[Reader-list] reader-list Digest, Vol 64, Issue 201

[Rohan DSouza]

Dear Paul,

Appreciate you forwarding this essay. Found it insightful and interesting.
It touches upon an area/subject (Hindi film songs) that is so deeply
embedded in popular culture and consciousness in India (and also to some
extent outside), yet not seriously talked about or analysed.

It to me, brought out among other things, the importance of songs in Hindi
films and how integral they are not only to the narrative, but also in
stating/reinforcing many aspects in the social and cultural realm the film
is set in and of the larger society it belongs to.

One of the aspects that particularly struck me is the demarcation of the
type of voice the female voice/singer for the heroine (embodiment of notions
of 'purity') can be and what it cannot be ('women with ethnic and sexually
provocative voices'). Pasting the relevant section from the essay below, in
bold:

*"women with "ethnic" and sexually provocative voices are deemed dangerous
and disallowed from speaking (or singing) for the nation. Thus, chapter 2,
"Meri Awaaz Suno" (Listen to My Voice), argues that the social norms
embedded in women's singing voices reveal the limits Hindi film music
imposes on the voice of nation, and vice versa."
*
This brings to my mind, the controversy that took place in the 90s over the
infamous and controversial (purposefully?), 'Choli ke Peeche' song from the
film 'Khalnayak'. In the movie, this song is picturised on the film's
heroine (Madhuri Dixit) and an ethnic friend/saheli (Neena Gupta). It takes
the form of ched-chad or teasing by the ethnic woman (voiced by Ila Arun,
with the earthy, sensual voice) of the heroine (voiced by Alka Yagnik). The
earthy sensous voice asks the heroine, the seemingly notorious line, 'choli
ke peeche kya hain' (what is behind your blouse?) and the demure and devoted
heroine responds with, 'choli mein dil hain mera, yeh dil mein doongi mere
yaar ko' (my hearts in my blouse and i will give it to my lover).

All this is taking place in a setting where the heroine, is going undercover
for her lover, the policeman/hero (Jackie Shroff) to trap the
khalnayak/villain (Sanjay Dutt) and is singing and dancing with the friend
in front of the khalnayak. The song picturised in as now what can be called
an item number fashion (dont think that term was coined then). This being a
need to entice and then trap the khalnayak. However, given that the heroine
is on a noble mission and is percieved as the 'pure' heroine of the Hindi
films of until then (a stereotype now being challenged) and devoted to her
lover, she is redeemed by her response in the song through the lyrics, and
also the choice of the singer - Alka Yagnik's 'sweet' voice in contrast to
Ila Arun's earthy, provocative voice.

The heroine, being on a nationalistic mission to help capture the
khalnayak/terrorist, who is a threat to the nation, therefore has to be the
voice of the nation, which Pavitra refers to, and can be musically expressed
only by a 'sweet' voice and not a 'earthy/sensual' voice.

This, an indication perhaps of expected (and imposed?) notions of behaviour
of the heroine and thereby by extension, of the female populace of the
country?

