Bollywood history

‘The Heart Has Gone Out’: The Evolution of Hindi Film Songs – and India

Since nothing that is coarse and meek lasts for long, it is not surprising to witness that most of the movies and songs of our age come and vanish without making a mark.

On a lazy Sunday afternoon, this winter past, I chanced upon a ten-minute video on YouTube that brought together some of the most admired Hindi film songs from 1931 to 2021. It comprised short, quick snippets, one after another, of the most popular song of the year across those 90 years.

Then, as it often happens on the internet – a hyperlink leading to another, like how a memory leads to another – I started watching two YouTubers react to the original video as it played on. Presented with the 90-year montage, they bared their enthusiasm every time a landmark moment came up. At the first sound of Lata Mangeshkar for example, in 1949, their eyes twinkled, their faces beamed with a broad, aﬀectionate smile as they cried out in unison: “THERE SHE COMES! LATAAA!” “What a great career, man!” said one of the YouTubers. “Yeah, and she was singing in films even before my parents were born!” added the other.

Ditto for when Mohammed Rafi or Kishore Kumar arrived on the scene. Or when a memorable song lit up the screen with the first sighting of a beloved actor, like the tramp Raj Kapoor bumbling down the road in Mera joota hai Japani, or the regal Madhubala rebelling and dancing her heart out in Emperor Akbar’s diwaan-e-khaas in Jab pyaar kiya toh darna kya, or the pensive Amitabh Bachchan (the YouTubers roared in unison again: “BIG BEEEEE!”) in Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein, or the fun and quirky Sridevi in Hawa hawaayi, or the diva Divya Bharti in Saat samundar paar, and, finally, the cheeky Shah Rukh Khan in Baazigar o baazigar, who is in a horrendous Batman-meets-Zorro costume, atop a white horse, ready to ride straight into a million hearts in the years to come, and down to many other defining songs through the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

It is fascinating to watch the two YouTubers for their innocent, lovable reactions, but it is also pleasantly overwhelming to switch oﬀ, lie back, and think about the journey and the evolution of the Hindi film song itself, especially against the backdrop of enormous social and political changes. In these 90 long years – from 1931 to 2021 – India has had many trysts with destiny. She put up an arduous struggle for freedom for which there is little parallel in the history of the world. She was dragged into a long, bloody World War with nothing to gain and only to lose. She won her independence, but was partitioned simultaneously – the horrors of which continue to linger to this day. She wrote and gave its citizens a bold and proud Constitution to live by, has fought five wars with its neighbours, saw the imposition of the Emergency when democracy was suspended and then fought for and reclaimed. She has held 17 general elections, elected and voted out 13 prime ministers, and witnessed numerous tumultuous social and political movements, including riots, pogroms, attacks on its own citizens and ten devastating years of rule of the current prime minister, on the eve of whose ascent to power in 2014, a former prime minister had quietly, prophetically, cautioned the country: “Without discussing the merits of Mr Narendra Modi, I sincerely believe that it will be disastrous for the country to have him as the prime minister.”

Art is not made in a vacuum. Art is, in fact, the barometer of its age. And so the Hindi film song too, as a work of art in its own right, has imbibed and expressed the sense and sensibilities of its time. Sometimes it has merely mirrored and reflected – albeit beautifully and profoundly – the prevalent social and cultural moods, like in Dil ka haal sune dilwala, seedhi si baat na mirch masala, which oﬀers a peek into the slums of a big city and sings defiantly, unabashedly, and yet smilingly, of the every-day life and struggles of the slum-dwellers, or in Thoda hai, thode ki zaroorat hai, which weaves together a myriad dreams and aspirations of a new, emerging middle-class. On other occasions, it has even influenced and refashioned the broader milieu of its time, like in Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chala gaya, or in Aane wala pal jaane wala hai – both relegating the burdens of the past and the concerns of the future to the backseat and, instead, providing a quotable cause to enshrine and revel in the freedom of the present moment.

We have seen the Hindi film song to both heed and lead public taste and opinion. Along with other works of art, it has played a crucial role in encapsulating and even shaping the sense of life of its society in any given period of time in much of modern India’s history. How far the Hindi film song has come and how far we, who have grown up on a rich diet of it, have travelled!

‘Yeh chiraag bujh rahein hain’

The most notable shift in the Hindi film song perhaps is that it has receded to the background of the Hindi film over the course of the past few decades. There was a time when a Hindi movie would not shy away from telling the story at hand through song and dance, amongst other narrative devices. The song used to be a scene of the movie, like in Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool or Vijay Anand’s Guide, carrying the narrative forward and adding to the characterisation. And this is a very Indian way of telling a story, as Salman Rushdie, one of India’s literary icons, reminds us. Reminiscing about his Indian roots and heritage that shaped his method of storytelling, Rushdie once talked about a way of telling a story – the tradition of oral storytelling – that is still prevalent and popular in India. “The storyteller,” he said in his talk at the University of Vermont, “would begin a story, digress and tell a related story, break into a song and dance routine, tell a few jokes about nothing in particular, and return to the original thread again. The storyteller would have three or four performative threads co-existing and intertwining and the genius of the storyteller is that he keeps all the balls juggling in the air.” The audience loves the juggling act and goes along with it in their hundreds and thousands.

Influenced by this ancient method (all the way back to the structure and style of the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata), and the Urdu-Parsi theatre of course, Hindi sound cinema arose in the 1930s, parallel to but unlike Hollywood, proudly using narrative styles of its own of which songs were a big part. And that is what distinguished Hindi cinema from other cinemas of the world.

