ACCORDING to legend, when the song Door hato ae duniya walo, hindustan hamara hai, sung by Amir Bai and chorus, appeared during the screening of Kismet (1943), audiences demanded repeat viewing; the reel was then rewound and the song played repeatedly to packed audiences. The song written by Kavi Pradeep, composed by Anil Biswas, and inspired by the Quit India movement, is one of the several popular film songs of the 1940s that used the chorus to evoke anti-colonial sentiments.

The use of chorus in Hindi film songs has been largely understood as either evoking the folk idiom of our musical traditions or reflecting the influence of progressive writers, musicians and artists who were associated with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA).¹ Several song genres lent themselves well to the use of multiple voices such as bhajans, qawwali, festival songs, folk songs, theatre songs (stage songs) and patriotic songs, where a group of singers repeated the mukhda sung by the lead singer. Alternatively a song could be introduced by the chorus and the antara² would be sung by the lead voices. What stands out in the late 1940s and ’50s is a different formulation for choral orchestration, which needs to be placed within the arrival of new technologies in sound, change in business practices, and new forms for circulation of star images and song texts.³

In this paper I attempt to explore the way the chorus was deployed in film songs in the ’50s, often depicting scenes of street corners, footpaths and other public arenas to dramatize moral conflicts on the public private axis, and critically comment on characters’ ethical dilemmas. This is also the time when the name of the playback singer started appearing on gramophone records and the radio, symbolizing the split between the on screen star and the singer.⁴ Thus as ‘voice’ in the film song turned more and more into an artifice, mediated through technologies that would make it audible, the film song’s reliance on chorus was directly implicated. The chorus in this new formulation played a crucial role in creating a dense social world in which the interiority of the individual was foregrounded by the iconic framing of the on screen stars, presented through the disembodied voice of the playback singer, which itself became a recognizable entity.

 

The decline of the studio era meant the steady movement away from the ‘joint family’ system identified with the older companies.⁵ In the new business alignments, the stakes were high due to the rising cost of stars as well as high duties and taxes. Music and the star system became the driving force behind the Bombay film industry during this period, often identified with the rise of the formula film.⁶ The technology of playback contributed significantly to the popularity of stars, as the playback singer spent considerable amount of time in rehearsing a song, working on the diction, the expressions, the breathing and the tonal quality that a song demanded.⁷ 

After learning the lyrics and the tune, singers rehearsed the song with the assistant music director who ensured that the words and the notes were sitting well with each other.⁸ The screen stars on the other hand were now free to work on their performance with a clear referent, the recorded song, using the disembodied voice of the singer to enhance their own performance, emoting according to the tonal and expressive registers of the pre-recorded voice. It has also been pointed out that the female star could now concentrate more on her make-up and her looks and not worry about the ‘sur’.⁹

 

The late ’40s also marks a significant change in playback singing with the introduction of more sensitive microphones. The new group of playback singers like Lata Mangeshkar, Manna Dey, Mukesh, Talat Mehmood and Mohammed Rafi used a softer crooning style of singing.¹⁰ It is no coincidence that it was only in the late ’40s that playback singers started getting recognized officially. Alison Arnold points out that the Gramophone Company of India started signing exclusive contracts with playback singers to receive small amount of royalties on the sale of records. ‘Film actor-singers in contrast had received no such contracts since the Gramophone Company did not consider these artists "singers" in the true sense of the word.’¹¹

 

With the studio system in a state of decline, Bombay became an undisputed centre for Hindi films and its songs. Bhaskar Chandravarkar has highlighted the importance of scoring or orchestration that completely transformed film music of the ’40s. The arrangers from Goa and Pondicherry were largely responsible for introducing chordal harmony in film music, adding colour and richness to the basic composition of the music directors.¹² With newer technologies available for simple mixing, the composers were able to use different tonalities to create overlapping sounds and voices that foregrounded the emotional complexities of individual characters.

