Dancing Women

Here finally is a book that gives us the conceptual vocabulary and historical imagination to grasp the politics and pleasures of dance in Hindi cinema. Dancing Women does nothing short of offering a new corporeal taxonomy of Hindi cinema, to revise how we think about female star bodies, gender, sound, nation, caste and community in film. With evocative detail and fresh troves of research, Iyer makes an enthralling case for embodied movement in film as the torque force shaping cinema's mise-en-scene, narrative and cultural politics. And somehow, even as she recasts Indian film history from the perspective of its famous dancers and dances, Iyer captures the sheer joy of Hindi cinema's spectacular numbers. A delight of a book. * Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space * In Iyer's astute and nuanced choreomusicological analysis, we encounter popular Hindi film dance in all its ontological and epistemological complexity. Not only does this book map the divergent and often competing ideological significations of the female dancing body in cinema, it also complicates ideas about women's agency, visibility, and erasure in modern histories of South Asian dance. Dancing Women is an interpretive tour de force. It inspires us to read film corporeally, and to radically rethink what we understand as spectatorial engagement with dance in Indian cinema. * Davesh Soneji, University of Pennsylvania, author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India *