It is diﬃcult to pinpoint with considerable accuracy when the change happened and when the Hindi film song stopped being an integrated and integral part of its film. The claim is not that every song of every old Hindi movie was a scene of the film, or that it carried the narrative forward always, or that it added to the characterisation in any substantial measure, just as not every song of every new Hindi movie is an “item number”, or an unintegrated part of the film, or a bundle of arbitrary theatrics happening on the side or in the background, with little to do with the story that is unravelling around it. There were many blips, even trash, before, just as there are many notable exceptions now. The claim has more to do with the frequency and consistency of the role that the Hindi film song played and plays in the cinematic storytelling of which it is supposed to be a part.

The change, then, is more crucially linked to two phenomenons that began unfolding over many years in Hindi cinema starting surreptitiously in the ’80s, then setting foot insidiously in the ’90s, and consolidating further in the first decade of the present millennium, before coming into full bloom now. The two phenomenons are: the lip-sync song falling steadily out of ‘fashion’, and, coupled with, the falling away of the “poet” part and what it signified in the title “poet-lyricist” that can be attributed to most of the artists who wrote songs back then and which cannot be said for many who write songs now.

The fading away of the lip-sync song

The most disdainful criticism of the lip-sync song perhaps is that it is “artificial”, and “not realistic”. If the holder of this criticism has acquired or desires to acquire fashionable western sensibilities and lives, voluntarily, in a deracinated urban bubble mistaking it for the whole world, their criticism of the lip-sync song holds true. But then the same could be said about them: that by uprooting themselves from their natural social and cultural environment and by trying to come across as a ‘nonconformist’ while actually conforming, quite anxiously, to anything western and to the western sense and ‘supremacy’, they, too, are “artificial” and “not realistic”, to say the least.

In commenting on art, any form of art, and while critiquing it, the question of what is legitimate and honest, what is true and real, the commentator and the critic must also pay attention to the socio-cultural ground from which that piece of art has emerged. The tradition of song and performance in India is deeply intertwined with the day-to-day matters of Indian lives. More than two-thirds of India’s population lives in its countryside and villages where, from births to deaths, weddings and harvests, practising one’s faith to indulging in leisure and entertainment, singing out songs over spirited claps and beats of a dholak are quite natural and realistic ways, often the most preferred ways, of expressing oneself and marking life-events. Even in India’s cities, in the many pockets that are outside the deracinated, elite bubbles (and even in those bubbles, in fact), the art of using a song, old or new, to express, to earmark a moment, to make something memorable, is spotted and experienced on numerous occasions.

To sum it up, we have been telling our stories through songs since time immemorial. Even before the arrival of talkies now almost a hundred years ago, the Urdu-Parsi theatre, relaying the age-old mood and custom, and mixing in new flavours and inspirations, would roam around towns and villages, telling tales and spinning yarns of which songs were an unmissable part. Bombay movies, as the Hindi cinema, or more correctly the Hindustani cinema, was called back then, readily adopted the ways of the Urdu-Parsi theatre, which was a raging success amongst the masses everywhere, and became the newest upholder and proponent of the old, native art of singing out stories. That this happened against the all-consuming backdrop of the call for swaraj and the freedom struggle is hardly a coincidence.

This aspect of an Indian way of life found easy, and natural, passage into its arts, and theatre, and its cinema. Rushdie’s tribute to the Indian oral storytelling tradition, paid decades after Hindi cinema came of age, is just another reminder of how this song- and performance-laden method of telling a story was mirrored without a fuss in its cinema. The Hindi film, along with other cinemas of India, had became a visual equivalent of a quintessentially Indian way of telling a story.

In addition to the arguments about authenticity, the other (underrated and little observed) beauty of the lip-sync song is that, at its best, it has added more dimensions to not just the story being told but also to the performance of the actors enacting the story. In order to perform, and in most cases lip-sync the song, the actors, to the extent of their genius, have had to become the song itself. They have had to learn projection, imbibe the song’s inflections, and pay attention to how to move and to be in the scene in a way that best epitomised what the song was saying. It made the best of them learn and explore themselves more and, as a result of those explorations, they accessed and brought out emotions that added to and enhanced the character that they played and revealed more deeply the situation concerned in the film. The lip-sync song helped add lyricism and depth to the characters that these actors portrayed.

This is not to say that every film must contain a song, or that every song must be performed and lip-synced. The argument is that we must not forget or underestimate the roots and influences of a musical performance in our movies and of lip-syncing a song, and we must not bare ignorance and an inferiority complex by looking at our own heritage and artistic productions through the ‘modern’, western glasses of what we think rules and moves the world. When and if done right, a song, lip-synced or not, adds more layers to the unfolding of the narrative.

‘Kahan gaye woh log’

The other notable shift in the nature and quality of the Hindi film song has to do with the lyricists and the filmmakers. As Javed Akhtar, one of India’s most celebrated screenwriters, poets and lyricists, said in a conversation with Kausar Munir at the Lucknow Literature Festival, “In the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, the lyricist was also a shayar, a poet.” Akhtar, who himself is a poet-lyricist, was perhaps thinking of people like Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shakeel Badayuni, Kaifi Azmi, Hasrat Jaipuri, Shailendra, and Gulzar, to name just a few. Those decades were, indeed, alive and kicking with the creations of such lyricists who were accomplished poets too. Akhtar laments and adds, “Now, the lyricist is just a songwriter writing a song for the situation that they have been allocated in the film. If you are writing songs after listening to songs that came before, your vocabulary is bound to be narrow and repetitive. But if your sources are beyond the world of films and lie also in the literature and folk traditions of your culture, your vocabulary will be broad and fresh. Your ideas will be fresh. Jaan–e–mann and maula: think of how many songs have used these! You put four maulas in a song and call it a Sufi song!”

