ABSTRACT
What do the international pop or hip-hop stars Akon, Snoop Dogg, and Kylie Minogue have in common? They have all recently been featured on the soundtracks of prominent Hindi films, more commonly referred to as “Bollywood” films. The word “Bollywood,” derived by combining Bombay with Hollywood, has become the dominant global term to refer to the prolific and box-office oriented Hindi language film industry located in Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995). The Hindi film industry is aesthetically and culturally distinct from Hollywood, but as prolific and ubiquitous in its production and circulation of narratives and images. Perhaps the most iconic and distinguishing feature of popular Hindi cinema, when compared to other filmmaking traditions in the world, is the presence of songs sung by characters in nearly every film. Regardless of genre-from gangster films to war films, frommurder mysteries to period films, from vendetta films to love stories-popular Indian films contain sequences where characters burst into song (often accompanied by dance) for a variety of reasons having to do with narrative, characterization, spectacle, or viewing pleasure. The near ubiquity of elaborately choreographed and lavishly produced song sequences has become the marker of Bollywood’s distinctiveness in the global media landscape, leading Gopal and Moorti to note in their introduction to Global Bollywood, “Frequently remarked upon by insiders and always remarkable to outsiders, song-dance occupies the constitutive limit of Bollywood cinema” (2008: 1). Sound and music arrived in Indian cinema with the release of the Hindi film Alam Ara
(Beauty of the World, Ardeshir Irani), on March 14, 1931, at the Majestic Theatre in Bombay. Advertised as an “all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing” film, this production, with its seven songs, established music, song, and dance as staples of Indian cinema. The centrality of music has its roots in older performance traditions which influenced cinema. Historians of Indian cinema trace the distinctive form of popular cinema to theatrical traditions such as classical Sanskrit drama, various forms of folk theater, and the nineteenthcentury Parsi theater (Garga 1996; Rajadhyaksha&Willemen 1999). All of these traditions tightly integrated music, song, and dance, with each element being essential to the entire performance. To those unfamiliar with popular Hindi cinema, song sequences seem to be ruptures in
continuity and verisimilitude. However, rather than being an extraneous feature, music and song in popular cinema define and propel plot development. Many films would lose their
narrative coherence if the songs were removed. Some scholars have described the popular film as operatic where the dramatic moments “are often those where all action stops and the song takes over, expressing every shade of emotional reverberation and doing it far more effectively than the spoken word or the studied gesture” (Prakash 1983: 115). Hindi filmmakers spend a great deal of time and energy crafting the song sequences, which have a wide variety of functions within a film’s narrative, as well as providing the main element of cinematic spectacle (Ganti 2013). Hindi film songs also circulate in a rich, complex aural economy, where they take on a life
of their own, disassociated from any particular film (Ganti 2000; Gopal and Moorti 2008). Until the early 1980s, film songs were the only form of popular music in India that was produced, distributed, and consumed on a mass scale, and even today film music accounts for the majority-nearly 70 percent-of music sales in India (Ganti 2013). While film music plays a significant role in the social and cultural life of urban Indians, the presence of songs in cinema had often been the object of ridicule and criticism by the press, state officials, and cultural elites, and filmmusic did not warrant much serious scholarly attention until recently (Adamu 2008; Booth 2008a, 2008b; Gopal and Moorti 2008; Sarazzin 2008). For years, Hindi films were dismissed by most scholars and intellectuals as formulaic and escapist, with the song sequences cited as the primary evidence. Even filmmakers are critical or disparaging of these sequences and thus, rather than being an unquestioned feature of Hindi cinema, the production of song sequences are sites of tension, debate, and intense negotiation among members of the Hindi film industry (Ganti 2012b). So how does one make sense of the enthusiasm and willingness with which some
international recording artists have participated in the production of song sequences in a variety of registers-from rapping in a promotional music video for the 2008 film Singh is Kinng (Snoop Dogg), appearing onscreen in a song and dance sequence in the 2009 film Blue (Kylie Minogue), to singing the playback vocals for leading star Shah Rukh Khan in his 2011 film Ra.One (Akon)? I contend that it is only after the Hindi film industry is transformed into “Bollywood”—a globally recognized and circulating brand of filmmaking from India, often posited by the international media as the only serious contender to Hollywood in terms of global popularity and influence-that these collaborations become possible. One of the most notable changes since the onset of the millennium is the way Hindi cinema and the film industry more broadly have acquired greater cultural legitimacy from the perspective of the state, the English-language media, and English-educated/speaking elites in India. This increased cultural legitimacy is a result of Hindi cinema and the film industry having
undergone a process of “gentrification” in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Ganti 2012a). Just as urban gentrification is marked by a vocabulary of progress, renovation, and beautification, which is based upon the displacement of poor and working-class residents from urban centers, the gentrification of Hindi cinema was articulated through a discourse of quality, improvement, and innovation, based upon the displacement of the poor and working classes from the spaces of production and consumption. The results of this gentrification were evident in the film industry, the films themselves, and the patterns of distribution and exhibition. Hindi films from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s exhibited a growing concern with wealthy protagonists, resulting in a near-complete erasure of the working class, urban poor, and rural dwellers who were once prominent as protagonists/ heroes in them. Additionally, more and more films were shot in North America, the UK, Australia, and Europe rather than in India, so that India itself was increasingly erased from the films. Secondly, the film industry had become progressively more insular and
exclusionary, so it became very difficult for people without any family or social connections to break into the top tier of the industry. Finally, a new geography of distribution emerged which valued metropolitan and overseas markets and marginalized equally populous but provincial markets (ibid.). This chapter will explain the consequence of this gentrification process in the best-
known feature of Hindi cinema-its elaborate and spectacular song sequences. The discourse of improvement in the context of song and dance is marked heavily by the use of the terms “international” and “global” to denote value. I argue that in the case of song sequences, appearing “global” or “international” is predicated upon both the erasure and foregrounding of certain gendered, classed, and racialized bodies onscreen. Before delving into this point, it is necessary to understand the transformations that beset the Hindi film industry and its filmmaking practices after the advent of economic liberalization policies following IMF-mandated structural adjustment in 1991.