For example, a new experiment in this direction was the introduction of a slow fade-in of Lata’s voice in an alap¹³ while Mukesh is singing the mukhda (refrain) of Chod gaye balam in Barsaat (1949).¹⁴ This overlapping of two voices in a duet performed by Raj Kapoor and Nargis in two discrete spaces was unusual, since until then the male and female singers sang alternate lines of a duet song, or the mukhda was sung by the female singer and the cross-line by the male or vice versa. By the end of the song, both singers would sing the mukhda together. In contrast, in Barsaat, Shankar-Jaikishan used Mukesh and Lata’s softer crooning style to their advantage, creating more intimate sound registers by introducing different temporalities within the framework of simultaneous time.¹⁵ The slow fade-in of Lata’s voice while Mukesh is in the middle of his line to create overlapping tonalities, became the hallmark of Shankar Jaikishan’s style of composing film songs.¹⁶

 

With India’s partition in 1947, the number of singers used for playback came down, as many singers and music directors left for Pakistan. After the release of Barsaat (1949) in which Lata Mangeshkar sang nine songs for three different stars, Lata’s voice became firmly entrenched in Hindi cinema as a generic voice for the heroine. In Andaz (1949), Naushad used Lata Mangeshkar’s voice to playback for Nargis while Shamshad Begum sang for Cuckoo. This was an interesting shift since Naushad had picked Shamshad Begum to sing for Nargis just a year earlier in Mela (1948) and later again in Babul (1950).¹⁷ In Mehboob’s Andaz, Nargis plays the role of Neena, a modern upper class woman who has to be punished for transgressing the moral code of a faithful wife.¹⁸ Neena, the only heir to her father’s business establishment is depicted as a westernized, fashionably dressed woman who loves horse riding and attending parties. The setting for Neena’s friendship with Dilip, even though she is engaged to Rajen allows the film’s melodrama to dramatize the conflict between modernity and feudal moral values through the figure of the heroine.¹⁹ Music becomes an important trope, where a woman’s desire for a man other than her husband must remain repressed. The grandeur of the palatial house with chandeliers, an imposing staircase and a large piano is underlined by an extensive use of background music using western orchestration.²⁰

 

Let me cite the example of the use of the chorus in the song Tod diya dil mera, a song that appears at the tail end of the film, depicting Neena torn by guilt for not adhering to the rules of the society that her father had warned her about. The song Tod diya dil mera, is sung softly, a hallmark of Lata Mangeshkar’s style of singing.²¹ A surprise element in the song is the intrusion of the chorus just when Neena completes the song.

 

(mukhda)

Tod diya dil mera

Toone o bewafa

Mujhko mere pyar ka

Khoob yeh badla diya

You have broken my heart

O unfaithful one

For all my love…

This is how you have repaid me

 

Antara 3

Aarzoo naakam hai

Zindagi badnam hai

Dil mera kehta hai ab

Maut hi anjaam hai

Ghont le apna gala

Aaj voh din aa gaya

My desires are unfulfilled…

I lead a life of disgrace

My heart now tells me…

That death is the only consequence for me

That I strangle myself

The day has arrived²²

 

Antara 3 as repeated by the chorus

Aarzoo nakam hai

Zindagi badnaam hai

Dil tera kehta hai ab

Maut hi anjam hai

Ghont de apna gala

Aaj voh din aa gaya

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

You have sinned

You lead a life of disgrace

Your heart now says that

Death is the only outcome

Strangulate yourself

Now is the time

Ha ha ha ha ha ha

 

The song opens with a long shot as we see Neena sitting on a stool, reclining her head on the piano. The shot is framed from outside the hallway, as you can see the doors at the edges of the frame. The cutting of the song moves to mid long shots and finally to closer shots of Neena. By the time we come to the last verse (arzoo nakaam hai/my desires remain unfulfilled), Neena’s face is composed in a mid close-up, framed diagonally. The song ends in Lata’s voice with the repetition of the mukhda. Suddenly, the chorus enters as an off-screen sound. Neena is startled and stands up. The film cuts between close ups of Neena, and shots zooming on to different objects on the hall. Her clothes and hair are dishevelled and she looks poised for a breakdown.

The staircase, the ceiling, the objects are framed as though Neena is searching for the source of the sound that is now occupying her psychic as well as the film’s moral universe. Musically, the chorus opens with the use of alap to create musical expansion. The antara is sung at a much higher pitch and a faster tempo. The vocal orchestration then moves towards atonality, destroying the melodic phrase; with the chorus breaking into an uncanny laughter.²³ As the ‘choric’ in the Greek tragedy, the chorus here adds movement and drama by not just preparing the spectator for the tragic turn of events, but rather provoking Neena to pick up the gun and take her own life.

