SPECIAL ARTICLE

The Item Number: Cinesexuality in Bollywood and Social Life

Rita Brara

In trying to capture the power of Bollywoods commercial cinema, this paper looks at what is described in common parlance as an item number. The item number is a cine-segment comprising an item-girl/boy, a racy song, a vivacious dance and a surround of erotic and immanent exuberance. At one remove from the cinema hall, item numbers circulate as video clips and off-screen performances that recreate the cinesexual in social life. At this second level, the item number, re-fashioned through spectacular familial and social practices of the middle classes, draws its sense from diverse, gendered and changing micro-contexts of cine-heterosexuality.

re we all cinesexuals now?1 Nestling amid our multifaceted experiences of the sexual, cinesexuality marks out a terrain of desire, even a philosophy, where we succumb to the images created on lm as individual-cum-social beings. MacCormack (2008: 2) puts it provocatively:
We can ask what is it you have sex with? The answer male or female is imagined as a stable enough term to explain sexuality. But if we answer cinema, questions proliferate beyond rather than refer back to a pre-established system of desire.

Rita Brara (ritabrara@yahoo.com) is with the department of sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

From her perspective, cinesexuality does not seek a return to already-existing expressions of sexualities, but asks of the viewer to look ahead to cinemas offerings. I go along with the thinking that cinema, which is in certain ways normed by the taboos of social life, queers and transgresses that normative. Breaking free of restrictive sexual mores in the realm of the cinematic makes for a pleasurable surrender to transgression and excess alongside the forging of new norms and the retooling of what pre-exists. But granting the cinesexual its secret joys and desires as well as the new social becomings of the old normative, cinesexually transformed lives are still lived, albeit differently, in sexual worlds where pleasure and desire are both expressed and constrained within milieu that are socio-economic, political and heterogendered (Foucault 1979; Krzywinska 2006). My questions turn to how the new normative nds variable expression inside and outside of reel life. Cinesexuality may enable me to traipse from the cinesexual of one lm and onto another, creating my own archive in a happy movement of spectatorial interiority in conjunction with new visual media. But how does one capture the wanderings of new cinesexual desires as these move from the space of cinema and individual recesses/micro-social niches onto the wider social and sexual worlds outside? And what about the commerce of depicting desires on screen as these intersect with culture, gender and class before being internalised as cinesexual by spectators? The norm-orientedness that characterises heterosexuality or heteronormativity is often analysed to draw attention to the marginalising of non-heterosexual desires and relationships (Rich 1980; Butler 2004). Yet, even as a monolithic heterosexuality is increasingly contrasted with non-heterosexuality, the diverse practices that make up heterosexuality in cine- and social life demand attention. My intention in this paper is to explore the wider arena of heterosexual desire that is overlooked when the emphasis is exclusively on the norm-oriented heteronormative, which is, then, equated with the heteroconjugal. The norming

june 5, 2010

vol xlv no 23

67

SPECIAL ARTICLE

and c ine-norming of heterosexual life exists as a practice alongside its subversions. By delving into what is called an item number in the cine-language of India, I attempt to understand, dialectically, both how the cinesexual is normed by social life, and in turn, casts social life in its own and changing images. I begin by noting what several of my acquaintances and internet sites2 describe as the item numbers striking, cinesexual aspects one, that it features a hot, tempestuous performance by an item-girl dancing to a racy song, replete with dramatic light effects and a supporting cast. And that it is a discrete or standalone performance that is loosely connected to the lms plot. As a delineated block of song and dance, it is often envisaged as the lms erotic piece de resistance. Chronologically speaking, the term item number came into linguistic currency among the urban middle classes in India (and the south Asian diaspora) in the late 1990s. On the one hand, the item number remains an aspect of cinesexuality, not its entirety. On the other, the item number grows its meanings from diverse signifying constellations both onscreen visual entertainment which gave rise to the term and the varying social contexts of consumption. Engendered in the specic discourse and practice of popular lm culture in India, the item numbers practice ranges beyond the lmic. Drawing on Deleuzes (1995) triadic assemblage, I nd it productive to envisage the item number as concept, affect and percept, at the rst level. As a concept, the item number frames the cinematic and allegorical space and time of erotic, heterosexual desire. As affect, the item number expresses that which may be viscerally or sensually experienced in the course of its onscreen dance and song performance.3 Perceived as a new mode of seeing/ hearing, the item number is also put to work as a percept (Deleuze, ibid). The item numbers presence is marked in Bollywood and the regional genres of commercial Indian cinema. It is enacted at off-screen social venues and events ranging from urban dance bars and live concerts to wedding celebrations and dance schools.4 At a second plane, I peruse the item number in wider sociosexual contexts where its practice reveals continuities and differences from the cinesexual as screened. Item numbers form part of a cinema of attractions (Gunning 1990), that leads to complex connections and disconnections with gender, class and family as well as the economic and the cultural. The sense of an item number acquires a new relevance or excises an earlier semblance as it taps into the newer currents which circulate outside the lmic in the attempt to retain and resist links to its traditional sense of self (Nayyar 1997). I argue here that the present emphasis on everyday life in sociology (and the social sciences) eclipses our understanding of spectacular performances, including the enactment of spectacular, cinesexual item numbers within the domain of the domestic. I am not saying that we should now concentrate on spectacular performances, but simply that we should focus on spectacular and everyday performances together. Moreover, while I appreciate that the dovetailing of heteronormative images of desire and the commercial is pronounced in our times, and especially, in Bollywood lms, that does not, in my view, make the production of the item number an object of slight or ridicule.

