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Film Music 12(1–2) 91–94, 2021
© 2021 Screen South Asia Trust
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DOI: 10.1177/09749276211026091
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Shikha Jhingan

Studies of music in South Asian cinemas are dominated by discussions of popular film
songs, their lyrics, vocal style, visual coding, placement in film narratives and their
afterlives in diverse media formats. Moving away from the song-driven approach, this
keyword is an attempt to expand the definition of film music by following its aural
trace amidst shifting media technologies and listening practices. The aural force of film
music carries an affective charge in excess of the verbal and has created a forcefield of
intertextual memory that was not recognised by academics until very recently. Here,
I focus on commercial Bombay cinema that has dominated popular music of the sub-
continent and is the site of my own research.
The overt presence of music in films as song has been framed as a continuation of the
idiom of musical dramas that drew on classical raga-based melodies. Further, the pre-
dilection of audiences to hum film songs with an ‘easy’, ‘repetitive’ musical structure
was linked to their affinity to communal folk music (Beeman, 1980). Interestingly, it
was the dispersal of film music into other intermedial forms such as printed chap-
books and song booklets that nudged listeners to sing the lyrics and ignore the instru-
mental sections. The radio stepped in to keep listeners connected to these non-verbal
musical sections of a film song. Highlighting the tensions and divergences between
verbal and non-verbal as being critical to performing arts, Ashok Da. Ranade (2006)
has drawn attention to the aesthetic principles that bring auditory and visual elements
together in film music. Introductory non-verbal sections of film songs and background
scores perform the work of effecting these divergences.
Another vexed question for both composers and film-makers has been to establish
a hierarchy of sources for film music. Satyajit Ray found Indian classical music unsuit-
able for background scores as it ‘lacked a dramatic narrative tradition’ (Robinson,
1989). Noticing how the Jatra companies in Bengal drew from a curious mix of both
Indian and western instruments, Ray tried to bring in a similar experimental approach.
Missionaries of the colonial period, military bands, jazz clubs in Calcutta, Bombay and
Lahore, gramophone records and the exhibition of Hollywood films had introduced
Indian listeners to Western classical and popular music genres. These influences made
their way into films. In the 1950s Bombay, working in an industrial context, music
directors like Naushad Ali expressed a similar concern as Ray. They felt that Indian
instruments such as the sitar, sarod or the flute fell short in expressing violence or

Shikha Jhingan, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

E-mail: shikha.jhingan@gmail.com
92 BioScope 12(1–2)

dissonance in film narratives. Naushad Ali was also responding to the postcolonial
Indian state’s attack on film music through its reformulated broadcasting policies. One
can trace interesting pathways between colonial governmentality and film music.
Under the colonial administration, musicians working at All India Radio (AIR) were
trained to read western staff notations in order to infuse Indian music with harmony
(Luthra, 1986). By the late 1940s, several of these musicians moved to Bombay to work
in the film industry, while AIR, in pursuance of its national cultural policy formed
Vadya Vrinda in 1952, a specially trained orchestra headed by Ravi Shankar, to develop
a sound that ‘could harmonise the pure modes of Indian music’ (Luthra, 1986). On the
other hand, broadcast slots for film music on AIR were significantly reduced in com-
parison to the time allocated for Indian classical music. Part of the reasoning was film
music’s overt reliance on ‘rhythm and melody from western popular music’; but also,
more importantly, because cinema’s sonic field drew from a wide range of sources –
the voices of courtesans, the use of Urdu (instead of Hindi), and the erotic content of
song lyrics (Lelyveld, 1994).
Popular Bombay cinema allowed music directors to borrow from diverse sources
including folk music, regional traditions, devotional and classical music, while simul-
taneously borrowing with ease from Latin American rhythms or tunes from the Middle
East (Arnold, 1988; Beaster-Jones, 2015). Moreover, it gave them freedom from the
sonic surveillance of the AIR. Goan musicians and arrangers, well versed in western
styles of music, became key figures in the film music industry, while remaining ‘behind
the curtain’ (Booth, 2008). Playing for the jazz bands in the evening and the film stu-
dios during the day, the Goans gave Bombay cinema the sound of a ‘bold modernity’
(Fernandes, 2012). Apart from writing music for each section to add colour and har-
mony, the arrangers developed innovative ways to bring the vocal melody, string sec-
tion, sitar, piano, trumpet, cello and dholak to speak to each other, thereby creating a
unique musical culture (Booth, 2008; Chandavarkar, 1987). Large orchestras with
Hollywood-style music were deployed by composers like Naushad Ali, in both film
songs and background scores, such as the coda at the end of ‘O mere lal aaja’, (Mother
India, 1957) using ‘extensive chromatic movements, large leaps and unmelodic sec-
tions’ to express disturbance, discomfort or suspense (Morcom, 2007).
But one can equally furnish examples of a single or a handful of instruments used
to create an eerie sound, or bring in an erotic charge. Musicians in the Bombay film
studios were bending, mutating and playing with the voice and the acoustic coloura-
tion of various acoustic and electronic instruments, at least from the 1950s onwards.
The been/pungi sound of South Asian snake charmers was refashioned in Nagin (1954)
by weaving the sound of a harmonium with a clavioline for the opening music of ‘Man
dole, mera tan dole’. The extended opening musical sequence in Nagin has a swooning
effect on the heroine, setting the stage for the song’s repeated recall on Radio Ceylon.
While film songs were able to ‘move across different media formats, spaces and sites’,
(Duggal, 2020), background scores remained occluded, receiving scant attention until
the action-oriented ‘angry man’ films of the 1970s introduced audiences to new sound-
scapes. The childhood traumas of ‘Vijay’, a character played by Amitabh Bachchan in
Zanjeer (1973), Deewar (1975) and Trishul (1978) were accentuated by aural motifs that
subtly resonated across the temporal and spatial journey undertaken by the protago-
nist. The dissonant banshee’s wail as Gabbar’s leitmotif in Sholay (1975) created by
Jhingan 93

