The Bollywood audience we were waiting for? Pathaan’s dancing-fans

This article examines the celebratory reception of the many videos of Pathaan ’s ‘dancing-fans’ that circulated on social media during the film’s release. It argues that an un-nuanced celebration of this vocal fan obscures the inaccessibility of the cinema theatre as a public space of leisure in neo-liberal India. Shot on mobile phone cameras inside cinemas, these videos were heralded as evidence of the ‘return’ of the Hindi film audience. The celebratory discourse around this new dancing-fan is in sharp contrast to the anxieties that such vocal fandom has historically generated in cinema discourses in India, being associated instead with the ‘rowdy’ lower-class fan, pejoratively termed the ‘frontbencher’. The article suggests that the desirability of the contemporary dancing-fan reflects a professionalization of Hindi film fandom. It reads this as a new stage in what Tejaswini Ganti identifies as a process of gentrification that began with the emergence of Bollywood in post-liberalization India

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• The 'Bollywoodization' of the Indian cinema

  Ashish Rajadhyaksha•Inter-Asia Cultural Studies•2003

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