An Aesthetic for Film Sound in India?
An Aesthetic for Film Sound in India? Ashish Rajadhyaksha There is an apocryphal story involving B.R. Deodhar, musician at the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, student of Vishnu Digambar Paluskar and teacher of Kumar Gandharva, speaking on film music. Indian music, he is supposed to have said, could never be used in the cinema because it could not approximate to sound . As long as we could not produce, say, the rumble of thunder through our music, we could never really produce useful sound. This problem would, for him, be especially a problem for India’s sound cinema. Satyajit Ray would make an allied argument in 1965, in his contention that the main difficulty Indian cinema’s storytelling ambitions faced was the absence of a ‘dramatic narrative tradition in Indian music’. Ray’s point is to do with music’s contribution to the unfolding of a narrative , Deodhar’s to do with music’s capacity to become sound proper. While these were two different ambitions for the entry of music into the cinema, the question was, would these collectively prove fatal roadblocks to the Indian cinema to become cinema proper? Both arguments have had their adherents; in fact, each could be effectively seen as providing a standpoint for sound theory for cinema in India. One way of reading Deodhar is to point to the inability of music to become sound, thus providing one context, and even a key explanation, for the peculiar inability of Indian cinema to produce a persuasive relationship with live location sound, the only proper sound resource actually available to the cinema.
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