[gregory d. booth] behind the curtain making musi(bokos-z1)

Behind the Curtain

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Behind the CurtainMaking Music in Mumbais Film Studios

Gregory D. Booth

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBooth, Gregory D.

Behind the curtain : making music in Mumbais lm studios / Gregory D. Booth.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 9780195327632; 9780195327649 (pbk.)

1. Motion picture musicProduction and directionIndiaBombayHistory.2. Motion picture musicIndiaBombayHistory and criticism. 3. Motion picture industry

IndiaBombayHistory. I. Title. ML2075B66 2008

781.5420954792dc22 2008007201

Recorded video tracks marked in text with are available online at www.oup.com/us/behindthecurtain

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

Shortly before this volume was completed, the Indian lm industry lost itseldest living member. Coming from a middle-class Parsi family in Pune,Cawas Lord began his long musical career playing military drums and bag-pipes under the tutelage of various local military bandleaders. He laterswitched to trumpet and, still later, to dance and jazz drums and played forvarious bands. In the 1930s he began working in Mumbais lm studios,initially for Imperial Studios, where he played music for some of Indiasearliest sound lms. During World War II he toured India as a captain inthe British army entertaining the British troops. After the war, Lord re-turned to Mumbai, where he joined the band of Mumbais great jazz trum-peter, Chic Chocolate, as a drummer. The presence of touring dance-bandmusicians provided Lord an opportunity to learn Latin Americanstylepercussion instruments. He subsequently played a fundamental role in thepopularization of those instruments and Latin dance rhythms in Mumbaisdance-band scene. His inuence became national when he rejoined thelm-music business. Working with composers such as C. Ramchandra, S.D. Burman, Naushad Ali, and others, Lord pioneered the incorporation ofLatin musical elements into the music of the Hindi cinema.

Widely respected throughout the lm-music industry, Cawas Kaka(Uncle Cawas), as he was known, helped younger musicians to developtheir own careers.

This book is dedicated to Cawas Lord

Cawas Lord (extreme right)rehearses Latin rhythms with

his son, Kersi Lord (far left,on bongos), and Dattaram

Waadkar (second from left,on congas). Music director

Shankar Raghuvanshi lookson (Famous Studios, ca.

1957). Courtesy of KersiLord and family.

I express my sincere gratitude to numerous musicians, engineers, music di-rectors, and others of the Mumbai lm industry. These individuals kindlyput up with my questions and confusion; many offered hospitality andfriendship, as well as information and connections. They are all cocontrib-utors to this book and this history; without their generosity this projectwould not have been possible. I have sought to do justice to their careersand their words; some have been kind enough to read parts of this manu-script and suggest corrections, for which I am grateful. Any errors that re-main are solely my responsibility. These people are listed here alphabeti-cally by rst name, as is common practice in industry listings:

A. N. Tagore, Abbas Ali, Amar Haldipurkar, Amin Sayani, AmrutKatkar, Anandji Shah, Anil Mohile, Anjan Biswas, Annbal Castro, An-thony Gonsalves, Anupam De Ghatak, Ashok Ranade, Ashok Shukla,Avinash Oak, Bablu Chakravarty, Benny Gracias, Benny Rosario, BhanuGupta, Bhavani Shankar, Bhupinder Singh, Bishwadeep Chatterjee, BoscoMendes, Cajetano Pinto, Cawas Lord, Charanjit Singh, Daman Sood, Dat-taram Waadkar, Deepan Chatterji, Deepak Chauhan, Ernest Menezes,Franco Vaz, Gyan Prasad, Halim Jaffar Khan, Homi Mullan, InduMehrani, J. V. Acharya, Jerry Fernandes, Jerry Pinto, Joe Gomes, JoeMonsorate, Joe Pinto, John Gonsalves, John Pereira, Kartik Kumar, KersiLord, Kishore Desai, Kuku Kholi, Leslie Godinho, Louiz Banks, Loy Men-donsa, Manohari Singh, Maoro Alfonso, Mario Fernndez, Maruti RaoKheer, Micky Corea, Mukesh Desai, Naresh Fernandes, Naushad Ali,

Acknowledgments

Nisar Ahmad Sajjad, Omprakash Sonik, Prabhakar Jog, Prakash Varma,Pyarelal Sharma, Ramanand Shetty, Ramesh Iyer, Ranjit Gazmer, RatnaNagari, Ravi Shankar Sharma, Raymond Albuquerque, Robert Corea, San-jay Chakravarty, Sardar Malik, Shakti Samant, Shankar Indorkar, ShankarMahadevan, Sharafat Khan, Shivkumar Sharma, Shreekant Joshi, ShyamRaj, Shyamrao Kamble, Sultan Khan, Sumit Mitra, Sunil Kaushik, SureshKathuria, Suresh Yadhav, Tanug Garg, Tappan Adhikari, Tauq Qureshi,Thakur Singh, Uttam Singh, V. K. Dubey, Victor DSouza, Vijay Chauhan,Vijay (Viju) Shah, Vipin Reshamiya, Vistasp Balsara, Yash Chopra, andZakir Hussain.

In addition, I owe special thanks to Alison Booth for her understandingand encouragement of the eldwork process and for her help with thevideos that accompany this book; to Naresh Fernandes for his insights andcontacts in the Goan community and Mumbai generally, as well as his col-legial support of and interest in this project; to Kersi Lord, for his knowl-edge and conversation and many highly educational lunches; to SunilShanbag of Chrysalis Productions for his friendship and enthusiasm, aswell as his support of the lming that was undertaken as part of this proj-ect and the production of the video excerpts that accompany this book;and to the University of Auckland Research Committee for its support ofthe necessary eldwork.

viii Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction: Who Is Anthony Gonsalves? 3

Part I History, Technology, and a Determinist Milieu for Hindi Film Song

1 Popular Music as Film Music 272 Musicians and Technology in the Mumbai

Film-Music Industry 563 Changing Structures in the Mumbai Film Industry 87

Part II The Life of Music in the Mumbai Film Industry

4 Origins, Training, and Joining the Line 1215 Roles, Relations, and the Creative Process 1546 Rehearsals, Recordings, and Economics 184

Part III Music, Instruments, and Meaning from Musicians Perspectives

7 Orchestras and Orchestral Procedures, Instrumental Change, Arranging, and Programming 225

8 Issues of Style, Genre, and Value in Mumbai Film Music 255

Conclusion: Oral History, Change, and Accounts of Human Agency 284

Notes 293

References 295

Index 305

Behind the Curtain

Almost anyone who grew up in urban India after 1950, especially in thenorthern two-thirds of the subcontinent, knows who Anthony Gonsalvesis: the middle of the three ctional brothers at the center of the classicHindi lm Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977), directed by Manmohan Desai.1

The lm is a typical 1970s Desai action lm with seemingly endless mixedidentities, brothers lost and found, cross-generation revenge, car chases,ght sequences, ashbacks, and a very urban, slang-based dialogue. As abrother lm, a structure that the Hindi cinema has borrowed and modi-ed from traditional epic narratives and modied to suit twentieth- andtwenty-rst-century India, it is full of narrative and dramatic parallelism atall levels, treating each of the three brothers identied in the lms title(who have been separated at childhood and raised as Hindu, Christian, andMuslim respectively) with precisely the proper amount of attention and re-spect to establish the hierarchy (Booth 1995). As the middle brother, An-thony Gonsalves is the most colorful. He does most of the ghting, cutsmore corners than the others, and has the most exuberant romance.

Anthony, played by Amitabh Bachchan in the early days of the angryyoung man phase of his remarkable career, also generates most of thecomedy. Among his famous comic scenes in this lm is the song My NameIs Anthony Gonsalves (composed by Laxmikant-Pyarelal, with lyrics byAnand Bakshi). In the song, Anthony bursts forth from a huge Easter eggat a Goan (and hence Christian) celebration of that holiday, dressed in a

Introduction

Who Is Anthony Gonsalves?

3

caricature of old-fashioned Goan formal dress, in an absurdly large top hatand tails. The scene, the song, and the character are iconic images of Indiain the 1970s and of the career of Indias most famous Hindi lm actor.

From a different perspective, almost no one outside the Mumbai lm-music industry knows who Anthony Gonsalves is (gure 0.1). Born in1927 in the Goan village of Majorda, Anthony Gonsalves was the son of achoirmaster attached to the local Roman Catholic church, Me de Deus.Anthony was trained in European classical music by his father and from1943 through 1965 worked in the lm-music industry in Mumbai. Al-though he frequently played violin in the front row of various lm-studioorchestras, he made more signicant contributions through his arrangingand composition work for a long and distinguished list of music directors(composers), including Shyam Sunder, S. D. Burman, and Madan Mohan.This real-life Anthony Gonsalves also taught many younger musicians toplay violin, read European staff notation, and understand the intricacies of(European) music theory and harmony (Fernandes 2005).

