Global Dancing in Kolkata, A Companion to the Anthropology of India

CHAPTER 7 Global Dancing in Kolkata Pallabi Chakravorty Arjun Appadurai (1997) has recently observed that the main feature of globalized public culture in India is the explosion of print and electronic media. Emphasizing the role of film, television and video technologies that lie at the heart of the transformation of India’s public sphere, he has described the rise of a culture of celebrity and consumption inextricably linked to the economic reforms of the mid-1990s. Implemented under the banner of “liberalization,” these reforms have opened up a consumption-led path to a transnational culture saturated with media, images, texts, and oppositional ideologies (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995). This globalization of Indian national culture has had far-reaching impacts on classical dance forms, such as Kathak and Bharatnatyam, as well as on folk forms like the martial art practice of Kalarippayattu (Zarilli 1995). My previous work on one such classical dance form, Kathak, examined the democratization of Kathak within the context of this “public culture” and its growing popularity among middle- and lower middle-class women in urban and semi-urban areas. In Bells of Change (Chakravortry 2008), I argued that the globalization of India’s public sphere has given rise to a heterogeneity of voices that is refashioning the classical dance of Kathak in multiple ways. This work also showed how explosion of new media on cable television and the participation of a wide cross-section of dancers (including diaspora dancers) in workshops and festivals have collectively disrupted the singular ideology of Kathak as the high culture of an authentic Indian or Hindu identity. This chapter builds on my previous argument by exploring the ways in which the globalization and Bollywoodization of Indian culture have given rise to various new dance genres, particularly dance contests on television reality shows. After first reviewing the anthropological literature on dance, and on Indian dance in particular, I focus on one such reality show, Dhum Machale, in order to suggest that dance reality shows A Companion to the Anthropology of India, edited by Isabelle Clark-Decès © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2011 Isabelle Clark-Decès 138 PALLABI CHAKRAVORTY are opening up new public spaces for contestations and reaffirmations of identities in contemporary India. More specifically, these dance genres are reconfiguring narratives of middle-class respectability by producing new identities for women from various socioeconomic strata in urban India. DANCE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS Despite its peripheral status in the discipline, early anthropologists, including Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Tylor, and Franz Boas, showed some interest in dance, if only to stress its social or cohesive and integrative functions in non-Western societies. Later, the study of dance bifurcated into two related fields – dance ethnology and dance anthropology, the former focusing on historical and comparative perspectives, and the latter on scientific generalizations about human cultures (Grau 1993). A significant interest in dance anthropology was laid out in the 1960s and 1970s, when scholars such as Adrienne Kaeppler, Joann Kealiinohomoku, Anya Royce, Judith Hanna, and Drid Williams began to emphasize not merely the social function, but the form and structure of dance in society (Reed 1998). Viewing both dancing and bodies as socially constructed entities, these scholars reformulated dance as a “culturally structured movement system” (Grau 1993:25; Farnell 1995; Kaeppler 1985), with the aim of understanding the “lived body,” “processes,” “functions,” and “symbolic systems” (Snyder 1990). Influenced by Boasian cultural relativism, the ethnoscience of the 1960s, and ideas of competence and performance derived from the theories of Saussure and Chomsky (Kaeppler 1991), anthropologists of human movement produced ethnographic studies of dance that drew on ethnoscientific structuralism (Kaeppler 1967; 1978), semiotics theory (Williams 1981), and psychobiological theories of dance (Hanna 1979). In all of these formulations, dance was envisioned primarily as a “system of communication” that could be analyzed through the categories of etic and emic, the semantics of body languages, or the sharing of emotion. In the mid-1980s and 1990s, Victor Turner (1987), Richard Schechner (1985), and William Beeman (1993), among others, worked to incorporate dance, ritual, theater, festival, and carnival into the field of “performance studies.” These studies called attention to the Eurocentric biases that had long been inherent in the categories of “dance” and “theater,” pointing out, for example, that theatrical activities are rarely separated from dance in many non-Western cultures. This performance model of culture shifted the central analytic focus of dance studies from movement systems and the cultural cohesion of shared symbols to processes of cultural contestation and change. Much of this development in dance anthropology was also linked to current debates in modern linguistics (Williams 1991), as can be seen most vividly in John Lewis’s study of Brazilian Capoeira (1992; 1995) – a complex genre that includes elements of martial arts, music, dance, theater, ritual, and sport. Using movement analysis derived primarily from Peircean semiotics, Lewis highlighted the contested and polysemic nature of all cultural production, and in so doing, departed definitively from earlier functionalist understandings of dance that emphasized shared meanings and integrated ethos and worldview. GLOBAL DANCING IN KOLKATA 139 Around the late 1980s and early 1990s another significant paradigm shift occurred in both dance anthropology and other fields of dance scholarship. As Reed noted (1998), studies of the