Disco flamboyance, performative masculinities and dancer heroes of Bengali cinema

In this paper, I attempt to study the different determinants of cinematic masculinities, the gendered bodies of male performer figures and their changing patterns with reference to film dance from the 1980s-1990s period of Bengali popular cinema. This paper explores how the inclusion of performative male bodies in the dance numbers brought a distinct imagination of masculinity and flamboyance, thereby disrupting the established idea of the bhadra (the polished and gentle class of Bengal) hero of Bengali cinema. In the first section of my article, I focus on how the disco sensation and its cinematic registers took a new form with Mithun Chakraborty’s figuration in Bengali film dances. The second section studies how this pattern of dancing male bodies and its flamboyance changed in the later period when the imagination of a working class male protagonist intervened in film dance in the 1990s. In brief, I try to read the shifting imaginations of masculinities in Bengali film dance from the disco flamboyance and ‘global-national-popular model’ of Mithun Chakraborty’s star persona in the 1980s to the more localized and hybrid form of dance idioms in Prosenjit’s iconic film roles in a later period.