Anxious pleasures: Reading Bollywood's item numbers through regional reception cultures

Introduction

The ‘item number’, a hypersexual song-and-dance sequence in Bollywood films, ¹ is widely popular among audiences in India. It typically features an ‘item girl’, a hyper-visible female figure, performing a sensual dance sequence set to a song that amplifies erotic appeal through deep, textured voices, a vivacious tonality, and a fast and catchy rhythm. She is adorned in provocative costumes and often surrounded by male spectators who dwell in exaggerated desire, frequently attempting to touch her. Far from being mere narrative detours, item numbers are integral to Bollywood film texts, serving as critical sites for the performance of desire, spectacle, and affect (Gopalan, 2002). ‘Sheila Ki Jawani’ (2010), ‘Chikni Chameli’ (2012), ‘Dilbar’ (2018), ‘Saki Saki’ (2019), ‘Uyi Amma’ (2025) are some popular Bollywood item numbers that have been produced in the last decade. While several scholars have provided critical insights on the form itself (Anjaria, 2021; Brara, 2010; Iyer, 2017; Kaur, 2011; Kumar, 2017; Shresthova, 2011), the reception of item numbers has remained particularly unexamined. The popularity of item numbers has seen a concomitant rise in critical narrative among audiences themselves. A pilot study conducted in several educational institutes of Guwahati and Mumbai demonstrated how youth articulate a sense of moral discomfort around item numbers, even as they continued to engage with the form in parties, college festivals, pubs, etc. More than doing an elemental study of the item number, this article, therefore, explores how audiences engage with and participate in the culture of item songs in a contradictory and ambiguous manner. By exploring the selective, affective, and reflexive ways in which item numbers are negotiated in everyday life, I frame these songs as critical epistemic resources that illustrate how audiences construct their subjectivity, constitute their relationship with the ‘erotic’ in contradictory manner, and self-fashion their identities in the process. In other words, the songs act as sites of contestation, where cultural and familial norms around gender, sexuality, and morality are both reinforced and subverted.

The findings in this article are rooted in semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions conducted with Assamese youth in the 18–25 age group, in both Guwahati city in Assam, a north-eastern state in India, as well as the Assamese diaspora in Mumbai (first-generation migrants). These two primary groups were chosen for the distinctive identities they bring to the discourse of popular culture consumption. Assamese audiences in Guwahati, a city that is seeing rapid urbanization projects in the past decade and fast assimilating the neoliberal lifestyle into its fold, regularly consume ‘mainstream’ pop culture idioms in their day-to-day lives. Bollywood, in this region, evokes an all-encompassing dominant fervour among its young audiences, who continue to engage with it either in colleges, music festivals, or at home and even in public spaces of leisure like malls, multiplexes, etc. ² The audiences in this region, however, typically remain on the cultural and geo-political periphery of reception studies in Hindi cinema. By bringing their voices into mainstream scholarship, I seek to visibilize the often-overlooked analysis of popular media reception in non-metropolitan spaces. The Assamese diaspora, on the other hand, given their upwardly mobile status as first-generation migrants in the city of Mumbai, gives us a glimpse into how the emerging cosmopolitan audience engages with and perceives the form in question.

A total of 32 interviews and 8 focus group discussions (involving 40 participants altogether) were conducted across both cities. Participants were selected through snowball sampling, allowing for organic recruitment across diverse social networks. Given the accessibility and relevance of educational spaces for reaching youth, fieldwork was primarily conducted in colleges and universities. In Guwahati, eight institutions were selected, while in Mumbai, four colleges were chosen based on the high proportion of Assamese students enrolled annually. Efforts were made to ensure a diverse mix of gender, class, caste, and ethnicity across participants to ensure equitable representation. Fieldwork was conducted over a period of seven months. Audience narratives ³ have been used in certain places to elucidate the conclusions and analyses.

Observation has also been used to observe audiences’ engagement with these songs in different settings like college fests, pubs, nightclubs, etc. As theorizations of subjectivity and culture have moved beyond linear models of communication, reception studies must increasingly turn to the practices and habits of daily life, which are discontinuous, improvised, and relational (Radway, 1988: 368). In this spirit, observation of engagement dynamics has not only helped to supplement interviews, but also to capture the embodied, performative and affectively charged ways in which Assamese youth interact with item numbers, through dance, gestures, joking imitation, etc.