politics of dance and the relations between culture, body, and movement then came to the fore. Drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Judith Butler, this new scholarship underscored, to put it somewhat broadly, the importance of human agency, intentionality, and resistance. In the writing of these poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists, the body became a key locus of dance analysis (Foster 1986; 1995; Morris 1996), and one that was envisioned primarily either as a technical tool for the enumeration of political agendas or a text on which various politics were played out or inscribed. This conceptualization of the body “as text” (which continues to underpin the notion of choreography for theatrical concert dances from ballet to modern to postmodern works), however, did not adequately theorize the interactive processes of performance and the contextual basis of meaning-making through dance. Many studies, still implicitly structured by the Cartesian binary, simply reified the body as the primary analytical category in the study of dance – a critique that has been advanced most forcefully by theorists like Cynthia Novack (1995:179). This is a problem that unfortunately persists in dance studies today, as scholars continue to focus on isolated individuals and bounded bodies. INDIAN DANCE AND SOCIAL THEORY Anthropological studies of dance in India can be traced to Milton Singer’s well-known work When a Great Tradition Modernizes (1972). Singer conceptualized performances such as prayers, rituals, recitations, rites, ceremonies, and festivals as the elementary constituents of culture and, therefore, the definitive units of observation. These performances, he argued, were always secular and sacred, religious and artistic. Analyzing cultural performances as “cultural media” that included various modes of communication, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, Singer argued that every kind of performance, whether song, dance, or drama, communicated and expressed the gist of Indian culture. As he observed, “Study of the different forms of cultural media in their social and cultural contexts would … reveal them to be important links in that cultural continuum which includes village and town, Brahman and non-Brahman, north and south, the modern mass media culture and the traditional folk and classical cultures, the Little and Great Traditions” (1972:76–77). But the little and great traditions (translated as “folk” and “classical”) that so intrigued Singer came under scrutiny by scholars of Indian culture in the 1980s. Joan Erdman’s (1987) work on Uday Shankar, for example, opened up important debates surrounding nationalism, history, and the construction of Indian dance around the categories of “classical” and “folk.” She argued that by recontextualizing Indian dance as the pure expression of an “authentic Indian identity,” the dance revivalists of the 1920s and 1930s had left little room for modern dance pioneers like Uday Shankar. Influenced by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and French pianist Simon Barbiere, Shankar invented a new Indian dance form in the first part of the twentieth century that was popular in the West, but widely rejected by Indian critics because it did not neatly fit the nationalist categories of “classical” and “folk.” In a similar vein, the 140 PALLABI CHAKRAVORTY groundbreaking work on the devadasis (female temple dancers) of South India by Amrit Srinivasan (1985) highlighted the processes by which the Anti-Nautch social reform movement of the 1890s stigmatized the devadasis as prostitutes, considering them menaces to society. The systematic campaign against both the devadasis and tawaifs/baijis (north Indian courtesans) on the part of both the educated Indian elite and their Christian missionary counterparts essentially transformed their dances into “shameful practices” (see Walker 2004 and Chakravorty 2008 for an elaboration on the dance of the tawaifs/baijis). Prior to Srinivasan’s seminal research on the history of Indian dance, its development was often portrayed as a linear, continuous trajectory that began with the Sanskrit treaties of the Natya Shastra (Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts) and that remained relatively unchanged throughout the centuries. After Srinivasan, however, contemporary scholars began to highlight the inherently constructed nature of classical dance narratives such as Bharatnatyam and Kathak, as well as the marginalization of both the devadasis and the tawaifs/baijis. The traditional practitioners of Bharatnatyam, the devadasis, have remained the focus of much dance scholarship during the last few decades, as the relationships between colonialism, nationalism, history, and the renaming of Sadir (the dance of the devadasis) as Bharatnatyam have increasingly been scrutinized from various perspectives (Allen 1997; Kersenboom-Story 1987; Meduri 1988; 1996; O’Shea 2007). Frederique Marglin (1985), for example, explored Odissi, another classical Indian dance, as a practice of the devadasis of Orissa, focusing particularly on a semiotic analysis of the devotional rituals carried out by the devadasis in temple precincts. Similarly, Kersenboom-Story (1987) and Srinivasan (1985) explored the lives and dances of the devadasi under precolonial and colonial rule, and Meduri (1996) further demonstrated how the devadasi became the central figure in debates around womanhood, sexuality, and national identity in India. As more and more voices enriched the discussions around Bharatnatyam, the disagreements at times grew heated. In particular, the stories of Rukmini Devi (an Indian theosophist and dancer 1904–1986) and Balasaraswati, the twentieth-century pioneers of Bharatnatyam who inhabited two very different sociopolitical spaces (the former a reformer and part of the social elite; the latter from the devadasi lineage) produced both exciting and factionalizing