In his analysis of Andaz, Ravi Vasudevan points towards the fissures in the coherence of the narrative marked by a ‘mismatch between the narrative objective and the construction of the feminine.’²⁴ By citing the example of the song Tod diya dil mera, I have tried to draw attention to the way the melodramatic mode in Andaz uses the conjoining of Nargis the star, and Lata Mangeshkar’s voice and its subsequent destruction by the chorus, to orchestrate a dramatic conflict between the public and the private. The private world evoked by Lata Mangeshkar’s intimate and soft voice stands fractured by the chorus that assumes a third person voice, with an interpolation (ghont de apna gala), drawing attention to the loss of female subjectivity.²⁵ The woman’s crisis emanates here from the fact that she has lost the referent, the materiality of her own voice.²⁶ 

 

Choral orchestration became an important device in films by Raj Kapoor, exploring themes with socialist overtones in the ’50s. In films like Awara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955), both written by K.A. Abbas, the street became an important signifier for the nation. In Awara, songs composed by Shankar-Jaikishan, and written by Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri, show-cased a whole range of styles, from folk to Indian classical and western harmonies to IPTA use of choral orchestration.²⁷ Chorus was used in several songs in the film including the title track version of Awara hun.

 

The first two songs of Awara appear in Judge Raghunath’s story, deploying the use of chorus in the folk genre, but also very much within the IPTA tradition.²⁸ Both Naiyya teri ((boatmen’s song) and Zulam sahe bhari janak dulari (migrant worker’s song) are narrational songs, undercutting Raghunath’s self-presentation through a flashback that begins in the courtroom. Judge Raghunath recounts how Jagga, a bandit abducted his wife Leela, leading him to believe that the child she was carrying was not his own. Haunted by rumours doubting Leela’s chastity and his own obsession with status and heredity, Raghu expels Leela from the house. The song Zulam sahe bhaari janak dulari, (Janaka’s beloved daughter was dealt with so harshly) evokes the Ramayana’s tale of Sita’s banishment by Ram. The song opens with an alap in the male voice as soon as Raghu says ‘nikal jao’ to Leela. The alap is followed by a doha²⁹ followed by the refrain, Zulam sahe bhaari, accompanied by the dholak usually identified with folk songs in Hindi films from Bihar.

In a detailed analysis, Vasudevan has shown how Leela’s expulsion by Judge Raghunath is composed of non-continuous fragmentary shots thus fracturing the spectator.³⁰ As the alap appears on the sound track, we see Leela falling on the ground. A series of discontinuous shots follow while the male lead renders the doha. The film cuts between Raghu framed in low angle shots, the clouds outside and Leela walking out of the house. When the mukhda begins, we see Leela walking on a rain drenched street, with shadows adding to a dense mise en scene. The track introduces overlapping sounds of the chorus mixed with a woman’s voice singing the alap. A stray dog, the characteristic street lamp and a woman in labour become part of the tableau, marking the street as an important site to mount a critique of Raghunath’s moral, legal and institutional power.

My purpose in citing the example of this song is to focus on the use of the female voice in the chorus. Gayatri Chatterjee rightly points out the unusual use of female voice in the chorus, giving it added political overtones.³¹ In my reading, the song is divided between the male chorus (with a solo lead) and a distinct female voice that only sings the alap or a musical elaboration using the ‘a’ or the ‘o’ vowel without the use of syllables and words.³² This song is also marked by pukar, or an address to bring out the emotional intensity of the individual. The alap rendered in the soft voice of a female singer represents the generic voice of a wronged woman, going beyond the specific text of the film. The lines of the songs follow the verbal/non-verbal distinction across gender divisions.

 

The opening line of the antara shows Raghu framed in a low angle shot with the chandeliers moving violently on the right side of the frame. On the other hand, the alap in the female voice is matched by a long shot of the street, with Leela framed in shadows, one hand stretched towards the camera. The first line of the antara is repeated by the male chorus and it is here for the first time in the song that we see a group of men singing in sync sound. While the male chorus is clearly identified and mobilized to comment on Raghu’s desertion of his wife, the female voice remains elliptical, failing to find words. Leela’s incomplete and delusional narrative is then taken over by Rita in the courtroom, while the alap can still be heard on the sound track till the shot of the courtroom is dissolved on to the shots of the city.

