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Behind the Curtain Behind the Curtain Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios Gregory D. Booth 1 2008 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Booth, Gregory D. Behind the curtain : making music in Mumbai’s film studios / Gregory D. Booth. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–532763–2; 978–0–19–532764–9 (pbk.) 1. Motion picture music—Production and direction—India—Bombay—History. 2. Motion picture music—India—Bombay—History and criticism. 3. Motion picture industry— India—Bombay—History. I. Title. ML2075B66 2008 781.5Ј420954792—dc22 2008007201 Recorded video tracks marked in text with are available online at www.oup.com/us/behindthecurtain 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 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 looks on (Famous Studios, ca. 1957). Courtesy of Kersi Lord and family. Shortly before this volume was completed, the Indian film industry lost its eldest 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 later switched to trumpet and, still later, to dance and jazz drums and played for various bands. In the 1930s he began working in Mumbai’s film studios, initially for Imperial Studios, where he played music for some of India’s earliest sound films. During World War II he toured India as a captain in the British army entertaining the British troops. After the war, Lord re- turned to Mumbai, where he joined the band of Mumbai’s great jazz trum- peter, Chic Chocolate, as a drummer. The presence of touring dance-band musicians provided Lord an opportunity to learn Latin American–style percussion instruments. He subsequently played a fundamental role in the popularization of those instruments and Latin dance rhythms in Mumbai’s dance-band scene. His influence became national when he rejoined the film-music business. Working with composers such as C. Ramchandra, S. D. Burman, Naushad Ali, and others, Lord pioneered the incorporation of Latin musical elements into the music of the Hindi cinema. Widely respected throughout the film-music industry, Cawas Kaka (Uncle Cawas), as he was known, helped younger musicians to develop their own careers. Acknowledgments I express my sincere gratitude to numerous musicians, engineers, music di- rectors, and others of the Mumbai film industry. These individuals kindly put up with my questions and confusion; many offered hospitality and friendship, as well as information and connections. They are all cocontrib- utors to this book and this history; without their generosity this project would not have been possible. I have sought to do justice to their careers and 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 first name, as is common practice in industry listings: A. N. Tagore, Abbas Ali, Amar Haldipurkar, Amin Sayani, Amrut Katkar, Anandji Shah, Anil Mohile, Anjan Biswas, Anníbal Castro, An- thony Gonsalves, Anupam De Ghatak, Ashok Ranade, Ashok Shukla, Avinash Oak, Bablu Chakravarty, Benny Gracias, Benny Rosario, Bhanu Gupta, Bhavani Shankar, Bhupinder Singh, Bishwadeep Chatterjee, Bosco Mendes, 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, Indu Mehrani, J. V. Acharya, Jerry Fernandes, Jerry Pinto, Joe Gomes, Joe Monsorate, Joe Pinto, John Gonsalves, John Pereira, Kartik Kumar, Kersi Lord, Kishore Desai, Kuku Kholi, Leslie Godinho, Louiz Banks, Loy Men- donsa, Manohari Singh, Maoro Alfonso, Mario Fernández, Maruti Rao Kheer, Micky Corea, Mukesh Desai, Naresh Fernandes, Naushad Ali, viii Acknowledgments Nisar Ahmad Sajjad, Omprakash Sonik, Prabhakar Jog, Prakash Varma, Pyarelal Sharma, Ramanand Shetty, Ramesh Iyer, Ranjit Gazmer, Ratna Nagari, Ravi Shankar Sharma, Raymond Albuquerque, Robert Corea, San- jay Chakravarty, Sardar Malik, Shakti Samant, Shankar Indorkar, Shankar Mahadevan, Sharafat Khan, Shivkumar Sharma, Shreekant Joshi, Shyam Raj, Shyamrao Kamble, Sultan Khan, Sumit Mitra, Sunil Kaushik, Suresh Kathuria, Suresh Yadhav, Tanug Garg, Tappan Adhikari, Taufiq Qureshi, Thakur Singh, Uttam Singh, V. K. Dubey, Victor D’Souza, Vijay Chauhan, Vijay (Viju) Shah, Vipin Reshamiya, Vistasp Balsara, Yash Chopra, and Zakir Hussain. In addition, I owe special thanks to Alison Booth for her understanding and encouragement of the fieldwork process and for her help with the videos that accompany this book; to Naresh Fernandes for his insights and contacts 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 Sunil Shanbag of Chrysalis Productions for his friendship and enthusiasm, as well as his support of the filming 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 of the necessary fieldwork. 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 27 2 Musicians and Technology in the Mumbai Film-Music Industry 56 3 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” 121 5 Roles, Relations, and the Creative Process 154 6 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 Introduction Who Is Anthony Gonsalves? Almost anyone who grew up in urban India after 1950, especially in the northern two-thirds of the subcontinent, knows who Anthony Gonsalves is: the middle of the three fictional brothers at the center of the classic Hindi film Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977), directed by Manmohan Desai.1 The film is a typical 1970s’ Desai action film with seemingly endless mixed identities, brothers lost and found, cross-generation revenge, car chases, fight sequences, flashbacks, and a very urban, slang-based dialogue. As a “brother film,” a structure that the Hindi cinema has borrowed and modi- fied from traditional epic narratives and modified to suit twentieth- and twenty-first-century India, it is full of narrative and dramatic parallelism at all levels, treating each of the three brothers identified in the film’s title (who have been separated at childhood and raised as Hindu, Christian, and Muslim 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 fighting, cuts more corners than the others, and has the most exuberant romance. Anthony, played by Amitabh Bachchan in the early days of the “angry young man” phase of his remarkable career, also generates most of the comedy. Among his famous comic scenes in this film is the song “My Name Is Anthony Gonsalves” (composed by Laxmikant-Pyarelal, with lyrics by Anand Bakshi). In the song, Anthony bursts forth from a huge Easter egg at a Goan (and hence Christian) celebration of that holiday, dressed in a 3 4 Introduction Figure 0.1 Anthony Gonsalves (2005). caricature of old-fashioned Goan formal dress, in an absurdly large top hat and tails. The scene, the song, and the character are iconic images of India in the 1970s and of the career of India’s most famous Hindi film actor. From a different perspective, almost no one outside the Mumbai film- music industry knows who Anthony Gonsalves is (figure 0.1). Born in 1927 in the Goan village of Majorda, Anthony Gonsalves was the son of a choirmaster attached to the local Roman Catholic church, Mãe de Deus. Anthony was trained in European classical music by his father and from 1943 through 1965 worked in the film-music industry in Mumbai. Al- though he frequently played violin in the front row of various film-studio orchestras, he made more significant contributions through his arranging and 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 to play violin, read European staff notation, and understand the intricacies of (European) music theory and harmony (Fernandes 2005).

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