1 Pre-History of the Item Number

The item number shaped up as a discursive form and congealed into a cinematic concept over time. In contrast to the portmanteau term Bollywood, the item number as an expression is, cinematically speaking, homegrown. Its usage is subcontinental and straddles the otherwise linguistically differentiated streams of Indian cinema. Unsurprisingly, the item number reveals the deployment of English words to connote a contemporary, Indian ensemble of onscreen song, dance and desire. The term item number nds an entry in the Wikipedia now as part of the language-in-use for Bollywood lms. By making connections with differing but semantically related discourses, where the term item surfaces, we can perhaps fathom how this apparently bland term emerged as a signier of a sexualised dance performance. The labelling of the item number and the underlying linguistic work is not entirely accidental. For one, the term item is etched in the menu cards peddled by urban eateries. Items here constitute distinct entities that are tempting, chilli-hot, and often what men drool or salivate over. Moreover, such items are served outside the home or the domestic sphere. When in street language, an attractive girl, especially one who is viewed as provocatively dressed, is termed an item, some of the connotations that spill over from food items served in eateries outside the home are carried across to the context of the girl who is outside her domestic realm, bringing out intersemiotic associations between these domains.5 And so the sense of an item number that may be difcult to verbalise gathers its meaning from associational elds that commodify sex and eating (cf Liechty 2005). The word item also denotes each discrete, cultural performance staged at urban variety or cultural programmes, such as a stand-alone song or dance (or song-and-dance) performance. This usage seems to have entered the cinematic conception of an item number that is understood as a distinct segment within the lm. The word number too lent itself particularly well to express economically, in a single word, the blending of song and dance that was not exclusively one or the other.

1.1 The Emergence of the Item Number

The specic use of the term item number is attributed to a description of sensuous dance-performances, often to the accompaniment of old Bollywood songs that were popularised by MTV in the late 1990s. The appellation item girl was rst associated with Malaika Arora. As other channels followed suit, the item girl came to constitute a new and visible role that highlighted the gym-toned, gyrating body beautiful as part of a contemporary aesthetic. This challenge from item numbers on television came home to roost in Bollywood that set about incorporating the item number as a distinct assemblage within its own productions (The Hindu 2007). The early use of the term item number is associated with Malaika Arora and Shahrukh Khans item number Chaiyya Chaiyya (Dil Se 1998) and Shilpa Shettys performance in Shool (1999). In a cine-sense, the genealogy or pre-text of Hollywood item numbers certainly goes back to the cabaret numbers of which Helen, and to a lesser extent, Nadira, Aruna, Bindu and Padma were well-known exponents.6 As history gets rewritten in the language of the present, Helen, who performed in the years
june 5, 2010 vol xlv no 23
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

68

SPECIAL ARTICLE

1952-72, is now described as the original item girl, especially in the language of the younger sections of urbanites. Yet, neither the cabaret artiste/dancer (nor Mona Darling, the sex moll), adequately capture the cognitive and affective space that has been created by the new item girls.7 Former cabaret dancers in Indian lms were cinematically and socially typecast in their roles. They could not make the leap to the status of leading actresses. Nor were the heroines ready to consent to cabaret performances though they were willing to be cast in leading roles as courtesans (Chakravarty 1999). This typecasting was a co-production of the background expectations of leading actresses, lm producers and cine-audiences. The distance that has been travelled in recognising Helen as an outstanding cine-artiste is perhaps captured by the fact that she was awarded a Padma Bhushan in 2009. Now, on the other hand, the item number is envisaged as a performance that may be inhabited by an item girl who may have debuted in that fashion (Malaika Arora, Urmila Matondkar, Lara Dutta, Isha Koppikar); in a cameo or guest appearance by a leading actor or actress (Sushmita Sen, Aishwarya Rai); by a former leading actress (Rekha in Parineeta 2005) or by top-billed actors (Shahrukh Khan; Abhishek Bachchan, for instance). The cinematic typecasting has diminished, and in addition, hybrid forms of dance, including the cabaret style, are clubbed together in current item number performances. Further, the item number works well as a generic description since these dance performances draw on varying traditions Indian classical and folk as well as popular western repertoires. The insertion of a new term in our lexicon item number and the adjectival use of the term item as in item girl, item boy, itemsong, item-dance, item-contest, etc, I think, points to the emergence of a novel phenomenon. It afrms the signicance of the item number as a cinesexual concept that is savoured by spectators, incarnated in contemporary Bollywood lms and broadcast by the print and visual media, quite apart from lm magazines. The term acquired a wider currency as re-mix music video producers began to market CDs that depicted skimpily clad item girls dancing to old Bollywood hits. Semiotically speaking, the sexneutral term, item-actor, has not been espoused to include both item girls and item boys in order to highlight the item numbers emphasis on youthfulness and heterosexual difference. By contrast, the term actor now refers to both actor and actress in current Bollywood discourse.

