Postmodern Cinema of Seduction: Subaltern/Folk Inspired Hindi Film Song and Dance, and the Art of Deferral and Play
If there is one phrase that has been used most often by Western audiences for popular Indian cinema, it is the phrase "musicals." The description gestures both at the fixation of Indian cinema on an earlier stage of cinematic evolution and the simple and uncomplicated pleasure derived by the audience from popular Hindi films that have an audience all over the world. This essay examines Hindi film "song and dance" spectacles as the art of deferment in the postmodern cinema of seduction, a notion derived from the work of Jean Baudrillard and the insights of Freud Lacan Zizek and Baudrillard himself on deferral and seduction. This chapter makes this claim not as an overarching theoretical nomenclature for all song and dance sequences in Hindi films. Instead the author argues for the primacy of the art of deferment and play in a postmodern cinema of seduction within the limited scope of her reading of a North Indian subaltern/folk inspired song and dance Hindi film, Amol Palekar and Sandhya Gokhale directed Paheli (Riddle, 2005) Reena Dube Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA Postmodern Cinema of Seduction