‘If Madonna can … ’: emergence of the female indipop star in the 1990s MTV cultural economy

Abstract

ABSTRACT As cinema moved from exhibition theatres to cable television in the late-1980s pre-liberal License Raj 1 economy, the competitive music label market in India pushed its executives to look beyond the established modes of music making and selling. This development also collided with the growing cultural demand for new and ‘fresh’ female voices, and innovative audio-visual modes inspired by the MTV consumerism model of the West. Additionally, music videos of international popstars such as Madonna, Michael Jackson, etc. started making waves in India through direct and indirect channels. As a result, the influence of western music video culture led the music industry officials to rope in ‘westernized in style, desi at heart’ female performers to represent the new wave of alternative non-film popular music – collectively popularised by music labels and the media as Hindi Pop or Indipop. Moreover, the cultural impact of American popstar Madonna’s stardom, performativity, and politics also played a critical role in the way the emerging Indipop ‘divas’ projected themselves, both in and outside the diegesis of their music videos, during the 90s MTV boom in India. Engaging with the textual and extratextual world of indipop music videos that belong to the ‘new women’ of the neoliberal-90s – Jasmine Bharucha, Alisha Chinai, Shweta Shetty, etc.—this paper attempts to track and locate the emergence of these ‘non-film’ 2 female voices in the traditional ‘song and dance’ aesthetic substructure of Bombay cinema.