part0013

One of the most striking features of cultural change in Tamil Nadu over the past few decades is the growth and dominance of film music.1 It is all-pervasive and enjoys a popularity that has few parallels in the history of music. ‘Life is not what it used to be thirty years ago and one of the factors that has changed it is film music.’2

Film music, is in fact, another dimension of the hold cinema has on the social and political life of Tamil Nadu. The nexus between politics and films has attracted scholarly attention in recent years.3 But film songs, which are a potent medium for propagating social and political ideas and a significant phenomenon on the cultural scene, have not been studied.

In India, film music’s most predominant form is in songs.4 Backed by a mammoth industry, film music is in the air constantly. Transistors and tape-recorders have contributed greatly to the spread and popularity of this music. On television, a programme featuring song sequences from films has been the most popular, practically since the inception of TV broadcasting in Tamil Nadu. During festivals, fairs and domestic functions such as marriages, loudspeakers blare out film songs. Even in remote villages, an amplifier and a box of discs are available for hire by the hour.

What are the historical, cultural and sociological factors which have brought about this situation? What are the divergent roots from which this film music has grown? How was the power of the ancient art of music harnessed to the new art of cinema? How do these songs affect the ideological content of a film?

While folk music forms, of which Tamil Nadu has a vigorous tradition, were people-oriented in character and appeal, the upper classes had their own exclusive forms of music.5 Nurtured in palaces and temple courtyards, Carnatic music of South India is basically religious in content. It requires prolonged learning and discipline. Even to be able to respond to Carnatic music as a listener, exposure is necessary, which until a few decades ago only the privileged could afford. So, kings and landlords patronized Carnatic music while the others had their folk music, which to a great extent was secular in content.

By the beginning of this century the situation had changed with the arrival of the gramophone. When musical performances came to be mechanically multiplied through the medium of gramophone records, the sharp distinction between upper and lower class tastes began to blur and music was able to transcend the barriers of social stratification. When classical music was recorded, the common man had the opportunity to savour it for the first time.6

A mass entertainment form had emerged by the end of the nineteenth century which contributed to the basic fabric of film music—the company drama. Though the tradition of theatre in Tamil Nadu goes back more than a thousand years, drama as we know it today, with divisions of acts, scenes and concealed orchestra appeared only in the middle of the nineteenth century. These were called company dramas as they were run on commercial lines, with professional actors.

The repertoire of these companies was limited to a few mythologicals which were written as musicals. The stories were narrated, in large part, through a series of songs. The playwright, called vathiyar (literally meaning teacher) in these companies, wrote the songs, composed the music and also directed the play. All the actors had to be singers, including the clown. The emphasis was on singing, not on drama. When a character died on stage after singing a lugubrious song, he would, in response to cries of “once more”, unhesitatingly come back to life and start singing all over again.

Songs used by the drama companies were based on Carnatic music. In addition, they introduced a new strain of music into Tamil Nadu, natya sangeeth (drama music), a kind of Hindustani music appropriated from Marathi drama companies which toured Tamil Nadu at the beginning of the century. Through this strain, Hindustani ragas were assimilated; the resultant synthesis claimed a very large following. Another influence on drama and cinema music came from Parsi drama companies which toured the Madras presidency in the 1930s. They introduced a mixture of Hindustani music and Gujarati folk music called Parsi tunes which eventually found their way into cinema.7 Folk songs were also featured in these dramas, usually performed by the comedian.8

Although silent cinema appeared in Madras in 1912,9 it could attain the status of a mass entertainment form only by the middle of the 1920s. Even at that time, company dramas continued to draw large crowds with their music. Silent cinema produced in Madras, did not affect the company dramas; both were able to coexist without any conflict. In the absence of sound, silent cinema in South India specialized in stunt sequences; it needed men who could impress the viewers by jumping from tall buildings. So the singers and musicians stayed on with the drama companies where they were assured of a steadier income than in the spasmodic production of silent movies.

But the situation changed dramatically when sound films —“talkies”—came on the scene. The talkies produced in the first few years were all film versions of successful, song-laden plays staged by drama companies. Thus stage actors who were not classical musicians, but singers familiar with classical music, found themselves in the tinsel world of cinema. Here, the difference between classical musicians and stage singers familiar with classical music must be made clear. The former were basically classical musicians and sang in concerts. The latter only acted on the stage, though some of them, after gaining fame through dramas, gave solo concerts.
S G Kittappa and Devudu Aiyar are examples of such singers.

