On a lazy Sunday afternoon, this winter past, I chanced upon a ten-minute video on YouTube that brought together some of the most admired Hindi film songs from 1931 to 2021. It comprised short, quick snippets, one after another, of the most popular song of the year across those 90 years.
Then, as it often happens on the internet – a hyperlink leading to another, like how a memory leads to another – I started watching two YouTubers react to the original video as it played on. Presented with the 90-year montage, they bared their enthusiasm every time a landmark moment came up. At the first sound of Lata Mangeshkar for example, in 1949, their eyes twinkled, their faces beamed with a broad, affectionate smile as they cried out in unison: “THERE SHE COMES! LATAAA!” “What a great career, man!” said one of the YouTubers. “Yeah, and she was singing in films even before my parents were born!” added the other.
Ditto for when Mohammed Rafi or Kishore Kumar arrived on the scene. Or when a memorable song lit up the screen with the first sighting of a beloved actor, like the tramp Raj Kapoor bumbling down the road in Mera joota hai Japani, or the regal Madhubala rebelling and dancing her heart out in Emperor Akbar’s diwaan-e-khaas in Jab pyaar kiya toh darna kya, or the pensive Amitabh Bachchan (the YouTubers roared in unison again: “BIG BEEEEE!”) in Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein, or the fun and quirky Sridevi in Hawa hawaayi, or the diva Divya Bharti in Saat samundar paar, and, finally, the cheeky Shah Rukh Khan in Baazigar o baazigar, who is in a horrendous Batman-meets-Zorro costume, atop a white horse, ready to ride straight into a million hearts in the years to come, and down to many other defining songs through the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.
It is fascinating to watch the two YouTubers for their innocent, lovable reactions, but it is also pleasantly overwhelming to switch off, lie back, and think about the journey and the evolution of the Hindi film song itself, especially against the backdrop of enormous social and political changes. In these 90 long years – from 1931 to 2021 – India has had many trysts with destiny. She put up an arduous struggle for freedom for which there is little parallel in the history of the world. She was dragged into a long, bloody World War with nothing to gain and only to lose. She won her independence, but was partitioned simultaneously – the horrors of which continue to linger to this day. She wrote and gave its citizens a bold and proud Constitution to live by, has fought five wars with its neighbours, saw the imposition of the Emergency when democracy was suspended and then fought for and reclaimed. She has held 17 general elections, elected and voted out 13 prime ministers, and witnessed numerous tumultuous social and political movements, including riots, pogroms, attacks on its own citizens and ten devastating years of rule of the current prime minister, on the eve of whose ascent to power in 2014, a former prime minister had quietly, prophetically, cautioned the country: “Without discussing the merits of Mr Narendra Modi, I sincerely believe that it will be disastrous for the country to have him as the prime minister.”
Art is not made in a vacuum. Art is, in fact, the barometer of its age. And so the Hindi film song too, as a work of art in its own right, has imbibed and expressed the sense and sensibilities of its time. Sometimes it has merely mirrored and reflected – albeit beautifully and profoundly – the prevalent social and cultural moods, like in Dil ka haal sune dilwala, seedhi si baat na mirch masala, which offers a peek into the slums of a big city and sings defiantly, unabashedly, and yet smilingly, of the every-day life and struggles of the slum-dwellers, or in Thoda hai, thode ki zaroorat hai, which weaves together a myriad dreams and aspirations of a new, emerging middle-class. On other occasions, it has even influenced and refashioned the broader milieu of its time, like in Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chala gaya, or in Aane wala pal jaane wala hai – both relegating the burdens of the past and the concerns of the future to the backseat and, instead, providing a quotable cause to enshrine and revel in the freedom of the present moment.
We have seen the Hindi film song to both heed and lead public taste and opinion. Along with other works of art, it has played a crucial role in encapsulating and even shaping the sense of life of its society in any given period of time in much of modern India’s history. How far the Hindi film song has come and how far we, who have grown up on a rich diet of it, have travelled!
