and the Cinema (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007).
10. Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions, 129 – 35.
11. I take into consideration as well studies of the Hollywood

musical, which categorize the genre into backstage and
integrated musicals. This taxonomy does not apply as neatly
to popular Hindi cinema, which features song-and-dance
sequences across various genres as well as the mixed-genre
masala form and rarely depicts the mounting of a show as in the
backstage musical. Hindi film employs the performance modes
of backstage and integrated musicals (i.e., foregrounding singing
and dancing skills or expressing emotions, respectively) without
adopting their narrative structure.
12. Indeed, it is the iconicity of Dixit’s dancing body that the
acclaimed painter M. F. Hussain celebrated in his paintings of
the actress and in his film Gaja Gamini (India, 2000).

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13. Item girl is a journalistic term for a female performer in a dance
number known as the “item number” that bears no relation to
the narrative but is inserted purely as a spectacular attraction.
14. The production number is different from the Hollywood

backstage musical number in that it need not be integrated into
a narrative of putting on a show. While the performance in the
production number may be frontal and for an internal audience
in some cases, the Hindi film narrative does not labor to situate
such a performance within a backstage narrative. Within the
same Hindi film, then, one can find varied performance modes,
while in the case of the Hollywood film the inclusion of music
radically alters the narrative structure.
15. From the 1940s to the 1990s, a handful of male actors such as
Master Bhagwan, Shammi Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal
Haasan, and Jeetendra danced in films and, even then, mostly in
coupled production numbers. Mithun Chakraborty, the disco-
dancing sensation of the 1980s, is among the rare male actors
whose dancing bodies were spectacularized in a manner similar
to that of actresses. In the current Bollywood mode, production
numbers are also designed for male stars like Hrithik Roshan,
Shah Rukh Khan, and others. However, even now, while there
is a proliferation of item girls, the corresponding equivalent for
male performers, that is, “item boys,” is not a regular feature of
Bollywood films. For a discussion of Shammi Kapoor, see Amit
Rai, “An American Raj in Filmistan: Images of Elvis in Indian
Films,” Screen 35, no. 1 (1994): 51 – 77.
16. Partha Chatterjee, “A Bit of Song and Dance,” in Frames of Mind,

ed. Aruna Vasudev (New Delhi: UBS Publishers’ Distributors,
1995), 197.
17. Unlike in the Hollywood musical, in which male stars like Fred
Astaire and Gene Kelly are held to be the epitome of film dance
performance and whose star status owes much to production
numbers specially designed to show off their dancing skills, until
recently dance in popular Hindi cinema has been much more
crucial to the construction of the female star text.
18. Star and Style, 2 – 15 December 1988, 70.
19. Mehta, Censorship and Sexuality, 160.

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20. Nidhi Tuli’s documentary, The Saroj Khan Story (India, 2012),
interviews Khan and various actors and directors who worked
with her and offers an in-depth view of her choreography as well
as the changes she initiated in Hindi film dance style.
22. Gopal, Conjugations, 41; Akshay Shah, “Tezaab Movie Review,”

Planet Bollywood, www.planetbollywood.com/displayReview.php
?id=041806055221 (accessed 19 June 2013).
23. Quoted in Bhawana Somaaya, Jigna Kothari, and Supriya

Mandangarli, “Madhuri Dixit: Had I Really Done All Those
Films?,” Rediff.com, 17 May 2012, www.rediff.com/movies
/slide-show/slide-show-1-birthday-special-revisiting-madhuri
-dixit/20120515.htm#1.
24. Dixit, as Mohini, also uses the ramp to model different outfits
in the manner of a fashion show. The conflation of the spaces of
dancing and modeling in the film indicates a new body culture,
as film dance shows and ramp modeling became more common
in India in the early 1990s.
25. Quoted in Patcy Nair, “Saroj Khan: Actresses Now Don’t Like
to Work with Me,” Rediff.com, 29 March 2012, www.rediff.com
/movies/slide-show/slide-show-1-interview-w ith-choreographer
-saroj-khan/20120329.htm#4.
26. Chatterjee, “Bit of Song and Dance,” 215.
27. Madhuri Dixit, interview by Usha Iyer, Mumbai, India, 27 June

2013.
28. For an analysis of how the narrative attempts to rein in the

sexual charge of this number, see Mehta, Censorship and Sexuality.
29. We are not specifically told that Nirmala is a classical dancer,

but in the flashback to her youth, we see her perform a hybrid of
the classical dance forms of bharatanatyam and kathak. Nautanki
is a North Indian folk dance and theater performance tradition.
Often in Hindi film dance, nautanki is reduced to a generic folk
dance, typically of a raunchy nature.
30. Kathak is the dominant North Indian classical dance form, one
of the first to be canonized as classical by the Sangeet Natak
Akademi (National Academy for Music, Dance, and Drama).

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31. Bharatanatyam is the dominant South Indian classical dance

form, also canonized as classical by the Sangeet Natak Akademi.
33. A similar heart-breast involution is present in “Choli ke peeche

kya hai?,” in which Ganga (Dixit) responds to the question
“Choli ke peeche kya hai?” (What is behind/inside your blouse?)
with “choli mein dil hai mera, yeh dil main doongi mere yaar
ko” (my heart is inside my blouse, the heart that I will give to my
love).
34. See Majumdar, Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!, for more on

the “dual star text” produced by the split between voice and
body of the female playback singer and the on-screen actress,
respectively.
35. Adrienne McLean, Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and

Hollywood Stardom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2004), 142.
36. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in

Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy
and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),
833 – 44. Mulvey has famously argued that mainstream popular
cinema highlights a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, and in fact
“builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself”
(837). While Mulvey acknowledges the potential of spectacle
to disrupt narrative coherence and threaten the stability of the
narrative system, her emphasis is on the narrative’s containment
of spectacle through the mechanisms of closure at the end of the
film that reassert the status quo.
38. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 838.
40. McLean, Being Rita Hayworth, 127.
41. “About Us,” Dance with Madhuri, www.dancewithmadhuri.com

(accessed 4 May 2015).

Camera Obscura
Usha Iyer is an assistant professor in the screen studies program

at Clark University. Her research focuses on dance, stardom, and
gender in Indian cinema. In her book project, she examines the role
of dance in the construction of female stardom in Hindi cinema from
the 1930s to the 1990s. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming
in Figurations in Indian Film (2013), Movies, Moves and Music: The Sonic
World of Dance Films, and The Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema.
Figure 2. Dixit performs “Choli ke peeche kya hai?”

(“What Is behind/inside Your Blouse?”) in Khalnayak
(Villain, dir. Subhash Ghai, India, 1993).

Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai Madhuri Dixit

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Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai Madhuri Dixit

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Figure 1. Madhuri Dixit performs “Ek do teen” (“One Two

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