Something About Bollywood Movies and Music
The film industry in Bombay, which is now called Mumbai for reasons
which have more to do with regional and religious intolerance than with
anticolonialism, is the biggest in the world. It makes almost double
the number of movies and sells a billion more tickets each year than
Hollywood.
Aishwarya Ray lip-syncing to "Silsila Yeh Chaahat Ka" in Devdas |
There
are big industries in other areas of India, producing a lot of movies
in local languages, especially Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, but most of
the time, the quality is lower (and Bollywood itself is already famous
for making a lot of stinkers) and the number of mustachios higher. The
main exception is West Bengal, where the Indian intelligentsia are
centered in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and where some art movies are made,
notably by Satyajit Ray (d. 1992). The Indian theater and literature
scenes are also mostly in Calcutta, although Bombay and, to a lesser
degree, Delhi and Madras (now Chennai) also have stuff going on.
All these other industries are involved with Bollywood, though.
Often, actors and actresses will get recognized because of their work
in regional cinema, and sometimes movies are made bilingually. For
instance,
Asoka was produced in both Tamil and Hindi, despite starring Shah Rukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor,
both big-name Bollywood stars. Actually, I think the Tamil version of
"San Sanana" is better than the Hindi one, but I couldn't download it,
and I only have a tape. The most famous composer these days, A.R.
Rahman, is Tamil, but now writes the music for some huge number of
Bollywood movies, as well as Tamil movies.
Having music by a famous composer like Rahman or the Kalyanji-Anandji duo,
who were roughly his '70s equivalent, is as likely to make a movie a hit as
having big stars, because of how much Indians love their movie music. Every
movie has five or ten song-and-dance numbers scattered throughout its three
hours, during which the stars lip-sync and dance, Busby Berkeley-style, to
songs prerecorded by famous playback singers. The most well-known are Asha
Bhosle, her sister Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi and Kishore Kumar. Supposedly,
Lata has sung in almost 20 languages for over 1,825 films, worked with 165
composers, and made 8,000 recordings overall, more than anyone else. Sometimes
the songs in a movie are related to the actual action, but not always in any
obvious way. Speaking of action, virtually all Bollywood movies contain the
same elements, but in different proportions. They all have romance (but you
almost never see a kiss), comedy and action, and often overt patriotism, sometimes
to the detriment of Pakistan. These days, though, a lot of movies try to be
pacifist and promote harmony.
Everywhere you go in India, Bollywood music is playing. Except in the
Punjab and Goa, movie music seems to be almost the only pop music that
exists, and Indian classical music has more or less the same
status
as Western classical music does here. It's an acquired taste for an
American, but it's a terrific thing once you develop a liking for it.
Songs like "Mera Man Tera Pyasa" make me comfortable in a quiet,
irreplacable way, and "Ina Meena Dika" is almost on the level of Louis
Armstrong for fun. I limited myself to one song per soundtrack, but I
gave in and put a couple more songs on this site than on the actual CD.
If you're burning the CD, by the way, you might have to fiddle with
track times in order to get it all to fit.
If you like these songs or want to see the dances that
accompany them, rent them at your friendly local Indian market. I
haven't seen all of the movies these songs are from, but the dances
from Dil Se, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas are especially great. Those are all excellent movies and good introductions to modern Bollywood, as is Lagaan, and all of them have other awesome songs on their soundtracks. Lagaan
might be the best introduction, because it explains a lot of things for
the benefit of Westerners. For example, "Radha Kaise Na Jale" has a
couple of meanings. In the movie, one character's jealous of another,
and they explain it in mythological terms of Radha's jealousy for her
lover Krishna's wife. Just because the movie's easy to understand
doesn't mean it's watered-down, though - it's a real Bollywood movie,
and it was a huge hit in India. To give fair warning, though, there are
definitely a couple of sucky English songs on the soundtrack.
I know less about older movies, but two that have great songs are Don
and Kabhi Kabhie. Don is a totally sweet gangster movie, and
Kabhi Kabhie is a lovely romance. Incidentally, it's based on the same
real-life affair that Amitabh Bachchan had as Silsila, but the difference
is that Silsila is a crappy movie with only one good song. In general,
look for movies with Aishwarya
Rai or Kajol
in the female lead, and Shah Rukh Khan or Aamir
Khan (like the slimy Salman
Khan, no relation). Also, anything with Amitabh
Bachchan is probably good, at almost any time of his long
career.
