13. Popular Hindi Cinema and the Film Song

13. POPULAR HINDI CINEMA AND THE FILM SONG Corey Creekmur While popular Indian films – especially the pan-Indian Hindi language movies produced in Bombay (now officially Mumbai) commonly and condescendingly known as ‘Bollywood’ cinema – typically share a number of stylistic charac- teristics and narrative conventions, the inclusion of film songs is their most persistent feature and an element of South Asian film culture which extends far beyond the boundaries of cinema halls. Film songs enjoy massive popularity and long-term relevance for audiences, and so frequently exceed their original significance within the films for which they were composed and performed. Although the claim is slightly overstated, popular music in India is film music, and the success of many films depends upon the popularity of their songs, usually ‘launched’ in advance of a film’s opening: if the music isn’t first a hit, the film is unlikely to then succeed. Circulated through other media such as radio, television and commercial as well as pirated recordings, film songs per- meate daily life in India; they can be heard at weddings as well as political rallies, in slums and in five-star hotels. The popular party game of antakshari, also played within films and on television quiz shows, depends upon players who can quickly recall and sing a large catalogue of film songs. While pop music soundtracks have become increasingly crucial to the mar- keting and success of American films across genres, popular Indian cinema as a whole has been a thoroughly musical cinema since the arrival of film sound, serving a massive audience in India and abroad that has come to expect songs in films which might otherwise be identified as romances, comedies, thrillers or melodramas. Because songs are a common feature of almost all popular Indian 193 TRADITIONS IN WORLD CINEMA films, the distinct Hollywood genre of ‘the musical’ is rarely used to designate films in India, though the pervasive use of songs has led some critics to claim, misleadingly, that all popular Indian films are musicals: one might just as persuasively assert that no Indian films are musicals, since songs are used across genres and thus a distinct category of ‘musicals’ cannot be clearly distinguished from other forms. The tradition of the film song in Indian cinema insists that almost all popular films should balance narrative with spectacle, speech with singing, and the gestures of acting with the choreography of dance. Rather than constructing a special but isolated genre for the presentation of musical performances, popular Indian cinema obscures any significant difference between the experience of cinema and of musical entertainment.1 The ‘Evergreen’ Film Song: ‘Mera Joota Hai Japani’ (‘My shoes are Japanese’) Film songs are not just a common attraction added to the other pleasures of popular cinema in India but serve as key components in the Indian mass audience’s popular memory and cultural traditions. The way in which film songs function as a modern tradition might be demonstrated by a convenient example from the South Asian diaspora, which traces the movement of South Asians as well as their popular culture across the globe. In an early sequence of Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1992), as an Indian couple and their daughter are forcibly ejected from Uganda, an armed soldier seizes one of the few items the family is attempting to carry to the United States, a portable cassette player with a tape the soldiers play briefly before smashing the machine: though its lyrics are sub- titled for the English-language audience, the song we hear is probably unfamil- iar to most of Nair’s western viewers. Less directly, another Indian artist working in and on the South Asian diaspora cites the same song at the begin- ning of another text. As the Bombay film star Gibreel Farishta falls through the sky toward England to begin Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988), he sings and translates ‘the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation’: ‘O, my shoes are Japanese, These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that’. Almost a half-century after the first appearance of the ‘old song’, the final Hindi line of its refrain provided the title for a 2000 film, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (‘But the heart is still Indian’), produced by and starring current Bombay super- star Shah Rukh Khan. But the song was already being cited by Hindi films as early as Chori Chori (‘Sneaky Sneaky’, 1956), a loose remake of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and the last film featuring the legendary 1950s screen couple Raj Kapoor and Nargis as a romantic duo. The hit song is briefly heard playing on the popular Radio Ceylon (at a time when All India Radio did not play film songs) to introduce the main male character played by Raj Kapoor. 