It is not so much about any qualifications needed to pen a song as much as it is about cultivating a thoughtful, sensitive and diverse view of the world around you and beyond. Literature and poetry open the universe a little more. They reveal deep truths about human nature and existence. And a song – a great song – is, after all, a piece of poetry in motion which, set to music, lifts us and flies out, soaring high above for a moment, aﬀording us an expansive, unobstructed view of how things are, before gliding down to the earth again, having enriched us, entertained us, and sometimes even having unpacked bite-sized philosophies for us, so that we look at our everyday life-situations with a newly found or renewed gaze and vigour.

According to Akhtar, one of the great achievements of Hindi film songs is that they also “shaped sensibilities in the masses for social justice and life philosophy”, which otherwise could have only come from high poetry, literature and works of philosophy. As Akhtar notes in the same interview, “In our society, the common man doesn’t read books on philosophy and sociology and social justice. The sensibilities towards human values and collective values were gleaned and imbibed from our film songs. Because in a few lines, set to a melody, profound insights into life were packed together in simple words.”

Kisi ke muskurahaton pe ho nisaar…kisi ke vaaste ho dil mein pyaar…jeena isi ka naam hai on one end of the spectrum and Dum maaro dum, mit jaaye gham on the other – these and many other songs in between, in addition to being scenes of the film in their own right, or adding to the drama and characterisation, also oﬀered the audiences value systems and public philosophy. It is not uncommon, after all, the eclectic frequency with which we quote lines from a beloved song to mark a moment or to help a friend, or even ourselves, in life-situations and to show the way around and forward. In conclusion, Akhtar minces no words in stating that “now such songs are too few and far in between”. He says, “Kal ho naa ho comes to mind, and maybe that is it.” And even Kal ho naa ho happened more than 20 years ago!

One of the causes, then, of the deteriorating quality of the Hindi film song is that the reference points of most of the present crop of filmmakers and lyricists are placed outside of the milieu of the society for which they are making films and writing songs. Unlike the filmmakers and poet-lyricists of the past, the sources and inspirations of most of the contemporary filmmakers and lyricists are not rooted in their soil and lie saat samundar paar, in the pop-music and pop-culture of western countries whose lifetimes, as Akhtar puts quite wittingly, “are smaller than even the artistic traditions of India let alone its civilisation.”

‘Woh subah kabhi to aayegi’

The progression of the Hindi film song, across almost a century now, is more than just a nostalgic, romantic yaadon ki baraat. On a deeper level, they stand testimony to and are imbibers of the big political and social changes that have shaped the country. From the crucible of the freedom movement led by Mohandas Gandhi, the republic of India emerged. Beaconing the new nation on an exciting experiment, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, spoke of redeeming an old pledge for a new age – one of equality, fraternity, liberty and justice. The heady idealism of the post-independence India from the early 1950s to the late 1960s made it possible for the filmmakers at the time to attempt to realise some of these ideals, mixed in with their own renewed romanticisms and artistic endeavours, in their movies and songs. It was the age of dropping the bitterness and burdens of the past and embarking upon a new journey, as depicted in the timeless Chhodo kal ki baatein, kal ki baat puraani; naye daur mein likhenge hum milkar nayi kahaani…Hum Hindustani. But it was also the age that made it possible for a Madhubala to play a Muslim courtesan and dance to a Krishna–bhajan in Emperor Akbar’s court in Mughal–E–Azam, portraying an incredible (and uncommon) combination of devotion and sensuality, of prayer and romantic love, in Mohe panghat pe nandlal chhed gayo re to the wild, wide acclaim of a largely Hindu audience.

As the founding ideals started to evaporate – as they usually do – and as the Tryst with Destiny with which India was launched in 1947 began to break down, the angry young man rose from the unjust streets of an impoverished India. The 1970s saw the beginnings of counter-culture, and of rage and colour and of unbridled, daring emotions. The Hindi film song was still memorable and melodious, but there was a visible shift in its vocabulary and values. Gone were the days of shy restraint, or of laid-back elegance and gentleness. It was the time, instead, of Indira Gandhi and of breaking the Zanjeer and playing with Sholay. It was the epoch of a great Aandhi both in Indian politics and society.

Like a bridge connects two separate, disparate masses of land, the period from the early 1970s to the late 1980s acted as the link-road in time connecting early Hindi cinema (widely believed to be its golden age) with its newest avatar in the post-liberalisation and post-Babri Masjid-demolition India. As the Indian economy, and with it the Indian society, opened their doors to the world and, amongst other things, to the internet and MTV and western (largely American) influences, the impact on the filmmakers precipitated the most notable shift in the language, vocabulary and values of their movies and, consequently, their songs. It was not an overnight phenomenon. The seeds of liberalisation would take years to shoot up and come into full bloom. But in the aftermath, the frequency of Hindi movies and songs that had their reference points in the pop culture of the west and the US was too stark to miss.