discourses that resulted in polarization along several axes: brahmans versus non-brahmans, middle class versus hereditary practitioners, Krishna Iyer (a Tamil lawyer, freedom fighter, and classical artist who fought for popularizing the dying art of Bharatnatyam in South India, 1897–1968) versus Rukmini Devi (Meduri 2001). O’Shea’s recent book (2007) on Bharatnatyam even analyzed its spiraling trajectory from devadasi practices to competing discourses on identities that are simultaneously regional, national, and global. This body of scholarship, grounded in postcolonial history, has been particularly useful in showing the suppression of subaltern history by an elite nationalist narrative of Indian dance, which constructed both national identity and middle-class sensibilities in ways that arguably erased the presence of the subaltern (Ram 2009). These studies have removed the cultural practice of dance “from the realm of the exotic custom, the festival, the ritual, and the like and into the center of the historical problematic, [recognizing] that the rituals and festivals are sites in which larger and more dynamic fields of discourse (singular), larger and more powerful hegemonies, are being constituted, contested and transformed” (Dirks et al. 1994:6). GLOBAL DANCING IN KOLKATA 141 GLOBALIZATION OF INDIAN DANCE Indian dance is now deeply engaged in a mushrooming visual culture driven by new media and new consumers, and created by fundamental changes in the nation’s economic and cultural spheres. Some of the greatest impacts of these changes can be seen in Bombay films, which were reconstituted as Bollywood in the 1980s. According to Daya Kishan Thussu, “The combination of national and transnational factors, including deregulation of the media and communication sectors, the availability of new delivery and distribution mechanisms, as well as growing corporatization of the film industry, have contributed to [the] global visibility of popular Indian cinema” (2008:97). The global prominence of Bollywood arguably began in 1994 with the film Hum Aapke Hain Koun? (Who am I to you?), a musical that focused on two weddings and that played for almost a year, grossing more than a stunning $30 million. The expansion of the Bollywood market to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and the East Asian countries is a tale of spectacular marketing success. The dominance of Bollywood cinema over all other aspects of cultural production deemed Indian, especially music, dance, and fashion, is particularly significant, and linked to a “cultural conglomeration involving a range of distribution and consumption activities from websites to music cassettes, from cable to radio” (Rajadhyaksha 2008:20). The dramatic expansion of television since the early 2000s, along with the emergence of cable networks such as Zee, Sony, and Star, have provided publicity engines for the rhizome-like circulation of Bollywood films, and especially the song and dance sequences (Thussu 2008). In fact, the song and dance sequence (renamed the “item number” in the 1990s) is a central aspect of Bollywood’s culture industry today, which usually features an overly sexualized dancing girl known as the “item girl.” Sangita Shresthova (2008) has explored the powerful cyclical migration of dance from films to live staged performances to films and then back again to stage. The film dances once deemed frivolous and lowbrow by the middle classes in India as compared to the classical concert dances are now regularly taught in dance schools along with the classical forms. The live staged performances of the film dances are a big draw in India and among the diaspora, and circulate now as authentic Indian identity. The result, she argues, has been a dynamic transformation of a medium (called “filmee dance,” or dance choreographies from films), influenced by existing classical and folk performance traditions, to a medium called Bollywood dance which has, in turn, influenced performed expressions of Indianness (2008:245). This constant movement of dance from one medium to another, or from one cultural context to another, has resulted in a coalescing of various dance genres into perpetually hybrid formations. LEARNING TO DANCE FROM BOLLYWOOD The music was blasting from a laptop and the youthful faces were moving to the music with shakes, breaks, jumps, twists, and turns. The instructor with a trendy cap on his head and a sleeveless T-shirt that revealed well-muscled arms shouted, “Drop to the floor!” The dancers clad in jeans and sneakers dropped horizontally on the 142 PALLABI CHAKRAVORTY floor from a vertical position with an easy slide. They were moving constantly with furious energy and sweating profusely. The ceiling fan seemed decorative, wholly inadequate for the hot and humid air of a Kolkata summer. I was standing awkwardly in the small room with my notebook and microcassette player trying to record what I was seeing, hearing, and experiencing. I was immersed in a world of new practices and new ways of knowledge transmission between dancing bodies. In the dance halls of Mumbai or dance classes such as the one I was visiting in south Kolkata, students learn “item numbers” from choreographers who are teaching hundreds of students in various locations during rehearsals for shows or through workshops for polishing techniques. In many of these dance classes, the laptop is a constant source of information. It was certainly one of the biggest investments for the choreographer whose class I was observing. He explained the importance of the laptop for him: I looked up movements by famous Bollywood dancers like Hritik Roshan and if a movement is appealing I copy and put it on my dancers. This is not a new invention. I personally learned a lot of moves from just watching Michael Jackson videos. I copied a move then practiced a lot. I love dancing and would practice for hours. I was always a dancer. Now I want to be a famous