Regards,
Rohan


> Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:35:13 -0500
> From: Paul Miller <anansi1 at earthlink.net>
> Subject: [Reader-list] Part III - footnotes
> To: Sarai list <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Cc: Pavitra Sundar <Pavitra.Sundar at Dartmouth.edu>
>
> Part III - footnotes
> Part III
> I had to break the file up so that it would go through the list filter.
>
> Please read below: To make it fit through the list serv filter, I've
> broken it into two sections. Please remember this is just a rough
> draft. Feedback for Pavitra is appreciated!
>
> thanx
>
> Paul aka Dj Spooky
>
> Paul
>
> Part 3
>
>
>
> [i] Quoted in Satyajit Bhatkal, The Spirit of Lagaan, (Mumbai: Popular
> Prakashan, 2002), 52.
>
> [ii] Salman Ahmed, Q&A session, visit to the University of Michigan,
> 2005. Ahmed's comments were made in the context of a discussion of his
> collaborations with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, leading exponent of qawwali
> music and world music maestro (now deceased). Ahmed spoke at length of
> how music is a "good medium of spirituality." When I asked him during
> the Q&A session why this was so, Ahmed responded with a thoughtful and
> impassioned explanation about music's universal qualities. In the
> lines quoted here, I believe he uses the term "aesthetics" to refer to
> the formal and informal cultural rules that enable linguistic
> communication. (You have to understand for instance what a particular
> turn of phrase means.) Music, however, can work its magic on us even
> if we are not intimately familiar with a particular musical style.
>
>
> [iii] Ibid.
>
> [iv] In this work, I use the terms "Hindi cinema," "Bombay cinema,"
> and "Bollywood" interchangeably. Bollywood refers to the prolific
> Hindi-language commercial film industry that is based in Bombay (now
> Mumbai), India. The term is of relatively recent coinage, and signals
> an industry that is increasingly being recognized (especially by the
> West) as a global force. Several Indian filmmakers and scholars
> dislike the term for it suggests that Hindi cinema is a copy, a lesser-
> version of Hollywood. While I agree with this position, I use this
> descriptor here for the sake of convenience and readability. (The term
> "Bollywood" is very widely used in India today, and is certainly the
> name by which Western audiences recognize Indian cinema.) However,
> when I refer to older (pre-1990s) films, I use the term "Hindi
> cinema." It should be noted that the Indian film industry is much
> larger than Bollywood. India produces between 800 and 900 films
> annually in at least 16 different languages. While Hindi films
> produced in Bombay draw the most revenue, they constitute only about a
> third of the industry.
>
> [v] Vanraj Bhatia, "Stop the Action, Start the Song," Interviewed by
> Ram Mohan, in "The Rise of the Indian Film Song," special issue,
> Cinema Vision India 1, no. 4 (1980): 33.
>
> [vi] For a succinct description of the "social world" of Hindi film
> music, vis-à-vis both Indian popular culture and scholarly discourse,
> see Tejaswini Ganti, "Casting Culture: The Social Life of Hindi Film
> Production in Contemporary India" (Ph.D. thesis, New York University,
> 2000), chapter 6, "Not Just Another Song and Dance: The Social World
> of Hindi Film Music," pp. 250-301. This work appears in revised form
> in Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, see
> especially pp.78-88.
> When I first this started work, the literature on Hindi film music was
> limited to one Masters thesis, one dissertation (by Alison Arnold),
> the dissertation chapter by Ganti noted above, and a handful of
> published essays—most notably, by ethnomusicologist Gregory Booth, and
> film scholars Corey Creekmur and Neepa Majumdar. Some essays and books
> designed as introductions to Hindi cinema (e.g., Nasreen Munni Kabir's
> work) did discuss the widespread popularity of Hindi film music;
> however, few authors treated film songs as worthy of serious musical
> and cultural analysis. The literature on Hindi film music was sparse
> in Indian intellectual circles as well. The film quarterly Cinema
> Vision India put out two special issues on the topic in the early
> 1980s, but most of the work aside from that was of the pop
> journalistic variety.
>
> Alison E. Arnold, "Hindi Filmi Git: On the History of Commercial
> Indian Popular Music" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-
> Champaign, 1991), Gregory Booth, "Religion, Gossip, Narrative
> Conventions and the Construction of Meaning in Hindi Film Songs,"
> Popular Music 12, no. 2 (2000), Cinema Vision India, 1983), Cinema
> Vision India, 1980), Charles Philip Gerhardt, "Love in Separation and
> Union: A Study of the Modern Hindi Film Song Lyric" (Masters thesis,
> University of Washington, 1975), Nasreen Munni Kabir, Bollywood: The
> Indian Cinema Story, (London: Channel 4 Books, 2001), Neepa Majumdar,
> "The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi
> Cinema," in Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music,
> ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham and London: Duke
> University Press, 2001). Also see footnote 33 of Creekmur's essay for
> an exhaustive list of articles on Hindi film music; the information in
> many of these essays is historical and descriptive, rather than
> critical musical (or even dramatic) analysis. Corey Creekmur,
> "Picturizing American Cinema: Hindi Film Songs and the Last Days of
> Genre," in Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed.
> Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham; London: Duke
> University Press, 2001), footnote 33, p. 405.
>
> All this has changed in recent years: there has been growing interest
> in Bollywood film and film music among mainstream Western audiences
> (especially in the U.S.) and academics. Lalitha Gopalan's Cinema of