 

In Shree 420, the chorus is used in several songs to create a dense social world, including the title/credit sequence and Ichak daana, beechak daana, where children sing a riddle game with Vidya. I would like to cite the example of Ramaiyya vasta vaiyya, a popular song from the film that appears just after Raj’s (played by Raj Kapoor) second visit to the nightclub, where Maya dances to the beat of an orchestra. Finding the nightclub claustrophobic, Raj walks out, haunted by a voice on the sound track. Raj stops at a street corner, and we see his point of view shot of the basti where a group of men and women are singing. In a typical leader/chorus alternation, Shiela Vaz, a well-known actress of that period and a male artist take the lead while the rest of the slum dwellers repeat the refrain, Ramaiya vasta vaiyya, in chorus. Work and leisure are enmeshed as we see the slum dwellers dance and sing while weaving baskets, repairing their fishing nets, winnowing grain and pounding spices, matching the rhythm of the sound track. Clearly, the chorus has been deployed here to produce the city with its polyglot culture.³³ 

 

The first two antaras of the song are performed by the two lead actors in the basti (sung by Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar) while Raj is watching them from a distance. The song establishes the philosophy of the simple and large-hearted slum dwellers for whom love is more valuable than money and status. After the second antara, Raj is framed in a mid close-up, setting the stage to reveal what is on his mind. While the mandolin is played on the sound track, the shot dissolves to show another part of the city; a man is pushing his pushcart while people are sleeping on the streets with two stray dogs running about; an alap in Lata Mangeshkar’s voice slowly fades in while we see a man on a carriage. The third shot is that of a milkman on a bicycle, singing Ramaiyya vasta vaiyya, overlapped with Lata’s soft alap.

In the background, we see Vidya (played by Nargis) sitting in her courtyard. The song is now taken over by Vidya while the milkman exits the frame. The use of alap to introduce the ‘star’ voice is crucial here for creating a separation in tonalities. What also needs attention is the distribution of lyrics between the chorus and the lead performers; while the chorus sings Ramaiya vasta vaiya, or the hook line, the lead singers render the more personal line, maine dil tujhko diya/I have given my heart to you, only to you, signifying the importance of ‘voice’ to produce a certain kind of subjectivity. The song travels through the city with the milkman (who sings while he works), its dispersion enabled by people who inhabit the streets at night, signifying the resilience of a disenfranchised community and recreating Ashis Nandy’s idea of the ‘remembered village’.³⁴

 

Vidya sings the third antara, revealing her love and longing for Raj; Lata’s sentimental voice matches Nargis’s performance, with the camera moving to closer shots.³⁵ As a teary eyed Vidya completes the antara, the chorus takes over and we return to the basti. Now it is Raj’s turn to share his private world as the song comes full circle. Mukesh, the well-known playback voice for Raj Kapoor sings the last antara as Raj joins the slum dwellers; they in turn welcome him and huddle around him. The spectators are held in a privileged position as they know more than the slum dwellers what Raj is trying to express, the story of his love and loss; they are privy not only to Vidya’s private emotional self, who shares the same song, but also to the off-screen romance of Raj Kapoor and Nargis. Further, by delaying Raj’s entry, the song also works on the audience’s expectation for Raj Kapoor to sing in Mukesh’s voice, placing the song in a larger context of a star singer relationship; allowing the circulation of popular memory to seep into this particular song text.³⁶ The use of the chorus forms a template, an open text in which the ‘self’ can be inserted, foregrounding issues of desire, identity and ambivalent morality.

 

In the ’50s, directors like Bimal Roy, Amiya Chakravarty, Mehboob and Raj Kapoor continued to use the chorus in films like Do Bhiga Zameen (1953), Boot Polish (1954), Seema (1955), Jaagte Raho (1956) and Mother India (1957) to name a few. The use of the chorus not only expanded the tonal colour of the song but also allowed audiences to reach out for the voice of the lead playback singer via the presence of the on-screen star. The collective registers evoked through the use of choral singing helped to iconically frame the screen star who performed the song with a clear referent; the recorded voice.