choreographer. The dancers in his class came from varied dance backgrounds. Many had Indian classical training, many had Western training (though the term “Western” is nebulous and can mean anything from hip hop and salsa to Bollywood freestyle), and many were self-trained. Although, the dancers I was observing resembled the backup dancers of Bollywood, they were mostly local dancers with dreams of making it to Bollywood. They were young, ambitious, flexible and adept at learning any steps or movements presented to them. A very talented dancer and a participant on the television dance reality show Dhum Machale (which will be explored in more detail in subsequent sections) explained: I began with Ananda Shankar’s school of modern dance. I then studied the classical dance style of Odissi for a long time. However, I was always attracted to Western dance. I looked at ballet on television and studied it on my own. I also tried to do moves used by gymnasts. Television was a source of inspiration. Now I am studying to learn Western dance. The dance classes like the one I was visiting in South Kolkata resemble the dance halls of Mumbai. In the dance studios in Mumbai (such as Satyam in Juhu), dancers and choreographers gather to choreograph and practice “item numbers.” The cultural landscape of dance halls in Mumbai reflects the new style of dance practice in Indian cities such as Kolkata. This evolving texture of daily dance routine is different from the system of practice such as riyaz or abhyas (the structure and ideology of dance practice) associated with classical training (see Neuman 1980; Chakravorty 2004). The dance halls are impersonal commercial spaces much like the neutral cubic studios in the Western world; although they are not new in Mumbai, many have sprung up in recent years due to the demands of a new breed of dancers and choreographers. These aspiring halls of fame have mirrored walls, are often air-conditioned, and have replaced the tabla player, musicians, and gurus of a typical dance context with DJs, big stereo systems, the choreographer and her assistant, and a schedule to keep track of the renters. GLOBAL DANCING IN KOLKATA 143 For the dancing girls or backup dancers of Bollywood films (previously known as “extras,” now as “junior artists”) dance training is a fluid concept. None of the choreographers and dancers I spoke with in Mumbai mentioned being taught by gurus or dance teachers, as was once customary among classically trained dancers (although that, too, is changing, as classical training merges with workshops and dancercise – a fusion of dance and exercise classes). The younger dancers could not, in fact, give me any specifics about their training. Many said they learned from television and were not familiar with classical dancers or film choreographers of an earlier generation who were also classical gurus (such as Lachchu Maharaj, Sitara Devi, Gopi Kishan, and Sohanalal). Classical forms were, to most of them, simply exotic relics of the past. As the Bollywood choreographer Geeta Kapoor has explained, young people mostly learn their moves from fashion shows, music videos, or Bollywood numbers on television, whereas in earlier periods, they would have been trained in Bharatnatyam, Kathak, folk styles, and so forth. In Bollywood, the changes are not only apparent in the nature of the dance practice once associated with traditional embodied aesthetics, but in the negotiations with new editing techniques and computer graphics, as well as in the representations of bodies that are inspired by commodity images. These sculpted dancing figures very often replicate fashion models, as fashion shows and film dance numbers increasingly run together. The emerging embodied aesthetics of Bollywood dancers and choreographers thus form an intertextual field that represents decontextualized bodies in music videos, fashion shows, and films.1 These bodies are not embedded in any particular cultural aesthetics. The dancing bodies are instruments on which movements are crafted using cut-and-paste techniques, as various movements are uprooted from specific contexts and remixed to produce an “item number,” reflecting the commodityoriented consumption practices of a global Indian modernity (Chakravorty 2009). The deeply rooted disciplining of the mind and body (associated with riaz or abhyas) that molded Indian dance subjectivities are now unmoored from such mix-and-match kinetics and aesthetics. The classroom in South Kolkata is also part of this new discursive dance field of fluid borders and aspiring choreographers and dancers, and this new dance in India is part of a larger movement of democracy ushered in by the economic liberalization that began in the late 1980s, but really took off only in the last decade. REFRAMING THE EROTIC: TELEVISION TALES Television has played an important role in democratizing the cultural sphere (Gupta 1998; Mankekar 1993; Ninan 2000). The development of state television (Doordarshan) for “education, information and entertainment” established the state’s role as the official patron of culture, and the birth of Doordarshan in 1959 was integral to the larger nationalist project of building a modern nation-state. The “holy triad” of public service broadcasting – education, information and entertainment – was reiterated by the various committees formed by the government to design guidelines for Doordarshan programming (Gupta 1998:35; Ninan 2000). Although Doordarshan had the lofty goals of maintaining “territorial integrity, national integration, secularism, maintenance of public order, and upholding the dignity and prestige of Parliament, state legislatures and the judiciary,” it was not until 1982 that it attained real significance as 144 PALLABI CHAKRAVORTY the government’s preeminent media organization (Ninan 2000:8). In 1982, Doordarshan introduced the nationwide coverage called the National Programme, which connected Delhi to other states. The