Table Of ContentDancing Women
Dancing Women
Choreographing Corporeal Histories
of Hindi Cinema
USHA IYER
1
3
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1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
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A part of Chapter 1 was previously published as “Dance Musicalization: Proposing a
Choreomusicological Approach to Hindi Film Song-and-dance Sequences” in The Evolution
of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema, edited by Ajay Gehlawat and Rajinder Dudrah, Routledge, 2019.
For Kamala, with gratitude
About the Companion Website
www.oup.com/ us/ dancingwomen
Oxford has created a password- protected website to accompany Dancing
Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema. The website
contains short clips of many of the dance numbers discussed in the book.
The reader is encouraged to consult this resource in conjunction with each
chapter. Examples available online are indicated in the text with Oxford’s
symbol .
Acknowledgments
As with the women that dance across these pages, this book also has many co-
choreographers that I owe deep debts to. It is only fitting that I begin a book
that foregrounds collaboration and labor by acknowledging the intellectual
and emotional support of numerous mentors, friends, and family members
that have been part of this journey. Through its earlier avatar as a PhD dis-
sertation, this project owes much to my formidable all- woman dissertation
committee comprising Neepa Majumdar, Marcia Landy, Lucy Fischer, and
Ranjani Mazumdar. The work of these foundational figures in feminist film
scholarship— on female stardom, melodrama, performance, and reading
history through cinema— has greatly informed the methodology of this
book. I feel their shadow presence, like that of the choreographer around the
on- screen dancer, in much of what I write and teach. As dissertation chair
and indefatigable supporter of students, Neepa Majumdar has modeled the
intellectual generosity that makes academic work rewarding and grounded
in an everyday politics of care and solidarity. I could not have asked for a
better mentor.
In its post- dissertation life, this book has benefited enormously from
conversations with scholars of cinema, dance, and music. Davesh Soneji’s
vital scholarship on South Indian dance and music, which excavates the labor
and virtuosity of hereditary performers and reveals the complex caste and re-
ligious politics that produce homogenous “classical” performance cultures,
has been central to my reconfiguring of this book from a study of dancing
heroines to a broader exploration of dancing women across Hindi cinema.
The manuscript review workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center was in-
valuable as well in helping me consider the final form of this book, and I owe
a deep debt of gratitude to Priya Jaikumar, Adrienne McLean, Jisha Menon,
Anna Schultz, and Scott Bukatman for their insightful and astute feedback.
These are scholars whose work I highly admire and friendship I greatly
cherish. The compelling and thrilling work of Hari Krishnan, Pavitra Sundar,
Rumya Putcha, Kareem Khubchandani, and Shikha Jhingan, among many
others, has contributed to an impressive body of scholarship on Indian film
music and dance, building on the foundational work of Sangita Gopal, Ira
xii Acknowledgments
Bhaskar, Lalita Gopalan, and others. I am grateful to be part of a scholarly
community that, through this close attention to the production and recep-
tion of music and dance, produces a rich intermedial history of film in the
Indian subcontinent.
Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History is a most supportive and
convivial professional home. Conversations with Jean Ma, Pavle Levi, Karla
Oeler, Alexander Nemerov, Bissera Pentcheva, Marci Kwon, Shane Denson,
and at the department’s faculty salons, where I workshopped some of this
material, have furthered my appreciation of lyrical writing, visual analysis,
and interdisciplinary thinking. Stanford’s Center for South Asia has offered a
most intellectually rewarding community, and the talks and symposia there
have informed many of the questions raised in this book. Thank you Janice
Ross and Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh for enthusiastically welcoming me
into the dance studies community at Stanford.
I thank Norm Hirschy at Oxford University Press for his ready enthusiasm
for this project and his supportive stewardship throughout. His editorial
work across film, dance, and music has produced some of the most exciting
work in these areas at OUP. I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers
of the manuscript for their close reading and constructive feedback, which
spurred some significant edits. Prabhu Chinnasamy has been a most effi-
cient and responsive project manager through the production phase. Pritha
Chakrabarti’s Bengali- English translations of Sadhona and Modhu Bose’s
autobiographies and expert sourcing of publicity materials of their films con-
tributed significantly to Chapter 3 of the book. Alexandria Brown-H ejazi has
been a most able and skillful research assistant in the final stages of the book.
I look forward to reading their work when published in the next few years.