Anthony Gonsalves: I was known for my willingness to teach. I wouldteach anyone. I didnt mind about religion or caste or any of those things.Lata [Mangeshkar, a famous lm singer] arranged a hall for me in Bandra

4 Introduction

Figure 0.1Anthony Gonsalves (2005).

so I could teach there. I taught them how to play for the lms becausemostly they had not done this kind of work before.2

One of Gonsalvess young students in the 1950s was Pyarelal Sharma,who, along with Laxmikant Kudalkar, went on to become one half of oneof Indias most famous composing teams, known publicly as Laxmikant-Pyarelal and within the lm industry often as simply L-P.

Anthony Gonsalves had left Mumbai and the lm-music industry be-hind more than ten years before Laxmikant-Pyarelal started composing thesongs for Amar, Akbar, Anthony. Because the lm required three names,preferably alliterative, representing three different religions, ManmohanDesai settled on Anthony for his Christian hero but had originally thoughtof his surname as Fernandes, also common in the Goan Christian world.When Laxmikant-Pyarelal met with lyricist Anand Bakshi and Desai tostart working out the songs, however, the title My Name Is Anthony Fer-nandes simply did not appeal to anyone. On a whim, Pyarelal Sharmasuggested that the name be changed from Fernandes to Gonsalves, con-sciously recalling the name of his own real-life violin teacher and namingBachchans soon-to-be-famous lm character for an important, if largelyunknown, lm musician.

Pyarelal Sharma is not a man on whom irony is lost. To name a charac-ter played by Indias most famous actor for a musician totally unknownoutside the small circle of the Mumbai lm-music industry was a gesturethat no doubt appealed to him as both a sincere gesture of affection and ahumorously ironic reection on lm-musicians anonymity. Nor is theirony lost on Anthony Gonsalves, who explains the lm-music business asa life of invisibility: We were always hidden, always playing behind thecurtain. No one knew.

The image of playing behind the curtain came up more than once inthe research leading to this book, sometimes in similar language, some-times in precisely those words; hence its place in my title. Although hecomes from a different sociocultural and musical background and from adifferent time, tabla player Sharafat Khan, who began playing on Hindilm scores in the 1970s, has used almost exactly the same imagery as Gon-salves to explain the nature of the musical life in the lm business:

Sharafat Khan: You know the thing about being a musician in this line isthat people never know what happens. We do such good work, but thepublic never sees behind the curtain, so they never know what weve done.Its like that even today. [ Video 0.1]

The musicians of the Mumbai lm industry have always understoodtheir own anonymity. They were working at jobs in which many earned

Who Is Anthony Gonsalves? 5

substantial amounts of money, but some at least would rather have beenplaying jazz or classical music. A number encountered the results of theirwork in theaters or on the radio; others had no knowledge of the names ofthe songs or lms they were working on.

In one sense, these are conditions that Mumbais lm musicians sharewith many lm and studio musicians throughout the world. How manyviewers watching Lawrence of Arabia, for example, are actively paying at-tention to the musical score or wondering about the composers identity, letalone the name of the musician who played the oboe solos? Anonymity isa fate shared to a greater or lesser extent by musicians in many narrativetraditions.

There is one signicant difference, however, between the music ofLawrence of Arabia and that of Amar, Akbar, Anthony. The songs thatwere part of the latters score were naturally composed to be integral com-ponents of a feature lm, but because of the specic circumstances of thepopular culture industry in India after 1947, they were simultaneouslyitems in a uniquely dominant popular music repertoire. Not only, then,does almost everyone who grew up in independent India or lived in thenorthern two-thirds of the subcontinent from 1977 onward know who An-thony Gonsalves (the lm character) is, most would also recognize the songin which that name was made famous. Unlike the musicians who playedfor Hollywood soundtracks, those of the Mumbai lm studios were simul-taneously performing songs that were also the major components of Indiaspopular music culture. They were the men and women who played the hitsheard and sung in homes and on the streets, as well as the music to whichHindi lm stars mimed and danced on the screen. They contributed to whathas been arguably the most important and widely received non-Westernpopular music of the twentieth century.

This dual identity of Anthony Gonsalves is at the heart of this book. Asa lm persona he embodies the enormous cultural presence of both theHindi cinema and its music. As a real but almost unknown music per-former, composer, and arranger, he embodies the anonymity of his profes-sion and his many colleagues. Perhaps more than in any other lm-musicindustry, Mumbais lm musicians were participating in the production oftheir countrys most popular songs. Moreover, perhaps more than any otherpopular musicians, they remained anonymous throughout their careers.

An Oral History of Mumbais Film-Music Industry

This book offers a view of the professional lives of musicians who playedin the Indian, Hindi-language lm industry located in Mumbai. I contex-

6 Introduction

tualize the stories they tell with a consideration of the fundamental cul-tural, technological, and industrial issues that shaped Hindi lm-musicproduction and the place of that music in Indian culture. The book is con-structed largely through and in the words of the musicians, which werespoken to me in interviews and conversations conducted between 2004and 2007. Well over half of the interviews were conducted in English,which is widely spoken in the lm business and is the principal languagespoken by most Goan musicians. The remainder of the interviews wereconducted in Hindi. It is thus an oral history.

Although musical performances often accompanied silent Indian lmsand were consistently present in sound lms from 1931 on, this volumefocuses on the period that has recently been termed Old Bollywood (Vir-mani 2004, 77). Bollywood is a somewhat contentious term for a varietyof reasons (I discuss my use of this term in detail in chapter 3). Briey, how-ever, Old Bollywood refers to the period in which Mumbai lm productionwas characterized by an independent-producer industrial system and by aseries of technological processes that ultimately required the synchronizedrerecording of sounds and images onto a single strip of celluloid lm. Thesetwo processes dominated Mumbais lm-production processes from thelate 1940s on and persisted throughout the late 1990s.

When younger, more technically sophisticated lmmakers and techni-cians nally introduced digital sound and lmmaking techniques and com-puters became widely available, a new era began that I call New Bolly-wood. Many aspects of New Bollywood are in fact new: The variousfeatures of digital technology, multiscreen theaters, the increasing eco-nomic power of the Indian diaspora, and the globalization of music televi-sion are the most important ones here. New Bollywood has offered a rangeof positive outcomes for Indian lmmakers, including the wider interna-tional access that comes with world-class production values and legible En-glish subtitles, but the introduction of digital, computer-based sound re-cording marked a drastic and less positive change for lm musicians. NewBollywood has also seen the advent of a new breed of professional lm pro-ducers, as Virmani argues. One consequence of these new developmentshas been the collapse, in effect, of the musical life that I describe. NewBollywood, of course, is an ongoing phenomenon in which musicians arestill active; as its history becomes its present at some point, it is necessarilyincomplete. In one sense, history becomes less satisfactory the closer itcomes to that imaginary line between it and the present.

Nevertheless, there is a sense among the musicians (even the youngerones) in Mumbais lm industry of something that began rather graduallyaround the time of Indian independence in 1947 but ended somewhatabruptly just before the beginning of the new millennium. This oral history


considers the years both before and after this period but focuses primarilyon the musical, professional, and cultural aspects of what I maintain is aremarkably coherent period of roughly fty years.

History and Oral History

An oral history is a dangerous thing. Michel de Certeau writes that onetype of history ponders what is comprehensible and what are the conditionsof understanding, the other claims to reencounter lived experience, ex-humed by virtue of a knowledge of the past (de Certeau 1988, 35). Claimsto reencounter lived experience must be deceptive, of course, especially inhistories based on documents. No historian can legitimately support sucha claim, as de Certeau argues. An oral history, on the other hand, does, inat least one sense, offer readers an encounter with actual experience. Thewords in this book are, explicitly and inarguably, retellings by those wholived the composition, performance, and recording of Mumbais lmmusic. Of course, the attraction of such a history is that it provides its read-ers unparalleled and personalized access to fascinating historical phenom-ena. In the chapters that follow, musicians of Mumbais lm industry speakto questions about how recordings took place, how the music was created,how they made decisions about careers, who controlled their pay, and soon from irreplaceable rsthand knowledge. No documents can offer suchclear and immediate understandings of these questions. Naturally, as withanything so appealing, one encounters a number of traps having to do with the historical process.

Among other things, oral history seems especially vulnerable to the val-orization of the relation the historian keeps with a lived experience(White 1987, 2). This is an inevitable outcome of the ethnographic (ratherthan historical) method, which effectively requires participant/observationstyle eldwork, the living of at least an ersatz version of the experience thatis the object of study. In the collection of oral history, the necessary eld-work establishes a relationship between the historian-ethnographer andthe people and places that are the objects of the research. This connectionprovides access to a lived experience that, in some cases (however tem-porarily or articially), closely resembles the actual experience of the ob-ject. I make no claim to any such resemblance with regard to my eldwork.The life that most of the musicians describe in this volume is effectivelyover; I can never claim to have lived that life or even convince myself thatI have.