National Programme had the explicit goal of disseminating news, information and entertainment for the forging of a “modern national culture” (Mankekar 1999). The mid-1980s to the early 1990s saw the dramatic expansion of television transmitters to various parts of the country in a renewed attempt to create a pan-Indian national culture. Television was meant to disseminate “high culture” that would educate the general population and raise their cultural tastes and values. Its main function was to disseminate nationalist themes and social messages. Classical Indian dance and music thus found regular expression as exemplars of authentic, national Indian culture. The various regional dance styles such as Bharatnatyam, Kathak, Odissi, and Manipuri became symbols of “unity in diversity,” forming the backbone of a pan-Indian national ideology. Folk dances were also presented, but the emphasis remained on classical traditions and the promotion of “high culture.” However, with the introduction of transnational satellites, there was a marked change in national television programming. The number of channels that became newly available offered viewers, for the first time, the ability to choose between various television programs. This, in turn, created a huge shift in cultural production that relied more on advertising and marketing budgets than on spreading national consensus. The production of slick images and texts became the hallmark of television productions. Many channels initially imported programs from America such as Dallas and the Oprah Winfrey Show, among others, but soon channels like Sony and Star reverted to Indian versions of the imports in order to retain the attention of Indian consumers. As Mankekar explains, Transnational images of commodities were modified in response to “local” images, aesthetics, and narratives. For instance, when Pepsi was launched in India, its first few advertisements cleverly incorporated hegemonic, nationalist representations of “tradition” (symbolized by Hindi film celebrity Juhi Chawla doing a classical Kathak dance) as well as “modernity” (in the figure of Goan pop star Remo Fernandes). (2004:417) Kathak was thus used in the advertisements to represent an authentic Indian tradition, even while it sold an American product. Such advertisements suggested that regardless of one’s cultural identity in India, every community is unified through its participation in new consumption practices like drinking Pepsi. Cultural production was thus closely tied to commodity production, and the glamorous image of a dancing Juhi Chawla was now competing with the amateur production of classical dances on national programming. The Pepsi ad also demonstrated that private corporations were emerging as important supporters of the national arts, pushing the traditional arts into new and contested cultural domains in which the line between artistic production and commodity production had become blurred. This transformation ushered in significant changes in the classical dance aesthetics that could no longer be bounded by the past codes and conventions of classicism (Chakravorty 2008). The arrival of cable networks created a significant shift in the narratives of modernity and identity in India. Dance programs such as Footloose and Boogie Woogie on cable networks in the 1990s started the trend of showcasing a new kind of commercial dance genre in which Bollywood, classical, folk, rap, break, and disco were packaged for consumption by the young. These shows followed a dance competition format GLOBAL DANCING IN KOLKATA 145 with jazzy sets and disco lighting and a panel of celebrity judges. For instance, in Boogie Woogie (the longest running dance talent show in Indian history), Bollywood dancer, choreographer, and actor Javed Jaffrey worked as the permanent celebrity judge for the show. Here, performers as young as six or seven amused the audience with spicy numbers incorporating everything from hip hop to Kathak. There were no cash prizes for the performers, but heaps of applause from the judges and a live audience. The popularity of Boogie Woogie (which ended in 2009) forged an alternative narrative of dance in India that seemed to be for everyone, both experts and amateurs, and that released Indian dance from the more austere conventions of classicism. One of the most popular shows in the NDTV empire is called Imagine. NDTV, launched in 1988, is one of the most esteemed television channels in India. It has a market share of around 30 percent, the highest among English-language television channels in India. In addition, it has three national news channels and has recently forayed into the infotainment sector with NDTV Imagine and NDTV Good Times. Imagine featured a dance show for teaching Bollywood “item numbers” to an imagined television audience using a group of live dancers directed by the famous Bollywood choreographer Saroj Khan. In addition to the usual glamorous stage settings of reality television programs, the show had a huge icon of the dancing image of the Hindu deity, Nataraja. The merging of “item numbers” with an emblem of classical Indian dance (Nataraja) again highlights, with particular intensity, the porous boundaries of Indian dance today. Well-known images of glamorous fashion models and beauty queens now compete with traditional images of dance (i.e. of Radha, the principal consort of the god Krishna) as symbols of Indian womanhood. The ideals of youth, beauty, femininity, and modernity are part of a clarion call for a new generation of Indians who have been fed by the media frenzy of celebrity culture. The “new Indian woman” is not constructed only through beauty pageants (Rajan 1993), but represented as performing a blend of classical dances and freestyle Bollywood dances. The key to this new reconfiguration is the merging of tradition with the consumption of commodities to create a new kind of cosmopolitan subject. Thus the sensibilities