Coupled with the market forces unleashed by liberalisation (which encouraged Indians to look outward), the spectacular rise of Hindu nationalism catapulted a shift in public concerns (which demanded Indians to look more and more inwards, as if on account of a deep-seated insecurity born out of looking out at the west and its glittering achievements). This in turn further catapulted the shifts in the Hindi film song that we have talked about so far. In Modi’s India, a Padmavati couldn’t dance and express her desires with the flaming sensuality and unfettered abandon of an Anarkali in Nehru’s India. Or the angry young man (still committed to the ideals of democracy and social justice) of Indira Gandhi’s infamous Emergency wouldn’t know what to make of the toxic bigotry and hate induced by the new elite – the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party and their followers.

The coarsened public discourse and a narrow imagination have coarsened and reduced the Hindi cinema and its songs in equal measure, if not more. On the other hand, the contemporary filmmakers have not covered themselves in glory either. They have, mostly, bowed down to the market and political forces instead of arriving at a working combination of the commercial, the political and the artistic. And since nothing that is coarse and meek lasts for long, it is not surprising to witness that most of the movies and songs of our age come and vanish without making a mark.

Talking to Tariq Ali on his show on teleSUR in an unusually rare interview about Hindi cinema, one of India’s foremost writers and thinkers Arundhati Roy remarked when asked about the evolution (or regression) of the Hindi film song: “Earlier songs were like incense sticks. They are throwaway lighters now.” When pressed further to explain herself, Roy said in a low, lamenting tone of voice: “The heart has gone out.”

There is enough new brilliance and talent on the Indian film scene. Perhaps some of them, or even most of them, will usher in a new day in Hindi cinema and bring back the heart in it. But whether Apna time aayega again or not, time will tell.

Shivendra Singh is a writer based out of Lucknow.

Jubilee Is a Beautifully Mounted Show About the 1930s but the Women Pioneers Have Been Erased

The producers seem to prefer female suffering over female success, even if many women were bigger stars than men.

No powerful industry can survive without self-mythologisation. Hollywood has excelled at such mythmaking, with several films about the origins and pioneers of its industry. Bombay cinema too has made attempts to render its cinematic history into screen fodder, but its myths usually belong to two types: the tragic fall of an artistic genius (eg. Kaagaz ke Phool), or the dreams and disillusionment of a struggling actor (eg. Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon).

The new Amazon Prime series Jubilee crafts a new, more resonant myth in the genre of Hollywood self-mythologies (think Sunset Boulevard to Babylon) – a tale of ambition, revenge and cold-blooded murder. This is a dark story of the original hustle, where India’s film practitioners constitute the first sector of workers who gambled away their wealth, bodies and loyalties for that thrilling dream called “love of cinema”. The show’s story and its ambitions are epic, and the plot is chockfull of epic stuff – the emergence of a film industry from the dastardly murder of a great talent, a sinister opening tone that resonates through the series alongside the murderous energies of the Partition and its aftermath.

Jubilee, helmed by Vikramditya Motwane, is loosely based on the rise and fall of Bombay Talkies, a legendary film studio founded by the Europe-returned couple Himansu Rai and Devika Rani. The show opens with the real-life elopement scandal that threatened to destroy the studio in its first years when Devika Rani ran away to Calcutta with her leading man, Najmul Hussain. Several rumours exist about what exactly happened, but as I have written elsewhere, it is clear that the two had fallen in love, and that Devika Rani was trying to leverage her star power to negotiate a joint contract for herself and newcomer Najmul at the legendary New Theatres studio in Calcutta.

As someone who has spent two decades researching the history of the Bombay film industry, and a few years working in that industry too, I am elated by Jubilee’s scale and grandeur. From lovingly designed Art Deco preview theatres to the immaculately accurate Roy Talkies canteen (BT insisted on its employees living in Malad and ran a great canteen), well-researched refugee camps (rarely seen on screen) and gorgeously simple lyrics and tunes, the makers have spared no expense or effort in bringing a lost era back to life in all its atmospheric textures. Kudos to production designers Aparna Sud and Mukund Gupta. Pratik Shah and team steal the show with sensuous cinematography and lighting, especially in night shots and interiors. This is film history as Bombay noir, with hardboiled heroes (Srikant Roy, Madan Kumar, Jay Khanna) unleashing moral chaos even as they script Bollywood’s future.

But this is where the showrunners miss a golden opportunity. Jubilee reinforces some cliched narratives of the Bombay film industry, the most unshakeable of which has been the myth of male pioneers. Srikant Roy may be unscrupulous but he is a creative visionary; Madan Kumar may be a murderer but we are asked to identify with his quest for stardom; and Jay Khanna may be an insecure sexist but he is marked for a sparkling career. To be sure, all three characters are played to perfection by the actors – Prasenjit, Aparshakti Khurana, Sidhant Gupta – but the question remains why pick these three to dominate the entire series?

Halfway through Jubilee, as I watched the shooting of the duet “Udan Khatole”, I was struck by the absence of Saraswati Devi. The mise-en-scene is accurate, with a live orchestra for sync sound recording, but as the camera pans 360 degrees around this space, the only woman we see is the singing actress. It might come as a shock to readers that Bombay Talkies had hired a woman, Khorshed Homij (renamed Saraswati Devi), despite great resistance from the local Parsi community, as its in-house music director in 1935. How wonderful it would have been to see an actually existing historical role model as a woman music director in the show. In fact, industry folklore is still divided between who deserves credit for inventing playback singing. Some say it was R.C. Boral of New Theatres, while others maintain it was Saraswati Devi at Bombay Talkies. In Jubilee, the credit goes to Srikant Roy and Madan Kumar in a charming and very clever little scene.