> Interruptions was one of the first books to consider the structural
> work of song sequences in any detail. Sujata Moorti and Sangita
> Gopal's edited volume Planet Bollywood: The Transnational Travels of
> Hindi Song and Dance Sequences is forthcoming, and the first monograph
> devoted exclusively to Hindi film music (by Ashok Ranade) was
> published in 2006 (a little too late, unfortunately, to fundamentally
> shape my own thesis). Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, eds., Planet
> Bollywood: The Transnational Travels of Hindi Song and Dance Sequences
> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming), Lalitha
> Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian
> Cinema, (London: British Film Institute, 2002), Ashok D. Ranade, Hindi
> Film Song: Music Beyond Boundaries, (New Delhi: Promilla & Co., in
> association with Bibliophile South Asia, 2006).
>
>
> [vii] Creekmur, "Picturizing American Cinema: Hindi Film Songs and the
> Last Days of Genre," 378.
>
> [viii] Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 2nd ed., (New
> York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 69.
>
> [ix] Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary
> Indian Cinema, see especially pp. 127-37.
>
> [x] K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Indian Popular
> Cinema -- a Narrative of Cultural Change (London: Trentham Books,
> 1998), 21.
>
> [xi] Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 155.
>
> [xii] Ganti, "Casting Culture: The Social Life of Hindi Film
> Production in Contemporary India" (thesis), 257-58. Ganti also directs
> our attention to Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian
> Popular Cinema, 1947-1987, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993),
> 242. "Social realism" and song-and-dance were not diametrically
> opposed concepts for filmmakers like K. A. Abbas and Raj Kapoor. In
> fact, music played a very prominent role in their state-centric,
> socialist-leaning films of the 1950s and '60s, decades nostalgically
> remembered as the "Golden Age" of Hindi cinema. However, this fact
> does not seem to deter critics of contemporary film and music.
>
> [xiii] Creekmur, "Picturizing American Cinema: Hindi Film Songs and
> the Last Days of Genre," 378. This sentiment animates famous art-
> filmmaker Satyajit Ray's collection of essays Our Films, Their Films,
> even though he claims to enjoy "those songs." (These last two words
> form the title of his essay on the topic.) Satyajit Ray, Our Films,
> Their Films, (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976), see especially pp. 72-75.
>
> [xiv] Ganti, "Casting Culture: The Social Life of Hindi Film
> Production in Contemporary India" (thesis), 253-54.
>
> [xv] Ganti makes a related argument: "Another reason for the lack of
> musicological interest is that the popularity of film music is
> perceived as a threat to more local, 'folk' musical traditions, which
> require documenting before disappearing altogether." Ibid.(thesis), 257.
>
> [xvi] Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, 78. See
> pages 78-88 for a crisp overview of the function and importance of
> music in Hindi film culture. Much of this material is a revised
> version of her dissertation chapter cited above: "Not Just Another
> Song and Dance."
>
> [xvii] Peter Lamarche Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and
> Technology in North India, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
> 1993), 53.
>
> [xviii] Lalitha Gopalan turns this dismissive rhetoric around in her
> book Cinema of Interruptions. She treats song and dance sequences, the
> interval, and the pressures of the Film Censorship Board as
> structuring devices of Indian cinema, rather than unnecessary
> punctuations that disrupt the flow of the narrative. Gopalan, Cinema
> of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema.
>
> [xix] Bhatia, "Stop the Action, Start the Song," 33.
>
> [xx] Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing the 'Popular'," in People's
> History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge
> and Kegan Paul, 1981).
>
> [xxi] Produced and directed by Toronto-based filmmaker Deepa Mehta,
> Fire was touted as the first Indian movie to portray a lesbian
> relationship. Three weeks after the film was released in India, movie
> theaters in Bombay and New Delhi were violently attacked by members of
> the right-wing Hindu party Shiv Sena. Party zealots prevented the
> movie from being screened by torching movie theaters, tearing down
> posters, and threatening audiences. These actions also sparked off
> vigorous public debate on freedom of expression in the arts, the
> meaning of Indianness, depictions of Indian womanhood, sexuality etc.
>
> [xxii] Ahmed's resolutely apolitical position is ironic since he was
> in Ann Arbor to screen his film The Rockstar and the Mullahs (2003).
> Ahmed's band Junoon had been banned, along with all other non-
> religious music, in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. Ahmed traveled to
> Peshawar with his film crew to learn what motivated the mullahs'
> decision, and what others (lay people) thought of music. But then
> again, Ahmed's stance is not altogether surprising. His belief that
> music "breaks barriers" was also borne out by his experiences playing
> to and collaborating with Indians as part of a peace initiative.
>
> [xxiii] Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and
> Hollywood Film Music, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
> 1992), 9.
>
> [xxiv] Mary Ann Doane quoted in Ibid., 6. See Mary Ann Doane,
> "Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing," in Film
> Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New
> York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 55. Flinn adds, "the ideal of
> utopia is itself etymologically linked to the non-representable since
