How to rethink dance history? How to shift focus away from the binaries of bodies-books/ archive-repertoire/mind-body and toward reimagining what has been written about dance? What are the dominant understandings of history, and how can a critical way of conducting dance analysis help us identify the hegemony of disciplines such as history? Moreover, how can a focus on dance studies help us rethink concepts of sociopolitical–cultural knowledge production? These are some of the key questions explored by Usha Iyer in Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema.

The book ambitiously charts the labor of producing one of the most popular cinematic spectacles: dance numbers from the 1930s to the 1990s in the mainstream Indian film industry, popularly known as Bollywood. Iyer examines how the spectacular dance in popular cinema is a crucial site where the problems of colonial/postcolonial India coalesce and are represented. Dancing Women focuses on corporeal history, a realm that by nature is considered unfinished, because moving bodies are slippery and do not always leave clear archival or textual traces (13). Iyer's study brings in dancing bodies as counter archives that destabilize the notion of corporeal histories as “unfinished” (13), thereby illustrating how the corporeality of dancing women, their gestural repertoires and other bodies engaged in the production of the dance spectacle, propose new modes of thinking about the historical narrative of Bollywood.

Dancing women of the Bollywood film industry are analyzed through cultural and material lenses, which delineate the social conventions associated with female public performance and how their specific gestures and movement vocabularies challenge or subvert social norms. The dancer-actor is employed as an “analytical category” (6) who acts as nexus for relationships between the industry, spectators, and narrative of the cinema, and is simultaneously also a material artifact (a composite dancing body) belonging to various castes, classes, religions, and races.

A key idea developed by Iyer is that in cases of certain dance sequences, the movement vocabulary and the choice of the dancer-actor precedes and influences the composition of a song, a process she terms “dance musicalization” (11). She suggests that a choreomusicological approach shapes the conceptualization of a choreomusicking body, composed of the on-screen dancer-actor, the singer's voice, the gestural repertoire, the music composition, the choreographer and their team, and other nameless bodies that are often present on or off screen in the production of the dance.

Through a choreomusical analysis of “Bakad bam bam baje damru” (a dancing spectacle of actor Vyjayanthi Mala), Iyer demonstrates how the dancing body is not an example of “call and response” (54) technique to music, but that dance moves become a method to reiterate music structures such as pulse and rhythm, while dance gestures accentuate the lyrics and musical score. Simultaneously, Madhuri Dixit's (one of the most prominent stars of Bollywood) peppy number “Ek do Teen” is instrumental in forwarding the idea of a choreomusicking body. Produced through the collaborative effort of Saroj Khan (an important Bollywood choreographer) and Dixit, the set design, costume, and music amalgamated to produce this number, which was key in shifting Dixit from a side actor to spearheading her as the central star in upcoming films (184–185).

The choreomusical approach and the choreomusicking body challenge the idea of the playback singer enhancing the on-screen performance and influencing their emotions, which become “expressive registers for the pre-recorded voice” (56). The choreomusical approach reverses this claim, questioning instead: “How does the gestural repertoire of the on-screen performer impact the musical performance of the singer?” (56). For instance, Iyer asks: What prompted Asha Bhonsle to include whispering sighs in her vocalization of Helen's “Piya tu Ab toh Aaja” (56)? She articulates how a choreomusical analysis of dancing-star Helen's baroque numbers reveals the production as the combination of the dancer-actor's movements, the rhythmic harmonies of the playback singer, the musicians, and the skill of the music director and composer, thus highlighting Bollywood dance-song sequences to be a “combinatoire” (57) of expressions produced through different performative exchanges.

Centering on the movements of the dancing body and the importance of dancing spectacle, Iyer shifts away from the scholarship of notable critics like Satyajit Ray (1976) and M. Madhava Prasad (1998), who vehemently advocated the dismissal of song-dance sequences in Hindi films. Instead, Iyer's study positions her among scholars such as Pallabi Chakravorty (2017), and Ajay Gehlawat and Rajinder Kumar Dudrah (2019), the duo who examine Bollywood dances as entities that might have reconceptualized the domain of Hindi cinema. Iyer's concept of dance musicalization through an analysis of dance-spectacles of actors such as Helen, Nutan, Dixit, and Vyjayanthimala (hailing from different Bollywood eras) thus offers a reconceptualization by breaking the hierarchy of playback singing over dancing. She mentions that it is essential to remember that the choreomusicking body and the choreomusical approach do not reproduce the hierarchy of dance over other categories of production, but rather subverts the unidirectional knowledge of hierarchy, and highlights the presence of multiple production elements that are mobilized to assemble and receive the spectacular dance performances of Bollywood.