Sound first came to Tamil cinema in the form of the four-reeler, which was just a series of sequences featuring semi-classical songs, folk songs and dances. It is significant that the very first Tamil talkie, Kalidas (1931), should have been a string of fifty songs; it was a continuation of the company drama tradition. It was understandable that an audience fed on music in all their entertainment forms expected the newfangled entertainment also to be fashioned on similar lines. In fact, it is this aspect of Indian cinema—the song-and-dance sequences—which lends it a distinct character.

For the first few years, all the talkies were only mythologicals and even later, only very few films of other genres were produced. In India, music has been used through the ages to commune with the supernatural, in worship and in mystic trances. The wandering minstrels narrated puranic stories to the villagers through songs in temple courtyards. So it was only logical that the early sound films—which were nearly all mythologicals—should have been mere vehicles for songs.

In a few years, regional films produced in Madras—Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu—achieved commercial success. Talking pictures therefore carved out a safe market in their respective regional language areas, thus countering competition from films made in America and England. When sound arrived, Madras-made films were able to distinguish themselves from imported films through their language.11

The first sound studio in South India, Srinivasa Cinetone, was established in Madras in 1934. By 1937, there were nine such studios and the stampede for entry into the glittering world of cinema had begun in right earnest. Songwriters, musicians and instrumentalists, all drawn from the stage, vied for a position in studios which were springing up in Madras.12 As baggage, they brought with them their learnings and skill honed in company drama music.

Movie business meant big money; its commercial prospects caught the attention of classical musicians, who had been dismissive of cinema as plebeian entertainment. There were other reasons also. Cinema had become somewhat socially respectable and primarily because of the money it made. It had grown and was now capable of providing facilities demanded by classical musicians who enjoyed independent status as vocalists. Afterall, when any art form is at an experimental stage, established artistes are naturally hesitant to make their entry into it. In the early days of the gramophone also, classical musicians had been similarly diffident about recording their performances.

Musicians like Papanasam Sivan, who wrote and composed more than 500 film songs, entered films and thereby seduced other classical musicians into following him. These musical luminaries of the late 1930s and Forties, like G N Balasubramaniam, M M Dandabani Desikar, Musiri Subramanya Aiyar and V V Sadagopan, did their stints in the film world. Some of their films became memorable solely due to the songs, like Meera (1945) in which M S Subbulakshmi played the lead role of the bhakti poetess.

However, classical music compositions had to be modified when they were adapted to films. One of the methods was to retain the essential features of a raga after which the duration of the songs were reduced and excluding the improvisations and innovative embellishments characteristic of the classical style of singing. This process of popularizing classical music and making it acceptable to a wider audience was set off mainly by the advent of cinema. Such modifications had been effected earlier when classical music was recorded on 78 rpm, 10-inch discs that played only for three or four minutes.13

The imperatives of sound technology also shaped the emerging trend of film music. Musicians responded to the challenges and utilized the new opportunities that were on offer. Stage singers, who were used to singing at the top of their voices in the absence of an amplifier, had to modify their singing technique to suit the microphone; a characteristic style of mellifluous crooning—in contrast to the full-throated expression on the stage—was born.

When recording was done through a single microphone, only one or two instrumentalists could accompany the singer. Interestingly, filming and recording had to be done simultaneously and a trolley carrying the instrumentalists would follow the camera in order to be within earshot of the microphone and the actor-singer. It was often difficult for the actor to sing while moving about and therefore, the camera remained static during song sequences. With better recording techniques, it was possible to use more than one microphone and therefore, more instrumentalists and a certain degree of complexity was now feasible.

When facilities for pre-recording music for films became available, it was no longer necessary to synchronize recording and picturisation. This had an interesting repercussion on cinema. As long as sound had to be recorded while the film was being shot, only those who could sing were hired to act. Once songs could be recorded independently and then synchronized with the lip-movement of the actors, there was no need for actors to possess singing ability. Artistes were chosen primarily for their good looks and acting talent and as a result, a distinct group of artistes known as playback singers who lent their voice to non-singing heroes and heroines emerged.