1.2 Elements of an Internal Structure

The item number has what one may describe as distinct elements interlinked to constitute an internal structure. Exuberant dancing by a cine-star or a starlet, especially written lyrics to anchor the images, songs set to music by maestros in a complementary vein and the razzmatazz of sound and light effects in a staged setting are intended to resonate together. The supporting cast of chorus girls, too, lends rhetorical amplication to the performance (Barthes 1973). The item girl/item boy is a synecdoche of the cinematic item number, representing it in the manner that a peak, for instance, can represent a mountain. She/he has a visually dominant role
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

here but the item number as an entirety brings together talented exponents from different streams to produce the erotic assemblage of dance, song, music and image. Distinct specialisations contribute to the making of the elements that constitute the item number. Lyric writers choose their words and idioms carefully to be in sync with the gestalt of upbeat item songs. For example, the renowned lyricist-cum-poet, Gulzar, uses alliterative phrases (like Chaiyya Chaiyya or Kajra Re Kajra Re) to create evocative word images. He notes that even if the item number features only during the credit titles, as in Saathiya, 2002 (or Slumdog Millionaire 2009), for him the song expresses the storyline in a nutshell.8 Playback singers are handpicked for itemsong renditions to take an example, Sunidhi Chauhans husky voice is currently celebrated and she is referred to as the queen of item numbers. Choreographers, such as Farah Khan, contribute to the creation of a distinctive Bollywood dancing style that is now going global. And music maestros tap into their expertise for fast-tempo dance numbers (A R Raman; Shanker Ehsan Loy). Oscar winner A R Rahman declares that he does not believe that item numbers are a compromise and enjoy(s) creating them.9 These chains of detail then create a spectacular assemblage of more-than-verbal communication what may be aptly alluded to as Spinozas structure of affect. The performance when described in words often evokes adjectives such as hot, steaming, or sizzling but the impoverishment of mere words is palpable when you watch it. In this spectacle of excess, the actors display the contents of their parts in advance through their costumes, gestures and props (Barthes 1973). At this pitch, Barthes notes, it does not matter whether the passion is genuine or not because what the spectators want is the image of passion or in Baudelaires words the grandiloquent truth of gestures (ibid). As the self-contained spectacle nested within the lm-asspectacle, the item number reworks the performance traditions of India, such as the nautanki, that present a story-within-the-story set to song or the Ramlila that enacts an episode-within-the-epic in the context of contemporary visual media (Manuel 1988; Morcom 2001). The structure of the item number has more or less crystallised for the present. Change here consists in changing the elements rather than in dismantling the format. Variations within item numbers are captured on the different registers of lyrics, music, dance, costume, and locales and contemporarily in the changing blends of the global and the Indian in each of these aspects. Incorporating an item boy displaying his muscles, alongside or instead of the item girl, accords with Bollywoods recognition of nascent female desire that is not pathologised. In an analogous manner, changes in the costumes of item girls (ranging from ethnic chic to bikinis or hybrids now), shifts in locale (including beaches such as Miami), or increasingly sexualised dance movements, for instance, go beyond what has already been framed.

1.3 Positioning the Item Number

From one angle, the item number may be regarded as a complete semiotic composition, a thing-in-itself, and a consummation of the theme that is without a location in the plot. The positioning of the item number to mark the beginning or conclusion of a lm here may not be altogether different from Shakespeares insertion of the

june 5, 2010

vol xlv no 23

69

SPECIAL ARTICLE

clowns sonnet as a dramatic technique at the beginning, middle or end of a play. Often, the item girl, like the clown in Shakespeares plays, offers a character that is out of sync with the normative. However, the item number cannot be treated as extrinsic to the heterosexual subtext of the lm that celebrates the dancing female/male form. Even when Bollywoods cine-directors seem to de-centre these enactments by asking questions about item numbers in the course of the narrative these performances are in effect re-centred. During a scripted aside in the movie No Entry, (2005), for instance, the lead actress lets us know that the item girls husband is stricken with cancer and that is why she has taken to this profession, inviting the spectators to identify with her reasons. In the lm Page 3, (2005) the item number is at rst reviled as a truck drivers song by the elite but those who scoff at it are later shown as unable to resist dancing to its beat. Reexive lms too deal with item numbers. Do Bollywoods item numbers hold some features in common with the strip dance sequence that was characteristic of American burlesque cinema in the period 1945-60? Although a striptease is not part of the performance in the Indian item number, both these forms seek to reach out to the audiences desire for spectacular, cine-sexualised dancing as entertainment. Writing on the burlesque lm, further, Schaefer (1997: 55) notes that burlesque sequences attempted to grip the spectators attention solely by the performance without the distraction or restrictions imposed by narrative. Item numbers and burlesque sequences shared the emphasis on the segments deliberate self-containment and adherence to a standardised format. As such, it could be easily and economically inserted in the lm, even as it stretched the limits of onscreen sexual propriety. In a classic statement, Mulvey (1975) put forth the argument that mainstream Hollywood lms enjoin a male gaze such that the male spectator identies with the hero while the onscreen actress becomes the object to be looked at. She believed that feminist lms would challenge such portrayals in a cinema of their own making. Depicting women as objects for the spectatorial male gaze would seem plausible in the context of Bollywood lm production but as Carroll (1990) suggests, not all of it is perversely voyeuristic or fetishistic. Men and women in the audience, too, may identify cine-sexually with feminine or masculine subject positions, as Mulvey (1999) recognised later. Looking at the heteronormative context of Bollywood lms, moreover, it is the item girls who seek to resignify the meaning of their sexy cinematic performances. Instead of holding out hope from feminist lm producers for an alternative cinema, they enunciate their positions on item numbers and their objectication for the male gaze with the help of adjacent visual and print media, the subject of the next section. At the same time, itemboys are increasingly grist for the cine-sexual mill.

