An “item song,” in Indian cinema, is a musical performance that has little to do with the film in which it appears, but is presented to showcase beautiful dancing women in revealing clothes, to lend support to the marketability of the film. The dancer who appears in an item number is known as an item girl.
Bollywood actor Malaika Arora Khan, whose popular item numbers like Chaiyya Chaiyya and Munni Badnam Hui have raised the bar for her contemporaries to match her style, finds the “item girl” tag “derogatory and silly.”
“I don’t like the term ‘item girl’. Why not look at it (item song) as a special song? I find it derogatory and silly,” Malaika told in an interview.
Unlike in the past, currently mainstream actresses like Kareena Kapoor Khan, Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Katrina Kaif and others are appearing such songs in different films.
Though Malaika has proved herself as a dancer on screen, but one format she wants to learn is belly dancing.
“I would love to learn popping, locking and robotics, gymnastics and acrobatics, it is amazing to learn these things. I know basic thing about belly dancing but not the technicalities, I want to learn it. I want to learn belly dancing. I wish to learn more of dancing. I have been associated with dance since long time but yet there is so much more to learn about it,” she said.
Malaika says the space of belly dancing is largely unexplored in Bollywood movies.
“We have done a few steps here and there in films, whether Deepika Padukone or Katrina Kaif they all have done it but not the real part. There is no one who has actually done belly dancing on screen.
Besides belly dancing, the 40-year-old actress would like to do some bike stunts and acrobatics, which she says fascinate her.