As film music became an industry in its own right, another strain found its way into this already mixed stream—western music. In the first few years, many Tamil talkies were made in the studios of Calcutta. The music directors of Calcutta were greatly influenced by western music; this paved the way for the use of western tunes in Tamil and Telugu films. Later in Madras, many sound studios acquired western musical instruments for use in film music. The use of these instruments, whose sounds were alien to the Indian musical tradition, was not conducive to the integration of music with cinema, particularly in period movies.14 In the Thirties, the practice of using tunes of popular songs from Hindi films began; it persisted right up to the Eighties. In Asandas Classical’s Nandanar (1935), K B Sundarambal sang three songs whose tunes were lifted from Chandidas (Hindi, 1934).15

Following the traditions of the commercial stage, characters in films also broke into a song, invariably in an intensely emotional context, as though spoken words would be inadequate for the occasion. Thus, songs were accepted as an essential ingredient of cinema right from the early years. Musicologist Ashok Ranade identifies a progression in which speech moved unobtrusively from pure prose to metrical patterns to simple tunes. The aim was not so much aesthetic as to clarify and help communication. He adds that songs from these early films were not really “film songs” in the sense we recognize them today, but mere extensions of speech. The film song, as a separate entity, was to evolve later. 16 In a manual on film making, published in 1937, dramatist P Sambanda Mudaliar wrote that, ideally, song sequences should take about one-fourth of the film’s duration. 17

The need to resort to a song in a given situation is perhaps a continuation of a literature-oriented aesthetic where versification or poetry is considered superior to the spoken or written form. The new medium of cinema probably appropriated the features of literature in order to gain initial validity as a medium. The song-dominated cinema was thus conforming to, and extending the framework of aesthetic value in Tamil society.

By 1944, the film song as we know it today, with a distinct set of characteristics, had emerged. So distinct were the characteristics of a Tamil film song, that ususally, listeners could identify a film song within the first few bars. It was a synthesis of various strains of music—Carnatic, Hindustani, folk and western pop. Soon film songs acquired an importance independent of cinema. Haridas (1944), which had a number of songs that were very popular, created a box office record with a continuous run of 133 weeks in Madras. This gave the music director star status.18 It is now a ritual to begin work on a new film with the recording of a song. Songs can also endow a film with extra-regional appeal.19 This was best evidenced by the successful run of the Telugu film Sankarabaranam (1981) in Tamil Nadu and the popularity of Hindi films with good musical scores in South India.

The gramophone industry has been closely allied with the development of film music in India. Since 1902, when the gramophone first came to South India, both classical and folk music were recorded and released as discs. The arrival of talkies coincided with the massive import of cheap (Rs.10-15) gramophone machines from Japan and film songs were released on graphite discs. To begin with, these songs were recorded separately, often by singers other than those who had acted and sung in the film. Later, songs from the soundtrack were reproduced on discs. Film songs could thus be listened to independently, without necessarily viewing the film.20 Right from the beginning, film songs were composed with an eye on the gramophone record market. A song usually lasted some three or four minutes, the duration of a 78 rpm disc; this practice persists to this day.

The songbook of a film, a low-priced publication, was an important adjunct to film culture. From the earliest days of the talkies, these books, sold in cinema houses, contained the story line, the text of the lyrics and the credits. Today, these songbooks are a handy source of information for film historians, particularly when prints of the films themselves are not available.

The soaring popularity of film songs was given a massive thrust by a development in neighbouring Sri Lanka. In 1949, a commercial radio broadcasting outfit, Radio Ceylon, began beaming film song programmes across the sea for nearly six hours a day. The sale of radio sets soared; film music was brought into the drawing room and in a large number of homes, film songs formed the background music for all household chores and leisure activities.

The state-owned All India Radio, which was the only radio broadcasting service in India then, also opened a commercial wing in 1967 for broadcasting film songs. On television also, song sequences from films are telecast in a programme called “Oliyum Oliyum” (Sound and Light), whose sustained popularity can be compared to that of the teleplays of the Fifties in America, like “Playhouse-90”.

Recent developments in sound technology—audio cassettes, “walkman” and compact discs—have completed the picture. Now film music is a multi-million rupee industry. There are many recording companies in India, and most film songs are released as discs even before the film is released.

However songs for most part, have been socially and politically superficial in content. They are featured in stock situations in films—after the boy and the girl have met for the first time, when he is travelling alone or when she is worshipping, and so on. Most films have one or two song sequences of the hero and the heroine frolicking about and singing a duet and surprisingly, it is possible to compose such songs without any reference to the dramatic context. This is perhaps the reason why several film songs sound alike and their content is always trite and frivolous. The flow of the film is seldom affected if song sequences are excised, wholly or partly.