The new modes of production of the film song and its interface with the star system made film-makers and music composers rely on vocal orchestration, for a staging of modernity in which the ‘intimate’ voice of the playback singer is set against a larger social setting through an intensification of the public/private dichotomy.³⁷ I suggest that the chorus thus became a device to evoke the ‘social’ in which the ability or inability to articulate the ‘self’ gets problematized on a larger public setting.

 

Footnotes:

1. On the use of chorus and songs for social and political awakening in Hindi films, see Pankaj Rag, ‘The Theme of Social and Political Consciousness as a Challenge for Indian Recorded Music’, Social Scientist 32, 2004, pp. 84-93.

2. Antara stands for the stanza. According to Javed Akhtar, ‘As a rule, Indian film songs have a mukhda (refrain), which comes again and again and two or three, and sometimes more, antaras (stanzas).’ See Talking Songs, Javed Akhtar in conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir, Oxford Univesity Press, Delhi, 2005, p. 7.

3. Although I use the term Bombay film industry, I am aware that this is fraught with problems. Calcutta, Pune and Bombay were three major centres for film production as distinct from the film industry that emerged in South India. It was in the 1940s that Bombay emerged as a major centre for the Hindi film industry.

4. According to Majumdar, Lata’s song from Mahal (1949), may be said to mark the transition from ‘ghost voices’ to ‘playback singers’. The record of the song Ayega Aanewala was originally released with the name of the narrative character, Kamini (played by Madhubala) credited as the singer, but it became so popular that with listeners request Lata’s name began to be announced over the radio. The names of playback singers starting appearing in the record disc from the film Barsaat. See Neepa Majumdar, ‘The Embodied Voice: Stardom and Song Sequences in Popular Hindi Cinema’, in Arthur Knight and Pamela Wojcik (eds.), Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, Duke University Press, Durham, 2001, pp. 170-171.

5. As Barnouw and Krishnaswamy show, ‘In the studio system an actor in New Theatres while not acting would be given some technical duties, while in Bombay Talkies a technician would occasionally perform.’ See Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, Columbia University Press, New York, 1963, p. 118.

6. Ibid., pp. 129-130.

7. Though the playback technique had been introduced in the 1930s, it was only in the latter half of the ’40s that music composers started relying on a new set of singers who remained ‘ghost’ voices. There are several claims made about the origin of the use of playback singing. In an interview, Saraswati Devi, considered to be India’s first female music composer, said that she introduced playback singing for the first time in Jawani ki Hawa (1934), when her sister Chandraprabha, the actor-singer could not sing due to a bad throat. ‘I asked Chandraprabha to move her lips while I kept the mike in front of me.’ See ‘Lasting Lady, Khurshid-Saraswati’ in Cinema Vision, 2 (2), 1983, p. 72. The other claim is that music composer Rai Chand Boral introduced the technique in Dhoop Chaon (1935), as suggested to him by the sound recordist Mukul Bose. See Ashok Da. Ranade, Hindi Film Song: Music Beyond Boundaries, Bibliophile South Asia, 2006.

8. In his autobiography, Manna Dey has written about his experience working as a Second Assistant Director for K.C. Dey; his key job was to learn the song with its notations and then train the singer. See Manna Dey, Memories Come Alive: An Autobiography, Penguin India, Delhi, 2007.

9. See Kishwar Desai, Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, Harper Collins, New Delhi, 2004, 74-75: ‘The popular press stoked the rivalry between Suraiya and Nargis…the big advantage Suraiya had was her ability to sing. However, she lost that edge over Nargis with the advent of playback music, and Lata Mangeshkar.’

10. See Gayatri Chatterjee, Awara, Penguin, New Delhi, 2003, p. 104. It has also been noted that the first singer to adopt the crooning style was K.L Saigal. Noorjehan and Suraiya are also known to have a softer style of singing. See Raghunath Seth, ‘The Sound of Magic’, Cinema Vision, 1 (4), 1980.

11. Alison. E. Arnold, Hindi Filmi Git: On the History of Commercial Indian Popular Music, (unpublished, PhD. Diss., University of Michigan, 1991).

12. Bhaskar Chandravarkar, ‘The Arrangers’, from a six part series, ‘The Tradition of Music in Indian Cinema’, Cinema in India, April 1987.

13. According to Ranade (2006), alap connotes the elaboration of musical ideas on the melodic axis.

14. I would like to thank C.M. Desai, a film historian and an avid collector of old records, for pointing this out to me.

