Dadasaheb Phalke for Mithun Chakraborty: How Jimmy spurred Bollywood’s disco fever

The actor is best known for his portrayal of Jimmy, a young street performer, in the wildly successful Disco Dancer (1982). The movie shot him to superstardom, becoming the first Indian film to earn over Rs 100 crore worldwide.

We explain how the film popularised disco culture in India.

The evolution of disco culture

The term ‘disco’ is short for the French discothèque, a venue where people gather and dance to pop music. It traces its origins to 1930s and 1940s public dance parties in wartime Germany and France, where a disc jockey used a single turn-table to provide the night’s musical entertainment (Disco Timeline, Portia K. Maultsby, Carnegie Hall).

Disco music traces its origins to a fusion of genres, including R&B, funk, soul and salsa. In her 2008 book, ‘Hot Stuff: Disco and The Remaking of American Culture’, Alice Echols wrote, “Promiscuous and omnivorous, disco absorbed sounds and styles from all over, and in the process accelerated the transnational flow of musical ideas and idioms.”

Disco culture as we know it truly began to take shape in 1964, when DJ Jimmy Savile set up two turntables side-by-side on the stage, visible to the dancers. A year later, Terry Noel brought the seamless mixing of two records to the disco at the Arthur Club in New York City instead of sequentially playing them without breaks. Thus the DJ went from being an invisible fixture to becoming the mainstay of disco parties driven by a heady combination of lights and sound.

In New York City in the early 1970s, the emergence of disco coincided with the rise of gay clubs, primarily frequented by an Afro-Latino demographic. Discos offered LGBTQ+ people a space to express themselves. The music of this era reflected these themes, focussing on love, sexuality and taboo subjects.

It also offered its musicians – primarily black, female artists who were sidelined in a heavily racist America – the opportunity to cater to a diverse audience. This allowed the likes of Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor to rise to popularity in a musical era dominated by the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd.

The disco scene would go on to capture popular imagination following the release of the movie “Saturday Night Fever” in 1977, fuelled by the charisma and sensuous dancing of its lead, John Travolta.

By the early 1980s, disco as a genre had begun to wane in the US, largely due to cultural backlash from critics who decried the hedonistic lifestyles that were associated with disco.

The Disco Dancer effect

Discos had become a fixture in India, with Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata welcoming nightclubs in the 1970s. But these existed as a counterculture, until Bollywood embraced it.

The stage was set in 1980 with the stupendous success of the song ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ from Qurbani (1980). It was sung by the 15-year-old Pakistani singer Nazia Hassan, and produced by British-Indian producer Biddu Appaiah.

By then, Mithun Chakraborty had already established his presence in the industry as an actor, debuting in a national award-winning turn in Mrinal Sen’s Mrigaya (1976). Bollywood films until the early 1980s predominantly featured the angry young man trope, popularised by actors like Amitabh Bachchan. Chakraborty stood out against his peers as an antithesis to the fair, sophisticated heroes of the day.

The release of Disco Dancer in December 1982 would prove to be Bollywood’s own Saturday Night Fever moment. In addition to a compelling rags-to-riches story, its success rode on Bengali producer-singer Bappi Lahiri’s catchy songs like the titular “I am a Disco Dancer” and “Jimmy Aaja”, and Chakraborty’s unique dancing style.

The film broke all box office records and spurred massive interest in disco music in Bollywood. Lahiri’s experiments with the genre in the 1980s would come to define the industry’s music standard, relying on synthesizers, drum machines and seductive vocals.

Bollywood disco too would be characterised by flamboyant dressing – shimmering outfits, bell-bottom pants and headbands, along with the combination of flashing lights and synth-heavy singing.

The movie was especially well-received in the Soviet Union. In her book, “Leave Disco Dancer Alone: Indian Cinema and Soviet Movie-going after Stalin”, Sudha Rajagopalan wrote, “Disco Dancer (Disco Dancer/Tantsor Disko) became a landmark film in the Soviet Union… with its disco music and tall strapping nimblefooted hero won adoring audiences in the Soviet Union in the eighties…” The release of the film reportedly created a stampede-like situation in Tajikistan, with one person being killed in the rush. The film was the highest-grossing foreign film in the Soviet Union.