Dance of the Hindu Gods to the Western electronic beats: the Bollywoodisation of Purulia style of Chhau dance

Majority of the Bollywood song-dance sequences are inspired/influenced/hybridised with Western popular culture, and often plays the role of a catalyst to bring exoticised, spectacularised, glamorised and glocalised images to people. These Bollywood song-dance sequences over the years have influenced the traditional folk, and classical dance forms of India tremendously, both in terms of form and content; for example Purulia style of Chhau Dance - a prominent folk dance form of the eastern part of India. Known as the theatre of gods, Chhau dance repertoire is based mainly on Hindu religious mythologies, such as Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Puranas carrying the message of good triumphing over evil. In this paper, I will examine how Bollywood cinema impacts Purulia style of Chhau dance, and how the traditional Chhau performances are giving way to a more hybridised (bollywoodised) version of Chhau dance. I draw upon Arjun Appadurai's (1991) conjecture ‘imagined selves and imagine world' to analyse the perspective of the Chhau dance practitioners, and experts (through personal interviews), why and how the hybridisation of Chhau is taking place and does the new hybridised form challenge the traditional form of the Chhau dance?