Director: Subhash Ghai
Duration: 00:01:15; Aspect Ratio: 1.222:1; Hue: 11.601; Saturation: 0.124; Lightness: 0.159; Volume: 0.480; Cuts per Minute: 10.363; Words per Minute: 40.656
Summary: Choli ke peeche kya hai is a clip from the film Khalnayak (1993), directed by Subhash Ghai and starring Sanjay Dutt, Madhuri Dixit. The queer element in this clip was pointed out by Shohini Ghosh in her article 'Queer Pleasures for Queer People: film, television and sexuality in India'.
The dance in this song was choreographed by Saroj Khan, and was attacked for its vulgarity both in court and in the media. What was however not overtly said ever, was that the song has two women singing to each other sexually, which allows for queer readings. The other version of the same song in the movie culminates in a violent assault on the woman, but this version did not get condemned.
Shohini Ghosh in her article points out that two women playing courtesans (Ila Arun and Neena Gupta) sing suggestively to each other and about the female body, using motifs of covering and uncovering. A segment of the song includes these lyrics:
What should the boy be like/ What should the girl be like?
The answering refrain is
The boy should be like you/ The girl should be like me
The article in which Ghosh talks about the discourse of vulgarity and sexuality in this song, can be found online as part of the Queering Bollywood database (created by Alternative Law Forum). The link is
http://media.opencultures.net/queer/data/indian/queer_pleasures-ghosh.pdf
The article ends by saying that queer desires and spectatorship practices indeed raise this question, except in new and exciting ways: Choli ke peechey kya hai? Is it a man, woman, an intersexed person, hijra or a kothi?
Queering Bollywood is an exhibition and demonstration of a collection of queer readings of Indian cinema. This open and collaborative database of articles, film clips, magazine stories, etc., has been compiled by Namita Malhotra, Lawrence Liang and many others at Alternative Law Forum and in Bangalore. For more, see
http://media.opencultures.net/queer/
The song is sung by two women to each other, asking the question about what is beneath your/ my blouse. It is from the movie Khalnayak and is titled 'Choli ke peeche kya hai' - what is beneath your blouse.
The dance in this song was choreographed by Saroj Khan, and was attacked for its vulgarity both in court and in the media. What was however not overtly said ever, was that the song has two women singing to each other sexually, which allows for queer readings. The other version of the same song in the movie culminates in a violent assault on the woman, but this version did not get condemned.
Shohini Ghosh in her article points out that two women playing courtesans (Ila Arun and Neena Gupta) sing suggestively to each other and about the female body, using motifs of covering and uncovering. A segment of the song includes the lyrics
What should the boy be like/ What should the girl be like?
The answering refrain is
The boy should be like you/ The girl should be like me
The article in which Ghosh talks about discourse of vulgarity and sexuality about this song, can be found online as part of the Queering Bollywood database (created by Alternative Law Forum). The link is
http://media.opencultures.net/queer/data/indian/queer_pleasures-ghosh.pdf
The article ends by saying that queer desires and spectatorship practices, indeed raise the question, except in new and exciting ways - that choli ke peechey kya hai? Is it a man, woman, an intersexed person, hijra or a kothi?
blouse
choli
dance
queer
song
women
Capitalism
Holocaust
Indic
Khalnayak
Mani Ratnam
Michelangelo Antonioni
Nazis
Previous annotation
Annotation 7: But what is important to note in this trajectory of development of cinema from a controlled anarchy of the late-first career phase Bachchan films and a film like Rangeela or Satya is the growing blowing up materiality (a la last sequence of Zabriskie Point) and rethinking sex through this carnage of the material frameworks of Indic experience.
For Zabriskie Point see:
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/00/4/zabriskie.htmlSexual ambiguity or the 'queering' of the real is one of the registers of a generalized becoming ambiguous of all sensory perception of the material, something that had been predicted in the aftermath of the Second World War as a generalized eugenics-driven Nazi-fication of our sensibilities in Holocausts of human life that would spin off industrialization and the Capitalist competitive order. Inasmuch it works out the fantasy of blowing up the archaic and the non-modern all over India it also works out an unconscious working of anarchic sexual liberation as well, the non-sublimated aspects of which end up as the item number and from there on to the dance bar. Bachchan's masquerade is a Dionysiac hesitation between sexual identities in a period when all sensory qualities are being rendered pure and shiny and therefore sensorially/sexually ambiguous in the bling, liberated from 'tradition', from humanist idealism, through the sheer mobility of bodies and objects that the new labour regime inaugurates in the 1970s. In response the hyper-material emerging from the liberation of sensory qualities from narratives are sought to be controlled by a progressive sexualization of the body and the gestural material across the class spectrum (and across ideological lines), if Bombay cinema is to be believed through it invention of the 'item number' of which this song is the very first.
This clip from Khalnayak is a sublime summation of this crisis in 'recognizing' sex and the need for the hypermaterial to define sex from the 1990s onwards. The film is a summation in more than one sense summing beyond the arrival of the hypermaterial in the times of 'twilight' sexual ambiguity but also summing up the entire spectrum of Hindi film production from A+ to C- films unfolding across the Indic in this period. The question to ask is not why the bar dance in the 1990s for the bar dance or some variant of it has existed for very long in Indian society. The question to ask is why the sexualization of the body and gestural material across the class spectrum and why does the bar dance become almost licit in the 1990s. Ram Gopal Varma films are important to follow in this matter since it seeks to theorize 'from the inside' this transformation. Mani Ratnam films by contrast provide distant commentaries on the same phenomena.
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Ram Gopal Varma
Rangeela
Satya
Second World War
Zabriskie Point
anarchy
bar
competition
humanist idealism
industrialization
item number
labour
material
queering
sensory
sexual liberation
sexualization
sublimation
tradition
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