Jag mein reh jayenge pyaare tere bol8230;

As year-long celebrations of the 75th anniversary of Alam Ara, the first Indian talkie, draw to a close this week, eye pays homage to the great unifier that is Bollywood music. Part surreal entertainment, part social reality and transcending all barriers, it has come to be representative not just of our movies but also of us.

Javed Akhtar

Even today, when we make a war movie, it has five or six songs. That8217;s our style of story telling. But lyrics in story telling wasn8217;t invented by Hindi cinema. Before the talkie era in films dawned with Alam Ara, our adaptations of Western plays in the urban Parsi theatre had foreign characters like a Helen or a Marcus express themselves in songs. Songs have always been a part of the folk theatre in the form of nautankis, jatras, Krishna leela. Even old Sanskrit plays like Mrichakatika had songs in them. This style of story telling is thousands of years old in our country.

In Indian theatre, songs were part of the drama and were given the same weight as a scene. Some may find it strange or awkward but the same can be said about the opera or kabuki. These are different styles of story telling typical to a culture, just as every language has its own grammar. And there is no need to be apologetic about it 8212; take it or leave it 8212; that8217;s our style of story telling.

Indian cinema furthered this traditional convention by using music and drama. So as the narratives changed with changing aspirations of their protagonists reflecting contemporary morality, so also did the lyrics of the songs in our films. Hindi cinema may be entertaining but it8217;s not a circus. Its situations, howsoever exaggerated, have always been reflective of social realities. The relationship between an audience and the cinema is like that between an individual and his dream. Just as a psychoanalyst decodes a dream, you have to go beneath the surface imagery to decode its context and only then can understand it best.

The songs of the 1940s, 50s and 60s and every decade reflect their times, the passion of that era or the lack of it in terms of aesthetics and literary depth. For instance, a Woh subah kabhi to aayegi Will the new dawn ever break? could have been composed only in the 1950s or 60s. Its writer Sahir Ludhianvi was a very good poet and took film song-writing very seriously. He wrote on his own terms and was the first to bring the film song closer to the poem. Be it Woh subah or the songs in Pyaasa, most of these are like poems. Sahir wrote lyrics too but he made his mark because of the poems he wrote for the films. Shailendra was another master of saying something emotional and deep in ordinary and simple words.

The reducing influence of folk and ghazal in our songs over the years tells us something about what is happening to our society, where dignity has been the casualty. I8217;m not afraid of outside or Western influences. But we had developed a unique style of picturising songs. It was unbelievably good. Directors like Guru Dutt, Vijay Anand or Raj Khosla had a superb style of picturising songs. I am disappointed to see that we are not carrying forward that tradition. Now we8217;re aping MTV and Channel V and the songs in today8217;s films cease to have a real function within the drama. The song has become a kind of a perk that8217;s offered with the film. We are achieving speed as seen in the Western influence on the tempo of our songs at the cost of depth and it8217;s not a good deal.

Popular songs also mirror morality levels in a society. There has been a slow but gradual dissolve of certain values and aspirations. Both Woh subah8230; in the 1950s and Choli ke peeche kya hai in the 1990s were big hits, but you can8217;t think of a song that is aesthetically beautiful or meaningful from the latter era.

Story continues below this ad

Pick up any calendar year between 1950s and 1970s and every year will give you at least five or six memorable songs, but I would call the late 80s and 1990s as the dark ages in the history of Hindi film music. That8217;s also because it reflected the overall degradation in the morality of the society in that period. For instance, communalism was a bane in 1947 too when Partition happened but it was never as ugly as the 1980s. It was impossible for communal propagandists to emerge national leaders in the 1940s and 50s. The same value system that hoisted communal leaders to the national apex was the one applauding the popularity of songs like Sarkaye liyo khatia jada lage because parts of society do not stay in water tight compartments.

However, today there is a desire to look at our roots and heritage as evident in the lyrics of writers from the new generation. The younger generation has realised that something precious is lost, thanks to the older generation. In the songs of today, there is a desire to be better, though we8217;re still a long way from the era of a Sahir Ludhianvi or Shailendra. But the graph is going up, the worst is behind us.

Javed Akhtar is a poet, writer and lyricist