By contrast with Goffman, who engages primarily with the idea of everyday performance, what I may refer to as performances with a small p, the idea of a performance in the item number confronts me with a spectacular performance or performance with a capital P that is intended for cinematic entertainment and prot. , Closer to our own times, Judith Butler (1993, 1999, 2004) too, engages with the idea of gender as performance which is a stylised repetition of acts and distinguishes it from the notion of performativity or what can be expressed as the reiterative norm-orientedness that underlies our (gendered) performances (Butler 1999: 179). Butler delineates the signicance of performativity, especially in relation to the norming of sex and gender. She addresses her concerns primarily to transgressions of heterosexual norms, such that homosexual performances, in her view, lead to the production of abject or uninhabitable zones of social life while heterosexualising practices produce what she terms valuable bodies or the bodies that matter (Butler 1993: 3). I nd Butlers suggestion that the norming of sex is indeed performed and leads to the materialisation of a particular type of body useful for an understanding of item numbers. However, here I have adapted her ideas to unravel the workings of normative heterosexuality apparent in Bollywoods current repertoire of item numbers. I argue that in the cinematic context of India, item number performances and the discourse surrounding them produces womens bodies that are regarded by these women themselves as valuable from certain subject-positions and debased from other vantage-points.

2.2 Item Girls: The Production of Spectacular Performances

The spectacular performance of an item number that the viewer sees on the screen is a front-stage and valuable performance for the actor. However, it is not without its elements of cinematic norming imposed upon the actor by the combine of the lms producers and directors who attempt to depict a salable product and a desirable body. These norms may sometimes run counter to the actors own predilections but there is a realm of her performance that is not entirely determined by the lm-makers. The item girls attempts to transform the sexual politics of cinematic visual display is mediated by performances on television, chat shows, lm magazines, internet sites, blogs and other media that is facilitated by the new array of interactive technologies. The actors subjective assessment of her cinematic item numbers is expressed in these other media. Small differences between the cinesexuality envisaged by the combine of lm-makers and the actors own take, broadcast in visual and print media, are perused by fans seeking out the cine-actors viewpoint. Such windows open up the dialogues with nascent cine-sexualities and lead to new discourses on the becomings of the sexual and the cinesexual.

2 The Social Lives of the Item Number 2.1 Item Girls: Recasting Heterosexual Abjectdom
As is well known, Goffman (1959) developed metaphors derived from the stage for his insights into everyday interactions, and especially, the distinction between the front stage and the back stage.

2.3 Resignifying the Item Number: What Do the Item Girls Say?
The statements made by cine-actors on being termed item-girls question the derogatory connotations of this appellation. Asked what it means to be an item girl, Rakhi Sawant avers that it implies that you are beautiful, you have a great gure and you
june 5, 2010 vol xlv no 23
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

70

SPECIAL ARTICLE

are a fabulous Malaika Arora opines that she loves dancing and doing item numbers, which also enable her trips to exotic locales, money and fame to boot. Since cine-stars, increasingly, perform as item girls in guest appearances their voices assume an amplied importance. Bipasha Basu states: There was a time when people considered looking sexy as doing something heinousbut todays scenario is completely changed.11 Or, to quote Celina Jaitley: I hate the term item number. It sounds so derogatory. Its a performance of a different type.12 When queried on which part of her body in her view is most attractive, Kareena Kapoor declares that it is her heart, while Sushmita Sen avers that there is nothing wrong in her wearing her skin. Such statements question the implied debasement in item number enactments and attempt to resignify the meanings of sexualised spectacular, front-stage performances. What you get here, then, is a reformulation of the value of item numbers for actors against attempts that may cast them as abject bodily performances. These performances in visual media outside of cinema may be viewed as back-stage performances relative to the front-stage enactments in the lm. At the same time, these performances also afford mediations between the subjective and the objective in the actors life. Goffman (1959) alerts us to the appreciation that the front stage is no less real than the back stage. Moreover, such interviews that deal in snippets of information about the backstage of a lms production generate interest in the lm per se and constitute a resignication of the back stage for the upfront or spectacular cinesexual performance on screen. In the continuing dance of difference within item numbers, wannabe female actors accede to more revealing item number performances to procure roles in Bollywood lms. As an aspirant put it: Were item girls: we have to stay a step ahead of the leading stars. And the competition is, indeed, hotting up with itemgirl entrants from eastern Europe and elsewhere whose performances, a lm producer declared, were less inhibited. On the other hand, leading heroines also feel the heat of the competition from item girls they are running against time in their short-duration careers to ensure that their star status is not jeopardised by this hot onslaught from item girls who materialise bodies that are considered desirable from a box ofce point of view (cf Datta 2000). As non-resident Indian (NRI) venture capital begins to nance Bollywood lms, moreover, item numbers enactments are lubricated by high monetary values for the relatively short duration of the ve-six days necessary to shoot an item number. As that market becomes a lucrative segment for Bollywoods products, what we get is more globally trendy appearances. The old-urban middle class morality is often given short shrift, if and while the money is good, and especially, during professionally leans periods when an item number can shoot an actor into visual prominence in a spectacular enactment.13 The backstage performance, however, is about legal contracts that seal the worth of revealing but aesthetic shows. Depending upon where you train your lens, the performances of item-actors are screened and revealed from different angles ranging from the valuable and professional to the mercenary and
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

dancer.10

abject. But the spectacular cinesexual as normed on screen and reproduced in other mass-mediated performances spills over as norming for a section of youngsters in the urban middle class.