of womanliness associated with the aesthetic of sringara rasa (erotic emotion) in classical Indian dance is juxtaposed with the images of fashion models wearing designer clothes, accessories, and other indexes of the modern cosmopolitan woman. REMIX AND DANCE REALITY SHOWS Dance reality shows on television form a burgeoning genre of dance practice in India which fuses Bollywood freestyle with Western forms and traditional Indian dances such as classical and folk. A new aesthetics of continuous “remix” (which cross-cuts classical and folk, Bollywood dance, and other hybrid forms that exist in-between) is replacing the past codes and experiences of Indian dance (associated with bhakti (devotion), bhava (feeling, mood), and rasa (aesthetic emotion). These shifts, in turn, index changing notions of “Indianness” and Indian national identity. Remix was originally invented by DJs mixing various musical tracks to create new hybrid forms. The “remix” genre is also associated with dance forms like break and hip hop that embrace notions of play, innovation, and mixing as they travel globally and morph into different forms (Osumare 2002). The practice of remix is now inte- 146 PALLABI CHAKRAVORTY gral to Bollywood and other emerging genres such as dance reality shows. The remix genre is creating new dancing bodies that are no longer bounded by geographical boundaries or boundaries between high and low culture. In this form and practice of dance in India, high and low, classical and folk, Indian and other cultural forms come together to produce endless hybridity. I suggest that remix is the quintessential postmodern experience of pastiche, in which the lines between culture and commodity are blurred (Jameson 1991; 1998; Harvey 1989). This present condition is marked by the postmodern indeterminacy of the body, which exists in a state of flux between the experiential-subjective and objective continuum (Csordas 1994). Thomas Csordas argues that embodiment encapsulates our lived experiences of indeterminacy, where the body cannot 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” (1994:6). The dance reality show Dhum Machale on the television channel ETV Bangla provides an example of a discursive space for the construction of new modes of dances that embody consumerist subjectivities. These dancing bodies are no longer confined to a singular notion of erotic associated with sringara rasa (or erotic aesthetic emotion of the classical dances) but blur the distinction between experiencing emotion and producing commodity. Purnima Mankekar (2004) examines the role of the erotic in contemporary Indian culture. She looks at the relationship between erotics and the consumption of commodities and the reconfiguration of gender, family, caste, and nation. She details the eroticization of commodities through images, texts, billboards, television, and films in the late twentieth century that stimulate the onlooker to desire, possess, or purchase the product. She shows the conjunction between erotic desire and the desire to consume, and calls it a “commodity affect.” There is a symbiotic relationship between television, films, and the production of “commodity affect” (2004:408). The pleasure of consumption is not just about acquiring something, but about gazing upon that thing and desiring to display it. Thus a new kind of subjectivity is produced: an active, sexual, consuming subject full of desires. I explore how this new kind of erotic and consumerist aesthetic desire is produced through the dance reality show Dhum Machale in ETV Bangla. ETV is a Bengali-language regional television channel based in Kolkata. The show Dhum Machale was launched on this channel in 2008 and continued through 2009, airing during prime time three times a week. It was designed to be a concoction of humor, dance, emotional drama, and artistic talent. The staging of the show was set up like a Bollywood event with strobe and technicolored lighting, and the backdrop used elaborate lighting designs to create the gaudy visual extravaganza of Bollywood blockbusters. The costumes were wide-ranging, and full body painting was often used for dramatic effect. The music was generally inspired by film and the songs were in either Bengali or Hindi. The presentations were short and concise, and followed the format of the “item numbers” in Bollywood. A panel of celebrity judges sat on one side of the stage, two of them well-known choreographers in the city and the third a film director. Each contestant, who was selected after many rounds of auditions, was assigned a choreographer and provided with backup dancers for choreographing the pieces. Before each dance sequence, the dancer and her or his choreographer were introduced by the host. They walked in side by side, often holding hands to the applause of a live audience. Then the camera cut to the dance sequence with the spotlight on the dancer. The GLOBAL DANCING IN KOLKATA 147 dance sequences had interludes where one or two co-hosts provided comic relief, often creating a comic supertext that ran counter to the dance narrative on stage. The emphasis of the show from the very beginning was not on showcasing proficiency in one technique, but on versatility. The numbers ranged from African, jazz, Tagore, folk, hip hop, Bharatnatyam, Kathak, Bollywood, and styles that were in-between. The show had certain themes such as “street scenes,” “courtesan,” “cabaret,” etc., and they showcased a particular choreography on a particular dancer. The song selections were chosen by the choreographers to focus on the themes. The show thus provided a televised platform for unknown dancers and choreographers who would otherwise seldom have had such an opportunity. Dhume Machale arguably created a polysemy of intertextual experiences that facilitated competing emotions. The sense of time and space was multidimensional, since the show was not live, but pretended to be. It was even more confusing for me as