Saraswati Devi (right) watching a rehearsal with Devika Rani and Kishore Sahu for a song sequence in ‘Jeevan Prabhat’. Image courtesy Wirsching Archive/Alkazi Collection.

Jubilee returns obsessively to what is cast as the original sin of Bollywood – the murder of a great creative talent, Jamshed Khan. Every episode takes us back to Khan’s screen test and the violent snuffing out of his talent by the usurper Madan Kumar. Of course, we know that Madan Kumar is a character based on the beloved thespian Ashok Kumar, who indeed was a laboratory assistant at Bombay Talkies before he was summoned to replace the disgraced Najmul Hussain. For the showrunners, Jamshed Khan serves as a symbol of Hindu-Muslim tensions that have shadowed cinema in India since its earliest years.

What else could the premature death of Jamshed Khan symbolise?

Based on my research, the story of Najmul Hussain isn’t the story of a Hindu takeover of the film industry but a surprising story about female stardom. Himansu Rai wasn’t upset about the loss of Najmul Hussain but outraged that his single-most prized asset – Devika Rani – might join another studio. Female stars ruled the marquee in the pre-Independence film ecology and intense bidding wars took place to control actresses and their star power. Studio bosses spent thousands of rupees to hire and hold big names such as Sulochana (born Ruby Myers), Shanta Apte, Meena Shorey, and Ermeline, all of whom were also dragged to court on various charges. Indeed, it is anecdotally known that it was Ermeline who picked out Prithviraj Kapoor from a line of junior artistes and made him a leading man!

Star actresses played key roles in production with Gohar Mamajiwala as a co-producer at Ranjit Movietone (her partner Chandulal Shah is the historical reference for Srikant Roy’s cotton fiasco), while Jaddan Bai (Nargis’ mother), Pramilla (born Esther Abraham), and Protima Dasgupta ran their own production companies. None of this is surprising once we understand that actresses were the foundation on which the film industry was built. Actresses like Sulochana, Gohar, Devika Rani and Sabita Devi had bigger fan bases than the male stars, and the evidence for this is aplenty. It was these actresses whose names were lit up outside theatres, headlining screen credits and advertisements, and it was actresses who were the earliest brand ambassadors for everything from soaps to telephones. Friends are astonished when I tell them that in the 1930s actresses like Sita Devi were earning four times the salary as their male counterparts such as D. Billimoria and Prithviraj Kapoor!

Star salaries in 1932.

Memory is fallible and can therapeutically select only those elements that serve us in the future. The male heroes, directors, and producers who took over the industry in the 1950s cannot be relied on to remember the women of the pre-Independence era. If, as Jubilee suggests, it is the victors whose version of history survives, the show also tells us that this history is forged through cowardice, ambition, and lies. Madan Kumar/Binod Das overcomes his nightmares by creating a narrative in which he is simply a bystander rather than a perpetrator. Jay Khanna, largely modelled on Raj Kapoor, joins Binod in this coverup. Who then, is the Jamshed Khan who haunts the show and the history of Bombay cinema? What was erased on the eve of Independence that continues to haunt our film history? Could it be Bombay cinema’s OG stars, its women?

It is true that by the time Ashok Kumar played Bombay’s first anti-hero, Shekhar, in Kismet, the era of female stars was waning. And that is one of the big industrial transitions that the Bombay cine-ecology goes through between the 1940s and the 1950s. But when the radio magnate Jotwani tells the star-producer Sumitra Devi that “masses follow male heroes” it is an outrageous lie. Jotwani cites Mehboob Khan’s Aurat as evidence that woman-centric films flop. What he doesn’t say is that Aurat was declared a “triumph” in the press and its 1957 remake, Mother India, starring Nargis, was one of the biggest hits of all time! Most of the earliest hits of Bombay – be it Telephone Girl (1926) or Achhut Kanya (1936) were heroine-centred films. And I believe that it is urgently important for our current generation of actors and producers to know this. As Sumitra Devi sits there listening to the obnoxiously smug Jotwani I felt a chill down my spine for the many times that Aditi Rao Hydari herself must have heard this spiel from her own male contemporaries.

Wamiqa Gabbi, who is stellar as Nilofer Qureishi, plays a part we know all too well: the kothewali-turned-filmstar who is serially exploited and betrayed by the men around her. While this trajectory is not historically untrue, it becomes harmful through repetition. It erases all the other imaginations of lives actually lived by women in the pre-Independence film industry. To give you just one direct parallel to Nilofer: in the 1930s an established and wealthy courtesan, Shamshad Begum, moved to Bombay and bought an expensive flat on Marine Drive. She was grooming her daughter to be a film actress and shooing off suitors such as the Nizam of Hyderabad’s most eligible son, Moazam Jah. This daughter was Naseem Banu, who came to be known as Pari-chehra Naseem and commanded one of the highest salaries in town. In later years, Naseem’s daughter Saira Banu became a star in her own right, stylishly outfitted in costumes designed by her mother. Naseem’s story could have easily been Nilofer’s, but our writers seem to prefer stories of female suffering over female success.

One of my favourite moments in Jubilee is when at end of Episode 2 we see Nilofer walking bare feet at Independence Day celebrations on the streets of Bombay, lustily drinking straight from a bottle, and laughing at gawking men. Here we have a rare moment of lightness in a show that is unduly burdened by the seriousness of its own mythmaking masculinist agenda. For me, this Nilofer embodies that brief interlude in South Asia’s film history when some women of the entertainment world enjoyed a rare creative freedom and a lightness of being.

Debashree Mukherjee is the author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press, 2020) and editor of the photo-anthology Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema (Mapin and Alkazi).