194 POPULAR HINDI CINEMA AND THE FILM SONG Whereas the last two examples, though from films produced almost fifty years apart, obviously rely on their assumed Indian audience’s early and ongoing familiarity with the song, Nair and Rushdie’s presumably more cosmopolitan, international audiences must be sharply divided by either knowledge or ignorance of the song. As an especially prominent example, ‘Meera joota hai japani’ (‘My shoes are Japanese’), composed by the legendary team of Shankar-Jaikishen with lyrics by Shailendra and performed by the famous ‘playback’ singer Mukesh, first appears in director-star Raj Kapoor’s 1955 classic Shri 420 (‘Mr 420’, the number ironi- cally referring to the section of the Indian Penal Code defining cheats after the hon- orific Shri). As an upbeat declaration of a character’s core identity despite global (albeit shabby) trappings, the song was immediately popular and especially rele- vant for Indians still revelling in their recently achieved national independence. As its clever reprisal in Chori Chori only a year later affirmed, the song was instantly associated with Raj Kapoor, especially in his frequent screen persona as an Indian version of Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp. For later generations of Indians, whether at ‘home’ or in ‘the world’ (to invoke Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s famous distinction), the song has provided a shorthand affirmation of national and cultural identity, serving an ongoing symbolic function that is the ostensible purpose, if not always the effect, of national anthems rather than mere pop songs. Known to millions of average Indians before its later circulation through art films and serious fiction, the song’s lack of familiarity among western audiences demonstrates a persistent cultural gap between the popular entertainment of South Asia and western recognition and appreciation of those traditions. If the example of ‘Mera joota hai japani’ (which, like many Hindi film songs, simply derives its title from its first line) demonstrates both the decades-long and international circulation of an ‘evergreen’ – to use the popular Anglo- Indian term – film song, as well as the cultural division between a mass audience familiar with a large repertoire of Hindi film songs and a (largely western) audience oblivious of such artefacts, we should recognise that such imbalances have historical and cultural explanations. Historically, film songs have travelled along with South Asians, of course, but have also circulated wherever Hindi films were distributed, including China, the Soviet Union, Greece, parts of Africa and the Middle East, where Hindi lyrics were often replaced with local languages, sometimes obscuring the Indian origins of the song. To this day ‘Awara hoon’ (‘I’m a vagabond’), the title song of Raj Kapoor’s Awara (‘The Vagabond’, 1951) remains well known throughout Russia, which the director- star visited, and China, where both the song and film were said to be Chairman Mao’s favourites. (As evidence of the song’s resonance, director Jia Zhang-ke’s 2000 film Platform includes a scene of young adults attending a late 1970s screening of Awara in a small town in western China while the title song plays.) However, popular Hindi film songs have only recently come to the atten- tion of American and most European filmgoers, through snippets in such 195 TRADITIONS IN WORLD CINEMA self-consciously hip films as Moulin Rouge (2001), Ghost World (2000) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), or through samples mixed into recent rap recordings. At the same time, the prevalence not just of Hindi songs but of what both Indian filmmakers and fans call ‘picturised’ song and dance sequences in almost all popular Indian films has probably prevented their success in some international markets. For American audiences whose taste for the tradi- tional film musical (featuring musical performances as opposed to the now ubiq- uitous song-filled compilation soundtrack) has diminished since the early 1960s, the promise that almost every popular Indian film includes from five to seven lengthy musical sequences may seem a threat rather than an attraction. The fact that such songs stretch mainstream Indian films to a running time of around three hours (with a marked intermission or ‘interval’) may also be unattractive to audiences used to shorter films. The use of clever and often highly poetic Hindi and Urdu lyrics that resist easy translation perhaps most obviously alienates audiences who rarely consume popular vocal music not performed in English. Within India, and with an impact on the international circulation of Indian films, the presence of songs has, again, typically divided films into the art cinema that does not contain ‘picturised’ songs, and the popular cinema which now seems almost unthinkable without them. For decades, this fundamental distinction encouraged the international distribution and acclaim of the realist Bengali films of Satyajit Ray, which were not widely viewed in India, whereas massively popular Indian films remained unknown to audiences as well as critics in Europe and the United States.

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