The ‘Bollywood item number’ – a sexually charged song-and-dance sequence prevalent in Hindi films – has become an integral part of contemporary media culture across India. Drawing on qualitative research methods conducted among Assamese youth aged 18–25 in two cities of Guwahati and Mumbai, this article investigates how young audiences in regional cultures engage with item numbers in everyday contexts. Revealing the ambivalent forces of anxiety and desire that coexist within the landscape of regional reception practices, the article highlights the tension between ‘rational perception’ and ‘affective engagement’, a central paradox of engaging with erotic media texts in Bollywood. Unpacking the affective and moral negotiations youth audiences undertake in engaging with Bollywood item numbers, the article argues that the ‘item number’ serves as a site for active identity construction and conscious self-making, constitution of a ‘moral subject’ that is informed by intersecting hierarchies of class, taste, region, and gender.
AhmedS (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2 edn s.l.Edinburgh University Press.
2.
AngI (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience. Routledge.
3.
AngI (1995) On the politics of empirical audience research. In AngI (eds) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences. Routledge, pp. 35–52.
4.
AnjariaU (2021) Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema. Routledge.
5.
BakshiMSarkarS (2015) ‘Crazy kiya re’: Explaining the consumption and popularity of Hindi film songs. South Asian Popular Culture13(2): 141–153.
6.
BourdieuP (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge.
7.
BraraR (2010) The item number: Cinesexuality in Bollywood and social life. Economic and Political Weekly45(23): 67–74.
8.
BrosiusCButcherM (1999) Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India. Sage.
9.
ButcherM (1999) Parallel texts: The body and television in India. In: BrosiusCButcherM (eds) Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India. Sage, pp. 165–196.
10.
DavidAR (2007) Beyond the silver screen: Bollywood and filmi dance in the UK. South Asia Research27(1): 5–24.
11.
DavisonPW (1983) The third-person effect in communication. Public Opinion Quarterly47: 1–15.
12.
DedmanT (2011) Agency in UK hip-hop and grime youth subcultures – peripherals and purists. Journal of Youth Studies14(5): 507–522.
13.
DickeyS (1995) Consuming utopia: Film watching in Tamil Nadu. In: BreckenridgeCA (ed.) Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 131–156.
14.
DurkheimE (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Free Press.
15.
FernandesL (2004) The politics of forgetting: Class politics, state power and the restructuring of urban space in India. Urban Studies41(12): 2415–2430.
16.
FoucaultM (1995) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.
17.
GhoshS (1999) The troubled existence of sex and sexuality: Feminists engage with censorship. In: BrosiusCButcherM (eds) Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India. Sage, pp. 233–259.
18.
GledhillC (2000) Rethinking genre. In: WilliamsLGledhillC (eds) Reinventing Film Studies. Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 221–230.
19.
GopalSMoortiS (2008) Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. University of Minnesota Press.
20.
GopalanL (2002) Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. British Film Institute.
21.
GotfritL (1991) Women dancing back: Disruption and the politics of pleasure. In: GirouxHA (eds) Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries. State University of New York Press, pp. 174–195.
22.
HallS (1999) Encoding, decoding. In: DuringS (eds) The Cultural Studies Reader. Routledge, pp. 90–103.
23.
HaydockW (2016) The consumption, production and regulation of alcohol in the UK. Sociology50(6): 1056–1071.
24.
IyerU (2017) Dance musicalization: Proposing a choreomusicological approach to Hindi film song-and-dance sequences. South Asian Popular Culture15(2–3): 123–138.
25.
KaurR (2011) Framing the body and the body of frame: Item songs in popular Hindi cinema. Acta Orientalia Vilnensia12(2): 101–124.
26.
KennedyH (2006) Beyond anonymity, or future directions for internet identity research. New Media and Society8(6): 859–876.
27.
KumarA (2014) The aesthetics of pirate modernities: Bhojpuri cinema and the underclasses. In: KaurRDave-MukherjiP (eds) Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World. Bloomsbury, pp. 185–203.
28.
KumarA (2017) Item number/item girl. Journal of South Asian Studies40(2): 338–341.
29.
MairaSM (2002) Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City. Temple University Press.
30.
MillerDCostaEHaynesN, et al. (2016) How the World Changed Social Media, 1 edn s.l.UCL Press.
31.
MonteiroAJayasankarK (2000) Between the normal and the imaginary: The spectator-self, the other and satellite television in India. In: HagenIWaskoJ (eds) Consuming Audiences: Production and Reception in Media Research. s.l.Hampton Press, pp. 301–321.
32.
RadwayJ (1984) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. University of North Carolina Press.
33.
RadwayJ (1988) Reception study: Ethnography and the problems of dispersed audiences and nomadic subjects. Cultural Studies2(3): 359–376.
34.
RamA (2014) Consuming Bollywood: Gender, Globalization, and Media in the Indian Diaspora. Peter Lang.
35.
RidderSDBauwelSV (2013) Commenting on pictures: Teens negotiating gender and sexualities on social networking sites. Sexualities16(5–6): 565–586.
36.
RoyAG (2010) Is everybody saying ‘shava shava’ to Bollywood bhangra?. In: MehtaRBPandharipandeRV (eds) Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora. Anthem Press, pp. 35–49.
37.
ShresthovaS (2011) Is It All About Hips? Around the World with Bollywood Dance. Sage.
38.
ThorntonS (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Polity Press.
39.
WeidmanA (2012) Voices of Meenakumari: Sound, meaning, and self-fashioning in performances of an item number. South Asia Popular Culture10(3): 307–318.
40.
‘Baby Doll’ (2014) From Ragini MMS 2, composed by Meet Brothers.
41.
Chikni Chameli (2012) From Agneepath, composed by Ajay-Atul.
42.
‘Dilbar’ (2018) From Satyameva Jayate, composed by Tanishk Bagchi. Remake of 1999 original ‘Dilbar’ from Sirf Tum.
43.
‘Fevicol Se’ (2012) From Dabangg 2, composed by Sajid-Wajid.
44.
‘Munni Badnam Hui’ (2010) From Dabangg, composed by Lalit Pandit.
45.
‘Saki Saki’ (2019) From Batla House, composed by Tanishk Bagchi. Remake of 2004 original from Musafir.
46.
‘Sheila Ki Jawani’ (2010) From Tees Maar Khan, composed by Vishal-Shekhar.
47.
‘Uyi Amma’ (2025) From Azaad, composed by Amit Trivedi.
