34
ANTHEM OF A NEW
GENERATION
‘Dum maaro dum’ and ‘I love you’
MUSIC: RAHUL DEV BURMAN
LYRICS: ANAND BAKSHI
SINGERS: ASHA BHONSLE, USHA UTHUP
‘DUNIYA ne humko diya kya? Duniya se humne liya kya? Hum sabki parvah kare kyon? Sabne hamara kiya kya?’ Decades before Gen Yers and Millennials came to be considered a self-obsessed lot, these lines shocked a generation and more with their nihilistic philosophy of life. If the West had its Beatles, Rock ’n’ Roll and Flower Power as symbols of protest against the status quo, R.D. Burman gave India ‘Dum maro dum’, an anthem for a disillusioned generation.
Though it is tempting to see the track as a hippie song, of lives lived in murky marijuana dens amidst swaying bodies with half-closed eyes, it is not about grass alone. It is not even about hippies. It tells of how the Indian youth perceived the world and their elders. The youth of the 1970s may have been born in an independent country, but they were disappointed and unhappy. Their defiance is evident in the transient pop and rock boom in India that Sidharth Bhatia has so lovingly described in India Psychedelic: The Story of a Rocking Generation.
‘Dum maro dum’ is a story about protests. It reflects the disintegration of the family unit in the West, which was making its presence felt in India, albeit on a much smaller scale. It came to epitomize the angst of the youth in an era of unemployment, three wars and price rise; it echoed their disappointment with twenty-five years of independence, which had only flattered to deceive. Not surprisingly, then, the era of the Angry Young Man in Hindi cinema was soon to follow.
Though Pancham was quick with tunes, he took longer to compose this particular number. According to Nandu Chavathe, a leading fiddler associated with Pancham’s team at the time, Dev Anand used to inquire about the status of the songs, only to leave disappointed. Among the songs Dev had asked for – one befitting the situation, ‘Dekho o deewano, tum yeh kaam na karo’. This song was supposed to be preceded by a piece of background music as the hippies puffed away – something Pancham struggled with looking for a suitable metre. It is at this point that Anand Bakshi stepped in with the lines ‘Dum maro dum, mit jaaye gham’. Composing the rest of the song was then, probably, a matter of minutes.
Hare Rama Hare Krishna. The storyline was too trippy
for his liking and it went to his son R.D. Burman on the
rebound. In fact, Dev Anand’s first draft of the film had
Prashant’s (Dev Anand) sister, Jasbir, falling in love
with him, a man she didn’t know was her brother. It
was only at SD’s insistence that this was dropped.
According to Dev Anand, Pancham created the tunes
for the film in two weeks flat.
The next day, when Dev Anand came to hear his ‘entry song’, Pancham unleashed ‘Dum maro dum’. Dev’s reluctance to use the song in the film, Pancham’s recommendation that it be retained for the disc, and the subsequent use of only one stanza in the film is now part of Hindi film lore.
Pancham lets the chant ‘Hare Krishna Hare Ram’ and the signature guitar riff by Bhupinder run like a motif throughout. According to Gorakh Sharma (brother of Pyarelal Sharma, and one of the first bass guitarists in the Hindi film industry), he played the bass guitar for this song. The lead riff, the sombre bass and Charanjit Singh’s notes on the transicord (a transistor accordion), create the rock-esque signature introduction to the vocal track, which, constructed on a soul-beat structure, exploits Asha Bhonsle’s bass and her expertise at higher pitches in the antara.
Before she began her journey with Pancham, Asha Bhonsle was never perceived as a substitute for Lata Mangeshkar. She would be in the reckoning for songs that required a heavier voice, had major vocal inflexions, or were plain lusty. Even composers like O.P. Nayyar, who never worked with Lata Mangeshkar, or Ravi, who worked with Asha quite extensively, usually leveraged her proficiency in negotiating mostly low notes.
R.D. Burman changed this. Asha could go as high as she could go low. If ‘O dilruba tu muskura’ (Teesra Kaun, 1965) was a sign of things to come, ‘Dum maro dum’, six years later, would become one of the top numbers in the history of Hindi film songs.
Strangely, this song was not intended for Asha Bhonsle to sing.
Usha Uthup says, ‘The Navketan unit, including Dev Anand and R.D. Burman, had come to hear me sing at the Oberoi, Delhi, in 1969. After the show, Dev Anand asked whether I would like to sing in his forthcoming film Hare Rama Hare Krishna. The song, “Dum maro dum”, as conceived, was a duet between Lata Mangeshkar and me.’
But things changed and it was Asha who went on to sing the song along with a chorus. There is no record of why this happened. At the time, Pancham was on the verge of separation from his wife, Rita (the divorce came through later). Though Asha may have influenced him, she did not officially leave Nayyar until August, 1972.
Pancham might have structured the song differently had he continued with Lata Mangeshkar, something that could have diluted its impact. With Usha, however, he might have had other plans. Sure enough, he roped in Usha for the song’s twin: ‘I love you’. It was phrased as a duet and featured Swiss teenager, Gerda Anita Weiss (who now lives in Australia and works as a travel agent for Nepal Tours), and Zeenat, fresh from her conquest of the Miss India Pacific Crown at Manila in 1970, thus ushering in the era of fashion divas in Bombay film world.
With Usha singing in English on the lower octave and Asha in Hindi on the higher, this number, along with ‘Dum maro dum’, was part of the formative years of kids in early 1970s. A major-scale composition as compared to the minor-scale ‘Dum maro dum’, it celebrates liberation and complements ‘Dum maro dum’.
S.D. Burman, not known to boast of his son’s fame, had a story to tell, which his son eventually narrated on the TV show Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan. SD used to take his morning walks in Juhu where people, upon recognizing him, would say, ‘Look, that’s S.D. Burman.’ One day, just after the release of Hare Rama Hare Krishna, he told RD, ‘Today people recognized me, not as S.D. Burman, but as R.D. Burman’s father.’
And the Navketan baton had passed on from father to son.