I am most grateful for the personal interviews with Waheeda Rehman and
Madhuri Dixit. Determined early on to not write a purely textual analysis of
film dance, but to engage with questions of training and labor, I was moved
by these incredible dancing stars’ accounts of their negotiations of the film
industry. Dayanita Singh’s photograph of Saroj Khan and Dixit from her
“Masterji” series prompted an examination of training, rehearsal, and col-
laboration in Chapter 5. I thank her for the use of the photograph from a
masterful series. Where archival traces of dancing women like Azurie and
Edwina Lyons barely remain, I turned to online fan blogs such as “Dances
on the Footpath,” “Cinema Nritya Gharana,” and “Dusted Off,” among many
others which, in their impassioned fandom, produce the only archive for
dancing women erased in official accounts of female pioneers in popular
Acknowledgments xiii
entertainment. The staff at the National Film Archives of India, the Sangeet
Natak Akademi, Doordarshan, and the Nehru Memorial Library were most
helpful and resourceful.
A year- long fellowship at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender
Research helped me engage with a wide range of research on gender across
disciplines, and faculty writing retreats at the Hume Center at Stanford pro-
vided a community of fellow writers. Prior to Stanford, I benefited greatly
from feedback from colleagues at Clark University, the University of the
West Indies, and Jawaharlal Nehru University. I owe my return to aca-
demia and my interest in film studies to many remarkable mentors over
the years, including Madhava Prasad, Ravi Vasudevan, Alok Bhalla, Samar
Nakhate, Aniket Jaaware, Sangeeta Dutta, and Eunice De Souza. Thank you
Monika Mehta, Madhuja Mukherjee, Kyle Stevens, Rajinder Dudrah, Ajay
Gehlawat, Meheli Sen, and Anustup Basu for your valuable editorial inputs
on earlier publications, some of which are related to the material in this
book. The broader field of South Asian film and media studies is an incred-
ibly welcoming and supportive community, and I’d like to thank so many for
their intellectual generosity and camaraderie, including but not limited to
Debashree Mukherjee, Manishita Dass, Kuhu Tanvir, Rochona Majumdar,
Samhita Sunya, Kartik Nair, Lotte Hoek, Gohar Siddiqui, Veena Hariharan,
Priyadarshini Shanker, Nitin Govil, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Anupama
Kapse, Anuja Jain, Bhaskar Sarkar, and Salma Siddique. All of you make our
conferences addas to look forward to!
As I write this alone at home during the coronavirus lockdown, I value
more than ever the soul- sustaining joy, mirth, and comfort that a sparkling
constellation of friends brings to my life. From those closest home, all as daz-
zlingly bright as the California sun, to those further away, but never too far
for a quick enlivening visit, to those in my other home, in India, to whom
many decades of my life belong, you— who would take up pages if I were to
name each one of you— are my family. As for my family, who are also my
friends (and easier to name in one paragraph!), I can’t thank enough my
sister Renu for her ready wit and our shared nostalgia for a childhood filled
with mischief on hot afternoons in suburban Bombay. My parents-i n- law,
Lucy and Sebastian, opened their verdant Kerala home and large hearts to
me from the moment we met. My parents, Geeta and Swaminathan, have
been indulgent, patient, curious, flummoxed, and proud by turn at my many
career and life transitions. Thanks to my mum for daily phone calls that keep
me grounded in the everyday rhythms of life in India. My father’s passion for
xiv Acknowledgments
Hindi film music has bestowed upon my memories of childhood and home
a pervading soundtrack of songs by Saigal, Talat Mahmood, Geeta Dutt, and
Lata Mangeshkar. His cinephilic presence suffuses many parts of this book.
Cyril, my untiring companion through the many adventures of the past fif-
teen years, encyclopedia of Hindi cinema and popular culture, indefatigable
motivator and detractor, has assiduously kept things real— “bhot hard”— for
both of us. Thank you for the hours upon hours of belly- shaking laughter,
passionate arguments, and that unique combination of sarcasm and senti-
mentality. And now, brace yourself for the travails of the next project!
I dedicate this book to my first mother, Kamala. In the three decades that
she has been gone, I have constantly felt her fearless and formidable pres-
ence, her Carnatic and Hindustani singing booming through the air, her
restless intelligence captured in urgent writing in numerous notebooks. This
is for her and for her mother, my paati, Lakshmi— a lineage of remarkable,
unconventional women who never quite fit in and taught us not to as well.