‘Yeh chiraag bujh rahein hain’
The most notable shift in the Hindi film song perhaps is that it has receded to the background of the Hindi film over the course of the past few decades. There was a time when a Hindi movie would not shy away from telling the story at hand through song and dance, amongst other narrative devices. The song used to be a scene of the movie, like in Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool or Vijay Anand’s Guide, carrying the narrative forward and adding to the characterisation. And this is a very Indian way of telling a story, as Salman Rushdie, one of India’s literary icons, reminds us. Reminiscing about his Indian roots and heritage that shaped his method of storytelling, Rushdie once talked about a way of telling a story – the tradition of oral storytelling – that is still prevalent and popular in India. “The storyteller,” he said in his talk at the University of Vermont, “would begin a story, digress and tell a related story, break into a song and dance routine, tell a few jokes about nothing in particular, and return to the original thread again. The storyteller would have three or four performative threads co-existing and intertwining and the genius of the storyteller is that he keeps all the balls juggling in the air.” The audience loves the juggling act and goes along with it in their hundreds and thousands.
Influenced by this ancient method (all the way back to the structure and style of the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata), and the Urdu-Parsi theatre of course, Hindi sound cinema arose in the 1930s, parallel to but unlike Hollywood, proudly using narrative styles of its own of which songs were a big part. And that is what distinguished Hindi cinema from other cinemas of the world.
It is difficult to pinpoint with considerable accuracy when the change happened and when the Hindi film song stopped being an integrated and integral part of its film. The claim is not that every song of every old Hindi movie was a scene of the film, or that it carried the narrative forward always, or that it added to the characterisation in any substantial measure, just as not every song of every new Hindi movie is an “item number”, or an unintegrated part of the film, or a bundle of arbitrary theatrics happening on the side or in the background, with little to do with the story that is unravelling around it. There were many blips, even trash, before, just as there are many notable exceptions now. The claim has more to do with the frequency and consistency of the role that the Hindi film song played and plays in the cinematic storytelling of which it is supposed to be a part.
The change, then, is more crucially linked to two phenomenons that began unfolding over many years in Hindi cinema starting surreptitiously in the ’80s, then setting foot insidiously in the ’90s, and consolidating further in the first decade of the present millennium, before coming into full bloom now. The two phenomenons are: the lip-sync song falling steadily out of ‘fashion’, and, coupled with, the falling away of the “poet” part and what it signified in the title “poet-lyricist” that can be attributed to most of the artists who wrote songs back then and which cannot be said for many who write songs now.
The fading away of the lip-sync song
The most disdainful criticism of the lip-sync song perhaps is that it is “artificial”, and “not realistic”. If the holder of this criticism has acquired or desires to acquire fashionable western sensibilities and lives, voluntarily, in a deracinated urban bubble mistaking it for the whole world, their criticism of the lip-sync song holds true. But then the same could be said about them: that by uprooting themselves from their natural social and cultural environment and by trying to come across as a ‘nonconformist’ while actually conforming, quite anxiously, to anything western and to the western sense and ‘supremacy’, they, too, are “artificial” and “not realistic”, to say the least.
In commenting on art, any form of art, and while critiquing it, the question of what is legitimate and honest, what is true and real, the commentator and the critic must also pay attention to the socio-cultural ground from which that piece of art has emerged. The tradition of song and performance in India is deeply intertwined with the day-to-day matters of Indian lives. More than two-thirds of India’s population lives in its countryside and villages where, from births to deaths, weddings and harvests, practising one’s faith to indulging in leisure and entertainment, singing out songs over spirited claps and beats of a dholak are quite natural and realistic ways, often the most preferred ways, of expressing oneself and marking life-events. Even in India’s cities, in the many pockets that are outside the deracinated, elite bubbles (and even in those bubbles, in fact), the art of using a song, old or new, to express, to earmark a moment, to make something memorable, is spotted and experienced on numerous occasions.
To sum it up, we have been telling our stories through songs since time immemorial. Even before the arrival of talkies now almost a hundred years ago, the Urdu-Parsi theatre, relaying the age-old mood and custom, and mixing in new flavours and inspirations, would roam around towns and villages, telling tales and spinning yarns of which songs were an unmissable part. Bombay movies, as the Hindi cinema, or more correctly the Hindustani cinema, was called back then, readily adopted the ways of the Urdu-Parsi theatre, which was a raging success amongst the masses everywhere, and became the newest upholder and proponent of the old, native art of singing out stories. That this happened against the all-consuming backdrop of the call for swaraj and the freedom struggle is hardly a coincidence.
This aspect of an Indian way of life found easy, and natural, passage into its arts, and theatre, and its cinema. Rushdie’s tribute to the Indian oral storytelling tradition, paid decades after Hindi cinema came of age, is just another reminder of how this song- and performance-laden method of telling a story was mirrored without a fuss in its cinema. The Hindi film, along with other cinemas of India, had became a visual equivalent of a quintessentially Indian way of telling a story.