2.4 Resignifying the Item Number: The Item Girl Contest

The tremendous diversity in the reception of item numbers demands audience segregation. Here, I shall focus rst on that fringe of youngsters that aspires to careers in visual entertainment. Bollywoods item numbers, increasingly seen on TV or as video-clips, are now an intervisual presence across distinct visual media. The arc lights attract a small but growing margin of middle class youngsters who have the requisite talent and are willing to undergo the grooming necessary for item numbers. The paths to item numbers are diverse and criss-crossing modelling, VJ-ing or winning beauty and talent contests. Television is often a source of information about talent searches held in conjunction with TV channels, audio-visual multinationals and movie-makers, who have together created what is now known as reality TV. Examples of talent searches in this milieu of reality TV recently included an Item Bomb contest and I look into some interviews with parents of contestants next. I have culled extracts of these interviews from the net what may be called etnography as distinct from ethnography.14 (1) On being asked what she thought of her daughters participation in the item contest, a 65-year-old mother and retired civil servant said: My daughter has had a passion for dancing since she was a child. And these days you have to go all-out if you want to be some one. This contest gives her a chance to showcase her talent. But we are not prepared for any other compromises. (2) Yet another mom said that her daughter was the only earner in a ve-member family and she did not want her to forfeit the chance. (3) A third one remarked: We had a problem with her choice initially but we did not want to end her dreams. (4) A fourth mother stated that though our daughter did not win the nal round, in our minds she has, because she has been offered so many music video roles. (5) And another mom observed that the item girl contest could not really be obscene, if it was being aired on TV. The contestants in the Item Bomb contest were judged on the basis of their vital statistics, the ability to follow the choreographers instructions and what is described as the oomph factor. Their proponents claimed that they were taking care of the aspirational needs of the young urban India.15 In their own front-stage performances, the organisers argued that they offered the winner a chance to perform an item number in a Bollywood lm. One of the judges saluted the courage of the contestants though some of the judges stated that they were aghast at having to rate body parts. Reality TV contests have also come into their own in the realm of playback singing, apparent in the contest for the Indian Idol (modelled after the American Idol). Increasingly, city-dwellers are asked to rate the performance of participants by sending replies through text messages. The winners may be signed on by commercial enterprises, which successfully dovetail cultural and commercial production through such ventures. The beaming of the contests themselves, too, command good viewership ratings.

june 5, 2010

vol xlv no 23

71

SPECIAL ARTICLE

These item-contests, replete with judges and ideas of objective chance and appraisal, provide an avenue of career development for a section of the middle class through talent competitions. The aspiring item girl certainly mobilises her desires and talents but is it often the mothers who channel these aspirations. A new liaising of the cultural and the economic is apparent as middle class families reorient themselves to the commercial mode of onscreen production (cf Butler 1997).

3 The Reproduction of Item Numbers: Dance Bars

Apart from onscreen media, item numbers are performed at staged travelling shows in metropolises, small towns and rural fairs. Item numbers are also reproduced at the very sites that are shown as their typical locales in lms dance bars. The spectacular front-stage performance of the item number on celluloid simultaneously screens and shields the item-actors body from a literal onslaught by the cinesexual intensities of viewers. Film-makers harness this feature of cinematic technology protably in that virtual rather than real bodies constitute the nal product. By contrast with item-actors, female bar dancers perform Bollywoods item numbers live before a male audience without cine-status. Micro-practices of difference bring out the continuities and discontinuities between onscreen and off-screen enactments. On the one hand, any discussion of these item performances pushes us to consider gender as an independent axis, distinct from class, as bar dancers too try to see beyond the supposed debasement of their bodies and their profession. On the other, a niche for entrepreneurship within a sexualised economy drives bar owners and impoverished girls/families to look for economic gains from bar dancing. In Mumbai alone, about 75,000 bar dancers performed item numbers to recorded music and live orchestras on specially designed, akin-to-cine-set dance oors before male audiences in 2005.16 Many of them belonged to communities where women traditionally danced for a livelihood and were now a part of this new economy. There were non-traditional entrants from the city as well. The dance-bar rendition of the item number is part of the bardancers everyday professional life without the social privileges accorded to cine-item girls. By contrast with item girls onscreen, here real as opposed to virtual dancing bodies are the object of the male gaze, visual display and tactile entertainment in an environment of drinking and masculine pleasure seeking. Drawing on the culture of the traditional mujra performances, the showering of currency notes on favoured bar dancers is regarded as an aspect of masculinity here (ibid). While women bar-dancers routinely inhabit the sexualised, hidden-from-mainstream, public spaces that cater to masculine desire, their social visibility in Mumbai was heightened on their protesting the state governments ban on bar dancing. In 2005, the state government of Maharashtra imposed a ban on dancing in bars on grounds of obscenity and immorality. One of Maharashtras elected representatives, while approving the legislation against bar dancing, declared that everything should be banned except Bharat Natyam and Kathak.17 In a contest of interpretations, feminist lawyers challenged the ban arguing that the performance of item numbers in dance bars was no more immoral than the item numbers shown on screen. Agnes observed,