The first part of the article delves into the various modes of engagement with item numbers. While a substantial portion of the article is dedicated to examining youth's engagement through ‘dance’ and its implications (a primary means of engagement), gossip, re-performances, and online engagement are also briefly touched upon to grasp the ubiquity of the form in youth's everyday lives. In examining the various modes of participation, the article also attends to the affective and moral negotiations that underpin their participation, revealing ambivalence at the heart of these engagements. The concluding sections examine how audiences resolve this tension through several mechanisms, revealing what I call a practice of ‘reflexive distancing’, that allows them to reconcile their desires with cultural anxieties.

Dancing to item numbers: Between participation and justification

As noted by Rita Brara, the enactment of spectacular, cine-sexual item numbers in the realm of the ‘everyday’ necessitates an exploration of the intersection between the spectacular and the everyday performances (Brara, 2010: 68). While multimodal engagement with item numbers is common, dancing to them emerged as a primary means of becoming a part of their glamourous world. Audiences categorically define how their engagement with item songs is never one of ‘sitting and praising’ and is most definitely that of ‘dancing and jumping’. The narrative below illustrates this further,

When I listen to item songs, I get a different form of energy because item songs can create that kind of energy. They are made in such a way that it has a tempo which gives that extra pump. If you are having a party, you have to listen to such songs. They are not the kind of songs that people just sit and enjoy like ‘Waah kya gaana hai’ [what a song this is!]. They are the kind of songs where involvement ‘aa jata hai’ [comes on its own]. (19-year-old, male, Mumbai)

Audiences believe that item songs provide a distinct kind of ‘energy’ that differentiates them from other genres of music, thus occupying a specific space within youth culture that is neither aesthetic nor passive but deeply performative. As Usha Iyer noted, ‘this difference in the embodied spectatorship of dance numbers, produces its own spectatorial comportment and affective intensity’ (Iyer, 2017: 129).

From college functions to wedding sangeets, ⁴ from pubs/discos to picnics, dancing to item songs carries multiple implications that need thorough analysis.

Discussions and gossip: Controlled aspirations and sexist banter

Beyond dancing, gossip serves as a key mode of engaging with item songs. Given my focus on youth (who often discuss hushed topics with their peers) and their relationship with a sexualized musical form, their informal conversations with friends became crucial to explore how they ‘gossip’ about item songs. Melissa Butcher, in her study on audience reception of the female body, employs gossip or ‘after-TV talk’ as a tool to understand how audiences negotiate and make sense of body images that proliferate in the media. She argues that communicative consensus – formed through everyday conversations – can bind an imagined community like ‘youth’ (Butcher, 1999: 184). She identifies gossip as a mechanism of social constraint, a means of reinforcing choices, and a way of categorizing media images, shaping the borders of acceptability and normality (1999: 168).

Among men, the conversations around item songs were often objectifying and derogatory, frequently manifesting as sexist banter. Often, these discussions fixated on the bodies of item girls framed in a pejorative manner. In contrast, women's gossip took on a fundamentally different tone, centered around dance steps and heroines, particularly their skill of dancing and visual aesthetics. These exchanges revolved around aspirations and desires to emulate the celebrities, making the female body a focal point of engagement. However, most women strategically delimit their boundaries of aspirations, making their discussions both celebratory and critical at the same time. For instance, Shrutika, a 22-year-old woman said, ‘I don’t want to wear those clothes, but yeah, that figure would be good!’ Such controlled aspirations reveal how women actively negotiate representations of femininity, where admiration for glamor and ‘perfect bodies’ coexist with an awareness of social constraints and moral expectations. Self-censoring, a common practice in such gossip sessions, underscores how women actively filter, modify, and reinterpret mediated images, aligning them with their lived experiences and social realities.

Despite differing approaches, the ‘female body’ remains a focal point of gossip among both men and women. Through these conversations, gossip functions as a form of social control – not only reinforcing normative gender roles and expectations around female sexuality, but also regulating how youth, particularly young women, are permitted to engage with such eroticized content. As Butcher has rightly argued, over these mediatized images, gossip acquires the power to discipline audiences’ reactions and behaviours, shaping what is considered socially acceptable or deviant in both public and private spheres (Brosius and Butcher, 1999: 183). Thus, post-viewing discussion tends to accept, reject, or transform the image (here the female body) in myriad ways such that parameters of desire, morality, and normalcy remain constantly in struggle.

