Music in Contemporary Indian Film

Memory, Voice, Identity

Jayson Beaster-Jones, Natalie Sarrazin, Jayson Beaster-Jones, Natalie Sarrazin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317399698
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity provides a rich and detailed look into the unique dimensions of music in Indian film. Music is at the center of Indian cinema, and India's film music industry has a far-reaching impact on popular, folk, and classical music across the subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora. In twelve essays written by an international array of scholars, this book explores the social, cultural, and musical aspects of the industry, including both the traditional center of "Bollywood" and regional film-making. Concentrating on films and songs created in contemporary, post-liberalization India, this book will appeal to classes in film studies, media studies, and world music, as well as all fans of Indian films.

Part I

Hindi Hegemony

Chapter 1

1942 – A Love Story

R.D. Burman’s Posthumous “Comeback” at the End of Old Bollywood

Gregory D. Booth

Ends, Beginnings, and Transitions in Mumbai’s Film and Music Industry

The end of the historical period I have defined as “Old Bollywood” (Booth 2008) was marked by a series of observable changes in the technological sophistication, aesthetics, human and physical infrastructure, regulatory and economic environment, and industrial structure and practice of popular film and music production that occurred in Mumbai. Each kind of change that I suggest here had its own sequence of events moving at their own rates of speed; but all were especially noticeable during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, even though some carried on into the twenty-first century. Sometime in the early years of the twenty-first century almost everything about the production and distribution of commercial Hindi-language films—and much having to do with the content of those films—was different than it had been in 1989. These inconsistent, and only partially related, processes of change led to what I have called a “New Bollywood” that is very much part of a global culture and industry.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the consistency of plot, narrative conventions, character type, and musical content and style, as well as the human contributors (actors, singers, composers, etc.) that characterized the conventional films of Old Bollywood have largely disappeared. Although some contemporary films such as Tevar (Sharma 2015) or Dabangg (Kashyap 2010) do reflect the continued influences and importance of the conventional cinema, those conventions are now more likely to be sources of nostalgia and/or humor than of pathos or tension. This chapter, therefore, is concerned with the beginnings of a long period of gradual change that led to a transformed film-music industry and that has been defined by many endings. Among the many terminal events of the 1990s—deaths, industrial changes, format changes, career collapses, and so on—I focus on the impact and meaning of one very empirical “ending”: the death of a major Old Bollywood composer.

When composer Rahul Dev (R.D.) Burman died early in January 1994, the work on 1942 – A Love Story (Chopra 1994), the final film for which he had composed the songs, was still underway. His death invested that ultimate set of songs with special significance; more importantly, however, Burman’s career and importance for Old Bollywood, as well as the timing of his death, meant that his demise embodied more than a single life. For many in the film and film music industry, and for many fans of Hindi films, it marked the ending of an era. Five weeks after Burman’s death, Mumbai’s iconic playback singer, Lata Mangeshkar, recorded the vocal track for the film’s final song: the recapitulation, conventionally known as the “sad” version, of the romantic song, “Kuch na kaho” (“Don’t say anything”). The front-page editorial of Screen, India’s national film and music industry weekly, enshrined the recording session with explicitly symbolic status.

The last and final creation of music maestro Rahul Dev Burman together with melody queen Lata Mangeshkar was made possible on February 12 when she rendered a song which was dubbed at Western Outdoor for Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 1942 – A Love Story.

(Screen, February 25, 1994)

In objective terms, this was a report of a recording session—no doubt one of many that Mangeshkar did that week—in which one singer was adding the vocal melody to an instrumental accompaniment that had been recorded some months earlier. That it merited the front page of Screen had to do with the emotional significance of the last possible time Mangeshkar—who had recorded many, many Burman compositions over the years—would record a new composition by R.D. Burman. The quality of last-ness imbued the session with a degree of pathos that those in the film music industry clearly perceived.