If an item number can be screened in public theatres, then an imitation of the same cannot be termed as vulgar.18 Dancing for a livelihood was a fundamental right and the Bombay High Court quashed the state governments order. On the other side, activists engaged in anti-trafcking supported the ban since they alleged that bar dancing led to the exploitation of women and the enrolment of minors in this profession. Girls from poverty-stricken homes who were attracted to Bollywood lms were tracked as items and brought to Mumbais dance bars (Nair and Sen 2005). An investigation by the Womens Study Centre of the SNDT University reveals that some bar dancers were initiated into dance bars by aunts or older relatives, who viewed bar dancing as an avenue for a livelihood that was preferable to prostitution in brothels. The SNDT report notes that about 60% of the bar dancers interviewed were the sole earners in their families and spent their earnings to support ageing parents, the education of their children as well as the wedding expenses of their siblings. Subsequently, Mumbais bar dancers were organised in a Bar Dancers Union that seeks to promote their interests within this industry. The union protested the ban and demanded the right to dance for a livelihood against the diktats of the state that arbitrarily marked out dance bars as immoral while dances in elite clubs went unquestioned. The gendered underpinnings of economic processes are evident as bar dancers carry out a dual struggle in the quest for wage labour as well as against the cultural devaluation of their performances on the margins of a normative heteroconjugality and a sexualised economy. At the same time, in continuing to use their earnings to maintain solidary kinship links with their natal/ marital families, bar dancers also live within the existing matrix of heteronormative familial relations. Any discussion of heterosexuality is pluralised when one considers sexual desire beyond what is framed as normative (for the conjugal unit) and non-normative (outside the conjugal unit). This wider penumbra of heterosexual desire is delineated as motif and practice in heterosexual and patriarchal societies, as, indeed, in Bollywood lms. Individual and social expressions of cinesexual item nunbers nd a toehold in the cracks within the heteronormative regulation of social lives by men/the family (Butler 1997) in the shape of the item number, as I try to show next.

4 The Play of Item Numbers: Middle Class Families

While the heterosexual and domestic family orients the everyday lives of middle class women, this everyday realm exists alongside spectacular and carnivalesque interludes of desire. The carnivalesque dimension to wedding celebrations and festivals in India, as counter to the socially established ow of domestic heteronormative life, doubles up as the location for cinematic item numbers, and in turn, inects these ritualised performances (cf Parveen 2003).

4.1 TV and the Heterogeneous Reception of Item Numbers in Homes

The entry of television into urban homes, perhaps, marked the beginning of the engagement with the virtual image as spectacle within the domestic milieu that has been extended with new onscreen forms of cine- and cyber-entertainment. Very briey
june 5, 2010 vol xlv no 23
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

72

SPECIAL ARTICLE

here, I will dwell on the heterogeneous views of item numbers within urban middle class families whom I broached in Delhi. First, there were those who rarely saw Bollywood lms in a cinema-hall but the numbers who did not watch television are very few. Even older men who turned to TV largely for the news claimed that they were often confronted by what some of them described as skin-shows of which I was told item numbers must form a part. They regarded the skimpily clad front-stage performances of item girls as obscene and subsequent statements made by these actors were viewed as utterances intended to mask their transgressions. Among families that tuned into item numbers on TV, each audience tended to get socially situated depending on whether the item number was being watched with parents (mother or father) or siblings (brother or sister). There was a dimension of performativity in the kind of item numbers that mother and the daughters watched together as they culled out the feminine aesthetic and the heteroattractive, to what was family viewing that included father and that which a youngster viewed alone. Some mothers encouraged the heterodesirability of their daughters through clothes fashioned in the style of cine or TV stars. Daughters were sometimes enrolled in dancing schools that included contemporary Bollywood dances. Here current item numbers worked as percepts that were espoused within the contemporary Bollywood genre. Reproduced in the domestic context, such dance performances took on a slew of functions ranging from the imprinting of gendered norms to the realisation of a contemporary aesthetic. There was also a discernible attempt by mothers, and some fathers, to acknowledge the force of contemporary cinesexuality epitomised by cinematic plots and enactments. A few mothers saw sense in not keeping heterosexual desire under a cloak. This view was strengthened by the discourse on AIDS and accorded weight by urban schools as sex education. Talk of sex was often occasioned by the visuals on screen. Most young girls and boys who enjoyed item numbers at home preferred to watch and enact them with peers when parents were not around backstage. Often a transgressive pleasure was apparent in viewing item numbers that contravened conventional attire and gestures or diluted the classical forms of dance and song which were valued by some parents as markers of culture and distinction in Bourdieus (1984) sense. From a musical angle, however, the item song in its audio version was tuned into without the reservations associated with item number visuals. Listening to such item songs cuts across classes and regions in the city (cf Morcom 2001). Music selections and solo listening/viewing options, too, were increasingly facilitated by the new technologies. But at marriages the item number came into its own as carnivalesque heterosexual enactment and entertainment.