All historical discourse narrates in some form, but the act of narrativiza-tionthat is, the construction of accounts of perceived reality in storyformis problematic. The distinctions between history and oral history lie

8 Introduction

in the difference between a discourse that openly adopts a perspective thatlooks out on the world and reports it and a discourse that feigns to makethe world speak itself and speak itself as a story (ibid., 3). Neither theworld nor the events of history are capable of speech, of course: In a his-tory that is derived from documentary evidence, real events should notspeak . . . real events should simply be (ibid.).

In an oral history, however, narrators abound. The musicians in thisbook are people who have subjectively reported the events of their profes-sional lives. They are narrators indeed. What is more, many of them under-stand their careers as stories and tell them as such, beginning at the begin-ning and continuing until they come to the end or to a point after whichthey perceive things to have gone on without change and therefore as un-worthy of (and untellable as) a story. This is not at all unexpected. Nar-rative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transculturalmessages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted (ibid., 1).The specic nature of an oral history lies in its ability to more legitimatelyaccess the metacode that White proposes and equally in the fact that thesemusicians, these narrators (and their words) are simultaneously the sub-jects of the events they recount and the historical objects of my study.

In the context of a coffeehouse, bar, or musicians front room, thesewords are accounts by actors in the Mumbai lm business speaking for andof themselves and the world in which they live; they are the world speak-ing itself as White puts it (above). In the context of this book, however,they are words spoken to and subsequently selected by me. In constructinga history I not only become the source of subjective narration but also de-construct the individual narratives told to me. I select some portions ofthose narratives and not others to weave into the fabric of a new narrative.I place the words of each of these individuals in a new context, alongsidethe words of their colleagues, interpreting and creating new historicalmeanings thereby. In the juxtaposition of three narratives about recordingsessions, for example, those stories may still appear to be accounts of his-torical action, but like all such descriptions, they are history because theirjuxtaposition is the result of my historiographic action. The words and sto-ries of these individuals are inevitably enmeshed in a narrative that, tosome extent, goes beyond their own immediate experiences.

Oral History in the Mumbai Film-Music Industry

I had a number of reasons for undertaking this project. First, of course, itis a fascinating subject. The Mumbai lm-music industry offers a globallyunique instance of an interaction between a lm-production system (withall its aesthetic, commercial, and industrial associations) and a popular


musicproduction system. The musicians of the Hindi lm world com-posed, arranged, and performed lm music as part of a self-organizedmethod that combined technological, aesthetic, and industrial aspects oflmmaking with lm-music and popular-music production in a culturalcontext where the identities of lm and popular music were effectively syn-onymous. Under the constraints of this technique, creative roles and socio-professional structures interacted in specic ways with economics andtechnology to relegate particular creative musical tasks or different typesof recording to various locations on the long path to lm completion. Inother examples, musicians were separated from the composers theyworked with daily not only in terms of the sources and nature of their pay-ments but also through distinct professional bodies.

As popular music, lm songs beneted from being embedded in a lm-production system, even one as chaotic as the Mumbai lm industry. Songsand their narrative contexts were often mutually reinforcing in terms ofpublicity, reception, and emotional impact and meaning. Ironically, songproduction in this environment was at times only partially or loosely con-strained by budgetary limits in both the short and medium terms. As longas lms were hits, it appears as if lm-music production was sometimesfunded from a seemingly bottomless pocket. These stories relate the condi-tions of this impossibility, which is then thrown into less rosy relief by sto-ries of limited budgets and late wages. At the same time, no amount ofmoney could overcome the physical limits of sound technology at anygiven point in the history of that fascinating subject or the barriers createdby the Indian government to the acquisition of such technology. Human in-genuity and an enormous amount of hard work, together with the socio-professional organizational skills that Indian culture possesses in greatmeasure, overcame these obstacles. The result was a sophisticated, if time-consuming, song-and-picture production process that generated one of theworlds most famous and most distinctive popular-music repertoires.

My second reason for embarking on this book and adopting its particu-lar structure is that, although much ethnomusicology is based on oral his-tory, there are very few oral histories in ethnomusicology. Oral history liesat an important conuence of ethnography and history as elds, a placewhere the current broad trend toward subject-centered ethnography meetshead-on ethnomusicologys and anthropologys concerns with the politicalimplications of essentialist representation. These were initially called to ourattention by Edward Said (1991). As I have noted, it offers the potential fora more direct connection with the object of our inquiry than does a historybased solely on documents. While this volume is as much a subject-centeredwork as any other (and with all of the aforementioned caveats in mind), Isuggest that an oral history provides access to the words of musicians

10 Introduction

themselves and offers the possibility of a desensationalized, demystied,but essentially human understanding of this music-production culture andprocess.

The Mumbai lm-music industry is an excellent choice for such an ap-proach. Although there were the usual professional, personal, and commu-nal jealousies and tensions, the world of Mumbai lm music, throughoutits history, has been quite small, tightly knit, and remarkably collegial. TheCine Musicians Association (CMA), the professional union for lm musi-cians, has rarely (if ever) had a membership of more than eight hundredmusicians. Probably fewer than three hundred of those were playing musicin the studios on a daily basis at any point in time. Roughly two hundredmore were working regularly but not daily.

Although every individuals story is different, most are familiar withothers careers; in many professional aspects, those careers were quite simi-lar. More than in some musical traditions and professions in India, the mu-sicians of the Mumbai lm industry can and do speak of the industry asa collective, homogeneous unit. Most have a sense of its history and ofchanges over time, as well as a perception that developing technology andbusiness practices were driving much of that change. Musicians are awareof their own place and that of others in the broader narrative of the pro-fession. One of the most consistent comments musicians make about thelm line, as most musicians call their business, concerns the pleasure theyhad in meeting on a regular, if not daily, basis. They understood themselvesas a group and, for the most part, recognized their common perceptions ofits divisions and subdivisions.

In the comments of many of these musicians, an enjoyment of the workand their pride in the quality of their performances are evident. This is es-pecially so because, although these were recording sessions, most record-ings sessions were explicitly performances. Even if they did not like themusic all that much (and some did not), a sense of shared musical accom-plishment and camaraderie stands out.

Musicians often express their feelings in these respects in language thatappears to be nostalgic. Nostalgia as such is a concern in any oral historyand for any oral historian. As with matters of narrativization, nostalgia isperil in which both the historian and the informants can participate. Aromanticized longing for a better, purer, happier past that was some-how more authentic, more diverse, and so forth is prevalent among mem-bers of any elder generation in any context. The romanticizing or oriental-izing tendencies of ethnomusicology have themselves been a concern withinthe eld. In a volume that focuses largely on a musical past and uses thewords of the musicians who lived that past to represent it, the dangers ofnostalgia are considerable.


The distinction between accurate and nostalgic representations in thiscontext is a very difcult line to draw. I have no doubt that at least someof the comments in this volume are nostalgic. I address this issue speci-cally at the conclusion of chapter 8, but I note at this point that, in em-pirical terms, the professional lives of lm musicians were better in the1970s and 80s. Work was plentiful, pay rates were set by negotiated settle-ments, wages were paid largely on time, and the future seemed certain. Sonsfollowed their fathers into the lm-music business with no expectation thatmusicians who began the 1990s working forty- to sixty-hour weeks would,by the end of that decade, be working forty-hour months if they werelucky. Thus, a longing for a lost (better) time is very much part of the mind-set of many musicians in Mumbai, although it is usually tempered by asense of resignation to the inevitability of change. Part of the value of thisvolume is that it captures the beginning and the end of a distinct period inworld music history that lasted roughly forty years and almost inevitablyinstills a sense of wistfulness among those who experienced it.

Many of these musicians are very aware of having participated in some-thing quite special. It would not have been possible to live in Mumbai oranywhere in India after 1940 and not be aware of the cultural importanceof the music they were playing. Musicians in the lm business have alwaysunderstood that they were making the popular music of the nation anddoing so in a fashion signicantly more anonymous than lm composers,whose credits in the opening moments of a lm are normally located pres-tigiously just before the names of the director and producer. Musiciansworked daily with the stars of that music, the composers and the singers,but were completely unrecognized outside of the industry. The extent towhich they contributed to the construction and development of this highlysyncretic music was also generally unknown. Part of the justication forthe format of this volume is that it provides a forum and some degree ofrecognition in the academic arena for the voices of these musicians whowere playing behind the curtain.

Scholarship on the Hindi Cinema and Its Music

This book can also be seen as a response to the nature of the Wests recep-tion of Hindi lm music and the scholarship to date on this topic. Untilvery recently there have been major gaps in our understanding of the waysthis music has been created, produced, and received.