I began watching the show in India and continued in the United States via satellite television. The television screen was just one of the frames through which I watched. The other frame was the actual stage in the television studio. On that stage, the emotional experience for the viewer ranged from being obviously contrived to being utterly spontaneous. And the most commonly contrived emotion was the collective experience of loss felt by viewers, judges, and participants alike during the elimination rounds. The importance of collective experience was emphasized in the show. The host always talked about the elimination rounds in terms of losing a family member. The dancers showed their ties to “tradition” and to the elders in society by doing pranam or bowing to the stage and to the judges (as their gurus). They embraced their choreographers as if they were best friends and longingly asked the audience to vote for them. Despite the competitive nature of the show, the importance of family and friends was continuously highlighted, as the camera focused in on family members in the audience or short interviews with them during the show. At the same time, the pressures of competing and winning were obvious for the dancers and choreographers. There were interviews with them after losing a round where they spoke candidly to the television audience about the problems they faced during practice sessions and performances. Sometimes the dancers spoke about their difficulties with a particular choreographer, or the choreographer complained about an insincere participant. Altogether, the episodes were emotionally charged, and the dancers and choreographers were all playing to win. There was a viewer’s choice award that was different from the actual award for the show. It was worth seven lakhs of rupees (enough money to buy a small apartment in an outer suburb of Kolkata). As one of the contestants reminded the judges and the audience after she lost in the final round, it was never about the money, but about succeeding. Desire, aspiration, and success were the key emotions of this show. The contestants came mostly from middle- and lower middle-class backgrounds and spoke about their aspirations of becoming famous. This kind of aspirational desire forms the larger emotional landscape for the new Indian youth in the market-driven economy, as William Mazarella (2003) has elsewhere discussed. Bollywood dance practice and its derivative versions showcased in the television reality show genre (such as Dhum Machale) is a potent engine for producing this new kind of desire and aspiration. 148 PALLABI CHAKRAVORTY New desires and aspirations molded through these dance performances on television reality shows produce new disembodied subjectivities in contemporary India. On a more fundamental level these kinds of disembodied subjectivities are connected to the “crisis of the quotidian” (Wolputte 2004:260). Accordingly, the habituations and daily routines that gave structure, routine, and continuity to experience are constantly interrupted through travel, information overload, or multitasking. Postmodernists call it the crisis of memory. A new kind of fleeting and marketed reality dominates the sensory world of the audience and the performer today with the captivating auras of success and celebrity. Dance reality shows are at the heart of these emotional dramas that are simultaneously contrived and real, and in which the pleasures of dancing are transformed into various strategies of winning and losing guided by the promise of transformation. Thus they produce a range of transitory and competing emotions that do not yet have a discursive configuration. As production values take center stage in the global circulation of dance, dance reality shows present to us the entanglement of emotion, desire, and eloquent bodies that sway precariously between morality and desire. The negative association of desire and consumerism is voiced by an Indian citizen in these words: One of the negative influences of cable is the excessive desire for consumer goods, compared to our time. People are more career-minded, but not necessarily as a result of cable. In the past the capacity to desire something was limited. Our “chaibar aasha” (capacity to desire) was limited and we asked for very little and our eagerness for wanting things was limited. Now even 10–12 year olds constantly want this and that. Their eagerness to want things is immense. (quoted in Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009:154) SEXUAL POLITICS AND DANCE DESIRES Dance reality shows open up new anxieties and debates about desire, consumerism, morality, and sexuality that impact middle-class sensibilities. Much like an earlier period of nationalist discourse, women’s bodies have emerged as central to these contestations, and dance reality shows such as Dhum Machale, in particular, have become public battlegrounds for young women and their mothers. (Although males are also well represented in the reality show genre, my focus is only women here.) Many young women use these shows to claim a new modern identity no longer bounded by the nationalist construction of respectable women (or bhadramahila). In fact, the nationalist construction of Indian women as repositories of tradition and spiritual identity is being turned on its head by a new generation of women and men in India, who are engaged in redefining femininity (and masculinity) through the dancing of different narratives of the new Indian democracy. This became particularly evident to me during my interactions with the contestants of dance reality shows in dance classes, coffee shops, and shopping malls. Once I sat down to talk with one of the contestants in her modest living room in a not so fashionable part of South Kolkata. She was one of the youngest contestants (who were generally between 18 and 30). In her miniskirt and highlighted hair, she looked at once ambitious, well groomed, and