4.2 Item Numbers as Spectacular Familial Performances

A recasting of the cine-item number occurred when it was enacted at extraordinary events in heteronormative familial milieus that accorded a distinct space to sexualised songs and dances. It was during the carnivalesque events of domestic life, such as prewedding song celebrations (sangeet) and now, wedding anniversaries, that the cinematic item number came to be recontextualised.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

Enacted at such rites of passage, item numbers became celebratory motifs of feminine heterosexual desire. I turn next to a brief ethnographic sketch of how the item number Kajra Re (performed by Aishwarya Rai in Bunty aur Babli 2005) was re-enacted within both the everyday and the spectacular familial sphere of four urban families in Delhi. (1) An eight-year old girl practised and danced to Kajra Re. She enacted her dance before her mothers friends with a little nudging. The pleasure that the emulation of a current number and a star gave her (and the women who watched her) was palpable. (2) A 19-year-old college girl danced to Kajra Re at her sisters sangeet ceremony. Her blouse was slightly modied but her outt was fashioned after the cine-original. The group was an intimate one, just the extended family. She would not agree to perform outside the context of her sisters wedding. Yet, her performance was not unrehearsed. The DVD and the mirror, she said, had been useful props for practising moves and gestures. (3) At her silver anniversary, a 49-year-old woman was cajoled into doing the Kajra Re number since the small group of friends and family knew of her passion for music and dance. Her daughter joined her for a part of the show before this audience. All present hailed her item number. In an aside, she told me that she had to practise heaving her breasts as part of the correct cinematic depiction. Her husband hoped that she would not break her bones. (4) At her sons wedding sangeet, a 60-year-old woman requested a friend to sing Kajra Re, including the dialogue that precedes the song. Her enactment drew a massive applause. Those in the know recounted that she had been an accomplished Kathak dancer in her youth. Others averred that her abhinaya (expressions) were indeed ner than Aishwarya Rais. What I want to underscore by recapitulating these ethnographic examples is that when item numbers are performed at extended-family functions, they tend to become tamed as celebratory practices of song-and-dance without the hotter signicances of the body in an item number. Yet, these practices are in tune with the heteronormative familial milieu that, like the Bollywood lm, accords a space and time for the enactment of feminine heterosexuality, albeit within limits. The erotic scripting that underlies the front-stage spectacular performance of Aishwarya Rai in Bunty aur Babli, is domesticated but not without disassembling and reassembling a new and acceptable face of both everyday and spectacular cinesexuality. While Cavell (1980) suggests that cine-stars are to be gazed at, the little girl enacting an item number derived pleasure from imitating the stars performance. The performance was simultaneously, girling the girl or imprinting the cine-heteronormative (Butler 1993). The latest item numbers are especially popular as the engagement with the new per se is a part of modernitys self, as Baudelaire (Benjamin 1973) reminds us, even as the perennial powers of dance and song as entertainment are harnessed for lifes heterosexual rites of passage.

4.3 Whither Item Numbers? And Cinesexuality?

A theory of cinema, Deleuze astutely observes, is not about cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to which

june 5, 2010

vol xlv no 23

73

SPECIAL ARTICLE

are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices (Deleuze 1989: 280). Here I have tried to show how cinesexuality, in the shape of the item number, has emerged as discourse and practice in Bollywood and the urban social life of India. Item numbers present us with a continuing dialogue between historical and evolving, cultural and heterosexual practices. By concurrently reiterating and rede ning received expressions of heterosexual propriety then, the cinesexual item number comes to constitute a new archive of the sexual (cf Ramaswamy 2003). How this cinesexuality is circulated, domesticated or reinvented in diverse societal spaces reveals how cinema is both moulded by but also moulds new practices and norms. The orbit and analysis of item numbers invite us to distinguish and acknowledge a wider arena of heterosexuality and heteroattractiveness alongside the more limited focus on heteroconjugality in Bollywood lms and social life. Although framed within dominant heteromasculinist and patriarchal regimes, I argue that item numbers nevertheless provide women too with opportunities for heteroattractive entertainment and prot as
Notes
1 We Are All Cinesexuals Now is the theme of MacCormacks (2008) book titled Cinesexuality. 2 See, for instance, www.bollywhat-forum.com/ index (accessed on 7 February 2008) and www. cylive.com/content/.../_quot_Item_Number_ quot_Dened (accessed on 7 February 2008). 3 I use the term Onscreen to denote the repetition of any cinematic item number that utilises new visual media such as DVDs, cable TV, computers, mobiles, etc. 4 See, for instance, Shresthova (2003). 5 In English slang, too, a sexually attractive woman may be referred to as a Dish. 6 Anirban Choudhury Item Numbers: Then and Now, .http://music.ndtv.com/music_story accessed on 23 March 2009. 7 See, The Hindu, Wheres Mona Darling?, Online Edition, 19 July 2002. http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/fr/.../2002071900170100.htm. Accessed on 2 July 2009; The Villain and the Bomb Online edition, 30 August 2004, http://www.hindu.com/mp/ 2004/08/30/stories/2004083002610100.htm. Accessed on 2 March 2007; The Acting Circus. Online Edition, 25 November 2004 http://www. hindu.com/mp/2004/08/30/stories/20040830 02610100.htm. 8 http://www.screenindia.com/news/full-circle/ 430313. Accessed on 23 March 2009. 9 http://timesondia./indiatimes.com/article show/ 28587491.cms. Accessed on 23 March 2009. 10 http://movies.dcealumni.com/archives/rakhi -sawant-on-being-called-an-item-girl. Accessed on 23 March 2009. 11 http:/wwwballeballeradio.com.uk/newspart.php? id=1067. Accessed on 20 September 2008. 12 http://www.bollywoodsargam.com/modules, php? Accessed on 2 July 2009. 13 http://top-bollywood-actress-blogspot.com, Access ed on 4 July 2009. 14 I am grateful to my colleague Deepak Mehta for this suggestion. 15 http://w w w.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/ 2004/11/25/stories/2004112501180100.htm Acces sed on 2 March/2009. 16 Moral Victories by Flavia Agnes (2005), http:// infochangeindia.org/200602235618/accessed on 9 May 2009. Hypocritical Morality: Mumbais Ban on Bar Dancers by Flavia Agnes (2005), http://www.