Ethnomusicologys initial concerns with authenticity and the confusionthat characterized the elds early relationship with popular music and themedia resulted in a dubious silence regarding lm music in the scholarshipof the 1970s and early 1980s. Hindi lm music also had the problem of

12 Introduction

being intensely hegemonic, obvious, and blatantly commercial. These char-acteristics no doubt made it a relatively unappealing object of study in aeld that, as we all now understand, was initially fascinated by the exotic,the endangered, and the authentic. The echoes of Indias ofcially negativemidcentury position on lm music (as exemplied in the 1952 ban on thebroadcast of lm songs by the state-owned All India Radio) still resonatedin many circles in which foreign scholars traveled.

Unlike the classical traditions, which could be approached through lit-erature, classical texts, and performance training, there was no specicmethodology for the study of lm music. The partial applicability (at best)of existing popular music theory to Hindi lm song (chapter 8) added yetother obstacles. Furthermore, while there has always been an enormouspopular press devoted to the Hindi cinema and its music, there has beenlittle in the way of documentation of this industry and still less of itsmusicand literally none in English until the 1980s.

Prior to the advent of the digital age, only those who spoke Hindi couldproductively watch Hindi lms since the addition of English subtitles usingvideotape technology was not cost effective and rarely undertaken. Evenwith the language, viewing Hindi lms in the 1970s and 1980s most com-monly meant watching pirated videos of highly variable quality and choos-ing lms in what was a more-random-than-usual guessing game at the local(but often invisible) video rental store. The export of lms was a government-controlled activity until 1992, subsidiary to the policy of exporting artlms (Rajadhyaksha 2004, 120). Finally, the sheer gigantomania of Indiaslm factoriesclose to seventy thousand commercial Hindi lms androughly half a million songswas intimidating (Rajadhyaksha 1995, 10).

As a result, if we talked about Hindi lm song at all, it seemed that theinvocation of Lata Mangeshkars name three times and the recitation of thepopular formula six songs and three dances was sufcient. Ethnomusi-cologists could then go back to a consideration of serious (that is to say,classical or sometimes folk) music, which was viewed as worthier of atten-tion. As with so many other things, I have Zakir Hussain to thank forsuggesting to me that lm music deserved serious attention. That notionand my own experiences in Indiawhere the cultural importance of lmmusic is inescapably impressed on even the most casual visitorhave ledto my efforts to improve my understanding of Hindi lm song and ulti-mately to this book.

Ethnomusicologists generally, and South Asianists especially, have beenaware of Hindi lm music for a long time, of course. Whether we knewabout playback singer Lata Mangeshkar and her former place in the Guin-ness Book of World Records for the most songs recorded by a single artistor about the biggest lm industry in the world or simply that all Hindi


lms are musicals, most have been at least dimly aware of the behemoththat is Hindi lm and lm-music culture. Despite this general awareness,lm music took quite some time to appear in published research. Wades1979 text is limited to the classical traditions and does not mention lmmusic. Neumans ethnographic study of classical musicians similarly ig-nores the topic and notes only that lm music is a social phenomenon ofgreat but unstudied signicance (1980, 21). On the very rst page of hismusical ethnography of a Bhojpuri village, Henry states that shrilly am-plied lm songs, the popular music of India, have for decades been a partof the urban ambience (1988, 1). Henry also refers to the presence anduse of lm songs in village life.

The rst direct approach to lm song production and the people in-volved in the business was made not by ethnomusicologists but by a lm-maker-journalist pair riding the crest of the world-beat phenomenon ofthe mid-1980s. Their documentary lm, There Will Always Be Stars in theSky, and accompanying book chapter presented a sensationalized and sex-ualized view of the Mumbai industry, in which terms such as hotchpotchand conveyor belt were combined with tales of corruption, antiquatedequipment, and general incompetence (Marre and Charlton 1985). The ap-pearance of references to Hindi lm song in the growing world music lit-erature and ethnomusicologys awareness of the phenomenon ultimately ledto serious study of the phenomenon by a small group of foreign scholars.

Ironically, lm music also received little attention in Indian writing, al-though studies of Indian cinema inevitably mentioned music. Firoze Ran-goonwallas considerable expertise and fondness for lm music are bothapparent in his early study of the Indian cinema (Rangoonwalla 1983).Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980), on the other hand, did little morethan reinforce the formulaic nature of the genres six songs and threedances. Dissanayake and Sahai (1988) noted songs expressive power inthe lms of Raj Kapoor. More recently, Rajadhyaksha and Willeman(1995) have produced a valuable source of information on Indian lmsgenerally, which includes biographical information about some importantHindi composers, lyricists, and singers. Rajadhyaksha suggests that manyIndian readers of the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema will be familiar withhow, in the 1970s, cinephilia relating to mainstream Hindi cinema be-came an important source for celebrating indigenous cultural populismwhile mounting a free-market attack on the NehruIndira Gandhi social-ist model of state institutions (ibid., 10).

The more recent Indian scholars of Hindi cinema are the children ofthose times. As such, they have engaged with Indian cinema from a posi-tion of cinephilia while, for the most part, rejecting the almost compulsoryexpressions of embarrassment that most Indians of their parents genera-

14 Introduction

tion seemed to feel was obligatory in conversations (at least with foreign-ers) about the Hindi cinema. Primarily scholars of lm rather than music,they offer interpretive analyses that include at least the mention of song inrelation to politics, cinematic structure, or aesthetics and semiotics (e.g.,Aziz 2003; Chakravarty 1993; Gopalan 2002; Mishra 2002). This researchis long overdue: Aziz focuses exclusively on Hindi lm song, while Mishrahas devoted a full chapter to its consideration. Most others at least men-tion the importance of songs or the scenes of which those songs are a part.This scholarship, however, has been based largely on lm, media, and/orcultural studies models; it has resulted in a broad focus on cultural mean-ing, reception, and an explicitly subject-centered interpretive approach.

In addition to this research, a handful of Indian authors have addressedlm music outside its cinematic context. Ashok Ranade published someearly essays (1984), as well a 2006 volume that he describes as paying hisdebt to the Hindi cinema; the latter work is an important account from amusical and stylistic basis of the earlier periods of Hindi lm music. ManekPremchand (2003), very much a lm song fan, has also published theresults of his interviews with many of the major gures of Mumbais lm-music world, an additional, if not always consistent, source of informa-tion. Along more obsessive lines, Harmandir Singhs six-volume HindiFilm Geet Kosh [Hindi lm song dictionary], which lists the entire outputof lms, composers, songs, lyricists, and singers, is an indispensable re-search tool, written in Hindi, that has made possible much of the statisti-cal foundation for studies in this eld.

Until recently, the Hindi cinema and its music have not fared well inWestern perception and scholarship. Based on the scantiest of sources butwith some apparent familiarity with the genre, Skillman published an earlyhistorical study in 1986. A more extended ethnomusicological study ofHindi lm song was produced by Alison Arnold, who took a relative un-familiarity with India, along with standard ethnomusicological methodolo-gies and concepts, with her to Mumbai in the late 1980s. The resultingdoctoral dissertation (1991) is part standard music history and part musi-cological analysis that focuses on music directors (i.e., composers) and, toa lesser extent, singers. There is justication for this approach, both fromIndian and foreign viewpoints, but the scope and the complexities of theproject were perhaps broader than Arnold realized.

As it is, the document provides irreplaceable information about individ-uals and music in the industry. The interviews that Arnold conducted in thelate 1980s are an invaluable resource at this point since many of those shespoke with are no longer living. The comments of Anil Biswas and SalilChaudhuri that appear in this book have been transcribed from Arnoldsoriginal interview recordings.3


Peter Manuels study of cassette culture in north India (1993) helped re-orient ethnomusicological attention toward the popular and industrial sideof world musics. Despite his industrial focus on the cassette industry gen-erally and his interest in (and preference for) nonlm genres, his researchset out some key issues in lm music, including the distinctive relationshipsbetween the recording and lm industries and the control of popular musicproduction by lm producers and distributors. Manuels research providesvaluable information about the cassette industry, which, from the 1980son, radically increased the consumption of lm music outside the theatersand broadcast media. Manuel also implies the unique ideological and aes-thetic nature of Hindi lm song content when he notes the explicit presenceof extra-musical values and associations (ibid., 48).

There is a unique relationship, a tension in fact, between musical styleand genre ideology in Hindi lm song (see chapter 8). This has, I believe,contributed to the relative paucity of scholarship (especially foreign re-search) on lm song. I suggest that this relationship, in which musical styleelements appear to be randomly deployed in a repertoire with a high de-gree of ideological uniformity, makes Hindi lm music less amenable to thekinds of analysis that have informed much ethno- and popular musicology(e.g., Watermans excellent 1990 study of popular music in Nigeria).