Book Excerpt: Early Bombay Cinema and Its Close Links With the Cotton Trade

An excerpt from ‘Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City’ by Debashree Mukherjee.

Q: Can you tell me why there is not a single film studio in the United Provinces, the home of the Hindi language?

A: Because that province has no official gambling dens like the Share Market and the Cotton Exchange where easy money can be made and invested in films. As yet film making has not become a real industry in India. It is still an adventure run with pirated capital.

—“Editor’s Mail,” filmindia, 1941

A cheaply printed Hindi weekly film magazine called Cinema Sansar (Cinema world) started circulating in Bombay in 1932. It regularly published weekly rates for American cotton futures alongside film advertisements and news. This casual juxtaposition of cotton futures trading and cinema prods us to think about their interconnections. Both cotton and cinema were pivotal to the emergence of Bombay as South Asia’s foremost industrial metropolis. The first cotton mills were built in the city in the 1850s, and cotton rapidly became India’s most important industry, controlled in large part by indigenous capital, and propelling Bombay’s business and labor concerns to the national stage.50 Cinema entered the scene at the very end of the nineteenth century, but it too played a major role in consolidating and confirming Bombay’s status as a modern metropolis with a sway over the late colonial “national” imagination. These synchronically twinned trajectories of cotton and cinema have more material connections than one might assume at first glance.

Hindi weekly film magazine Cinema Sansar. Photo: Author provided

In his latest book, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations, Lee Grieveson situates the rise of Hollywood within a complex matrix of “interlocking relations among telecommunications, media corporations, and finance capital.” He argues that Hollywood’s much-touted system of vertical integration was not invented by studios but prompted by a longer history of the American corporate form and its drive toward oligopoly. This is an important point as it suggests that in order to understand the form of a film industry, one must look sideways at the dominant models of business that surround it. Bombay’s cine-ecology had deep roots in regional networks of speculative trading, and it sourced much of its capital from Gujarati and Marwari credit and cotton merchants located in the city and its hinterland. Indian capitalists were a “rising group, socially as well as economically” in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their two main constraints were the dominance of British capital over most of the modern sector and the predominantly precapitalist structures of the agrarian sector. The Indian film industry was wholly indigenous in its finance and executive control, producing home-grown content for home-grown audiences. Cotton trading was closely monitored by the Indian Cotton Committee of the Textile Control Board, but cinema, still struggling to gain industrial and social recognition, was outside the purview of colonial economic regulation. Indian cinema’s most prominent nodes of growth (studios, laboratories, technicians, actors) were also actively trying to remake themselves as modern, scientific, and corporate. Thus the in-between industrial status of cinema—as indigenous, modernizing, and governmentally undervalued—made it a prime location for multiple financial interests to converge.

The poster for Madam Fashion. Photo: Author provided

The commodity derivatives market in Bombay was thriving since at least the mid-1850s, with cotton futures trading getting an unprecedented boost during the 1860s with the American Civil War. As U.S. cotton exports declined, England turned to India to supply its textile factories with raw cotton. Bombay’s rise as the foremost industrial and financial center of South Asia is closely linked with the “Cotton Mania” of the 1860s when “the phenomenal flow of gold into the Presidency, accruing from the abnormal prices of cotton induced by the American Civil War, sent the city temporarily mad. It is estimated that the five years brought Bombay profit on its cotton trade worth eighty-one million pounds more than it would have received in ordinary times.” Record profits entered Bombay in the form of gold and were redistributed along channels of real estate, the textile industry, philanthropic civic infrastructural development, and the credit economy. Scores of new banks, financial institutions, and businesses sprang up at this time, and so high was the cotton euphoria that, reportedly, “four thousand rupee shares of the Back Bay Company were forced up to twenty-four thousand rupees—a premium of 600%.”

In 1865, however, when the war ended, Bombay’s speculative mania abruptly terminated in a “ruinous panic” where “in a few weeks the whole mass of paper wealth [shares] became unsaleable” making the “Bombay crash one of the severest disasters which ever fell upon a mercantile community.” Still, the city’s appetite for speculation soon revived, and Bombay witnessed periodic booms during World War I, 1925, 1935, and World War II, alongside global aftershocks of the Great Depression (1929–1939). The speculative finance that flooded Bombay in these years found another exciting redistribution outlet with the emergence of a local film industry.

One of Bombay’s oldest film studios, Kohinoor Film Company (1919–1932), was started by a local cotton mill owner, Dwarkadas Sampat. Similarly, Ishwarlal Umedbhai Patel moved profits from his family’s ginning factories in Gujarat and Bombay into film, financing “about half a dozen petty producing concerns” before entering film distribution and then production with the concerns Gujerat Film Circuit and Jay-Bharat Movietone. Mayashanker Bhatt, proprietor of Sharda Film Company and President of the Motion Picture Society of India (1933–34), maintained a parallel business in textile production. The earliest avatar of Bombay Talkies, the “Indian Players,” received financial backing from the cotton merchant-turned-Theosophist Jamnadas Dwarkadas in 1923 for its proposed film, Light of Asia. Dwarkadas was also a member of the Legislative Assembly and offered a 3,000-pound guarantee against a 30 percent share of profits. When the Indian Players started Bombay Talkies, their studio was built on the property of F. E. Dinshaw, a member of the BT Board of Directors who had made his fortunes partly from the Bombay cotton industry and offered the use of his large Malad summer bungalow and sprawling estate. Sir Phiroze Sethna, later president of the Motion Picture Society, had begun his career as a cotton supplier and mill owner before moving into insurance and banking.