Re-performing item numbers: Negotiating boundaries of permissibility

Re-singing popular item numbers during cultural festivals is a common way to grab attention and engage with the genre today. Amanda Weidman argued that ‘film is not simply viewed or “received”. Rather, elements from films are re-animated – appropriated and performed – in everyday interactions and in performance contexts, to accomplish specific kinds of social and cultural work’ (Weidman, 2012: 308). Therefore, understanding how item songs are performed in various non-film backgrounds and contexts became critical.

Several of my research participants are pursuing music professionally, often showcasing their talents through stage performances at various cultural and religious festivals like Bihu, Diwali, etc. Their performances of Hindi numbers include Bollywood item songs that are popular among audiences in Assam. Sunita, a 19-year-old girl from Guwahati training to be a singer, shared how she engages with the genre with a calculative mind.

I have been singing in stage programmes since class 7. Item songs definitely feature in my list of songs as that is how I will get people's attention and love. The audience needs that today. All the new songs that have become blockbusters are item numbers and we as professional singers have to be updated about them. We also get many requests from the audience to sing these songs. I have sung ‘Chikni Chameli’, ‘Dilbar’, ‘Sheila’ and all that. I haven’t sung ‘Munni’ though, despite its popularity. I feel like that is not appropriate. (19-year-old female, Guwahati)

Here, she clearly points out how singing item songs helps her achieve recognition as a skilled, professional singer. For budding singers like her, being able to provide the audiences with what they ‘need’ is of utmost importance. However, it is important to note that the act of locally and collectively reproducing a song significantly alters its meaning (Weidman, 2012: 314). For instance, the absence of reverb, auto-tune and bass beats, can diminish a song's sonic markers of ‘Westernness and debauchery’ (Weidman, 2012: 314). In such altered contexts, re-performance also involves a conscious and strategic decision-making process wherein female singers carefully plan the songs that can be viably and legitimately sung in public. This selection process reflects how audiences construct hierarchies of acceptability, distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ item numbers. Sunita consciously avoids performing ‘Munni Badnam Hui’ [‘Munni Got Defamed’] (2010), a song featuring Malaika Arora with suggestive lyrics and a rustic aesthetic, that is perceived as vulgar and overtly provincial by her. Conversely, she is comfortable performing other item numbers like ‘Dilbar’ [‘Lover’] (2018), an item number starring Nora Fatehi, which carries a more polished and contemporary visual grammar infused with global atmospherics. Constantly self-fashioning her identity to carefully negotiate the boundaries of acceptable female public performance, she chooses not to engage with ‘profane’ item numbers in settings that celebrate religious and cultural identities. This suggests that these performances are not only reshaping personal identities but also subtly redefining what is deemed appropriate and permissible within these communal spaces. Youth's willingness to perform item numbers in private leisure spaces, and their simultaneous restraint in moralized or communal public contexts, demonstrates the ambivalent, context-sensitive strategies through which they negotiate pleasure and cultural identity. This spatial selectivity underscores how audiences actively navigate their relationship with eroticized media forms, even when their engagement appears inconsistent.

Engaging with item numbers online: A reflection of digital selves

The increase in digitally mediated forms of entertainment, along with the soaring YouTube ‘views’ of item numbers, demand an exploration of how audiences engage with the form online. This section briefly examines online engagement with item numbers and looks at the elemental differences that emerge when compared to audiences’ offline interactions.