In coming to grips with these issues, Arnold resorts to an explicitly evo-lutionary and ultimately comparative paradigm and states that the evolu-tion of lm song . . . has progressed remarkably slowly in comparison withthe development of Western pop music (Arnold 1991, 227). AlthoughArnold does not make this clear, her conclusions implicitly equate the his-tory of lm song with the series of ideologically or musically distinct stylesor genres that characterize Western popular music. Manuel also basesmuch of his analysis of lm music on what is effectively a Western (if notAmerican) popular music model.

Arnolds consideration of production is largely in musicological terms;she problematizes the creative process through a concern for the produc-tion of autonomous, unique songs. Manuel more protably recognizesthe distinctive nature of the Hindi lm-music production process, but hedoes not appear to fully consider the consequences of that uniqueness forthe validity of the comparison with Western popular music. While Arnoldprovides information about the creation of songs (largely as melodies) andManuel offers a wealth of facts about the production of cassettes, this re-search does not help us understand these aspects as part of a single culturaland industrial process. There is very little material on the actual produc-tion of music in the Hindi lm industry, the ways in which that music wasarranged, performed, and recorded, and who organized and undertookthose tasks. Given the intensely syncretic content of Hindi lm music

16 Introduction

(Arnold describes it as eclectic), in which Indian classical and folk musicswere routinely combined with both Western styles and the distinctive or-chestral sound of Mumbais lm orchestras, we have little real informationabout how this amalgam was achieved.

More recently, Anna Morcoms 2007 study of lm song begins withArnolds and Manuels research. As the rst study written by a foreigner fa-miliar with ethnomusicology, India, and Hindi cinema, however, Morcomsethnographic approach and her results offer a more integrated view of thekey issues in Hindi lm song. Signicantly, its production and meaning areplaced in the aesthetic and industrial contexts of the lm industry. Morcomconsiders industrial production, style, meaning, and the commercial life oflm songs, as reported by the producers, directors, and composers of theMumbai lm industry. Hers is consequently a rather raried view of thelm business from the top, at least in comparison to my sub-altern focuson musicians and arrangers.

The more recent time frame of Morcoms research (and much of thecontent as well) places her work in the transitional period between Old andNew Bollywood. She also avoids earlier implied expectations that lmsong should, in one way or another, be analyzable in a way similar toanalyses of Western popular music. Like Morcom, I argue that Hindi lmmusics uniqueness must ultimately be understood on terms that extend be-yond repertoire to include uniqueness as a music culture.

The exceptional nature of Mumbais culture of lm-music productioncomes out clearly in this oral history. The inclusion of and focus on all ofthe roles involved in the creation of lm musicthe musicians, arrangers,and engineers, as well as the star singers and composersgenerate a cul-turally and industrially complete understanding of the conditions of pro-duction under which this music developed. From this perspective, we canbegin to develop a broader understanding of the music of the Hindi cinema.

Structuring a History of Mumbais Film-Music Industry

No history of any single language-based lm industry in India can be com-plete without a consideration of the others. The inuences among the majorand minor players (not only Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu but alsoPanjabi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri, and Malayali) have uctuated over the yearsbut have never been completely absent. Nevertheless, lms in Hindi havebeen the largest single component of the national output for the vast ma-jority of years since 1931. In stylistic terms, Hindi lms have frequentlybeen leaders in fashions for stories, costumes, music, and so on. Finally,within the context of the linguistic politics of South Asia, Hindi has beenthe closest thing there is to a national language; Hindi lm songs are thus


the closest we can come to a national popular music. With these justi-cations and because of the level of detail that I assess, my focus remains ex-clusively on the industry that produces lms in Hindi. Since the early 1950sthat industry has been located wholly in Mumbai and, in an Indian play onthe colonial name of that city (Bombay), has increasingly become identiedas Bollywood (cf. Prasad 2003). I suggest that there is considerable scopefor future research in the musics of the regional cinemas, especially bythose uent in Tamil or Telugu.

When I rst discussed this topic with Kersi Lord, who has played,arranged, and composed music for Hindi lms since the late 1940s, his re-sponse was, Youve come ten years too late. He was right. An oral his-tory developed in the twenty-rst century cannot begin at the beginning(leaving aside completely the matter of beginnings as a theoretical con-cept). There is hardly anyone still living who was working in the businessbefore the late 1930s. Even since I began this research, that population hasdwindled. There is, furthermore, little documentation that gives us anysense of the working realities of the 1930s; a detailed history of music pro-duction in the early years of the Indian lm industry is beyond our reach.For these pragmatic reasons, this history begins in the late 1930s, which isafter the development of what is called the playback system. As I explainin chapter 1, playback represents a signicant shift in the limits of the pos-sible; it laid the foundation for the processes that later became the norm.For the most part, the stories in this volume take place from the 1950sthrough the present.

At this point, astute readers may already be experiencing some histori-cal discomfort. I have proposed an Old/New Bollywood historical frame-work but have made little reference to playback. As an important techno-logical and cultural phenomenon that began in 1935, playback clearlyimposes a level of historical difference on the lms and the music made be-fore and after its advent. However, it does not align with (or even directlyrelate to) the Old/New Bollywood distinctions. This tension is built intothe nature of cultural/industrial change and into my approach to writingabout it.

Toward the conclusion of his monumental economic history of civiliza-tion and capitalism in the fteenth through the eighteenth centuries, Fer-nand Braudel questions the notion of historical change (and hence peri-odization) in the context of the Industrial Revolution:

[The Industrial Revolution] was certainly not on account of progress in someparticular sector . . . but on the contrary as the consequence of an overall andindivisible process, the sum of the reciprocal relations of interdependenceand liberation that each individual sector as it developed, sooner or later, by

18 Introduction

accident or design, had helped to create for the greater benet of the othersectors. Can true growth . . . be anything but growth which links together,irreversibly, progress on several fronts at once, creating a mutually sustain-ing whole which is then propelled on to greater things? (Braudel 1984, 539)

As always, Braudel accurately identies the key historiographic issue. Inwriting this volume I have dealt with nonsimultaneous change on severalfronts at once, change that was, what is more, nonsimultaneous for dif-ferent reasons in different instances. The developments that have takenplace in Mumbais lm-music industry are the result both of a rapid se-quence of events and of what was clearly a very long-term process: two dif-ferent rhythms were beating simultaneously (ibid., 538).

No period of seventy years (19312001) can be dened as long-termprocesses, of course, but advances in Mumbais lm and lm-music worldshappened both relatively suddenly and more slowly. There were always (toparaphrase Braudel) developments that demanded or allowed innovationsand systems of cultural value and social organization that inhibited them.As the rst three chapters explain, no single periodization satisfactorily en-compasses the history of the Mumbai lm industry.

Structure and Usage

In confronting this problem, I have chosen not to organize this book as aseries of strictly chronological chapters. Instead, I have structured thematerial as a combination of industrial/technological and ethnographicchapters, organized into three parts, not all of which rely equally on oralinterviews. In the rst part I address directly and repeatedly the matter ofperiodization. Each of the rst three chapters presents a different view ofthe subject, such that the same issues resurface in the context of threeslightly different chronological models of the Mumbai lm industry.

I begin with a consideration of the industrial and cultural systems ofmusic production and consumption as these were created by playback, thephenomenon that gave rise to the life of music that most of the musiciansI have interviewed have actually lived. Playback (chapter 1), in which pre-recorded songs were played back while lm actors mimed their words forthe cameras, also produced the stars and music that have typied Hindilms from that point on. The ways in which playback has structured In-dian popular culture is broader than the limited discussion I offer here,which provides only the necessary contextual and historical background.

Chapter 2 effectively picks up the largely technological story once play-back had been introduced. It identies major advances that allowed or im-


posed signicant innovations in lm-music production. Although it mayseem quite early for such a detailed and specic chronology, that chronol-ogy and the technological developments that dene it form the foundationfor other, more commonly advocated chronologies of Mumbai lm song.

In chapter 3 I directly confront the matter of periodization and proposethree broad periods based on industrial and cultural practice. This exerciseexamines the outcomes of the technical changes described in chapter 2. In-dustrial structures and interactive responses to social, economic, and pro-fessional processes all play a role here.

The second part of this volume begins with chapter 4, which draws onthe musicians perspectives to develop a descriptive understanding of musicproduction in Mumbais lm studios. I should note at this point that I madean early decision not to discuss the choirs and chorus singers who con-tributed to many lm sound tracks. It seemed to me that while many of the issues affecting their professional lives were similar to those of their in-strumentalist colleagues, other aspects of the choral world would requireenough additional discussion to warrant separate treatment. This is a topicthat remains to be explored. As do all the chapters in this section then,chapter 4 examines matters of training, identities, and the pathways bywhich instrumental musicians found themselves playing in the lm busi-ness. In these stories we hear echoes of the collapse of music drama formsand, later, of the touring dance-band trade as well. This chapter also offersimportant insights into the sources of the foreign musical styles that foundtheir way into Hindi lm music.

