In a scene in Basu Chatterjee’s Rajnigandha, Amol Palekar’s character, Sanjay, enters a cinema hall lazily. When a song sequence begins on screen, he sniggers, “Lo, gaana shuru ho gaya” (“Oh, it’s time for a song”), and gets up to go and get some fresh air.
Interestingly, songs in Rajnigandha were themselves so well woven into the plot that if someone, like Palekar, decided to get some fresh air then, s/he would end up missing a crucial chunk of the film. Rajnigandha came way back in 1974, long before the age of the multiplexes and the altered narrative and storytelling in Hindi cinema. However, the discourse on use of songs in a Hindi film is perennially relevant.
Recently, a conference on Hindi film songs, jointly organised in Mumbai by Ashok Da Ranade Trust and the Screenwriters’ Association concluded in the city. Filmmaker and musician Vishal Bhardwaj, lyricist and screenwriter Jaideep Sahni, Hindi film music scholar Anna Morcom and screenwriter Anjum Rajabali went back to the same discourse, rather also took it forward by focusing on the evolution in the usage of a song within a film in recent time. Is it a boon for our cinema or a bane? Has it helped define its identity or prevented it from making inroads into the West?
Tradition versus modernity
Rajabali began with a curious observation on two of the big ticket films from last year — Sultan and Dangal. While both are about the same sport – wrestling – the former has traditional lip-synched songs as set-pieces, while the latter uses songs only in background. Is it to underline or accentuate the film’s narrative that aims to be more “modern” and attuned to realism?
Lip-syncing to background — it is this evolving relationship of cinema and music that new filmmakers like Bhardwaj ascribe to. On being asked why we never question Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt classics that have lip-synced songs, Bhardwaj said, “Then we see as an audience. But when I am making a film, as a professional, I am conscious about how cinema is evolving.”
Sahni agreed and recollected that after the box office failure of Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, his father had asked him why he didn’t incorporate songs in the film. How could he sing in an office setup, Sahni wondered, but then realised that in Mr & Mrs. 55 Johny Walker did sing ‘Jaane Kahan Mera Jigar Gaya Ji’ under the office table.
He recalled a scene from his first film as a writer in Jungle. The couple (Fardeen Khan and Urmila Matondkar) is running away from bandits in and the director felt that it was the right place to have a song. Sahni retorted with logic: How can they sing when in the previous scene they have been whispering to each other so that the bandits won’t hear them? The director, Ram Gopal Varma, sat him down and explained the economics of a Hindi film song — the concept of music rights and how a certain per cent of the film’s revenue came from the sale of it. Sahni then included ‘Do Pyaar Karne Wale’ in the script.
Broadening horizons
“So, are the traditional song-dance sequences impeding the modernisation of our cinema and are the reason for [them] not being able to travel to Western markets?” asked Rajabali. “Our films are not travelling not because of the song and dance; but because of the way we tell our stories,” said Bhardwaj. “And we are such a self-sufficient market that we don’t need to reach out. It is only for our pride and ego that we want to reach out. The moment we start seeking money from Western markets, our distinctive storytelling will change.”
“For us to cross cultures, we also need good subtitles,” Sahni added. “We don’t have good subtitlers, which is general problem with our literature in any case: we don’t have very good translators. So, all the expressions in a song would look unnatural to the Westerners because all the subtexts and the cultural layering are lost.”
The conversation went on to a comparison of our films with the musical genre of the West. Bhardwaj shed light on the realistic way of doing lip-sync like how he did with ‘Jag Ja Ri Gudiya’ in Omkara. The song was first recorded (in Suresh Wadkar’s voice), then used for the shoot, and then on post-production, the ambient sound was removed and re-recorded with Wadkar and a layering of Ajay Devgn’s whispering was added.
Times are a’ changing
“If you have a lip-sync song, then it has to be absolutely connected to the character – the singer must sing on that character; they have to be the voice,” said Marcom. “But if the song goes into the background, the playback singer gets to be her/himself.” Also, when Kishore Kumar lip-synced for Pran, he used to modulate his voice. Now a young Arijit Singh sings almost similarly for Ranbir Kapoor as well as Shah Rukh Khan. “Perhaps, now the balance is shifting,” added Marcom about the singers gaining more clout and concomitant ego.
Lip-syncing in a musical is, of course, more of a stylistic nature. Is that the reason why such films don’t have a ready audience in India? Recent examples being Mirzya and Jagga Jasoos. Bhardwaj, who was in no-holds-barred mood, wished that the Jagga Jasoos director Anurag Basu was there (as originally planned for the panel): “I wish Basu was here so that I could tell him his film flopped not because it was a musical but because it was not a good script.”
He even went on to express disdain for much that he perceived wrong with contemporary Hindi film music. The incorrect lyric-writing, for instance. He pointed out how the phrase “usse mayassar kar bhi aao”, from his singer-wife Rekha Bhardwaj’s song ‘Phir Le Aaya Dil’ (Barfi), is a wrong Urdu expression. He even had a bone to pick with incorrect diction, (‘Ghum hai’) in a song, ‘Ikk Kudi’, from his own protégé Abhishek Chaubey’s film Udta Punjab. “I feel like breaking the speakers whenever I hear that song,” he erupted. The audience listened on.