From item girl to stardom

The Riverdale Studio in the suburbs here is an unlikely setting for a fairy tale. Located at the end of a narrow lane facing railway tracks, the studio is surrounded by squalor. Families huddle on the pavement and half-naked children play in the traffic Inside, however, Cinderella is being born.

On a set, throbbing with strobe lights, lasers, dry ice and a “Chicago”-style bulb wall, a weekly television show is being shot. Girls, dressed in standard-issue erotic dancer costumes -- boots, bustiers, body glitter -- take turns at center stage. For three minutes they thrust and grind using the available props: a pole, sometimes a chair.

One, Gwendolene Fernandes, a 17-year-old student, has brought her mother along for moral support. Clara Fernandes waits in the wings, hopeful that her daughter will trounce the competition. The winner, chosen by a different celebrity judge each week, will participate in a grand finale competition in February. The prize is the good life: instant stardom, music videos, endorsements and ultimately films. The show is called “Dance Divas,” but that is a euphemism for what the participants really want to be: a Bollywood item girl.

“Item” is Bollywood-speak for a set piece song and dance number. Most mainstream Hindi films are musicals. Historians believe that this dramatic structure comes from Indian theater, from the high classical traditions, Parsi theater and the nautanki or street theater. Songs carry the narrative further, express heightened emotions and provide a link between the actions. But the item song does none of this. The item is a number that is divorced from the narrative and exists purely to provide extra entertainment. It is a perk for the viewer, or as lyricist Javed Akhtar aptly describes, “a monkey sitting on the shoulder of the story and doing tricks.”

The trick, increasingly, is unadulterated, unabashed eroticism. Thanks to vigilant censorship laws, Bollywood filmmakers have traditionally sublimated sexuality in thrust and grind songs. But a decade of liberalization, satellite television and the evolution of an urbane multiplex audience has changed societal mores. Dirty dancing is no longer dirty.

The item number is a critical marketing tool -- it is rotated endlessly on television in music countdown shows and trailers and is at least partly responsible for bringing in the vital first-day audience. So girls, uniformly young and sensuous, some unknown, others established actresses, heave and hurl themselves across the screen, fueling the fantasies of millions.

In the past there were designated dancers who provided the sex quotient in Hindi films. But now, Bollywood is overrun by starlets who use the item song as a career break. One hit translates into instant celebrity and sometimes a full-fledged career. The item number is not just a song; it’s a lottery.

Mumait Khan is a recent winner. Mumait, 19, is an Afghan Muslim; her name means “beautiful” in Persian. But years ago, poverty buried her conservative pedigree. When Khan was 14, she says, her father lost his job as a lower-rung executive and never managed to find another. Khan dropped out of school and started dancing in films.

For four years, she performed in about 30 films as yet another $35-per-day dancer. Last year, she was selected to perform an item number in a comedy called “Munnabhai MBBS” (Brother Munna M.D.). The film and the song were unqualified successes. Khan became a star.

Since then, Khan has performed the song in stage shows, done six more item numbers and is being seriously marketed by Universal Music India as a possible partner for Enrique Iglesias in a video he will shoot later this year. In anticipation of international fame, she has cultivated a new look -- she has jewelry in her navel, chin and ears and tattoos on her shoulder and lower waist. In a few months, Khan will leave her decrepit home in suburban Bombay and move into a chic, duplex apartment that cost her $114,000.

Points for ‘oomph’

One Khan launches a thousand dreams. Which is perhaps why hundreds of girls queued up recently to dance seminaked with a pole in a talent contest called the Zee Music Musafir Item Bomb Hunt. The contest, organized by a leading television music channel, was held in six cities, including London and Dubai. The prize was the chance to perform an item with star Sanjay Dutt in a film called “Musafir” (Traveler).

A brazen attitude was as much a requirement as dancing skills. The judges, an assortment of celebrities, graded the girls on their bodies, faces and “oomph,” calling out their marks after each performance. The harsh public rating system wasn’t a deterrent.