15. Mukesh sings Chod gaye balam, saath hamara chod gaye, while Lata sings Choot gaya balam blaming destiny for their separation.

16. Chatterjee suggests that Raj Kapoor’s use of chiaroscuro lighting and intimate close-ups went well with the softer intimate style of singing (2003, p. 104).

17. In contrast to the role of Neena as a modern urban woman in Andaz, Nargis’s role in Mela is placed in a rural setting, while in Babul she plays the role of Bela, a postman’s daughter in a feudal set-up.

18. See Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998, p. 69.

19. See Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, new rev. ed., BFI/Oxford University Press, London, 1999, p. 312.

20. Naushad is considered to be one of the most versatile music directors who gave an immense amount of importance to background score, sometimes using up to 100 musicians for his orchestra.

21. Lata sings at a much lower pitch in Tod diya dil mera, which made critics comment that she was greatly influenced by Noorjehan in the early part of her career till she developed her own style. She started singing at a much higher pitch in later films with composers like Shankar-Jaikishan and Lakshmikant-Pyarelal. See Girija Rajendran, ‘A Search for Self’, Cinema Vision, 2 (2), 1983.

22. Translations sourced from subtitles in the DVD version of Andaz by TIME Video.

23. This is done by introducing western musical harmony which allows movement away and then back to the tonal centre. In this case that return remains elusive, thus setting the stage for the violent conflict that follows.

24. Ravi Vasudevan, ‘ "You Cannot Live in Society – and Ignore it": Nationhood and Female Modernity in Andaz’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 29 (1-2), 1995.

25. The interpolation is far more apparent in the subtitles provided in the DVD version of Andaz.

26. In her insightful work on Karnatic music in South India, Amanda J. Weidman explores aurality to suggest how sonic and material aspects of ‘voice’ intersect with issues of subjectivity and agency. Moving away from ethnomusicology, she proposes that the idea of voice needs to be ‘denaturalized to open up the study of musical sound and ask what new forms of subjectivity and identity are enabled by changing conceptions and practices of voice?’ See Amanda J. Weidman, Singing the Classical Voicing the Modern, Duke University Press, Durham, 2006, pp. 12-13.

27. Gayatri Chatterjee, op cit., p. 106.

28. Sumangala Damodaran in a recent essay, ‘Protest Through Music’, Seminar 588, shows the use of folk tunes by IPTA song squads as well as debates in IPTA publications on ‘the extent to which folk music was people’s music’, p. 41.

29.The lines, ‘Pativrata Sita maiyya ko tune diya banvaas, kyun na phata dharti ka kaleja, kyun na phata akash’ are rendered in a narration tone, hence I the use term, doha.

30. Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Sexuality and the Film Apparatus: Continuity, Non-Continuity and Discontinuity in Bombay Cinema’, in Mary E. John and Janaki Nair (eds.), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1998, pp. 192-215.

31. Gayatri Chatterjee, op cit., p. 107.

32. See Ashok Da. Ranade, Hindi Film Song: Music Beyond Boundaries, Bibliophile, New Delhi, 2006, p. 176.

33. The first line of Ramaiya vasta vaiya is in Telugu, while the rest of the song is in Hindi. Loosely translated it means, ‘Ramaiya, when will you come?’ It is said that the members of the RK musical team were inspired by a folk song they heard one night, while walking by a construction site in Bombay. I would like to thank Ira Bhaskar for pointing this out to me in a personal communication.

 

34. See Ashis Nandy, ‘Indian Popular Cinema as Slum’s Eye View of Politics’, in Ashis Nandy (ed.), The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, OUP, 1998, pp. 1-19.

35. Though Lata’s voice has been used for both Shiela Vaz and Nargis in this song, one can notice a difference in her rendering with Nargis’s section expressing longing and despair. This according to many music critics was Lata’s forte.

36. Neepa Majumdar has suggested a doubling of aural and visual stardom in song sequences dominated by the monopoly of the same playback singer over multiple decades.

37. Amanda Weidman in her work on politics of music in South India has used Timothy Mitchell’s idea of ‘Staging the Modern’. See Amanda J. Weidman, Singing the Classical Voicing the Modern, op cit., pp. 1-24. (Seagull, Calcutta, 2007.)