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The Dancing Subject in Hindi Film

It gradually becomes clear that the subject “we” invoked in the title and contents of Pallabi Chakravorty’s new book, This Is How We Dance Now! Performance in the Age of Bollywood and Reality Shows, refers to those who dance to Hindi film songs. The book contains a wonderful ethnography of participants in the Mumbai and Kolkata film industries. One should note, however, that selected topics focus predominantly on Hindi films in which dances are based on Kathak, “filmi dance” (colloquial, mixed-genre dances), and international hip hop dance forms and their historical contexts. The overarching narrative of the book is how the dance within India has transitioned from its high-art status, representing the traditional, the sacred, and the nation, to a site of struggle between the forces of globalism, consumerism, and spectacle. Thanks to commercial television, the numbers of participants in and viewers of dance have increased exponentially. But this has only intensified the need to acknowledge and unpack controversial related issues—a Gordian knot that Chakravorty attempts to unravel as she presses readers to reconsider their individual stances on the exploitation of sensuality and the meanings of success. The author wants us to know that, in the midst of competing social forces, some individuals still live to dance and feel that, socially and financially, their lives have been upgraded by their involvement with dance. Meanwhile, others from upper-middle-class backgrounds would experience the opposite. Herein lies the second theme of Chakravorty’s narrative— “embodiment and experience.” A third theme is the problem of how current scholarly discourse needs to be fine-tuned and qualified so as to clarify the complexities of applying