Given the private nature of online engagement, the aspect of anonymity played a crucial role in how participants engaged with the form in the digital space. Throughout many narratives it was clear how young men exercise strategic control over their online engagement with item numbers, reflecting a conscious effort to manage their digital footprint. For instance, a 20-year-old respondent from Guwahati, avoids ‘liking’ such videos through his primary YouTube account, and sometimes uses multiple accounts to ensure that item songs do not affect his primary playlist. Similarly, a 21-year-old from Mumbai is highly selective about his online activity, meticulously managing his watch history and ‘liked’ videos. While he may listen to item songs, he refrains from sharing, liking, or commenting on them, emphasizing his desire to curate a carefully controlled digital identity. Both these young men belong to upper middle-class families and are concerned with ‘managing’ their history to construct an image that affirms respectability. Multiple accounts also suggest the possibility of disguising and performing a range of identity options through cyberspace, where youth can navigate stringent social norms by creating parallel, unpoliced selves online. Their carefully negotiated interactions in this semi-public space showcase how urban middle-class students closely monitor their self-representations leading to the creation of ‘new youthful subjectivities’ (Ridder and Bauwel, 2013). This desire to construct an identity that distances oneself from item songs, points to how notions of class and taste inform identity construction.

Within this complex web of interactions, where youth is constantly trying to portray a non-erotic/ non-vulgar self, ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’ take on different meanings. Sudhir, a 23-year-old young man studying in a popular government college in Guwahati argued, ‘In online spaces, I might indirectly make a “like” sometimes. The main thing is it should be interesting, which I can later show to my friends and laugh over it.’ In other words, the act of ‘liking’ a song or a video can carry multiple, sometimes contradictory purposes. A ‘like’ does not necessarily indicate genuine engagement; rather it may also function as a means of bookmarking content for future use, to later act as anecdotal references in social interactions. Sudhir further explained that his ‘liking’ of the item song ‘Garmi’ (2020) – a viral Nora Fatehi dance number known for its provocative choreography (her twerking on the dancefloor also became a subject of many memes) – is not an expression of admiration but rather a means of saving it for later discussions within his social circle. Sometimes, associated memes are saved for these discussions to repurpose the songs as instruments of irony and affective disruption in youth digital interactions. With memes acting as the ‘moral police of the internet’ (Miller et al., 2016: xvi), young audiences are able to express their moral values and disparage those of others through these interactions.

Similarly, the practice of ‘sharing’ item songs has also taken on diverse and often ironic meanings. Nandini, a 20-year-old female from Guwahati said, ‘sometimes I share these songs with my friends to irritate them. Not to recommend for sure!’ Not always an act of celebration; sharing can also signify a prelude to collective amusement or playful mockery, sometimes also as a tool to annoy others, demonstrating how these songs function as instruments of humour in digital interactions. As Miller et al. (2016: 187) argues, such practices help ‘bind the wider audience into a shared cultural knowledge’. Here, what is shared is not just aesthetic pleasure, but an implicit understanding of what is funny, what is cringe, and what ‘crosses the line’, demonstrating how item numbers are often consumed through registers of irony, discomfort, and ambivalence, rather than through straightforward enjoyment.

Digital spaces have reshaped the meanings of seemingly straightforward actions like ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’. While such songs can act as a code for shared pleasure offline, their meaning and assimilation within online spaces undergo a distinct transformation. Therefore, despite being crafted as objects of sexualized desire in Bollywood, the participants in my study approach them as conversationally engaging, as a tool to create laughter, joy, and humour within a closely monitored space of social interaction.

Othering of pleasure: Reconciling cultural anxiety

Although engagement with the genre is evident through dance, re-performances, peer discussions, and online engagement, audiences continue to pin this form onto an imaginable ‘other’. Informed by notions of morality and taste (Bourdieu, 1984), a binary between ‘self’ and the ‘other’ frequently emerge in conversations regarding consumption of Bollywood item numbers (Ram, 2014: 140). Such forms of ‘othering’ leads to a gradation of pleasure itself. It also gives a peek into ‘the fluid terrain on which identities are constructed and reproduced within urban popular culture in India’ (Monteiro and Jayasankar, 2000: 302). Let us look at the below narrative to understand this:

The dimension of entertainment is very different for different people. Now the songs that educated people will listen to will be very different from a thelawala. If we say item songs, they are mostly heard by such kinds of people whose multidimensionality is missing like the drivers, rickshaw pullers, roadside workers, maids, etc. (19-year-old male, Guwahati)

Taking a similar tangent, several respondents try to deconstruct the entertainment principle of a labouring class individual. The construction of one's ‘spectator-self’, as opposed to ‘others’, that include identities like thelawala (pushcart vendors), rikshawala (hand-pulled rickshaw driver), hawkers, etc., invokes ‘dividing practices, which involve the identification of a normal “us”, in contradistinction to a deviant “them”’ (Monteiro and Jayasankar, 2000: 314). Thus, in evaluating the effects of communication, audiences tend to construct the most vulnerable section out of not ‘me’ or ‘you’, but ‘them’ – the third persons (Davison, 1983: 3). In this context, third persons are constructed through markers of class and caste, essentially leading to an ‘othering of pleasure’ such that the politics of spectatorial positions, through which erotic texts in Bollywood are negotiated, becomes visible.

