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Kaal

Shah Rukh Khan and Malaika Arora in Kaal.

A Bollywood[1] song number designed for only one thing: Fan Service. The song in question traditionally had an "Item Girl" whose only role is to do a dance for either the hero or the villain, but usually did not involve them beyond ogling the girl in question; nowadays the trend is to get the Item Girl to do an elaborate (often very sexually charged) performance along a main male character to the tune of the catchiest song in the soundtrack. Usually, the song itself may or may not have anything to do with the plot, and its lyrics are usually either sexually charged or full of double entendres. A very common variation on this would be the heroine to do the Item Number, depending on a few factors: She is either a skilled dancer, a new actress in her first movie, the studio could not afford the Item Girl they wanted, or the movie's promotion is centered around the song in question.

While the term itself was coined around the 1990's[2], the tradition of a fanservicey musical number has been present in Hindi cinema since at least the 1930's, usually in the form of a vamp character or the villain's girlfriend doing some provocative dance, or "tribal-style" dance numbers in the middle of romance montages. Indian producers began to add item numbers with more frequency in the 1990s after the success of film Khalnayak was discovered to be because people wanted to see Madhuri Dixit's song "Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai" again and again.

Since the early 2000's, there has been an increase on numbers having an "Item Boy" instead, usually starring the hero to remark his attractiveness, or an established actor doing an special appearance. Abhishek Bachchan was a pioneer of this trend, but it was perfected by Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan.

Arabic film (or rather Egyptian film, but frankly they're all but synonymous) does much the same thing with a belly dance.

Examples of Item number include:


  1. And The Otherwoods too, by the way
  2. The term was allegedly born after the use of "item" to refer to pretty girls in Mumbai film slang as a term of female objectification