Path: Lehigh.EDU!netnews.upenn.edu!news.cc.swarthmore.edu!psuvax1!news.ecn.bgu.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!news.umkc.edu!cctr.umkc.edu!rthamma From: rthamma@cctr.umkc.edu (Renu Thamma) Newsgroups: rec.music.indian.misc Subject: Rmim-Jhim Geeton Ki - 25 - Part I Date: 5 Jul 95 09:14:48 CST Organization: University of Missouri - Kansas City Lines: 124 Distribution: world Message-ID: <1995Jul5.091448@cctr.umkc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: axp1.umkc.edu Rmim-Jhim Geeton Ki - 25 - Part I --------------------------------- (Note: This is not the quiz itself) The newsgroup rec.music.indian.misc is for many of us a forum where interesting Indian film music discussions take place. But what we do not realize is how integral a part of our daily schedules it has become. The topics discussed, the quizzes, the 'wars', all take place in a general atmosphere of bonhomie and camaraderie. And it is this precise togetherness that has kept this group active, interesting and virtually flame-free for so long! The 4th of July marks the 2nd anniversary of the RJGK series of quizzes. Started off by Sami as a challenge to the net-lyric-experts, at a time when rmim was a quiz-deficient land, this quiz has gradually evolved into an acronym that may well be called the rmim-mantra. A nettor who scores well on this quiz, indisputably becomes a net-guru. Every quiz sparks off discussions related to its theme, the selection of songs, and sometimes to the clues itself. This RJGK is the 25th in this series, and is hence a sort of a double-anniversary special. I will be posting the quiz-related posts in two parts. The first part is a brief intrduction to the history of Indian Film Music and the second part is the quiz itself. I will be posting the quiz in a few days from now, to allow plenty of time for discussions on the Lata RJGK. Hoping for an enthusiastic response for RJGK-25, here we go with the first post- Cinema and Film Music - An Indian Perspective At the turn of the century, when the country was poised for major social and political reform, a new entertainment form dawned in India - the cinema. The development of India's film industry is as old, as varied and as exciting as the history of the medium itself. The first Indian feature film started in 1912, coinciding with the making of features in the United States. The first talkie, came out in 1931. Ever since, the Indian film industry, despite many travails, has never looked back. It has produced close to 1,300 silent and around 28,000 talkie features to date. And it is now the most prolific in the world, producing more than 800 features in numerous Indian languages every year, one of the highest number for any country. The arrival of sound in India proved less traumatic than it had in Hollywood. Most of the actors were rushed in from the professional theater. Sound, of course, brought with it the hazards of new technology. But the real problem was - sound being an expensive innovation - to cater to varied linguistic groups on the one hand, and an all-India market on the other. The film industry the world over had to face the unpleasant fact that the arrival of sound resulted in the fragmentation of its audiences into disparate linguistic groups. In view of the size of its market, Hindi emerged as the lingua franca of the all-India film. [ Regional films at that time, would try to attract audiences with slogans such as "apne devi-devtaaon ko apni hi bhaasha mein bolte hue suniye!" :)] A typically Indian result of the coming of sound was that music took the center of the stage. Indrasabha had as many as 71 songs. Songs, that have been argued to be one way of bringing diverse linguistic groups together. This formula worked and continues to do so, also because it meant the continuation of the essentially musical nature of Indian theater. Today, 63 years and hundreds and thousands of film songs later, the popularity of a film's music is a major criteria for its success. By the mid-thirties, music had become serious business. Real expertise was demanded of the music directors. Many famous 'classical' musicians were brought into films to direct music. Music in films slowly evolved into the sole binding factor that prevented the linguistic splintering of the audience. It evolved from being just an essential element of entertainment into a defining characteristic of togetherness. Although the early film songs were products of an oral culture, where speech was just set to rhyme to a simple meter, which was then given a tune, later film songs were consciously aesthetic in nature, meaning to intensify the mood of the scene. Thus film-songs soon became a self-complete unit - the words and music creating an emotionally satisfying world which required no dramatic context. In fact, over the years, they have developed so distinct a form that although included in the films, they live an almost autonomous existence, often even saving a deplorable movie from near extinction. [The mass popularity of film music brought such a lot of flak upon its head at one point of time, especially with the mixing of Indian and Western music traditions which was considered 'defiling' tradition, that All India Radio refused to broadcast film songs for several years! ] It cannot be denied that this very vitality of film music, its need and desire to experiment endlessly and to seek out new forms, its receptivity to other musical traditions (sometimes amounting to straight 'lifting' of tunes from abroad) have broadened the basis of Indian music. The ragas of Indian music form an essentially melodic system and composers have found it very difficult to harmonize them. Film experiments have made a remarkable contribution in this area. By the mid-thirties an actor had to be a singer to remain in films. The first two decades of talkies were entirely dominated by 'singing stars' like K.L.Saigal, Pankaj Mullick, Noorjehan and Suraiyya. By the late forties however a dissatisfaction was evident with the singing-star system. A good singer was not necessarily a good actor. Music directors could not use the best singing talent available. Besides the tone-deafness of some of the popular stars made song-recording a heart-rending business. A compromise solution was reached: playback singing. For a whole decade the actors sang their own songs. But in the free-lance and 'untraditional' craze of the post-war world, the principle was slowly accepted that the singer who sang the song could be different from the singer on the screen. Despite the many atrocities that resulted [an actress with a base voice suddenly singing in contralto or soprano :)] the method solved a basic problem for the music directors and the audience didn't really seem to care. Playback singing by independent singers revolutionized the whole nature of Indian film songs. It effectively moved film songs from being mere 'adjuncts' to the film into a more autonomous role. If the 30s' Devdas was built up around the personality of Saigal, by the 50s it was Dilip Kumar singing to the voice of Talat Mehmood. More persistently noticeable than the proverbial Indian fly, is Indian film music. Neither the village nor the seclusion of the urban rich provide an escape. The surge of this tidal wave has penetrated all spheres, sparing no corner of the country. Truly, in the Indian context film music has become more inspiring than the films themselves. Renu.