Beyond class ideologies, ‘othering’ through invocation of regional pride was also common. For instance, Assamese students instinctively link item numbers to specific culture(s) of consumption, leading to what can be denoted as ‘dual othering’, that is, othering that happens at the level of both individual and community. For instance, the Bhojpuri/ Hindi-speaking belt receives the most flak for not just consuming item songs but also producing the culture of the item number. Akshay, an 18-year-old student from Guwahati said, ‘I don’t want to be judgemental. But it's mostly people from Haryana or Uttar Pradesh who like such songs.’ As Akshaya Kumar (2014), in his study of Bhojpuri music culture argues, while the upwardly mobile middle class has embraced globalized notions of vulgarity like wearing bikinis, kissing on screen, abusive language etc., performative bawdiness is still tagged as a repulsive practice that belongs to others (Kumar, 2014: 14). Imageries of this ‘other’ are bolstered by item numbers like ‘Munni Badnam Hui’ (2010) or ‘Fevicol Se’ (2012), where distinct kinds of community are shown to enjoy and derive pleasure from these performances within the cinematic narrative. Bracketing certain communities as guilty of engaging with item songs also seems to reflect a hyper-regionalist sentiment that tends to construct one's own community as ‘not guilty’ of perpetuating such genres of music. In this case, item numbers, seen as hypersexual, mass-oriented, and sensational, are often deemed culturally illegitimate within regional frameworks of respectability. This kind of othering can be understood as a means to steer clear of ‘shame’, here shame being attributed to the genre of the item number. As Sara Ahmed argued, ‘shame can be experienced as the affective cost of not following the scripts of normative existence’ (Ahmed, 2014: 125).

This process of distancing oneself from a sexualizing genre, despite continued engagement with it, underscores the paradox of desire. Thus, along with engagement, there are also specific forms of dis-engagement that are intentional and conscious in nature. As Ien Ang argued, ‘identification and distancing constantly alternate with one another’ (Ang, 1991: 479).

Conclusion

Building on the tradition of ‘reception as negotiation’ (Ang 1995; Gledhill, 2000; Gopal and Moorti, 2008; Hall, 1999), this article explores how youth audiences in a regional Indian context negotiate their affective and moral engagement with Bollywood item numbers. What is being negotiated here is not simply meaning or ideology, but desire, shame, and taste, all situated within gendered, classed, and regional cultural logics. Conceptualizing reception as a process, emphasizing flux, discontinuities, and shifting subject positions that envelop a person's engagement dynamics (Radway, 1984), the article examines the complex interplay between text, audience, and social context.

By bringing to light audiences’ conscious self-making that is informed by class, taste and regional hierarchies, the article highlights the fluid, often contradictory nature of identity formation that occurs vis-à-vis erotic song-and-dance sequences in Bollywood. With an array of such images on display, audiences tend to use different ways to negotiate their way in and out of such forms today, such that they exist both within and outside the form in different degrees. The interplay of desire and distance suggests not merely a critique of content, but a broader negotiation of cultural legitimacy and regional belonging. The moral disdain Assamese youth express towards item numbers does not simply echo larger national discourses of vulgarity or shame, but rather articulates a regionalized cultural self-positioning, a way of saying ‘this is not us’, even as they remain enmeshed in the circuits of consumption that these songs inhabit. In the context of item numbers, the pleasure youth feel is not unproblematic, it is entangled with moral judgement, social shame, and anxieties around what is ‘appropriate’ culture. Rather than interpret this ambivalence as contradiction or denial, it can be seen as a tool that allows them to negotiate their place within a pan-Indian media ecology while preserving a sense of regional moral/aesthetic distinction. Thus, through a critical understanding of item numbers, the study tries to reposition regional audience agency within the matrix of pleasure, anxiety, and identity politics.