Disco Dancer

In the history of world cinema, there will be few films where you can hear the words ‘come sing and conquer’ or ‘he has guitar phobia’ or ‘he has murdered over thirty disco dancers in London’. And even if you did, chances of them being in the same film are slim. That’s till Disco Dancer came along. In the glory days of socialist India, where the Hindi film industry churned out hero versus system stories, Disco Dancer turned that concept on its head. It gave you a proper ‘Bollywood’ film – much before the term came into existence – with all the struggle of a hero’s journey from poverty to success, but not through fighting the villain, but through … yes … disco dancing. Part screenplay, part interviews, some analysis, this book tries to understand what it was about this film that drove Osaka, Japan, to build a Jimmy statue, stadiums of devout Russian fans for three generations to go into raptures when it came on, and for millions from Dubai to San Francisco to know only this movie, when anyone mentioned Bollywood. Most of all though, it is an effort at preservation: To translate and archive some of the greatest lines of dialogue, ingenious inventions of plot and narrative, and perhaps the greatest dancing character ever written in any cinema. So that even if new India is not the nation we once were, Disco Dancer, hopefully, will not be forgotten.