> it is a 'no place,' a society that cannot be put into representation
> (much less practice) but only described and alluded to, talked
> 'about.' In this way, music's abstract nature gains special
> resonance" (10).
>
> [xxv] See, for instance, Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer
> Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, (Durham: Duke University
> Press, 2005), see especially chapter 2, "Communities of Sound:
> Queering South Asian Popular Music in the Diaspora," pp. 29-62.
>
> [xxvi] Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia," in The Cultural
> Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1999).
>
> [xxvii] Flinn uses Dyer as her starting point for her concept of
> "partial utopias." As the subtitle of her book suggests, Flinn
> discusses gender extensively—however, her analysis addresses the
> critical discourse on music and utopia more than the ways the
> gendering of music itself. Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender,
> Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music.
>
> [xxviii] Susan McClary, "Same as It Ever Was: Youth Culture and
> Music," in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, ed. Andrew
> Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), 33.
>
> [xxix] Two points of clarification on terminology before I proceed.
> The first concerns the distinction that scholars of Western film music
> often make between diegetic and non-diegetic music—that is, between
> music that emanates from a source within the filmic narrative (the
> diegesis) and that which cannot be explained based on the on-screen
> world. This musical classification does not work at all in Hindi
> cinema. A film song may appear to be diegetical at first, with an
> actor mouthing the lyrics and holding an instrument in hand. However,
> this same song may quickly move into non-diegetic mode with the use of
> additional voices and elaborate orchestration that have no obvious
> source in the on-screen drama. Besides, so much of what goes in this
> cinema is "unrealistic" and "illogical" that identifying the source of
> the sound does not give us much critical purchase.[xxix]
> The second point to keep in mind is that Hindi films are not
> "musicals" in the Hollywood sense of the term. Generic terms such as
> "romance," "drama," "action," and "comedy" that are used to classify
> films in the West do not apply to Bollywood. Most mainstream Indian
> films are "masala" films (masala being a Hindi term for spice mix),
> combining elements from all of the above genres, in addition, of
> course, to the ubiquitous music. Spectacular and melodramatic though
> they may be, Hindi films are structured somewhat differently than
> Hollywood musicals. Indian film scholars also use a different set of
> terms ("mythologicals," "historicals," and "socials," for instance) to
> mark generic differences in Hindi cinema. The use of songs is not
> limited to any of these genres.
>
>
> [xxx] Sheela Raval et al., "Making of Lagaan," India Today, XXVI, no.
> 26, June 25 2001, 45. I also discuss the reception of this film in a
> section entitled "Creating a Period Film, Recreating History" in
> chapter 4 (on temporality) of this book.
>
> [xxxi] See, for instance, Aamir Khan, Interview by David Chute, "Aamir
> Khan," Hungry Ghost, 2001, Bollywood,
> http://www.geocities.com/hungry_ghost_2000/bollyw-aamir.htm
> .
>
>
> [xxxii] I began to comprehend the power and deftness of Lagaan's
> ideological claims as I walked out of the movie theater chattering
> excitedly with family and friends, after my first viewing of the
> movie.  The youngest members of our group, Meghna and Ipshita, five
> and seven years old respectively at the time, immediately recognized
> Bhuvan's team as "Indian" and Russell's as "British." They received my
> insistent questions—but how do you know it's Indian? Maybe it's just
> the villagers' team and not India's team—with patient contempt. That
> this was a national fight was patently obvious to them; no textbook
> history lesson was required to convey this fact.
>
>
>
> [xxxiii] On Indian cricket mania, see Kimberly Wright, "Advertising
> National Pride: The Unifying Power of Cricket Fever, Kashmir, and
> Politics," Advertising and Society Review 4, no. 1 (2003).
>
> [xxxiv] Another nationalist film, Gadar—Ek Prem Katha (2001), was
> released around the same time as Lagaan, Although it raked in even
> more revenue than did Lagaan and is counted as one of the highest
> grossing Hindi films, it has not lived on in collective public memory
> as Lagaan has.
>
> [xxxv] Mayank Shekhar, "We Have Done It!," Mid-day, February 13 2002.
>
> [xxxvi] Meghna Prasad, "Hit a Six at the Oscars," Times of India,
> March 24 2002. To get a broader sense of the extent of online support
> for the film, see Nidhi Taparia Rathi, "Net Bats for Lagaan: A Tsunami
> of Support Sweeps the Web for India's Oscar Contender," Rediff.com,
> March 20, 2002, Rediff Guide to the Net,
> http://www.rediff.com/search/2002/mar/20lagaan.htm
> .
>
> [xxxvii] Gowariker quoted in Nishat Fatima, "For Gowarikar, Lagaan Is
> Already a Winner," Times of India, March 22 2002.
>
>
> [xxxviii] See, for instance, "Indians Mourn Oscar Miss," BBC World
> Service, Monday, March 25, 2002, BBC News Online, World, South Asia
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/south_asia/1892792.stm
> , Karishma Upadhyay, "Team Lagaan Sheds Tears for Skipper Aamir,"
> Times of India, March 26 2002.
>
> [xxxix] Nithya Subramanian, "Bollywood Lures Sony Music," The Hindu
> Business Line, October 8, 2001, Online edition,
> http://www.blonnet.com/businessline/2001/10/08/stories/14081830.htm
> .
>
> [xl] Brooks quoted in Creekmur, "Picturizing American Cinema: Hindi
> Film Songs and the Last Days of Genre," 393. See also Peter Brooks,
> The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the
> Mode of Excess, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 49.
>
>