A poster for Dr Madhurika. Photo: Author provided

Apart from capital investments put forward by cotton magnates, Bombay cinema was increasingly financed by short-term profits from cotton speculation. The most routine form of finance available for film production was through local moneylenders who charged exorbitant rates of monthly interest. Next came regional and community-based networks of credit and investment that were connected to global economic currents in cotton and bullion. These mercantile networks seized on film as an avenue for offloading unreported and untaxed incomes from speculative and other trade. Owing to the intense colonial scrutiny of locally established commodities futures markets, the economically inconspicuous film industry became a logical venue for a new kind of futures trading. Driven by the extrapolations of distributors, short-term investors approached film as a commodity derivatives market, moving money into and out of the film economy without concern for the quality or even delivery of the film commodity.

Film was not considered a national commodity that deserved special attention, nor was it regarded as an essential wartime resource. This was one reason that many of Bombay’s early film concerns were directly funded by profits from the cotton trade. The 1940s saw the rapid mushrooming of scores of independent and fly-by-night film production companies in Bombay, a fact that has been attributed to the increased circulation of cash in a wartime economy. The extreme precarity of cotton futures markets during the war years must be considered as another key factor in the proliferation of intrepid, short-lived film concerns during this time.

Speculative finance had become so naturalized by the 1940s that film journalist Baburao Patel felt obliged to remind readers that “in the course of thirty years, through the routine evolution of mortgages, the early speculating financiers came to be known as the studio-owners and incidentally as the producers. Though now they produce pictures on their own, their profit motive remains paramount.” Clearly, the cinema-cotton relationship was mutually beneficial. If cinema needed finances from Bombay cotton, then cotton futures trading also needed Bombay cinema to reroute investments.

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Spatially, too, cotton and cinema made parallel claims on the city. Cotton mill districts, the residential neighborhoods inhabited by millworkers, and the earliest theaters to screen exclusively Indian films were spatially connected. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar tells us that “from the late nineteenth century onwards . . . the city’s poor began to drift away from the high rents of the native town to the villages of Parel, to Mazgaon and Tarwadi, Sewri and Kamathipura.” The city’s cotton mills were increasingly concentrated in these same areas and “90 percent of the city’s millworkers lived within fifteen minutes’ walking distance of their place of work.”

The high concentration of working-class populations led to the increased demand for theaters, and “from the mid-1920s, a new exhibition locale was developing to the north of Grant Road.” These northern neighborhoods included the millworker districts of Parel and Sewri. A history of such neighborhood links shows us that the local cotton industry not only supplied finance but also provided the earliest audiences for Indian cinema. In turn, cinema offered Bombay’s overworked and underpaid factory workers an escape from everyday drudgery, fantasies of alternate worlds, and a place to relax for three or more hours, thus providing the sociophysical conditions for the reproduction of labor power. Overlapping these spatial concentrations of urban labor, production, and film exhibition were the city’s infamous red-light neighborhoods, zones of sex work such as Kamathipura, Khetwadi, Phunuswaree, Girgaon, and Tardeo, many of which had a high concentration of millworkers.66 Entertainment and extraction, labor and leisure, worked symbiotically in these social zones of contact, contributing to the consolidation of the talkie cine-ecology.

Excerpted with permission from Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle-Making Movies in a Colonial City, Penguin Random House (August 2020).

Debashree Mukherjee is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. She worked in Mumbai’s film and television industries from 2004–2007.

Basu Chatterjee Created the Perfect Alternative to Violent Hindi Movies of the 1970s

It was ‘Rajnigandha’ (1974), based on Mannu Bhandari’s novel ‘Yahi Sach Hai’, that brought him to public notice.

Filmmaker Basu Chatterjee, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 93, was one of the leading lights of the ‘middle of the road’ cinema of the 1970s and ‘80s, which fell in the gap between purely commercial masala and art house films.

In that space, he carved himself a reputation for sensitive films with a light-hearted touch, many of them set in Bombay, such as Chhoti si Baat, Piya ka Ghar and Manzil. His first one, a small gem called Sara Akash (1969), was about a young college student and his wife who have to adjust to married life in a joint family. Chatterjee caught the small town milieu in Agra perfectly and the film got a national award for cinematographer K.K. Mahajan. Trivia buffs will be interested to know that Mani Kaul too acted in it.

Chatterjee was a cartoonist, mainly for Blitz, and his films often reflected his sense of humour. Chhoti si Baat, one of his funniest, told the story of how a shy accountant (Amol Palekar) transforms into a lover boy after some clandestine training from Col Julius Nagrendranath Wilfred Singh (Ashok Kumar) and is able to best his rival Asrani to win over the girl (Vidya Sinha). Film buffs still recall the scene in a Chinese restaurant where Palekar uses chopsticks, which Asrani can’t.

It was Rajnigandha (1974), based on Mannu Bhandari’s novel Yahi Sach Hai, his third film, that brought him to public notice. A love triangle about the dilemma of a young woman (Vidya Sinha) who can’t forget her ex (Dinesh Thakur), a worldly-wise advertising executive from Bombay, but is in love with the sweet but clueless office clerk (Amol Palekar, making his film debut), won the hearts of viewers and critics alike. The film was made in barely Rs 3 lakh, and his later films too were small-budget films, which endeared him to producers.

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Chhoti si Baat followed and again, was a commercial success. His next, Chitchor once again featured Palekar as an overseer on a construction project who charms the winsome village belle Zarina Wahab.