Avinash Oak was the engineer for this recording session with India’s most famous playback singer; he has reported that Screen in fact did not exaggerate the session’s emotional significance. Oak was employed at Western Outdoor Recording Studio that had long been Mumbai’s most technologically advanced recording studio; it specialized in advertising jingles and vocal recordings. In the technologically specialized world of music recording in Mumbai, Oak suggests below that Western Outdoor was not normally a site of film music production, at least not in 1994. Nevertheless, because Lata Mangeshkar refused to go to the film music studio where Burman had normally worked (Film Centre), Oak had to transfer the orchestral tracks from the film-music medium of the time (Hi-8) to Western Outdoor’s conventional magnetic tape. Once Mangeshkar had completed the recording, Oak had to transfer the entire song back to Hi-8. Like many in the film industry, Oak referred to R.D. Burman by his nickname, Pancham, and adds a respectful suffix (-ji) to Mangeshkar’s name in our conversation:

Avinash Oak: I recorded Lata-ji’s song, “Kuch na kaho” after Pancham died. She said, “You get the tracks. I won’t be able to come to Film Centre,” because that was where Pancham always used to record. “I won’t be able to sing there, because of the memories. That would be too much. He’s not there.” So, we got all the tracks in digital Hi-8 tape format and we transferred that onto our 2-inch 24 track, and then we dubbed her voice.

(personal communication)

Listening to Mangeshkar’s version of “Kuch na kaho,” which comes over two hours into the film (see Table 1.1) it is hard to decide whether the pathos in her voice is simply artistry, or whether she was, indeed, overcome by the sadness of Burman’s death.

The emotions surrounding the death of R.D. Burman persisted as his final soundtrack moved through the various stages of the music and film industry process. When HMV released the soundtrack on cassette at the end of March 1994, this event also was dramatized in the context of Burman’s absence: “Pancham was not there last night when HMV released the cassette of Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 1942 – A Love Story, and yet he was there and everywhere, in every heart.” Producer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra “gifted that night to Pancham” (Screen, April 1, 1994). Indeed, Chopra gifted more than the night to Burman. The film’s very first image is the simple dedication, “In fond remembrance of music maestro Rahul Dev Burman.” The evidence suggests that Burman’s peers experienced his death as an ending of considerable significance. Aside from the direct impact of his music and his personality, both of which were important features of the 1970s and 1980s, part of the explanation for this powerful reaction to Burman’s death among the Mumbai film and music world lay in the extent to which he embodied a kind of continuity that must have seemed increasingly precious to many as the 1990s moved on.

R.D. Burman in the World of Hindi Film Song

R.D. Burman’s family was strongly connected to the Bengali language and culture centered in Kolkata, where his father, Sachin Dev (S.D.) Burman (1906–1975), began his own musical career. As Khagesh Dev Burman (2013) has detailed, however, S.D. moved his musical career from Kolkata to Mumbai in 1944. In that Hindi film production center, S.D. Burman became one of the founding members of the Old Bollywood’s classic post-independence generation of film directors, composers, lyricists, and actors.

Born in 1939, R.D. Burman learned the film music business working with his father; his first independent soundtrack was released in 1961. Due to its engagement with early 1960s rock ‘n’ roll, his second soundtrack (Bhoot Bangla [Ali 1965]), began to define Burman’s interest in global, and especially Western, popular music. The association was one that continued for the rest of his career, which proved to be more prolific and, perhaps, more influential than his father’s had been. From the latter 1960s through the early 1980s at least, Burman was at the cutting edge of Hindi film song (Bhattacharjee and Vittal 2011; Beaster-Jones 2015).

Because R.D. carried on in his father’s occupation, (the first such hereditary progression among composers in the Hindi film music industry), the work of the two Burmans covers almost the entire historical range of the remarkably long period of culture history called Old Bollywood: one or more Burman soundtracks was released every year between 1944 and 1994, over which time nearly 400 of their Hindi film soundtracks were released (Rajadhyaksha and Willimen 1994). The two were the musical voice for important film stars such as Guru Dutt, Dev Anand, and Rajesh Khanna, and were closely connected with the careers of two of Mumbai’s most important playback singers, Asha Bhosle and Kishore Kumar. They were regular collaborators with a number of the Hindi cinema’s most important film directors, including Vijay Anand, Guru Dutt, Nasir Hussain, and Shakti Samanta. In the face of this kind of continuity, the death of R.D. Burman in 1994 at only fifty-five years of age must have felt to many like the end of an era.

