(My latest Economic Times column. It also mentions the bulky new anthology The Swinging Seventies – co-edited by Nirupama Kotru and Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri – which has had many promotional events over the past few months. I have been involved with quite a few of them, mainly in Delhi but also elsewhere. Please look out for the book)
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Last month, in Bombay, I participated in a few cinema-related panel discussions featuring a number of writers, critics and filmmakers. There was a conversation with director Vishal Bhardwaj and the talented young actress Wamiqa Gabbi about their Khufiya, a spy thriller that in the typical Bhardwaj style also manages to be an unusual love story and a wacky dark comedy. There were also a few discussions around the anthology The Swinging Seventies, a collection of essays about 1970s Hindi cinema.
All this was fun, given the inevitable constraints of a 40-minute session where five or six movie-nerds must condense their thoughts. There was camaraderie, over-the-top fandom, and unexpected links were made. During a tribute to Shyam Benegal, while speaking about a cherished Benegal film Charandas Chor, I took the opportunity to tell fellow panellist Ketan Mehta that his debut feature Bhavani Bhavai was one of my favourite films – artfully melding cinema with folk theatre in much the same way that Charandas Chor did.
But there was one session where I felt like an impostor – or at least that I should stay quiet and listen to what other, wiser souls had to say. This was a talk about lyrics in our film songs.
Ironically my own piece in the 1970s book had centred on a song – “O Saathi Re” from Muqaddar ka Sikander – which I loved so much as a child that I tried to record myself singing it (before sadly conceding that posterity would be better served by the Kishore Kumar version). But speaking generally, much as I loved film songs while growing up, my engagement with them was more at the level of tune than lyrics. The music would often embed itself into my head even though I hadn’t quite registered the words.
I could, of course, understand an old song with the surface simplicity of, say, “Mera joota hai Japani” or “Nanhe munne bachhe”– and closer to my own time, I loved the lowbrow wordplay of the Tom and Jerry song in Sharaabi (“Khel rahe thay danda gilli / Chooha aage, peechhe billi”), or lyrics that were accessible and integral to a narrative situation, e.g. “Chal mere bhai” from Naseeb. But even today, I can say little of worth about the differences in meter and philosophy in the poetry of, say, Sahir Ludhianvi and Majrooh Sultanpuri. Loving masala Hindi cinema – with its dialogue-baazi and dhishoom-dhishoom – was one thing, but it was quite another to process Hindustani or Urdu phrases of a certain complexity or literariness.
I don’t know if this is a left brain-right brain thing, or something that can be explained by the fact that I grew up in an Anglophone environment, with English as a first language. (Later, in my teens, encountering English lyrics by Dylan or Cohen or even Eminem, I memorised the words of entire songs without even consciously trying.) Or it could be because mainstream Hindi film songs of the 1980s tended to be lyrically formulaic, with endless permutations of “pyaar”, “ikraar”, “deewana” and “parwaana” – and this encouraged laziness as a viewer. As a child I loved romantic songs from films like Love Story, Betaab, Hero, Pyaar Jhukta Nahin and Ek Duuje ke Liye, but then a line like “Yaad aa rahi hai / teri yaad aa rahi hai / yaad aane se, tere jaane se / Jaan jaa rahi hai…” couldn’t be accused of lyrical ambitiousness, whatever else it was. Years later, listening to something like the catchy Govinda-Neelam song “Pehle pehle pyaar ki” from Ilzaam, it was impossible to miss the parts where they went “Pyaar! Pyaar! Pyaar!” in a growing crescendo – but that didn’t require intense concentration on my part.
One offshoot of this was the comedy of misheard lyrics when it came to “deeper” songs. For instance, I spent years wondering why Amol Palekar in “Ek akela iss shahar mein” was always searching for Sabudana, and it came as a relief to learn that other friends had made this mistake too – Gulzar’s “aab-o-daana” being too high-flown for us youngsters. But there is one blooper that’s uniquely my own. It involved a song from the film Sindoor, where Jaya Prada lists the seasons thus: “Patjhad, Saawan, Basant, Bahaar”. The first of those words was so indecipherable for me that I made no effort to understand the meaning of the line – and then, as an insular South Delhi kid, figured that the last two words were “Vasant Vihar”. For a few days I felt a strange pride that a Bombay movie had acknowledged a posh Delhi colony in this timeless way.
Naturally, this was a disclosure I avoided making in the discussion last month, in the presence of Vishal Bhardwaj and many other maestros of song.
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(And a couple of other photos from the sessions, here)
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| Khufiya session with Shantanu, Govardhan Gabbi, Wamiqa Gabbi and Vishal Bhardwaj |
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| With Ketan Mehta, Rajat Kapoor and others |
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