vulnerable. Her mother came in during our conversation with tea and snacks for me, and because there was an immediate rapport between us, she felt like inviting me to lunch. The stories tumbled out from mother and daughter, and I felt both their conflicts and angst and their sense of pride GLOBAL DANCING IN KOLKATA 149 and accomplishment. The mother told me in detail that her daughter was a regular participant in dance contests, and that she had won many gold medals. The dance competition on ETV, Dhum Machale, was a great opportunity for her daughter to showcase her talent. But there were conflicts with the choreographer, she said, and both mother and daughter were unhappy about the choice of costumes for the show. Both of them narrated to me their embarrassment about a particularly revealing costume that the daughter had once been asked to wear – a problem that had been compounded by the fact that the string of the dress snapped during the performance. Related sentiments regarding costumes were similarly expressed by another contestant, as well as a general disapproval by university professors that she chose to be part of a commercial television show. During many of my interviews with the contestants and their mothers, I learned how the schools and colleges have been openly hostile toward these students, even going so far as to encourage other classmates to avoid their company. The sexual morality of the contestants of reality shows has been repeatedly scrutinized and questioned by academic authorities in public schools and colleges, and generally speaking, contestants and their families have been treated as corrupting influences on the academic environments of schools and colleges. In the context of this ongoing social transformation in India, Ruchira GangulyScrase and Timothy Scrase observe: “The struggle to preserve middle-class culture and identity in the face of great social change highlights the way in which cultural politics is at the core of middle class opposition to neoliberal reforms and, moreover, these cultural struggles take place as much within the relative privacy of the home, as in the public sphere” (2009:152). Although this is partially true for a section of the middle classes, the narratives of these mothers and dancers actively contest these sentiments and clearly recognize the possibility of class mobility in the new economy – attitudes that were repeatedly apparent to me during my conversations not just with mothers and contestants but with producers, recruiters, and choreographers. All of them routinely expressed the importance of platforms such as Dhum Machale in providing opportunities to talented young adults who were not from well-connected or rich families. Many contestants and their choreographers even pointed out that the platform had allowed them to launch their dance or acting careers. Many from the small towns saw this as an opportunity to realize their dream of buying an apartment in Kolkata or a car. One contestant’s mother and grandmother both asserted that their daughter/granddaughter’s life would not follow their own; according to them, the time had arrived for women to pursue their own desires. Others articulated their ambivalence about past codes of morality by explaining that those codes had denied them opportunities. Despite the fact that they did not blindly embrace the dictates of the market or uncritically celebrate commercial platforms like Dhum Machale, they saw the reality television show as opening a crack in the door that might finally allow them to participate in India’s future – a door that had been fully shut for them in the past. CONCLUSION This chapter has mapped the development of dance in anthropological discourses concerning Indian culture and identity. As I have argued, in the Indian context, scholars trained in postcolonial history and anthropological theory have productively 150 PALLABI CHAKRAVORTY analyzed forms of dance in terms of national history, identity, gender, and resistance, but have paid little attention to the impact of media and the emergence of new hybrid forms. Focusing on the Bollywoodization of Indian culture and the reformulation of Indian dance as the practice of “remix,” I have tracked the emergence of new genres such as “dance reality shows.” The unmooring of Indian dance from the past authoritative narratives of classicism has created new debates about cultural authenticity and middle-class respectability. The popularity of Bollywood in the global circulation of Indian dance has given rise to new genres of Indian dance and new identities of womanhood. The new generation of dancers and dance makers or choreographers has put fusion of various dance styles at the center of their identity formation. The aesthetics of “remix” has produced intercultural and intertextual bodies that are versatile and global and are not confined to any particular tradition or aesthetic. Bollywood dance practice and its derivative versions showcased in the television reality show genre such as Dhum Machale are potent engines for producing these new kinds of hybrid consumerist identities. The Bollywoodization of culture has led to new career possibilities in Indian dance for middle-class and lower middle-class women. In earlier days, such dance careers were confined to hereditary practitioners and the women of exclusively elite and affluent families. The broadening of this dance context has allowed young women (as well as men) to explore new career opportunities by participating in venues like reality television shows. However, at the same time, these opportunities have also been seen as exploitative engines of the neoliberal economy that are leading to excessive desire and the erosion of morality. Thus dance reality shows are among the new public spaces in which heated narratives of gender, class, sexuality, and democracy are being brought actively into debate. 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