Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance

347 Pages·2008·3.12 MB·English

by  Sangita Gopal

Global Bollywood
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Global Bollywood
Travels of Hindi Song and Dance
Sangita Gopal
Sujata Moorti
Editors
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Copyright 2008 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
orotherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Global Bollywood : travels of Hindi song and dance/Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-978-0-8166-4578-7 (HC, alk. paper)—
ISBN-978-0-8166-4579-4 (PB, alk. paper)—
1. Motion pictures—India. 2. Motion picture music—India. I. Gopal, Sangita.
II. Moorti, Sujata
PN1993.5.I8G54 2008
791.43'0954—dc22 2007048983
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance/1
Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti
Part I. Home Terrains
1. Tapping the Mass Market: The Commercial Life of
Hindi Film Songs/63
Anna Morcom
2. The Sounds of Modernity: The Evolution of Bollywood
Film Song/85
Biswarup Sen
3. From Bombay to Bollywood: Tracking Cinematic and
Musical Tours/105
Nilanjana Bhattacharjya and Monika Mehta
4. Bollywood and Beyond: The Transnational Economy of
Film Production in Ramoji Film City, Hyderabad/132
Shanti Kumar
5. The Music of Intolerable Love: Political Conjugality in
Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se/153
Anustup Basu
Part II. Eccentric Orbits
6. Intimate Neighbors: Bollywood, DangdutMusic, and
Globalizing Modernities in Indonesia/179
Bettina David
7. The Ubiquitous Nonpresence of India: Peripheral
Visions from Egyptian Popular Culture/200
Walter Armbrust
8. Appropriating the Uncodable: Hindi Song and Dance
Sequences in Israeli State Promotional Commercials/221
Ronie Parciack
Part III. Planetary Consciousness
9. Dancing to an Indian Beat: “Dola” Goes My Diasporic
Heart/243
Sangita Shresthova
10. Food and Cassettes: Encounters with Indian
Filmsong/264
Edward K. Chan
11. Queer as Desis: Secret Politics of Gender and Sexuality in
Bollywood Films in Diasporic Urban Ethnoscapes/288
Rajinder Dudrah
12. Bollywood Gets Funky: American Hip-Hop, Basement
Bhangra, and the Racial Politics of Music/308
Richard Zumkhawala-Cook
Acknowledgments/331
Contributors/333
Index/335
Introduction
Travels of Hindi Song and Dance
Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti
Bollywood and the Artworks of Globalization
To talk of Bollywood is inevitably to talk of the song and dance
sequence. For auteur Ram Gopal Varma whose work has not found
global audiences, song-dance is the reason Hindi cinema fails to reach
international standards, but for Aamir Khan whose 2002 film Lagaan
(Tax) was seen worldwide, the song-dance sequence is the dealmaker.1If
feminist independent director Aparna Sen identifies herself as someone
who does not do song and dance, noted U.S.-based diasporic filmmaker
Mira Nair’s crossover hit Monsoon Wedding(2001) is an homage to the
all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood flick. Frequently remarked upon by
insiders and always remarkable to outsiders, song-dance occupies the
constitutive limit of Bollywood cinema. It determines—perhaps
unfairly but invariably—the form itself even as it frequently escapes the
filmic context to inhabit other milieus. While Hindi popular cinema
from the very beginning has remained committed to the song and
dance sequence, filmi song and dance has been a capricious friend—
frequently morphing into other forms such as Trinidadian “chutney,”
Greek “indoprepi,” or Javanese “dangdut.”
The song and dance sequence, then, is the single most enduring
feature of popular Hindi cinema, although song-dance is hardly unique
to Hindi film. From the earliest days of sound, song-dance has charac-
terized the commercial product in other Indian languages including
Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali.2 Indian films, however, are not
This introduction has been coauthored, and author names are listed in alphabetical
order.
1
2 | SANGITA GOPAL AND SUJATA MOORTI
musicals, and the ubiquity of song and dance cannot be rendered in
generic terms. Though the coming of sound heralded an era of musicals
in Hollywood, almost immediately the “musical” evolved into a distinct
genre even as the notion of “genre” itself became more stabilized.3In the
early decades of sound, many world cinemas were dominated by the
“musical,” but to call Hindi films “musicals” because they incorporate
song-dance is to fundamentally mischaracterize them.4As Rosie Thomas
has pointed out, “by the 1930s a number of distinctly Indian genres
were well established. These included socials, mythologicals, devotion-