But film songs have also been used for propaganda purposes by major political movements in Tamil Nadu. During the freedom struggle, when the British government had muzzled all mass media, film songs served the nationalist cause ably and songs like the one below were used to whip up patriotic feelings:

It may be recalled that the British government had either banned nationalist films or deleted certain sequences from them, but when nationalist songs were released on gramophone records, it was impossible to control their reach. In the post-Independence period, writers from the rationalist movements entered films. Their songs, with an anti-religious message, were released to the public.

Some song writers of leftist persuasion used film songs as vehicles for political comment, thereby lending them some measure of substance. In a film titled Times Have Changed/Kalam Mari Pochu (1956), this song is addressed to the farmer:

The role and significance of film songs in popular culture was evident in 1984 when M G Ramachandran, chief minister of Tamil Nadu, was ailing in a hospital in the United States. In the film The Bright Lamp/Olivilakku (1970), when MGR, who plays the hero, is shown fighting for his life, a woman sings a plaintive song pleading with god to save his life:

This song was played through amplifiers in public places and cinema houses all over Tamil Nadu as a prayer for MGR’s recovery. 22 But most film songs are intended to be merely titillatory, often containing double entendres, like the following from a very popular film:

Like mentioned above, film songs often reflect certain social attitudes prevalent at the time the film is made, and can thus be a barometer for change over the years. In R R Pictures’ Gulebakavali (1955), comedian Chandrababu cautions Allah in a song: Be watchful or else, even you will be cheated . He uses the metaphor of a kulla (cap) which rhymes with the word Allah. Such inoffensive and good-natured humour about certain sects and communities, quite common in the early decades, was progressively deleted from films due to increasing social distance and an implicit taboo on the slightest reference to caste or sect.

By the end of the first decade of talkies, some poets of repute, like Baskara Das, a nationalist, and Bharathidasan, who was radical and a rationalist, began writing songs for films. In the 1950s, Pattukottai Kalyanasundaram from the Communist movement and in the Sixties and Seventies, Kannadasan from the Dravidian movement dominated the scene. While the songs of the former were inspired by the folk tradition of Tamil Nadu, Kannadasan’s songs were literary in flavour. For poets with ideological convictions, film songs also doubled as an instrument of propaganda. While they composed songs tailored to meet the requirements of films, they also managed to package their own ideas. The songwriter had to supply words to suit a tune which was composed earlier.

As songs became an essential ingredient of films, other professionals appeared on the film scene: the music director, and the playback singer. The songwriter from drama companies, who doubled up as the composer and music teacher, controlled all aspects of a film’s music in the early sound films. Later, when music and recording grew complex, the music director was inducted as another professional resource person. The song-and-dance combination also gave rise to two more practitioners, the choreographer and the dancer. The roles of these five practitioners were for the most part an intrusion into cinema as songs and dances remain unintegrated with the filmic narration in most films. 23

Along with the songs, dance inevitably made its entry into cinema but without any regard for the formal grammar of dance traditions. Invariably, each dance came with a song and was often an excuse for one. Each actress was free to create her own style, based on any type of dance she knew. Thus a new genre of dance, an arbitrary mixture of all schools of dance—often referred to as “oriental dance”— came into being. In the Fifties, oriental dance performances by well-known actresses were quite common.

Historically, film songs have supplanted folk music in the lives of the common people, exercising a much stronger hold on their emotions. Both have a simplicity that does not pre-suppose knowledge of music. Even when familiarity with the language of a film song is absent, an intense response is still feasible. The association of sound with images, of songs with certain film scenes and actors, is certainly another factor responsible for their popularity. Most of the songs revolve around the boy-meets-girl theme and every film has at least a duet or two, with much caressing and hugging. The lyrics are often unabashedly erotic. These love scenes endow the songs with direct sexual associations, thus increasing their appeal.

Film music is catholic in its approach, adapting continuously from other styles; and though such adaptation at times degenerates into plagiarism, its appeal is undiminished. This is one area of the Indian musical scene marked by constant experimentation and innovation.

Technological developments like microgroove, compact disc and the stereo revolution further accelerated the spread of film songs.24 This omnipresent nature of film music has had an interesting effect on the cultural scene. While in many other parts of the world, changes in musical tastes affect the kind of music used in films, here the situation is exactly the reverse. It is film music which sets trends and moulds musical tastes. The cultural niche occupied by pop music in the West is occupied by film music in India.