they refashion the meaning of item numbers as valuable rather than abject performances in particular contexts. Against attempts at a totalising masculinist appropriation of a womans body/sexuality, item numbers performed for merriment and/or prot, implicitly afford a critique of the univocal meanings of sexual propriety. I have attempted to bring out how item numbers that transgress expressions of middle class moralities are now being resignied by item girls (and item boys), a section of the youth that aspires to careers in onscreen visual entertainment, bar dancers and ordinary women. It is thus that we can no longer say of item numbers, that it is she or he who rocks but it is we who are alive to the pleasures of item numbers and/or derive a livelihood from it who rock in our Bollywood-mediatised, cinesexualised lives. The personal histories of item girls and boys on screen then, are relegated to the backstage and their spectacular performances connect with the life-histories of ordinary spectators and enactors even as difference continues to be inserted between those spectacular cinesexual performances with a capital P and our relatively less spectacular cinesexual performances within the round of urban, middle class lives.
Gunning, T (1990): The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde in T homas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, British Film Institute, London, pp 56-62. .htm. (2007): Bollywoods Hegemony, Online Edition, 12 August. Indian Express (2009): www.indianexpress.com/storyOld.php?storyId=13507. Accessed on 2 July. Krzywinska, Tanya (2006): Sex and the Cinema (London: Wallower Press). Liechty, Mark (2005): Carnal Economies: The Commodication of Food and Sex, Cultural Anthropology, 20(1): 1-38. MacCormack, Patricia (2008): Cinesexuality (UK: Ashgate). (2005-06): A Cinema of Desire: Cinesexuality and Guattaris A Signifying Cinema in Women: A Cultural Review, 16(3): 340-55. Manuel, Peter (1988): Popular Music in India: 1901-86, Popular Music, 7,2, 157-76. Morcom, Anna (2001): An Understanding between Bollywood and Hollywood? The Meaning of Holly wood-Style Music in Hindi Films, The British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 10, (1): 63-84. Mulvey, Laura (1975): Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, 16 (3), 6-18. (1999): Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in S Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Nair, P M and Sankar Sen (2005): Trafcking in Women and Children in India (New Delhi: Orient Longman). Nayyar, Sheila J (1997): The Values of Fantasy: Indian Popular Cinema, Journal of Popular Culture, 31(1): 73-90. Parveen, Nazima (2003): Hindi Cinema and South Asian Communities in UK, Economic & Political Weekly, 38 (36), 3753-54. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, ed. (2003): Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (Delhi: Sage). Rich, Adrienne (1980): Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(4): 631-60. Schaefer, Eric (1997): The Obscene Seen: Spectacle and Transgression in Postwar Burlesque Films, Cinema Journal, 36(2): 41-66. Shresthova, Sangita (2003): Strictly Bollywood? Story, Camera and Movement in Hindi Film Dance. Masters Thesis presented at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US.
vol xlv no 23
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

India together.org/manushi/issue149/bardan ce. htm. Accessed on 9 May 2009. And also see The Hindu, Bar Dancers Take to the Streets, 4 May 2005 online edition. 17 Moral Victories by Flavia Agnes (2005), http:// infochangeindia.org/200602235618/accessed on 9 May 2009. 18 Hypocritical Morality: Mumbais Ban on Bar Dancer by Flavia Agnes (2005) http://www. india together.org/manushi/issue149/bardan ce. htm. Accessed on 9 May 2009.

References
Barthes, Roland (1972)(1973): Mythologies (London: Vintage). Benjamin, Walter (1973): Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1935-39). Translated by Harry Zohn and Quentin Hoare (London: New Left Books). Bourdieu, Pierre (1984): Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge). Butler, J (1993): Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London:Routledge). (1997): Merely Cultural, Social Text, 52/53, 265-77. (1988) (1999): Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge). (2004): Undoing Gender (Oxfordshire: Routledge). Carroll, Noel (1990): The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48, (4): 349-60. Cavell, Stanley (1980): The World Viewed: Reections on the Ontology of Film (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press). Chakravarty, Sumita S (1999): National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-87 (Austin: University of Texas Press). Datta, Sangeeta (2000): Globalisation and Representations of Women in Indian Cinema, Social Scientist, 28, (3/4): 71-82. Deleuze, Gilles (1989): The Time-Image (tr) Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). (1995): Negotiations, 1972-1990 (tr) Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press). Foucault, Michel (1979): Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, An Introduction (London: Penguin Books). Goffman, Eric (1959): The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday).
june 5, 2010

74