Chapter 3 focuses on a new class of urban performers—Azurie, an “Indo-German ‘dancing girl’” (23) and Sadhona Bose (a Bengali bhadramahila)—revealing the interconnected network of transnational dance, cosmopolitanism, and the nationalist modernity project of India. In this light, Iyer negotiates with the historical narrative of Bollywood delineating how film dance was not limited to the bodies of the star dancer-actors but extended to those left out of the official narrative of Indian cinema and therefore opened pivotal historical plots. The account of Azurie raises the critical issue of changing names pertaining to Muslim cosmopolitanism. At a period when Hindu majoritarianism was the primary reason behind such changes, Azurie's name trajectory from Anna to the addition of the prefix “Devi,” to finally Azurie in order to corroborate her image as a dancer by tapping into the exotic dancers of “bazaar cinema,” delineates how there was a complex fashioning of identities at play in the Bollywood cinema industry. Additionally, the search for Azurie led Iyer to find counter archives where the invisibilized “dancing girl” resided. While invisibilized as a nameless character in the textual narratives of plot and character, Azurie's image as a dancer is available in excess in the visual archives of photographs, rare videos, and so on. The book visibilizes the counter archives while simultaneously drawing attention to the interconnection of devadasi, tawaifs, courtesans, Indian classical dancer, the dancing girl, and the dancer-actress in the films by illustrating how the erasure of names of devadasis, and other hereditary dancers, is like the erasure of Azurie's name, her mixed-race background, and her hybrid dance styles.

Dance scholar Prarthana Purkayastha states that, in order to decolonize the domain of history, it is necessary to engage with unfamiliar bodies, traces, and forgotten history (Purkayastha 2017, 134). Through a continuous emphasis on unfamiliar bodies (such as Azurie's) who are key dancing figures but not mainstream heroines, the often invisibilized but interconnected concepts of dance musicalization and the choreomusicking body, and the vocabulary of the moving body on-screen and off-screen, Iyer presents a decolonized historical narrative of Hindi cinema.

Moreover, the focus on corporeal history also negotiates with the idea of binary figurations of female performers (heroine/vamp) shedding light on an intersecting global history of the female performing body, a theme that runs through the book. Sadhona Bose, the wife of theater director Modhu Bose and granddaughter of the social reformer Keshab Chandra Sen, shifted the position of bhadramahila (a woman educated and trained in cultural forms like dance music) from the realm of domesticity to a professional public performer. Bose's dance vocabulary comprised elements from Indian classical dance traditions such as Manipuri, Kathak, and Kathakali. She also borrowed from Uday Shankar's dance vocabulary, Rabindra Nritya, and Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian dance forms (109), thereby illustrating the cultural exchange that marked the 1930s in India. Bose was also simultaneously the dancer, set and costume designer, and primary actor and choreographer, thus exemplifying the multiple factors at work in the production of film dances. Next, a study of Madhuri Dixit's dance movements in chapter 5 becomes key not only in revealing how the identities of the “coy heroine” and the “brazen vamp” (24) were consolidated in the 1990s, but also in foregrounding the expertise of the choreographer and the collaborative experiments between the dancer and choreographer that were crucial to emerging dance techniques in the 1990s.

In conclusion, Iyer's focus on the corporeal, gestural, and visceral repertoires of dance successfully studies film in relation to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, other performing cultures such as music and designing, and multiple material and aesthetic practices. In today's India, where Hindu fundamentalism lies at the crux of the decolonized historical narrative, works like Iyer's benefit readers across the disciplines of performance studies, dance studies, postcolonial criticism, and film studies. Dancing Women focuses on the interconnection of multiple aesthetic, material and corporeal histories in the production of India's popular culture, Bollywood.