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Book Review
A nation’s enduring love affair
Savitha Gautam
BOLLYWOOD MELODIES — A History of the Hindi Film Song: Ganesh Anantharaman; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 295.
If music be the food for the soul, then Hindi film music is food for the Indian soul. That’s the premise on which Ganesh Anantharaman builds his book Bollywood Melodies. And truly so. As filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt points out in his foreword to the book, without Hindi songs, our lives would be “much more parched and colourless.”
Like the countless music lovers across the country, whose faces break into a smile and lips unconsciously hum along when they hear “Yeh chand kila”, “Suhan safar”, “Jo wada kiya who”, “Dil tadap tadap ke”, “Mera jhoota hai Japani” or “Churaliya hai” (but mere drops in the ocean, these!), Ganesh too grew up on a healthy diet of Hindi songs. And this “labour of love” is his way of paying tribute to those musical geniuses who brought great music into our lives: composers, playback singers and lyricists.
The book starts with the beginning… when silence was broken by the spoken word on the big screen and the first ever Hindi film song “De de Khuda ke naam” was heard in “Alam Ara” way back in 1931. Then, there’s the period between the 1940s and the 1960s, considered by many as the golden period, and moves to the Bappi Lahiri era before concluding with the music of today where the likes of A. R. Rahman, Anu Malik, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and Shantanu Moitra rule the roost.
He has perceptively dealt with the subject by broadly dividing the book into three main sections: the Melody Makers, the Songwriters and the Playback Singers. Each chapter is then divided generation-wise, where some of the most prominent names are written about in depth. The format makes for an easy read. So, if the chapter on composers talks of all those men who wove magic with their tunes, the one on lyricists sings paeans to the master wordsmiths whose contribution to a song is immeasurable. And finally there is the chapter on the playback singers, all those dulcet voices that gave life to a song.
Evolution
The book elucidates the evolution of Hindi film music which was gradual before reaching its peak in the 1950s. The classical and folk (especially Rabindra Sangeet and Marathi Bhavgeet) tunes gave way to pop and rock-inspired numbers and even ghazals. At every stage, somebody took a bold and innovative step and that became a rage. Be it Punkaj Mullick who brought Rabindra Sangeet to film music or C. Ramachandra who stormed the scene with his Westernised compositions or S. D. Burman whose poignant melodies are timeless or Naushad Ali who captured the richness of classical ragas in his tunes. Peppered with anecdotes, the write-up about each composer provides interesting if not fresh insights. Wonder why Ganesh did not include Usha Khanna in his list? She was perhaps the only woman composer of Hindi cinema, and achieved a fair amount of success. In the section on the lyricists, one encounters the imagery of Kidar Sharma, the mass appeal of Kavi Pradeep, the political ideologies which emerged from Shailendra’s deceptively simple poems, the prolificacy of Majrooh Sultanpuri and the magic of poetry of Gulzar and Javed Akhtar.
Playback singers
The best section is the one on playback singers. Lata Mangeshkar hogs the limelight here as she does in the other sections as well. The chapter on Kishore Kumar is engrossing. However, he does full justice to Saigal, Shamshad Begum, Noorjehan, Suraiya, Geeta Dutt, Asha Bhonsle, Mukesh and Rafi.
The interviews with Lata Mangeshkar (who talks about other singers and dismisses her so-called rivalry with Asha Bhonsle), Manna Dey (who has lovely stories to tell about the senior Burman and Rafi), Dev Anand (who talks about the special bond between S. D. Burman and Navketan Productions), Pyarelal (he recalls his days with Laxmikant) and Gulzar (gives his views on poetry and Hindi cinema) make for superb reading. The index that occupies the last few pages is a list of songs with the name of the composer, the film, the singer/s and the year it was recorded. A useful inclusion indeed. You may not agree with Ganesh’s observations and choices. But, it’s no mean task to write about the history of the Hindi film song. That’s why his effort needs to be lauded.
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