DAWN
Tuesday Review, Nov 7-13, 1995
Sold for a Song
There
can be three ways of looking at the enormous mass of music produced
by the Pakistani and Indian filmmakers. Firstly, we may
categorize them according to the feelings they seek to evoke.
Alternatively, we can choose to look at them accordingly to
their film settings, for example party songs, love songs, street
songs, drawing-room songs and so on and so forth.
Last, but the best way of classifying
could be according to the dramatic purpose they serve in the
plot. For instance, two distinct categories would be the songs
which introduce a character and the songs which bring about
the relief after a tense scene. In this article I will try to
establish all three ways of classification because I think that
these classifications do not just allow us to appreciate the
film music in its proper plot context, but they also help us
to look at the social and cultural context of the cinema.
As far as the evocation of feelings
is concerned, we may notice that the Indo-Pakistani musician
has always been more ambitious in this regard, having been brought
up on stories of musicians setting up fires or bringing rains
with the power of their music. Consequently, the Indo-Pakistani
classical music traditionally covers a vast range of emotional
contexts including love, spiritual devotion, fear, anxiety,
anger and a lot more. The most definite contribution of the
film in this regard has been to provide opportunities for the
music director to use music for representing specifically complex
emotional contexts. One fine example comes from Naag Muni (1972)
where the singer (a female character) fears for the life of
her lover, who is severely wounded and under the threat of another
attack while the singer is stopped from seeing him by the same
people who have wounded her lover. This complex emotional hypothesis
is dexterously realized in the song Sajna ray. It is hard to
imagine that a song like that could have been produced if the
institution of cinema wasn’t there.
We may classify our film songs
into romantic, happy, sad, patriotic, spiritual/devotional,
rustic and so on. The list also shows how our films are different
from the American musical films: till late the American musical
was restricted only to light themes. Representing complex, catastrophic
emotional contexts in a musical is an option that Hollywood
has only discovered with such films as Cabaret (1971) and even
then the possibilities have not been substantially explored.
Let us now turn to some familiar “song settings”
of Indo-Pakistani cinema. It is remarkable how these have remained
unchanged through the decades. The romantic couple (or one of
them) dancing in the fields, the village folk dancing, the night
club disco scene, the drawing-room scene/birthday party, children’s
birthday party, the wedding, the vendor on the street (e.g.,
Mera joota hai Japani) and last but not the least, the nauch
girl. List all the songs you remember, and you will find that
each of them, save a few, fall into one of these catergories.
And if you can remember some from the ‘30s and ‘40s
you may find that most of these lists come right up to our times
uninterrupted. Yes, the sets might have changed with the times,
but not the settings.
This gives room for theorizing
that the Indo-Pakistani audiences have always looked forward
to “being taken out” to some typical settings (most
noticeably the nauch girl’s). Hence the purpose of an
Indo-Pakistani filmmaker is not only presenting drama, it is,
in addition, giving the audience experience of situations they
would like to be in but are not likely to be. In a way that
is true of all art forms and most so of the film, as the film
has been compared with fantasy since its very inception. The
experience of the audience has been given such names by the
critics, such as “alternate reality”, “doing
it by proxy” and so on. Where the Indo-Pakistani cinema
is different from most others is the point that the audience
expect at least a substantial part of this “alternate
reality experience” to come through music. And they expect
a lot of this in each film.
Perhaps there is some audience
to support this theory: how else would you explain the record-breaking
success of Hum apkay hain kaun? To say the least, it is a film
which has almost no storyline and hardly deserves to be called
a film in that sense. Yet we are told that the film has done
better business than Sholay (1976). I think that the secret
of its box-office success lies in the fact that these days people
have developed a hobby (call it ‘taste’ if you like)of
celebrating weddings in a somewhat show biz style and spending
hors watching the home-video of these events afterwards. The
makers of Hum apkay hain kaun have apparently exploited this
phenomenon.
However the positive side of the
alternate reality experience in the subcontinent is that more
serious-minded directors get a chance of using songs for greater
dramatic purposes in ways which are not always possible in Hollywood.
This gives us reason to categorize songs according to their
function in the plot. The plot of a drama (or film) is traditionally
divided into the following components: exposition, problematisation,
crisis, relief, resolution and climax. Songs of exposition are
common – most of us have enjoyed those happy pieces which
introduce the debonair hero in words like Mera joota hai Japani,
etc. To name two more: Ko ko korina, and Aik rasta hai zindagi.
Then there are songs which occur during that phase of the story
when the first signs of a problem are making their appearance.
The problem could be a rich hero falling in love with a poor
girl or vice versa. Or a tough guy (the hero) developing a conflict
with the bad guy (the villain). Most love songs naturally fall
into this category. As we watch the heroic couple sing and dance
and have fun, we begin t nurture this question in our minds:
“Will they be able to unite and keep on being just as
happy as they are now?” Alternatively, it became customary
in the ‘80s for the hero (usually Amitabh Bachchan) to
challenge his antagonist in a night club or some other song-and-dance
situation. (Remember films like Waris and Kaalia?
A unique characteristic of the
Indo-Pakistani cinema is to present even the most catastrophic
crisis through music. In the Pakistani film Lakhon mein eik
(1966), the heroine is informed that the hero has met with an
accident. She has already known that they will never be united
in wedlock due to some earlier complications, but still she
has loved him. Now, as she reaches the hospital she is told
that “the man has lost his memory.” This one-liner
is followed immediately by the song Chalo achcha hua tum bhool
gaye.
Perhaps the best classic example
comes from Mughal-e-Azam (1962). The emperor has told
Anarkali to denounce Prince Salim in the court but instead,
she sings a song which is a bold proclamation of her love for
the Prince and a denialof the emperor’s power to control
people’s love affairs. Do you need to be reminded that
the song in question is Jab pyaar kiya toh darna kiya? The song
holds the entire court in terror, causes the emperor to lose
his temper and throw Anarkali into the prison. This last action
instantly brings about a civil war led by Prince Salim.
A typical example of the songs
of resolution is connected with the recurring device of “the
lost siblings” in our movies. When a grown-up son/daughter
or brother/sister fail to recognize the long lost father/mother,
brother/sister (crisis) one of the concerned relations usually
sings a song they had sung in the past and the “discovery”
is brought about by this means.
Perhaps a classic example of the
climax song is Akailay na jana for Arman (1966). Waheed Murad
has assumed that Zeba is dead. Out of desperation, he is about
to throw himself off the cliff. As Zeba reaches the hillside
to save him, she rather “shouts” the song at him
and he comes back. The film ends with the fading notes of the
song.
Hence we see that the function
of songs in the Indo-Pakistani cinema is essentially different
from the other cinemas of the world. They represent a wider
range of feelings, cover an odd variety of situations and serve
as dramatic devices in a number of ways which could be considered
unorthodox by a viewer imbibed in the western tradition but
which are completely comprehensible to the masses of the subcontinent
and do not always hinder the effectiveness of the film.