R. D. Burman and his team marked a new landmark in Indian sound cinema, defying
the conventional use of French horns and brass instruments to depict villainy. Extended
openings and longer musical interludes that could accommodate action sequences
became a hallmark of Hindi films in the 1970s (Bhattacharjee &Vittal, 2011).
The arrival of cassettes as mobile musical objects led to an unprecedented expan-
sion of music genres such as disco, rock, ghazal, and devotionals, besides allowing
local and regional musical forms to proliferate. Music became a key site for fluid cul-
tural borrowing across the subcontinent in the 1980s, with singers from Pakistan and
Bangladesh such as Salma Agha, Reshma and Runa Laila, making a significant aural
mark in India (Jhingan, 2016). The 1990s brought an explosion of film music into televi-
sion. Live orchestras played instrumental preludes to film songs in shows like Close-Up
Antakshari (1994–2005), and contestants were asked to identify these songs based on
their memories of these nonverbal musical pieces. Ironically, at a time when synthesis-
ers and sampled music were edging out live orchestras and acoustic musicians from
recording studios, audiences could watch musicians playing together in an ensemble
for television shows that worked like live performances. The transformation in tech-
nologies and studio practices such as the use of programmable music brought in new
sound aesthetics, a change that was recognised by the Filmfare awards which intro-
duced the category of ‘Best Background Score’ in 1998.
Using digital technologies with a handful of musicians in a small studio to his
advantage, A .R. Rahman introduced greater sonic complexity and nuance to film
soundtracks (Sarrazin, 2014). In Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995), Rahman incorporated
a leitmotif approach to his score by ‘blending voices and instruments’ that became a
hallmark of his style (Wilcox, 2017). The music of films such as, Bunty Aur Babli (2005),
Rang De Basanti (2006), Jab We Met (2007) and Om Shanti Om (2007), helped in scaling
up the ‘big Bollywood sound’, that spilled across territorial boundaries, by blending
contemporary global music with Bhangra, Sufi, Indipop, and remixed spinoffs of older
film songs. However, films such as Dev D (2009) and Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye (2008), with
sounds of brass bands, wedding orchestras and mobile ring tones, offered an alterna-
tive sonic imagination. Dense auditory experiences of the towns and cities of North
India, with their sensory infrastructures became part of the musical landscape of these
films, softening the boundaries between film song, background score and noise
(Jhingan, 2015; Mukherjee, 2017). The sonic ecology of item numbers with their accent
on ‘extreme amplification’ was created by key assembling figures such as DJs, play-
back sopranos and mixing engineers (Mukherjee, 2016). More recently, music driven
films exploring the lives of angst-ridden youth have amplified genres such as rock
(Rock On, 2008; Rockstar, 2011), rap/trance (Udta Punjab, 2016) and rap/hip hop (Gully
Boy, 2019), acknowledging the rise of amateur music production and DJ driven prac-
tices. Sound design and visual coding, indexing a distinct spatial and sonic universe
plays a key role in fleshing out performed music sequences in these films.
Future directions for film music studies lie in expanding the field to pay greater
attention to background scores, orchestration, and the use of chorus. The emergence of
new aesthetic practices of film music with the arrival of digital sound cultures and its
feedback loop need to be further examined in a broader context of regional films and
the many cinemas of South Asia.
94 BioScope 12(1–2)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

Key Readings
Fiol, S. (2017). Folk drums and tribal girls: Sounding the Himalayas in Indian film. In J. Beaster-
Jones & N. Sarrazin (Eds.), Music in contemporary Indian film: Music, voice, identity (pp. 133–
147). Routledge.
Getter, J. (2014). Kollywood goes global: New sounds and contexts for Tamil film music in the
21st century. In G. Booth & B. Shope (Eds.), More than Bollywood: Studies in Indian popular
music (pp. 60–75). Oxford University Press.
Niranjana, T. (Ed.). (2020). Music, modernity, and publicness in India. Oxford University Press.