To chart a history of dance in Bollywood is to unravel a series of regulations of women’s bodies on-screen. Brahmanical, domestic femininity is repeatedly upheld on-screen through dance discourses; the naive Hindu woman is saved from her life as a dancer by the hero, the dancing Muslim tawaif (courtesan) is relegated to a life of spinsterhood, and the Anglo-Indian cabaret dancer dies before intermission. Collusions of caste, religion, race, and class respectabilities restrict the conditions under which a heroine can dance. As is the case in most epic choreographies, the heroine involuntarily dances under the phantasmatic rapture of a villain or in order to seduce or distract him for the purposes of revenge; in these ways, she is absolved of the moral transgression of dancing publicly. The convoluted logics under which women are allowed to dance seductively are indicative of broader sociocultural anxieties...
Kareem Khubchandani, 'Snakes on the Dance Floor: Bollywood, Gesture, and Gender'