The dominant hold of film music on society has hindered the development of any other kind of popular musical expression outside cinema. Even the little non-film music is patterned after film music. Songs in praise of gods or political leaders, which are normally played through the loudspeakers of a public address system, are churned out by the hundred, patterned after film songs. It is the same playback singers and musicians of the film industry, the culture-heroes of the masses, who are hired to sing these songs.

Symptomatic of the influence of film music in rural areas is a performance known as “record dance”, a kind of poor man’s cabaret, which is usually played at village fairs. An erotic film song, full of puns, is played on a turntable and a scantily clad girl gyrates to the music. Gate money is collected and often the dance degenerates into a striptease, much to the delight of the eager patrons.

Despite criticism, songs and dances have constituted an important ingredient in Indian films right from the beginning of the talkies. Songs are often of greater importance than all the other cinematic elements in a film. One anthropologist has suggested that this feature relates directly to the semiotic function of music in the Indian cultural tradition.25 It is this character, the predominance of songs in a film, which sets Indian cinematic tradition apart from others.

But, the effects of songs on a film, its cinematic character, and aesthetic implications, have not been examined thoroughly. The songwriters and music composers of the early years had all been trained for the stage. As a result, when they entered films, they did not learn the discipline required for film music. Film music is basically an applied art26, but in Tamil cinema, I reckon there was very little attempt at such application. The music was not adapted for cinema but was merely transferred as such, from the stage to the screen.

Most song sequences even today appear like commercials during a television show. They are unrelated to the main narrative. In the era of black-and-white films, these song sequences were in “real” time and no changes in costumes occurred during the course of the song. But by the end of the Sixties, black-and-white gradually gave way to colour, and this development affected the song sequences. They grew slightly more complicated as filmmakers tried to get maximum mileage out of colour. They began to shoot a single song sequence in different locales and in varied costumes. This meant a complete suspension of the logic of time and space for the duration of the song. In duets, which form the bulk of the songs, the man and the woman often sing one line standing on a hill! It is significant that the films that have won critical acclaim, both in India and in foreign film festivals, have been films without songs. To cite only two examples, Some One Like You/Unnaipol Oruvan (1964) and House/ Veedu (1988) did not feature any songs. And in such films, there is a discernible attempt to integrate music with cinema.

There is also a sociological dimension to the predominant role of songs in films. By curbing the cinema-specific characteristics, songs keep films at the level of escapist entertainment, which has an ideology of its own. It ensures that the prospect of a truly political cinema’s emergence remains bleak. Even films which espouse an ideology, however obliquely, have been diluted by the importance given to songs. The audience does not receive the message due to the distraction of songs and dances. The possibility of the movie-going public developing a sense of cinema is severely circumscribed by this practice.

The predominance of song as an element of Tamil cinema is exemplified by the long and illustrious career of music director Ilayaraja. He made his debut with the film Annam the Parrot/Annakili (1976), in which he used folk tunes; songs from that film have proved enduringly popular. He later went through a rigorous discipline and honed his sensibility to Carnatic and western classical music. Today, he is one of the most sought-after music directors in the country and has worked in more than 950 films in all the four South Indian languages. Many films have been commercially successful solely on the strength of his music. Even till recently, whenever new films are announced, prime importance is attached to his role as music director. He not only composes music, he also writes songs and is a singer to boot. Ilayaraja’s music can be called a combination of Carnatic, western classical and western pop. His fidelity to a chosen form—folk or classical—and his musical imagination, combined with his brilliant orchestration are the factors behind his phenomenal success.28

Though the overwhelming popularity of the film song as a form of contemporary music and its widespread impact are so evident, there has been a continuing feud between film music on the one hand and classical music on the other. Classical musicians, who sneered at films first, came into it in a big way, lured by money and fame. But eventually they had to vacate their place in favour of more innovative and populist composers. Ever since then, film music has been subjected to hostile criticism by the classicists. In July 1952, B V Keskar, then Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, announced that broadcast of film songs by All India Radio would be progressively reduced. In seminars on music and culture, film music is not even mentioned; scholarly books and articles on Indian culture maintain a studied silence. But the fact remains that this music of the masses has always been—and will be—a significant phenomenon in the social and cultural history of Tamil Nadu.

15 . Nandanar film review by Kalki under the pen name Karnatakam in Anandavikatan, 21 July 1943. There were three film versions of Nandanar, one by the New Theatres in 1933, and another by Asandas Classical in 1935 and the third by Gemini Studios in 1942.