In Delhi, girls drove in from the neighboring states of Haryana and Chandigarh. One enthusiastic participant started dancing on the judges’ table. In Calcutta, women came into auditions scantily clad -- one brought her grandmother with her. In Bombay, a 14-year-old was heartbroken because the judges deemed her too young to participate. The winner: 25-year-old Tatsiana Bokhan, a ballet dancer from Belarus, who lives in Dubai and has grown up watching dubbed Bollywood films but doesn’t understand a word of Hindi.

In the erotic sweepstakes, language is not a barrier. Bokhan isn’t the first non-Indian item girl in Bollywood. In fact, white or light brown skin seems to be the preferred fantasy. “It makes tongues hang out more,” says Bunty Walia of G.S. Entertainment, the event management company that handled the Item Bomb hunt.

So the producers of a film called “Popcorn Khao! Mast ho jao!” (Eat Popcorn and Be Happy) flew in Jelena Jakovljevic, a former Miss Yugoslavia from Dubai. Thai pop star Tata Young performed a hot number in “Dhoom” (Cacophony) -- the song was originally shot as a music video to market the film on television, but it became so popular that the producers tacked it on to the film.

One of the reigning item girls here is a Czechoslovakian model named Yana Gupta. Gupta modeled in Milan and New York before coming to India for a holiday, where she met her husband and never left. In 2003, Gupta performed a song in a film called “Dum” (Strength). The lyrics loosely translate as: “Mister walk slowly please, Lightning [i.e. Gupta] is standing in the way.”

“Dum,” brimming with gratuitous violence, flopped but altered Gupta’s life irrevocably. She is now an in-demand dancer for stage shows (she reportedly charges about $10,000 per performance). She’s done more songs (three in South Indian-language films) and is scouting around for a Hindi teacher. Gupta is ready for the upgrade from item girl to heroine.

This is the trajectory of most item girls. They want to leverage their three minutes of song glory into a more lasting acting career. Depending on the film and the choreographer, item songs can range from gloriously vulgar to artfully stylish. So established leading ladies also do item songs as a way to perk up sagging careers. “Everyone wants an audio hit,” says director-choreographer Farah Khan. “It’s a way of extending your bank balance and career. It’s a very high glam star appearance.”

Changing boundaries

Moreover, being sexy is no longer taboo. In the last decade, urban India has undergone an enormous cultural churning. In 1991, the government introduced wide-ranging economic reforms and allowed multinationals entry into the country. In the same year, satellite television arrived. India -- a traditional and sleepy society mired in thousands of years of history -- was thrust headlong into globalization. The West, with its promise of a flashy, glittering, consumerist lifestyle, entered Indian homes.

Since then, a proliferation of sleek, semiclad bodies in magazines, television, music videos and films has pushed the limits of what is acceptable. These shifts have been paralleled by the rise of various fundamentalisms, particularly a Hindu right wing; what is and isn’t properly Indian has been a constant feature of public discourse in recent years.

But sex is firmly out of the musty Indian closet. Rachel Dwyer, a reader in Indian Studies at the University of London, observes that the “new item girls are often celebrated as sexually liberated and empowered. Their presentation owes more to music television and the world of fashion than Hindi films themselves.”

Fahad Samar, who directs “Dance Divas,” calls the situation “extraordinary.” “What’s amazing,” he says, “is the respectability now accorded to someone who earlier would have been regarded as a glorified prostitute. Now they are working girls just like the rest of us.”

Working girls with skimpier uniforms perhaps. At the “Dance Divas” television shoot, the executive producers make sure that clothes don’t cross the line into sleaze. Clara Fernandes watches keenly as her daughter heaves on stage. “Gwen is very against showing cleavage,” she says, “but I don’t mind it because I think the job demands it. I am more liberal than she is. India is changing, and the times are changing too.”