The politics behind Dhurandhar’s addictive 90s soundtrack

Beneath the celebration lies a sharper point. The pleasure of listening to the soundtrack can also carry ideological weight.  It is based on a form of musical expression that itself desires to become ideological, like the cinema it accompanies.

Music as memory

In India, politics can become cinema by other means. The corollary is equally true. Cinema can also be politics by other means. And film music can itself simulate the cinematic experience, over and over again.

When it comes to the Dhurandhar duology, it is the musical experience that lingers after watching the films. The resurrection of tunes from Hawa Hawa (Hasan Jahangir, 1987), Didi (Khaled, 1992), Baazigar o Baazigar (Baazigar, 1993), Rasputin (Boney M, 1978), and Tirchi Topiwale (Tridev, 1989), among others, constitutes an artistic coup.

The resultant soundtrack is no Downton Abbey suite, of course. And it does not even aspire to come anywhere close to Nino Rota’s soundtrack for The Godfather. Nevertheless, it catches the pulse at its sorest—a most nostalgic yearning for a past that almost never was and yet remains palpable.

It seeks to invoke the spirit of the 1990s, the early years of India’s economic (and many other kinds of) liberalisation, and the cosmopolitan energies of a Bombay (of Dawood Ibrahim, Harshad Mehta, Sachin Tendulkar, Lata Mangeshkar, Dhirubhai Ambani, Bombay Stock Exchange, Bollywood, to name a few of the usual suspects) that is still secretly longed for even by the fiercest critics of the machinations of that era.

Dhar receiving the Best Director Award for Uri: The Surgical Strike at 66th National Film Awards (Wikipedia)

Meanwhile, Dhar also reminds one of Quentin Tarantino’s well-known plot of repurposing famous melodies he found in his own musical collection, including One Silver Dollar (Un Dollaro Bucato), originally composed by Gianni Ferrio for the 1965 Spaghetti Western film Blood for a Silver Dollar, in his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds.

The Dhurandhar duology’s repurposing of the music of the 1990s restores familiar sounds back into circulation with precision. The films’ nostalgic force comes from the memory behind the sounds that defined the liberalisation of the economy of the 1990s. Since the promise of liberalisation was never entirely realised—not only due to economic factors, but also political and geopolitical barriers, like the Kargil War and the Kandahar hijacking episode—the emotional space that the Dhurandhar films create for the rehabilitation of those memories becomes even more conspicuous.

Looking back to this imagined recent past does not hide the fact that the cultural roots of the neoliberal era go back further, to India’s long habit of meeting modernity through imitation and mimicry. In that light, the films’ music restores a historical sensibility in which modern life is already mediated, hybrid, and unstable. In the guise of that music, the emotional charge of cultural revivalism comes from an older cultural condition, where India was learning to inhabit modernity through divided selves.

 Dhurandhar’s sonic heritage

Dhurandhar’s music director, Shashwat Sachdev, displays an uncanny understanding of India’s musical tastes. So does Aditya Dhar, who began his career as a songwriter. It is intriguing to see Dhurandhar fans call the duo’s taste in music “vintage” and “elite”. What is more appropriate, at least in historical terms, is that a generation that grew up in the 90s was the most ardent recipient of the first notes of the songs that the duology has revived from that legendary past.

The musical experience, hence, became intertwined with the cinematic narrative, without much effort by either the screenplay or the audience. For something to be close to a religious experience, it does not need to be vintage or elite; all it needs to be is part of one’s elemental conditioning. Dhar and Sachdev know this far too well.

Shashwat Sachdev (Wikipedia)

So, Dhurandhar, today, is a beneficiary of an almost four-decade-old trend that lay dormant like a volcano desperate to explode. It was an era dominated by music directors Nadeem-Shravan, Anu Malik, Jatin-Lalit, and Anand Milind, with Jagjit Singh’s ghazals just about to top the charts. Even India’s then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was not far behind. His poetry was set to music and sung by Singh in Samvedna (2002), in what may be said to mark the end of the long 90s.

Dhurandhar’s musical memory of the 1990s stems from the same historical soil as the economic liberalisation of the decade, which saw the transition from cassettes to CDs and mass proliferation of pirated audio and video cassettes of films and even devotional songs in Hindi and regional dialects.

Paradoxically, MTV and slogans of Swadeshi went hand in hand. If Hindutva politics gained legitimacy, so did foreign brand power. If Coke and Pepsi vied for a share of the marketplace of fast-moving consumer goods and on urban glow signboards, so did national self-assertion. As these brands aspired to speak the local idiom of 900 million Indians, the latter aspired for access to round-the-clock news channels and American television.