In addition to the arguments about authenticity, the other (underrated and little observed) beauty of the lip-sync song is that, at its best, it has added more dimensions to not just the story being told but also to the performance of the actors enacting the story. In order to perform, and in most cases lip-sync the song, the actors, to the extent of their genius, have had to become the song itself. They have had to learn projection, imbibe the song’s inflections, and pay attention to how to move and to be in the scene in a way that best epitomised what the song was saying. It made the best of them learn and explore themselves more and, as a result of those explorations, they accessed and brought out emotions that added to and enhanced the character that they played and revealed more deeply the situation concerned in the film. The lip-sync song helped add lyricism and depth to the characters that these actors portrayed.
This is not to say that every film must contain a song, or that every song must be performed and lip-synced. The argument is that we must not forget or underestimate the roots and influences of a musical performance in our movies and of lip-syncing a song, and we must not bare ignorance and an inferiority complex by looking at our own heritage and artistic productions through the ‘modern’, western glasses of what we think rules and moves the world. When and if done right, a song, lip-synced or not, adds more layers to the unfolding of the narrative.
‘Kahan gaye woh log’
The other notable shift in the nature and quality of the Hindi film song has to do with the lyricists and the filmmakers. As Javed Akhtar, one of India’s most celebrated screenwriters, poets and lyricists, said in a conversation with Kausar Munir at the Lucknow Literature Festival, “In the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, the lyricist was also a shayar, a poet.” Akhtar, who himself is a poet-lyricist, was perhaps thinking of people like Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shakeel Badayuni, Kaifi Azmi, Hasrat Jaipuri, Shailendra, and Gulzar, to name just a few. Those decades were, indeed, alive and kicking with the creations of such lyricists who were accomplished poets too. Akhtar laments and adds, “Now, the lyricist is just a songwriter writing a song for the situation that they have been allocated in the film. If you are writing songs after listening to songs that came before, your vocabulary is bound to be narrow and repetitive. But if your sources are beyond the world of films and lie also in the literature and folk traditions of your culture, your vocabulary will be broad and fresh. Your ideas will be fresh. Jaan–e–mann and maula: think of how many songs have used these! You put four maulas in a song and call it a Sufi song!”
It is not so much about any qualifications needed to pen a song as much as it is about cultivating a thoughtful, sensitive and diverse view of the world around you and beyond. Literature and poetry open the universe a little more. They reveal deep truths about human nature and existence. And a song – a great song – is, after all, a piece of poetry in motion which, set to music, lifts us and flies out, soaring high above for a moment, affording us an expansive, unobstructed view of how things are, before gliding down to the earth again, having enriched us, entertained us, and sometimes even having unpacked bite-sized philosophies for us, so that we look at our everyday life-situations with a newly found or renewed gaze and vigour.
According to Akhtar, one of the great achievements of Hindi film songs is that they also “shaped sensibilities in the masses for social justice and life philosophy”, which otherwise could have only come from high poetry, literature and works of philosophy. As Akhtar notes in the same interview, “In our society, the common man doesn’t read books on philosophy and sociology and social justice. The sensibilities towards human values and collective values were gleaned and imbibed from our film songs. Because in a few lines, set to a melody, profound insights into life were packed together in simple words.”
Kisi ke muskurahaton pe ho nisaar…kisi ke vaaste ho dil mein pyaar…jeena isi ka naam hai on one end of the spectrum and Dum maaro dum, mit jaaye gham on the other – these and many other songs in between, in addition to being scenes of the film in their own right, or adding to the drama and characterisation, also offered the audiences value systems and public philosophy. It is not uncommon, after all, the eclectic frequency with which we quote lines from a beloved song to mark a moment or to help a friend, or even ourselves, in life-situations and to show the way around and forward. In conclusion, Akhtar minces no words in stating that “now such songs are too few and far in between”. He says, “Kal ho naa ho comes to mind, and maybe that is it.” And even Kal ho naa ho happened more than 20 years ago!
One of the causes, then, of the deteriorating quality of the Hindi film song is that the reference points of most of the present crop of filmmakers and lyricists are placed outside of the milieu of the society for which they are making films and writing songs. Unlike the filmmakers and poet-lyricists of the past, the sources and inspirations of most of the contemporary filmmakers and lyricists are not rooted in their soil and lie saat samundar paar, in the pop-music and pop-culture of western countries whose lifetimes, as Akhtar puts quite wittingly, “are smaller than even the artistic traditions of India let alone its civilisation.”