Chapters 5 and 6 examine the roles and tasks of creating and recordingmusic in the lm industry. Initially I consider professional roles in the con-text of the structure of the music production process, the composition,arrangement, and approval of songs, as well as the fees and salaries thatdrove the industry. The vast bulk of musicians incomes came from playingat recording sessions; I subsequently look at the recording process and itsnancial aspects. How did music directors and musicians structure thisprocedure?

Chapters 7 and 8, which form the nal part of this book, are more di-rectly concerned with musical sound. Chapter 7 addresses the growth andeventual demise of the studio orchestras in Mumbai, which was due in partto the role of electronics. I consider musical matters that in other contextswould be called style or genre and relate how the musicians thought aboutsounds and the technology (in some cases) that produced it.

Chapter 8 discusses matters of style and value in Mumbai lm musicfrom a theoretical and a musical perspective, as well as through the ideasand comments of the studio musicians and composers. This is a large andcomplex topic that should no doubt be a book in itself and may one day be

20 Introduction

so. In this chapter I limit my consideration to the ways that musicians con-ceptualize style, the stylistic expertise they brought to the creation of thismusic, and how those sounds and concepts interact. This chapter also exa-mines the musicians expressions of the value systems at work within theirprofession and the ways in which their specic attitudes have interactedwith those of the broader movie-going public.

English/Indian Usage and Structure

For the aforementioned reasons I have chosen to use extensive quotes fromthe musicians and others involved in the Mumbai lm industry. Like allpopular culture enterprises in my experience, the lm line is full of nick-names and abbreviations. Perhaps the most famous in Mumbai is the namePancham (literally, fth, often used to indicate the fth degree of a mu-sical scale), which still routinely refers to R. D. Burman (reported byValicha 1998 to have been coined by actor Ashok Kumar). I dene nick-names on their rst appearance in musicians comments.

Another idiosyncrasy in musicians talk revolves around pairs of com-posers. In the lm business composers are called music directors; I use thesetwo terms synonymously. Many composers work as individuals, but Mum-bais lm industry has had numerous pairs of composers who have workedtogether for much, if not all, of their careers. Teams such as Shankar-Jaik-ishan, Shiv-Hari, or (in a much more obscure example) Vipin-Bappu arecommon. In recent times the number has occasionally increased to three,as with the trio Shankar-Eshaan-Loy. Musicians talk about teams as unitaryidentities but also recognize that they are made up of individuals. Espe-cially in English, this sometimes leads to a rapid shifting between singularand plural constructions.

When speaking in English, Indians routinely use two numbers that arespecic to Hindi and the Indian system of counting. These are most com-monly written in English as lakh and crore. One lakh is a one fol-lowed by ve zeroes (or one hundred thousand); one crore is a one followedby seven zeroes (or ten million). When used in multiples (e.g., ten lakh, orone million; two and a half crore, or twenty-ve million), the same prin-ciple applies, but as can be seen, these constructions cut across the systemused in the West, which are based on thousands and millions.

I have spelled the names of Indian cities according to contemporarypractice (e.g., Mumbai rather than the colonial Bombay, Kolkatarather than Calcutta). However, when the old name is part of a specic(and usually historical) institution (e.g., Bombay Talkies or the CalcuttaSymphony) or is used by musicians in quoted material, I retain the olderforms.


Another idiosyncratic usage routinely encountered in Mumbai involvesthe music-industry giant that was originally the Gramophone Company ofIndia, Ltd. This was the rst overseas production subsidiary of EMI (Lon-don), of which the British parent, the Gramophone Company, was also apart. The companys primary label was the widely recognized His MastersVoice (HMV), with its reproduction of the phonograph horn and attentivedog Nipper. As fascinating as it is, the Gramophone Companys history isbeyond the scope of this book, although some of it is available in the workof Kinnear (1994) and Manuel (1993). As an Indian record label, His Mas-ters Voice was retired at the end of the twentieth century and replaced bythe more appropriately Indian label Sa Re Ga Ma (as in Do Re Mi Fa).Nevertheless, most lm musicians, especially when talking about the past,still refer to the company exclusively as HMV, regardless of what itsactual name was at that particular moment or which label might have re-leased a particular song (there were other labels in India). In the context ofthis volume, I have followed the musicians practice, although when I referspecically to the post-1998 company, I use the new name, Sa Re Ga Ma.

Early lm-music recordings were often made on lm setsthe largespaces in which lms were shotrather than in recording studios. Musi-cians routinely refer to any such space as a set, whether in fact it is a lmset or not. The changing nature of recording spaces in Mumbai is discussedin chapter 2; regardless, a musician who says I was sitting on Nayyar-sahebs set means he was at a recording studio, recording a song com-posed by and under the supervision of O. P. Nayyar. Less unusually, musi-cians frequently use the word take as both a noun and a verb, to meanrecording session or to record.

Finally, as in the preceding example, common Indian discourse routinelyattaches a range of sufxes to peoples names to indicate levels of social orfamily relations and usually respect. The sufx ji is widely used in thenorthern, Hindi-speaking regions. When one says Pyarelal-ji, one says,in effect, Mr. Pyarelal or Pyarelal-Sir. Some of those speaking Englishout of habit or politeness to me will routinely use a persons full name (e.g.,Mr. Pyarelal Sharma) simply to maintain the respect in a language woefullydevoid of such structures.

Ji is most commonly used either toward those for whom one has re-spect and with whom ones relations are somewhat formal or in formal sit-uations (which for some can include interviews with unfamiliar foreign-ers). Ji is not a gendered sufx. One can say Lata-ji with the sameeffect as Pyarelal-ji. However, in referring respectfully to women, somemusicians in this part of India use the sufx bai instead (e.g., Lata-bai). Saheb is a still more formal and respectful Hindi term, with ex-plicit connotations of social distance and the superiority of the person

22 Introduction

so called. It is a bit too formal and distant for common usage in the tightlyknit and relatively informal world of Mumbais lm-music culture and in-deed is used almost exclusively for especially esteemed members of theolder generation of music directors (such as O. P. Nayyar).

More commonly, musicians who are speaking Hindi may use bhai,which means brother; the term is often used affectionately not onlyamong social and chronologic equals but also by juniors in addressing orreferring to seniors. It may indicate a degree of respect and seniority andalso suggest a closer personal friendship than does ji. Because so manyBengali musicians have been part of the lm industry, the common Bengalisufx da, which has a slightly more respectful connotation than theword bhai, is also often heard in Mumbai. Usually it is used by or in ref-erence to those with Bengali connections. Thus, R. D. Burman is frequentlyreferred to by his nickname, Pancham, accompanied by the sufx da(i.e., Pancham-da). His father, on the other hand, might be referred to asBurman-dada; the second da here adds still greater respect and often ageneration to the distance in the relationship.

Dates are always a matter of concern in history; in oral history they arevulnerable to the inconsistency of peoples memories. In most cases, the ex-periences or insights in this book are more important than whether the yearwas 1959 or 1960. When dates and sequence are especially signicant, Ihave located events in relation to larger developments (pre- or postparti-tion, for example) or by referring to lms. Sometimes it has been impos-sible to completely sort out sequences; chronologic inconsistencies thusappear in some of the comments included here. For much of the history ofOld Bollywood especially, people were simply too busy to keep track orwere merely unconcerned. With some exceptions, Mumbai musicians are,in my experience, at best mediocre at accurately specifying the year inwhich something happened.

An additional factor in the matter of dates is musicians tendency torefer to specic lms as time markers. In many cases, however, and espe-cially in the case of songs, recording sessions (which is what musiciansmost consistently remember) sometimes occurred well before a lm wasnally released. The only consistently veriable date in the Hindi cinema,however, is that on which a lms censor certicate was issued (which hap-pened immediately prior to its release). These are the dates reported inSinghs Encyclopedia of Hindi Film Songs and those that I use in all circum-stances. Readers should keep in mind that these dates are always later thanthe experiences the musicians report for those lms.

Background music may have had a less demonstrable public impactthan songs, but musicians spent a great deal of time in background ses-sions, which were consequently an important part of their lives and their


income. Background music production and recording are therefore impor-tant but slightly slippery parts of this study. The same technologicalprocesses were involved, as were most of the same individuals. Aestheti-cally, however, and in direct contrast to song recordings, to which actorsand camera people responded, background music was composed in re-sponse to the images that had already been lmed. It was recorded after thelming instead of before, usually on a very tight schedule, and was oftencomposed by assistants. I specify comments and discussions that applyspecically and exclusively to either songs or background music; all othercomments apply to both processes.

Finally, it is not my intention in this book to report gossip or stories thatreect badly on individuals. I mention this since certain stories in the lm-music industry have little to do with the construction of an oral history anddo not aid our understanding of this music culture. Where I feel that com-ments can contribute to a productive understanding of the Mumbai lm-music culture, however, I report them. In so doing, I intend no disrespectto anyone.