Chatterjee’s films were perfect alternatives to the violence ridden mainstream Hindi cinema of the 1970s. Where Bachchan fought villains of every size and shape, Chatterjee’s well told stories were about ordinary, middle-class folks. They looked and sounded real, without being gritty in the manner of the arty New Wave. Piya ka Ghar, an underrated film about a young couple living in a cramped Bombay chawl who crave privacy, is a good example – there was joy and sadness but without needless angst and misery of the tales told by high-minded directors.

Most of all, he knew his Bombay. The films were almost always shot on location and the city, as it was in the 1970s, was lovingly shown; to see the bus shelters, taxis, trains and landscape of the time is to recall a nicer Bombay, without skyscrapers and malls. This song from Manzil, filmed on the rainy streets of south Bombay never fails to evoke deep sighs of nostalgia.

Chatterjee’s films that were shot among Parsis (Khatta Meetha) and Christians (Baaton baaton mein) too were fondly observed rather than offensive, notwithstanding the clichés and again, remind the viewer of the city’s many communities.

Its not as if Chatterjee couldn’t make something dramatic – Ek Ruka Hua Faisla (1986) based on 12 Angry Men was a tense television drama about a divided jury, which, though not as successful as his romantic films, was praised by the critics.

Chatterjee was an early adapter to commercial television, making the hugely popular serial Rajani (1985) about an angry housewife (Priya Tendulkar) who, as a citizen and consumer, takes up cudgels with recalcitrant service providers like telephone repairmen. In 1997 came Byomkesh Bakshi, about the Bengali detective, which again was a successful television serial.

That was his last well-known work. A few more are listed under his name on IMDB, but they did not make any waves. Hindi cinema had new stars, new directors, new sensibilities and the middle-class of post-liberalisation India was not the same as that of the 1970s.

‘Takht’: Karan Johar’s Film on Dara Shikoh May Just Be a Refreshing Change

Dara’s story must not succumb to the perils of a single-story structure that burnishes accounts of the hunter, and burns that of the hunted.

A settled attribute of our history textbooks is that they’re insipid – written in a particular way by historians of a particular ilk, designed around events of a particular nature. Succession drives their literature. Wars dominate their thought. Stories of the victors remain, while those of the fallen are lost.

They follow a takht (throne) – over – taboot (coffin) model; a single-story structure that burnishes accounts of the hunter, and burns that of the hunted.

Single stories, however, are a problematic way of dealing with ‘itihas’ (the-way-things-were). For, not only do they moat their audiences into a dull, monolithic narrative, turning them into sounding boards for isolated and cherry-picked details, they simultaneously strengthen stereotypes, breed binaries, and create unmerited cults – a tragedy to the possibilities of human imagination.

It is in this context that filmmaker Karan Johar’s recent interest in the life of Dara Shikoh comes as a refreshing change. It’s a relief not only because many have tried to read modern concepts such as secularism and liberalism into Dara Shikoh – a human alive in the age of empires – but also because it opens a stream of thought into the past, challenging the parochial narrative that views the Mughals as a monolithic entity of bigotry, corroborated largely by the improprieties of emperor Aurangzeb.

Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of emperor Shah Jahan, was much more than a regular prince for he could think beyond the clash of swords and clink of coins. He was fond of calligraphy and poetry. He liked engaging with the saints and philosophers, inviting plurality of thoughts to visit him. He devoted much of his life trying to find a common grammar between Islam and Hinduism. In pursuit of that goal, he translated 50 Upanishads from Sanskrit to Persian so that they could be studied by Muslim scholars as well as Persian-reading Hindus. Dara was a man made of love.

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In the struggle for succession, he was defeated in Samugarh by his brother, Aurangzeb. After that defeat, Dara spent his last months as a fugitive, only to be captured later by Aurangzeb’s men. It’s said that when he was captured, Dara tried to defend himself with all he had left – a knife used for sharpening pens.

However, Dara’s story must not succumb to the perils of a single-story. Contrary to popular opinion, he was not a man who completely removed himself from the hurry and strife of politics – he rather viewed himself as a future emperor. He undertook military campaigns, at times even demanding from his father, emperor Shah Jahan, that he be put in charge of such campaigns. He was a governor to Lahore, Allahabad, Malwa, Gujarat, Multan-Kabul and Bihar.

Dara’s life was a fusion of his academic explorations and his political aspirations. He did not pursue knowledge because he thought of himself as someone unfit for the throne, but because he did, one day, see himself on it. He modelled himself, according to historian Supriya Gandhi, on Akbar and Alexander — embodiments of the idea of a philosopher-ruler.

Filmmaker Karan Johar, therefore, sits on a great opportunity. And I look upon a film for this course-correction rather than books — though there are good ones by Avik Chanda and Supriya Gandhi — because films, as a medium, are uniquely placed. They allow us not only to visit events of the past as spectators to a time passed, but to inhabit and dwell in them, even if briefly. They provide not just a space people visit to have fun and share their time with the stars, but one that allows people to meet with their own inner rigidities, conflicts, and even their hidden hopes.

“History wrote this story,” said Johar at a press conference, “I’m only telling it.”

One hopes that in telling this story, Johar looks above and beyond the Takht model of story-telling and makes a feature that introduces diversity in our conversations, our relationships and eventually in us.

Chandan Karmhe is a Chartered Accountant, an alumnus of IIM-Ahmedabad and a Delhi University law graduate.

Featured image credit: YouTube screengrab