Disco Dancer and the Idioms of the Global-Popular

Disco Dancer and the Idioms of the Global-Popular Neepa Majumdar (bio) Even in the wake of the relatively recent academic respectability of popular Indian cinema, there are areas of South Asian film culture that were still too lowbrow to merit much scholarly discussion. Lowbrow cultural products such as the 1982 Hindi-language film Disco Dancer (dir. Babbar Subhash) tend to elicit studies of reception, while higher-brow texts more commonly elicit formal and aesthetic responses. In this article, I would like to partially reverse this tendency by considering the experimental form forced by the global "disco sensibility" on conventional stylistic and thematic modes of popular Bombay cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s. This offers us an opportunity to consider the encounter of a global sonic mode or sensibility with a localized popular media form, in the process generating a new popular text that in turn traveled globally and generated new popular and even viral media. Disco Dancer, however, serves as much more than a representative case study when one considers its seminal retooling of narrative, thematic, and star practices to accommodate new flows of international popular media such as Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977) or Ottawan's disco song "T'es OK," which Disco Dancer's last song, "Jimmy Jimmy aja" reworked. 1 In the Soviet Union, as Sudha Rajagopalan points out in her important study of Indian cinema in the Soviet Union, "the hysteria around the film has often been compared to the phenomenal success of Awara in 1954" (164). I would like to start with a quick snapshot of dominant film culture in India at the time that Disco Dancer was released, as found in reviews, interviews, and feature articles in magazines and newspapers such as Filmfare and Times of India. The chatter centered on stars such as Tina Munim, Rishi Kapoor, and Amitabh Bachchan and films such as Silsila [End Page 82] (with its rumors of a correspondence between on- and off-screen affairs) and Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire/Home and the World (with India's first screen kiss since the 1920s) as well as other films of the so-called parallel cinema. In an interesting sedimentation of highbrow and lowbrow Indian cinematic cultures of the 1970s and 1980s, several actors associated with critically acclaimed films of the 1970s ended up in Disco Dancer, such as Mithun Chakraborty (or simply Mithun) from Mrinal Sen's Mrigaya (1976), Gita Siddharth from Garam Hawa (M. S. Sathyu, 1976), and Om Puri from various films, including Aakrosh (Govind Nihalani, 1980). I have found no trace in these print sites of Disco Dancer or of Mithun, its star (Figure 1), other than a few patronizing paragraphs here and there about his potentially rising career, of which the following statement from Filmfare in 1984 (April 16–31) is representative: "Mithun is often accused of signing films, good or bad, with any director. . . . 'Disco Dancer' may not have been everyone's cup of tea but it was successful (golden jubilee in places 2 ) and when it comes to disco, there's no one like him" ("Bappi Lahiri," 23). Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the written record does not confirm Disco Dancer's well-known box office success, especially in rural India, Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Mithun Chakrabarty in Disco Dancer (1982 screenshot) [End Page 83] given the low cultural status of this B grade film. In contrast, thanks to Sudha Rajagopalan's research, we know that Soviet film magazines ran numerous letters and debates on the film, where the phenomenon of Disco Dancer became the occasion for a broader debate on the place of Indian cinema in the cultural life of the USSR. In 1979, Richard Dyer wrote a defense of disco that acknowledged its strongly technological bent and its unquestionable alignment with capitalism. Other scholars such as Tavia Nyong'o have gone so far as to argue for the cyborg-like quality of disco with its interface of human and machinic sounds "produced by organs attached to machines attached to organs, reverberating and echoing a feeling-tone between the live and mediated" (111). In its sound and instrumentation, disco thus...