There were still other factors that may have added a sense of remorse to the pathos surrounding R.D. Burman’s death. An obituary published in the Indian Express summarized the popular perception of Burman’s later career (roughly the final ten years, 1984–1994). “Many who were associated with him promised that they would work with him again even when he wasn’t quite the rage; but few kept their word. This life for R.D. in his later days was quiet on many fronts, with both health and friends deserting him” (Corea and Sinha, Indian Express, January 16, 1994).

Prior to his death, many journalists had been critical of Burman’s later output, which helps explain the suggestion of abandonment in this report. In 1989, reviewing a newly released, retrospective cassette entitled 25 Years of Rahul Dev Burman, Amit Agarwal wrote, “this twin-cassette should actually be called 20 years of R.D. Burman. The music director hasn’t done anything much of note in the last five years. The collection itself stops at 1983; obviously, there was nothing worth including after that” (Times of India, July 5, 1989). In the same year, the anonymously pseudonym-ed “Essjay” wrote a short, inauspiciously titled piece on the state of Hindi film song, “Songs aimed at the crassroot level.” This author began with a rhetorical question “When a ship is sinking, guess who are the first to defect?” As “Essjay” went on to imply, the “rats” in this context were the film directors who had deserted Burman in his later career (Times of India, December 20, 1989).

In the late 1980s, the sinking ship metaphor seemed appropriate; evidence that major film producers were avoiding R.D. Burman was readily available. In the build-up to the production of his 1988 hit Ram Lakhan (Ghai 1988), the film director Subhash Ghai had suggested Burman’s name as the likely composer; but in the end Ghai chose R.D.’s long-time rivals Laxmikant-Pyarelal. Burman was disheartened by this, and more so by the loss of that year’s other big musical hit, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (Khan 1988), for which he had had high expectations (Bhanu Gupta, personal communication). Mansoor Khan, who directed Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, was the son of Burman’s long time collaborator, director Nasir Hussain, who had employed Burman in eight films between 1967 and 1985. Despite the family history, Khan hired newcomers Anand-Milind to score Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak.

Like “Essjay” (above), Lata Sinha used the maritime analogy in her retrospective assessment of Burman’s career. Noting that both R.D. and his father had composed a number of songs based on Bengali folk songs (manjhi, or boatman songs as she called them), she suggested that this “proves that Papa and Burman Jr. were sailing in the same boat,” before going on to argue that “sadly, by the time RD’s boat sailed into the 1980s, it developed a leak” (Sinha 1998, 110).

The “leaks” in R.D. Burman’s boat were, in part, related to his reputation after a string of unsuccessful films; but other leaks were human. Cellist Vasudeo Chakravarty had begun working as a musical assistant to Burman’s father in 1958 and had been a senior musical advisor to R.D. since at least 1966. Together with Manohari Singh, his name appears in the “Assistants” credits of many films scored by R.D. Burman, sometimes under the duo’s professional designation, “Vasu-Manohari.” In 1982, however, Chakravarty’s declining health ended in a heart attack that left him unable to work for over a year. Burman replaced Vasu-da with his nephew, Bablu Chakravarty, with the result that the elder Chakravarty never worked with Burman again.

The loss of Vasudeo Chakravarty to the Burman team was more than strictly musical. In both social and musical terms, and in a culture where age almost inevitably brings respect, Chakravarty was senior to Burman; an employee certainly, but one who could challenge, tactfully no doubt, Burman’s aesthetic decisions and one whose contributions helped maintain “the more Indian portion of the thing” (Sanjay Chakravarty, personal communication). Chakravarty’s loss appears to have weakened the social bonds of the famous Burman team; his departure and later death, together with the tensions around his replacement depressed Burman as well (Bhanu Gupta, personal communication).

R.D. Burman was further depressed by another death in the mid-1980s: that of playback singer Kishore Kumar (1929–1987). Kumar had worked closely with the Burman family since 1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Music in Contemporary Indian Film
• Routledge Music and Screen Media Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Hindi Hegemony
• Part II Regions and Identities
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index