The oral history and historical context that I present here offer one per-spective on the music of the Hindi cinema. It is not the only viewpoint, butgiven the general lack of information and understanding about this indus-try, I consider it the best place to start. The majority of this volume is basedon the interviews that I have conducted with musicians, music directors,arrangers, recording engineers, and others connected to the lm-music in-dustry in Mumbai.

24 Introduction

No one works in a vacuum. As I have already suggested, the musicians whoare the focus of this volume were signicant contributors to and thus partof Indias popular music culture. As more or less anonymous musicians forhire, however, their role in that popular culture was intimate but limited.Part I is, in effect, my rst approach to the central historical period that Iapproach again in parts II and III. It is also the most circuitous in that itfocuses on not only the industrial and technological milieu that shaped OldBollywood but also the early years of Indian cinema leading up to the verybeginnings of that period.

Part I reects on the historical and technological factors that producedthe conditions under which musicians worked and argues that musiciansacted under a set of constraints imposed by the cultural and economicstructures of lmmaking in India, which themselves functioned in the con-text of the technological limitations of sound recording for lm. This sec-tion outlines those structures and limitations and adds input from thosemusicians whose experiences provided them with perspectives modied by time, individual perceptions, and professional roles. Not all musiciansattended to or were able to perceive the structural nature of the system inwhich they worked. While some were interested in and able to participatein technological decisions, others spared only an occasional thought for theways the music they were playing was being recorded. While some partici-pated in musicians attempts to inuence the economics and working con-ditions of their industry, others took their pay, complained (or not) as they

Part I

History, Technology, anda Determinist Milieu for

Hindi Film Song

felt appropriate, and went about their business. Overall then, part I offersthe broadest perspective of Mumbais (and Indias) lm/popular-musicindustry and its role in popular culture. My focus remains the musicians,but this section contains less input from fewer musicians than those thatfollow; their comments are supplemented by those of composers, record-ing engineers (called sound recordists), lm directors, producers, and othermusic-industry gures who were better placed to understand the structuresand limitations under which they all operated.

Part I is more history than ethnography. Specically, aside from the tech-nological information in chapter 2, the section eschews ethnographic detailfor the broad outlines of cultural/industrial structure and of the large-scalechanges in them. Since I have already argued that those developmentswere interactive and nonsynchronous, I would normally not need to repeatthat chapters 2 and 3 each offers a distinct chronology of the same period.However, I do need to emphasize this, given the vulnerability of the Mum-bai cinema to attempts at periodization. Hardly anyone who has writtenabout the subject has failed to organize it into various early periods,golden ages, and so forth, as I discuss later. These many historicizationsall confront, knowingly or unknowingly, the problematic that Braudel setsout (see the introduction). I conne each of the three chapters of this sec-tion to a single historical perspective and approach covering the sameyears, and I separate the various strands that determined the history ofMumbais lm and lm-music industry. In doing so, I inevitably expose my-self to the charge of repetitiveness. Nonetheless, only by focusing on eachperspective in turn am I able to proceed to a more comprehensive perspec-tive in succeeding parts of the book.

I argue later that the technology and practice that India calls playbackis one of the primary determinants in a determinist history of lm song inMumbai. Playback is a technological practice that occurs all over the globe.The cultural and industrial practices that developed around it in India, how-ever, have often been unique and had signicant repercussions for every-thing that followed.

Other determinants of more immediate importance to lm musiciansarose from this most fundamental component. In combination with lmsongs role as popular music and other factors, playback has had a pro-found impact on the entire range of Indian public-performance culture.The three chapters of part I examine these causal factors: playback as such,lm-music recording technology in general, and industrial and culturalstructures. I argue, in effect, that determinism, whether technological oreconomic, can at best paint the broad strokes of cultural practice thatethnographys more bricolage-style approach must necessarily esh out.

26 Part I

The interaction between music and lm begins very early in the history ofcinema and the music industry. In the United States it extends into thesheet-music industry, which published music for the accompaniment ofsilent lms. The record industry, however, has had a much longer-lastingand widely distributed set of relationships to cinema around the world. Inthis chapter I briey examine the interaction between music (and moredistinctively, song) and lm in India. In the particularly intense and symbi-otic relationships between popular lm and popular music that developed,the careers of the musicians whose stories appear in this book were madepossible.

The depth and breadth of the Hindi lm songs impact on popular In-dian culture is a book or more in itself, as Morcom (2007) suggests and asa forthcoming study of the transnational travels of Hindi song and danceby Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (2008) no doubt demonstrates. Anenormous range of cultural behaviors and content owes its existence to thespecic ways in which Indian popular music was produced exclusively (formuch of the twentieth century) for commercial narrative lms. My concernhere, however, is only with ways in which that impact and the industrialrelationships that were part of it affected and contextualized the profes-sional lives of the musicians who are at the heart of this study.

More specically I offer a basic historical and contextual considerationof the practice of playback as a technological, industrial, and cultural pro-cess. This generic term refers to many things in the recording process. In

1

Popular Music as Film Music

27

the Indian lm industry, it commonly denes a method of lming in whicha song is recorded and then played back over loudspeakers while actorsmime, dance, and act for cameras. The term and the technology are basedon separate audio and visual recordings that are subsequently combinedinto a single nished product. The careers of the musicians who are thefocus of this book were shaped by the technological constraints and possi-bilities of playback and by Indias cultural response to that system of musicproduction.

The relatively simple technology that made playback possible and thepractice of playback were hardly unique to Indian lmmaking; a widerange of miraculous cinematic musical performances, in all national cine-ma traditions, owe their existence to the exibility that was possible oncethe production processes for music and image were separated. The way inwhich that simple technology was implemented in India and the extent towhich its demands dened industrial practices of popular music, however,are unique.

Finally, playback as a cultural and industrial system stands out quiteclearly in India, in contrast to the practice of lmmaking from 1931 to1935. The importance of this historical context lies in the specic changesin industrial logic that developed after 1935 and formed the basis for mostof what followed in Indian popular culture. In effect, the industrial historyof what would later be called lm songs begins before the advent ofsound lms. To this extent, it is crucial to consider a song in its role as acommercial, industrial product, a saleable artifact. This chapter, then, pro-vides the essential framework for the stories that appear in the followingchapters. I suggest, however, that it also provides a background (althoughat greater and lesser distances) for all considerations of Hindi lm song.

Popular Music and Music Drama before Sound Film

Most foreign scholars (e.g., Arnold 1991; Manuel 1993; Morcom 2007)address the reason for the inclusion of songs and song scenes in Indiancommercial lms, but this is of little concern to musicians and others whowork in the lm industry. Prakash (1983) offers a useful summary of therationales most commonly advanced and notes the tensions around com-mercial lm musics inuence on Indias noncommercial new cinema.Despite the quarter century that has passed since Prakashs summation,fundamentally new explanations have yet to be advanced.

I have not addressed this question here and discuss it only briey in thischapter in a purely historical manner. In the period of my primary concern,from the mid-1940s through the early 1990s, the question was effectively

28 History, Technology, and a Determinist Milieu for Hindi Film Song

moot; almost no commercial Hindi lms were made without songs duringthose years. In my conversations with musicians, industry personnel, direc-tors, and others in the lm-music industry I have routinely encounteredvariations on the phrase lms must have songs not as a statement ofprinciple or even an assertion of aesthetic norms but as a simple and un-questioned explanation for behavior or events, somewhat similar to thelaw of gravity. In his description of the workings of the record and lm in-dustry, Abbas Ali, who began his music-industry career in the 1950s withAll-India Radio before working for the Gramophone Company of Indiaand later the cassette giant T-Series, mentioned songs, along with lm stockand other items that one must accumulate in order to make a movie:

Abbas Ali: You are producing a lm. So that means you are fullling all therequirements for a lm. That means the makeup, the raw stock, and thatmeans you are making the songs also. Song is a part of the lm.

The cultural expectation of music scenes in lms was never subjected tosubstantive internal critique within the mainstream lm industry, althoughalternative or parallel lmmakers raised the issue from time to time, evenif only through their sometimes nonmusical movies. The rst Hindi lmever made without songs or dances was K. A. Abbass Munna (1954), butdespite international critical success, it failed at the Indian box ofce(Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980, 139). In most of the years this bookcovers, the primacy of song in lm was not seriously challenged or evenexamined by those who were making commercial lms. It appears to havebeen accepted along with other aspects of precinema popular drama andcontinued because it was well received. Only Indias recent and newly com-petitive appearance in the mainstream global lm market has suggestedthat there might be a viable commercial alternative to the assumption thatsong is a part of the lm. Regardless of the explanatory models, how-ever, the fundamental assumption that lms must have songs is a keyunderstanding for almost everything that happened in Indian popular cul-ture after 1931.