als, historicals, stunt, costume, and fantasy films. As song and dance is
an integral part of films of allgenres, the term musical is seldom used.”5
Genres have evolved historically as well, thus adding categories such as
the multistarrer, the horror flick, the urban film, and even more recently,
the nonresident Indian (NRI) film, and “the musical.”6These generic
categories may not necessarily follow Hollywood typologies, and the
misrecognition of the indigenous logic of genres leads to broad general-
izations like all Bollywood films are musical melodramas. In postinde-
pendence India, with the waning of the studio system and changes in
film-financing, the all-encompassing “social” became the predominant
genre. The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of the star system such that
films were categorized according to stars and their preference for a certain
image or thematic—an excellent example is the “Vijay” film. Amitabh
Bachchan played the role of an “angry young man” in a number of films
from the 1970s. This character was always called “Vijay” though the
films were not linked to each other in any other way. Indian film typolo-
gies and taxonomies remain seriously underinvestigated.7
While song-dance is by no means the only remarkable feature of
Hindi popular cinema, it is a deep structure of this tradition and crucial
to the way it is described by both insiders and outsiders.8 Thus,
attempts to define an alternative cinema invariably identify the song
and dance sequence as an element that must be discarded in order to
bring greater realism to film. As early as the 1940s, for instance, Nimai
Ghosh while formulating principles for an experimental cinema in
Bengal eschewed the song sequence along with professional actors and
the use of makeup as part of a new aesthetics,9 whereas Satyajit Ray, a
figurehead of the parallel cinema movement, noted, “If I were asked to
find room for six songs in a film that is not expressly a ‘musical’, I would
have to throw up my hands . . . yet six songs per film, per every film, is
INTRODUCTION | 3
the accepted average and at no point in the history of Indian films has
there been an uproar against it.”10
Similarly, most “outsider” accounts of Hindi popular cinema are
usually discursivized as an encounter with song-dance. Thus, the editor
of a recent anthology on Bollywood films writes, “my own enthusiasm
for ‘Bollywood’ film took off in a cinema in Zanzibar in 1989, watching
dance scenes, gods and goddesses, averted kisses, and heroes and hero-
ines rolling joyfully singing down the slopes of Himalayan mountain
sides, in the company of an Afro-Arab audience of Swahili-speaking
Muslims who understood as little of the Hindi dialogue as I, but were as
effectively hypnotized, eagerly whistling the songs and debating what
had been going on after the show.”11 Though the excellent collection
has but one essay dedicated to filmigit, this originary scene is often
repeated in myriad ethnographic accounts where the first-time viewer
of Hindi film is simultaneously estranged by and attracted to the spec-
tacle of song and dance. Moreover, this account highlights the afterlife
of the song-dance sequence—its propensity to circulate outside of exhi-
bition space and filmic contexts. Songs seem to condense and stand in
for the films of which they are a part—thus, megastar Amitabh
Bachchan reminisces, “I was walking down London’s Piccadilly Circus
when I saw this group of Kurds running towards me. (Laughs). I thought
they wanted to assassinate me. But they stopped right there and started
singing songs from Amar Akbar AnthonyandMuquaddar Ka Sikander.”12
In this oft-repeated trope, Bollywood cinema survives for its viewer as a
song or the fragments of a song, so we hear of the guide at the Great Wall
who hums a tune from Disco Dancer (Babbar Subash, 1982) or the taxi-
cab driver in Athens who connects with an Indian passenger over the
title song of Awaara (The innocent, Raj Kapoor, 1951). The song frag-
ment in these instances forges an affective relationship between strangers
while serving as a metonymy for India thus raising interesting questions
about film music’s relationship to national culture.
Before we proceed, a note of clarification of some terminology is
imperative. The epithet Bollywood as a description of popular Hindi
cinema, and increasingly all Indian cinema, has been the subject of
intense scholarly debate. While the origins of the terms are uncertain,
some historians suggest that it was coined by fanzines in the 1970s as a
“parodic and cheeky echo of the North American film industry, a mim-
icry that is both a response and a dismissal.”13 Thus, actors such as