This talk considers the low‐brow Hindi film *Disco Dancer *(Babbar Subhash, 1982) in terms of its seminal retooling of narrative, thematic, and star practices of Hindi cinema to accommodate new flows of international popular culture, specifically the “disco sensibility.” In its participation in a complex citational network of plagiarism, homage, and adaptation, the film is particularly seminal in its domestication of disco into a melodramatic mother‐centered narrative and its formal experimentation as it struggles to construct a cinematic language adequate to disco. *Disco Dancer* elicited at least three historical responses: the “naïve” response indicative of its enormous success in India and the USSR, the opprobrium of cultural critics, and the camp response it appears to have received in the US, and which continues to be the most common response to the film and its songs outside the cultural space of India/USSR.

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