Historical Precedents

Prakash (1983) and Ranade (2006) are among those who suggest that thelive music drama forms that were prevalent in India in the early twentiethcentury are the basis of the cultural assumption that lms will have songs.The range of these forms in India and the cultural and industrial motivationsin the transition from the stage to the screen are among the many things thatare beyond the scope of this book (see Gupt 2005 and Ranade 1986).

Many early Indian lms were adaptations of stage music dramas (as in-deed were some early American lms). From 1931 to the late 1940s, com-

Popular Music as Film Music 29

posers, singers, and musicians who had been working in live theater werending new jobs in the lm-music industry. Of the sources of inuence inMumbai, the most important were the rather classically oriented, Marathi-language Sangeet Natak and the urban, popular musichall theater formcalled Parsi Theater. Tamil-language music dramas in Tamil Nadu wereinuential in that region, while in Kolkata and Bengal generally, the Ben-gali form called jatra played a similar role.

Music-drama traditions occupied a major place in popular or light clas-sical public culture that lms gradually usurped. Similarly, the growing re-lationship between music dramas and Indias incipient record industry(largely as a source of popular content for that industry) was threatenedand nally replaced by the association between lms and the record com-panies. In western India, the music of Sangeet Natak attracted the Gramo-phone Companys attention; Marathi songs and singers were recorded ondisc from the earliest days of the Indian record industry and constitutedone regional genre of popular, light-classical music (Kinnear 1994). Histori-cal recordings are still available in Marathi-speaking parts of India on CDand cassette. In Chennai, 78 rpm recordings of excerpts of dialogue andsongs from Tamil stage plays were produced by the Gramophone Com-panys main international rival, Columbia, in the 1920s and 1930s. Thesecompilations were known as drama sets (Hughes 2007).

There is little information about industrial relationships in the 1920s,but it is instructive to speculate about the relationships between recordingsas mediated commodities and the dramatic productions that were theirsources. These issues were crucial to the development of the lm-music in-dustry. Hughess (ibid.) research shows that drama sets were recorded andreleased after the success of the stage plays from which they were taken haddetermined which dramas, scenes, and songs were popular. The logic inthis sequence is based on the production process and the value of the com-ponent parts in the overall prot-making system.

Songs that were excerpted from stage plays and later released on discwere initially produced by a method and an economy that were completelyindependent of the record industry. They were part of the aesthetic andeconomic demands of creating a music drama for the stage and would havebeen produced whether the recording companies existed or not. Compa-nies such as the Gramophone Company of India or Columbia thus had ac-cess to ready-made content (songs) that had been, so to speak, market-tested for audience response.

I can only speculate as to whether the producers working for early In-dian record companies came to some nancial arrangement with the dra-matic producers who had paid for the production of the songs they wishedto record or whether the songs were recorded without agreement. Because


there was no copyright agreement applicable to Indian intellectual prop-erty in 1930, both scenarios are possible. Any fees that the record companymight have paid to a music dramas composers, producers, or singers/actors added to these individuals incomes, making their dramatic careersmore successful overall. Regardless of whether such fees were paid, it issignicant that the interaction between the recording companies and thestage drama content was economic, as well as cultural. It made all aspectsof the commercial activity of operating a drama company at least slightlymore viable in both direct and indirect ways. This kind of historical specu-lation is justiable only to the extent that it emphasizes the fundamentallysymbiotic relationship between the economics and the content of musicdramas (staged or lmed) and Indias recording industry. This connectionexisted from the very beginning of the latters history.

In releasing songs from the popular stage, early Indian record compa-nies were following international practice; European and American stagesongs of all kinds were released on record after their introduction throughlive commercial performance. With the introduction of sound lm, lmproducers and recording industries also established various types of rela-tionships across the globe. The patterns that were created in India werenaturally specic, but they persisted throughout the entire twentieth cen-tury in a way that was unique to South Asian industry and culture.

Because of musics exible and indexical sources of meaning, songs withorigins in dramatic narrative have the ability to act as standalone aesthetic,emotional, and commercial objects but also enhance their meanings via thenarrative context (cf. Turino 1999; Morcom 2001). A song that might beplayed on a gramophone or broadcast over radio could reach a larger au-dience than the music drama for which it was originally composed and alsorequire neither the staged context nor the other songs from the drama toconstitute an attractive commercial package. The consumption of an indi-vidual recorded song required less time and less attention than did dramasand was not dependent on whether the songs consumers had seen thedrama. Songs could form a pleasant background to social activities in away that even drama sets (which routinely included dialogue) could not. Ineffect, songs could live an independent existence and take on personalizedemotional meanings that might supersede or simply ignore their dramaticcontext. For these reasons, their potential audience exceeded the size ofthat for the staged drama. In the music drama/record industry nexus, asongs potential commercial value consequently came in two ways. First, itwas an attractive, expected, and expressive component of the dramatic,narrative experience; second, it was an independent recorded commodity.

At the same time, and in a way that has had distinctive implications forlive and lmed music dramas, those who had seen the stage play (or later,

Popular Music as Film Music 31

the lm) would have memories of the physical realities of the actors and theemotional content of the dramatic context, both of which could potentiallycontribute to the songs affective and contextual content. Therefore, the re-lationship between a music drama, whether on stage or screen, and the me-diated song that might have come from it is both exible and complex. Inthe case of the Mumbai lm-music industry, individual music producers(that is, lmmakers) entered into a range of relationships with record (andcassette) companies; both expected to benet economically from the in-creased consumption of each others products. When sound lms appearedin 1931, the producers of Indias popular recordings and much of its popu-lar music had already been confronting the complexities of the situationin which popular music had been located in dramatic forms for some time.It was not only the content of the songs or the lms that maintained a de-gree of continuity between stage dramas and lms. The industrial relation-ships between music and dramatic narrative of all types also demonstratea similar degree of conceptual continuity.

Musicians before the Advent of Sound in Films

Of more immediate relevance to the content of this book was the humancontinuity between musicians of the presound era and those of the lm in-dustry. Early lm musicians were often drawn from drama troupes, butthose who had been accompanying silent lms also crossed over to the newmedium.

Prior to the arrival of sound-lm technology in India, many theatersshowing silent lms had live musical accompaniment. Outside the mainurban centers, issues of literacy (especially in English, but also in Indianlanguages) made music and live narration essential. These elements werecrucial for Naushad Ali, who was growing up in early twentieth-centuryLucknow. Naushad-saheb was one of Indias most important lm-musiccomposers and an early fan of silent (and later sound) lms:

Naushad Ali: Before [sound lm], there had been some one in the theaters to play the music, maybe on tabla or harmonium. If there was a ght scene,they would play music for that, or if there was a chase, they would playdifferently. That was very good, and people liked it very much. Then theyalso had one boy for singing. And so if there was a love scene, he wouldsing a ghazal [a romantic poem, usually in Persian or Urdu]. And also onthe side would be one announcer who would give an accounting of thescene. This girl has fallen in love with this boy, and her parents do notapprove, and now they will meet to decide what to do.

While harmonium and tabla were suitable for theaters that showed In-dian lms or attracted an Indian audience, those for the colonial classes


often used Western instruments (piano, violin, etc.,), as was the practice intheaters in Europe and the United States. A small handful of musicianssuch as composers R. C. Boral and Pankaj Mullick, who both directed andconducted for silent lms (Arnold 1991), later worked in Mumbais lmstudios but began their careers before sound lm.

Born in Goa in the rst years of the twentieth century, cellist AlphonsoAlbuquerque was a well-known gure in the lm-music industry. Before hebegan playing in the lm studios, however, Albuquerque spent some yearsas a musician in the silent-lm theaters of the British Empire not only inIndia but also in Singapore around the time of the Great War, as his sonrelates. Those who played tabla, harmonium, clarinet, or bowed lutes suchas sarangi or violin often accompanied silent lms as well, especially thoseproduced in India. In western India, some of this group, who had beenworking in music drama troupes, also transitioned rst to silent lms andlater to sound lms.

Early Sound Films

In the remainder of this chapter I examine the fundamental productionconditions under which sound lms were made in India and consider, atleast briey, how they structured both the relationship between the lmand music industries and the role of lm music in Indian culture. Thesetopics deserve separate books and considerable additional research, but anoverview establishes the necessary foundation for an examination of themore specic ways that technology and industrial structures inuenced thelives of Mumbais lm musicians. India was one of many countries exper-imenting with the organization, technologies, aesthetics, and ideologies ofsound lm; in that context, Indian popular culture and its associated indus-try developed their character. To that extent, I offer some comparativeanalysis in relation to the dominant Hollywood industry, as well as to earlyFrench cinema. In this discus

[gregory d. booth] behind the curtain making musi(bokos-z1)

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