Bollywood flashback

Abstract

The songs that punctuate Hindi films and give them much of their remarkable international appeal are particularly significant sites in the cinema's attempt to deal with challenges to traditional structures of authority. Focusing on spectacular moments of non‐narrative – and often explicitly erotic – pleasure, such songs proffer utopian scenarios within which the tensions raised by the narratives of kinship in crisis that dominate Hindi film are emolliated. It is the moments of melodic fantasy embedded in Hindi film, the song and dance routines which offer these condensed images of reconciliation, that predominantly working class youths in Britain appropriate in order to express the conflicting hopes and fears that characterize their own cosmopolitan identities. In this article, I discuss two of the most important instances of remix culture in Britain over the last decade in order to offer a retrospective take on the uses of Hindi‐language film by second‐generation Asian youths. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All right reserved.