‘Woh subah kabhi to aayegi’
The progression of the Hindi film song, across almost a century now, is more than just a nostalgic, romantic yaadon ki baraat. On a deeper level, they stand testimony to and are imbibers of the big political and social changes that have shaped the country. From the crucible of the freedom movement led by Mohandas Gandhi, the republic of India emerged. Beaconing the new nation on an exciting experiment, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, spoke of redeeming an old pledge for a new age – one of equality, fraternity, liberty and justice. The heady idealism of the post-independence India from the early 1950s to the late 1960s made it possible for the filmmakers at the time to attempt to realise some of these ideals, mixed in with their own renewed romanticisms and artistic endeavours, in their movies and songs. It was the age of dropping the bitterness and burdens of the past and embarking upon a new journey, as depicted in the timeless Chhodo kal ki baatein, kal ki baat puraani; naye daur mein likhenge hum milkar nayi kahaani…Hum Hindustani. But it was also the age that made it possible for a Madhubala to play a Muslim courtesan and dance to a Krishna–bhajan in Emperor Akbar’s court in Mughal–E–Azam, portraying an incredible (and uncommon) combination of devotion and sensuality, of prayer and romantic love, in Mohe panghat pe nandlal chhed gayo re to the wild, wide acclaim of a largely Hindu audience.
As the founding ideals started to evaporate – as they usually do – and as the Tryst with Destiny with which India was launched in 1947 began to break down, the angry young man rose from the unjust streets of an impoverished India. The 1970s saw the beginnings of counter-culture, and of rage and colour and of unbridled, daring emotions. The Hindi film song was still memorable and melodious, but there was a visible shift in its vocabulary and values. Gone were the days of shy restraint, or of laid-back elegance and gentleness. It was the time, instead, of Indira Gandhi and of breaking the Zanjeer and playing with Sholay. It was the epoch of a great Aandhi both in Indian politics and society.
Like a bridge connects two separate, disparate masses of land, the period from the early 1970s to the late 1980s acted as the link-road in time connecting early Hindi cinema (widely believed to be its golden age) with its newest avatar in the post-liberalisation and post-Babri Masjid-demolition India. As the Indian economy, and with it the Indian society, opened their doors to the world and, amongst other things, to the internet and MTV and western (largely American) influences, the impact on the filmmakers precipitated the most notable shift in the language, vocabulary and values of their movies and, consequently, their songs. It was not an overnight phenomenon. The seeds of liberalisation would take years to shoot up and come into full bloom. But in the aftermath, the frequency of Hindi movies and songs that had their reference points in the pop culture of the west and the US was too stark to miss.
Coupled with the market forces unleashed by liberalisation (which encouraged Indians to look outward), the spectacular rise of Hindu nationalism catapulted a shift in public concerns (which demanded Indians to look more and more inwards, as if on account of a deep-seated insecurity born out of looking out at the west and its glittering achievements). This in turn further catapulted the shifts in the Hindi film song that we have talked about so far. In Modi’s India, a Padmavati couldn’t dance and express her desires with the flaming sensuality and unfettered abandon of an Anarkali in Nehru’s India. Or the angry young man (still committed to the ideals of democracy and social justice) of Indira Gandhi’s infamous Emergency wouldn’t know what to make of the toxic bigotry and hate induced by the new elite – the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party and their followers.
The coarsened public discourse and a narrow imagination have coarsened and reduced the Hindi cinema and its songs in equal measure, if not more. On the other hand, the contemporary filmmakers have not covered themselves in glory either. They have, mostly, bowed down to the market and political forces instead of arriving at a working combination of the commercial, the political and the artistic. And since nothing that is coarse and meek lasts for long, it is not surprising to witness that most of the movies and songs of our age come and vanish without making a mark.
Talking to Tariq Ali on his show on teleSUR in an unusually rare interview about Hindi cinema, one of India’s foremost writers and thinkers Arundhati Roy remarked when asked about the evolution (or regression) of the Hindi film song: “Earlier songs were like incense sticks. They are throwaway lighters now.” When pressed further to explain herself, Roy said in a low, lamenting tone of voice: “The heart has gone out.”
There is enough new brilliance and talent on the Indian film scene. Perhaps some of them, or even most of them, will usher in a new day in Hindi cinema and bring back the heart in it. But whether Apna time aayega again or not, time will tell.
Shivendra Singh is a writer based out of Lucknow.