Born of those memories, Dhurandhar’s soundtrack reconfigures as the film’s atmosphere –like carbonated drinks and fast-food chains, inaugurated in the 1990s, reconfigured thirst, hunger, and taste as emotional identities.

Liberalisation and nostalgia for consumer culture

The 90s were the first time Indians were exposed to celebrity advertising, catchy taglines, bottling and packaging, logistics, and distribution on a mass scale. The decade was not merely an economic landmark but also a period for new aspirations, consumption patterns, and mobility, which grafted the new historical soil from which today’s nostalgia springs. Economic liberalisation was expected to work through import access, technological upheavals, market reconfigurations, and ultimately creative destruction of older consumption and cultural tastes.

It was not so much Hindi cinema, at large, but Bombay cinema of the 1990s that, as social scientist Ashis Nandy famously said, represented a slum’s eye view of Indian politics—likely in reference to the films of director Ram Gopal Verma, among others. For Nandy, commercial cinema was capable of spanning many cultural diversities and epochs of Indian society. Thus, it was far from being a pure art form in the neoliberal era, especially. Rather, it was a composite artefact, not least because of the music of the times. And since liberalisation was contested and politically uneven, in India, its layers are only still becoming visible, and the 1990s still appear to be very much alive.

Ram Gopal Varma (Wikipedia)

According to Nandy, once developmentalism became closely tied to liberalisation, economic reform also brought a broader cultural shift. Traditional cultural values began to be seen as backward, while ruling elites tried to reshape culture to fit the global order. The cultural trends set in the 1990s, therefore, remained as incomplete experiences that brewed over the next three decades in the minds of young Indians of that era, making the nostalgia of Dhurandhar’s soundtrack all the more potent.

Back in the 1990s, Indian modernity was remade through mimicry and unease, and it is only in the second decade of the 21^st century that the Indian self has come to enjoy the experiments of the day as an autonomous source of entertainment; when the residues of the moral and economic losses of that decade could finally be recalibrated as respectable cosmopolitan taste.

Surplus enjoyment in a musical utopia

So, the Dhurandhar duology’s soundtrack, like the popular beverage Coke, offers what the philosopher Slavoj Zizek would call surplus enjoyment—meaning a political pleasure that lasts far beyond the act of consumption. The duology’s reuse of 1990s music cannot hence be read as innocent nostalgia, but as a modern retooling of memory for mass circulation. A Bombay ambience becomes retrospectively magnetic because of the challenges Indians faced while a new urban consumer world was being assembled three decades ago.

The neoliberal era generated its own cultural, political, and economic anxieties, and the musical revival in Dhurandhar converts that anxiety into pleasure. The sonic utopia of the Dhurandhar duology is rooted in an urban condition where globalisation, media, and everyday life were already folding into one another at breakneck speed. The film’s success in the mid-2020s can then be seen as the return of an urban sensibility that one had thought had ended long ago.

The films’ musical playfulness becomes especially striking in the way it links old songs to violent scenes in a consciously ironic way. Hasan Jahangir’s Hawa Hawa plays as SP Aslam Chaudhary shoots Baloch drug peddlers in a scene that turns a familiar tune into a dark, almost glib counterpoint to brutality.

Theatrical release poster (Wikipedia)

Tamma Tamma Loge from the film Thanedar (1989), sung by Bappi Lahiri and Anuradha Paudwal, and taken from a film featuring Sanjay Dutt himself, who plays the role of SP Chaudhary Aslam Khan in the Dhurandhar films, is uncannily repurposed for the scene in which the SP is killed in a car crash plotted by Hamza Ali Mazari (played by Ranveer Singh).

Finally, Tirchhi Topiwale from Tridev (1989) returns at the phenomenal moment when the film imagines Dawood Ibrahim being slow-poisoned into paralysis by dimethyl mercury by Jameel Jamali (played by Rakesh Bedi)—in a flourish that recalls Quentin Tarantino’s habit of rewriting history through revenge fantasy, as in Inglourious Basterds.

In each case, the music does far more than decorate the scene. It sharpens irony, rewires memory, and turns popular nostalgia into a cinematic weapon in the guise of black comedy.

Talking of comedy, Bedi’s comic series from the 1990s, Shrimaan Shrimati, is almost never far from the audience’s subconscious mind. Watching Dawood collapse on the bed, Indian cinema theatres have been bursting into a plethora of emotions, as the Tridev song plays in the background.

It is a scene that leads the viewer to a reprisal of the last scene of Casablanca—alas without a Humphrey Bogart—as Jamali sees Mazari off at the airport! If Dhurandhar’s music is a subtext, for its fans, the Bombay of the 90s will never fade. And so, they might as well say, “Play it again, Sam”—or, this time, Shashwat.

References

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