A Little About Language
Bollywood movies are in Hindi, which is the main national language of
India, of, I think, 17. Most people speak it to a degree, although
maybe not that well in places like Tamil Nadu, which has a big
political movement against Hindi, which is seen there as a Northern
imposition.
Posters in Delhi, advertising a movie called American Kamasutra |
Most
people in cities speak some English, but not everyone is fluent. Still,
it looks cool to speak English, so a lot of Bollywood movies include
English phrases like "Better luck next time" and "Rock and roll, man!"
Since it's in the nature of escapist entertainment to be fascinated
with the rich, a lot of Bollywood movies, especially these days, are
about Indians who have struck it rich in England or America. A lot of
the time, they come back and realize that they need India, and girls
wearing skanky Western clothes often put on a
sari or a
salwar-kameez and show their true nature as good Indian daughters.
It's not that simple to just say they're in Hindi, though. Before
Independence in 1947, a lot of people in the North actually spoke a
related dialect called Hindustani, which was written in Arabic script
regardless of religious community. Incidentally, a common mistake is
for people to refer to Hindi as "Indian," implying that there's only
one Indian language, but "Hindustani" really just means "Indian" -
"Hindustan" and "Bharat" being the most common names for the country,
other than "India." Since Independence, though, most Muslims speak
Urdu, which is written with the Arabic alphabet in a slanting style
called Nastaliq. Urdu speakers are proud of Nastaliq, since they feel
that Urdu is one of the most beautiful languages in the world and this
way of writing is more beautiful than the flat way they write in the
Middle East. I think they're right, too - it's one of the most graceful
writing styles. Hindus, Jains, Parsis (Zoroastrians originally from
Persia), and Buddhists speak Hindi, written with the Devanagari
alphabet, which is also used for Sanskrit. By the way, most Indian
Buddhists, these days, are converted low-caste Hindus who aren't
necessarily very Buddhist the way we think of it. Of course, like I
said before, there are a lot of regional languages with a lot of
speakers. For instance, Telugu, spoken in Andhra Pradesh, whose capital
is Hyderabad, has 71 million speakers and was the most widely spoken
language in India before Independence.
Urdu and Hindi, though, aren't that different. In theory, Urdu
is more Persianized and Hindi is more Sanskritized, and literary Urdu
definitely is that way, and the government and media speak Sanskritized
Hindi. But really, most people speak Hindi that's more or less
Persified depending on their community and fairly heavily influenced by
English, but never as Sanskritized as Hindi on the TV news. There are
differences in dialect, like how Urdu speakers will say "sar" for the
English "head" and Hindi speakers will say "sir," but most people will
prefer to say "university" instead of "vishwavidhyalya," which is what
you're supposed to say in "real" Hindi. And there are regional
dialects, too. Many Northerners will pronounce "vegetables" as "sabzi,"
which is the way you say it in Farsi and Urdu, but some in areas like
Uttar Pradesh and Delhi will say "sabji," because "z" is one of the
sounds that Hindi doesn't have. Given that it's not always obvious what
the difference is between Urdu and Hindi, it's actually more accurate
to say that Bollywood movies are in Urdu, mostly because it's
considered more beautiful than Hindi. Religion, which is the ostensible
difference between the dialects, is a tricky thing in movies, because
nowadays, moviemakers often try not to offend anyone - although other
times, they're complete demagogues. Sometimes people seem to switch
religions during the course of a movie, but even when a character is
obviously Hindu, she'll often speak Urdu, or especially sing it, for
beauty. Also, my friend Daniel, who helped me with this page, told me
that after Independence, when the film industry was starting, "Muslims
were those who wrote poetry and songs and went to courtesans, and these
courtly cultured people shifted to film after the nawaabs lost money.
And the langauge of education was Urdu, so the screenwriters all spoke
and had their entire education in Urdu. Therefore, it was only natural
for them to write in Urdu. Also, a 'respectable' Hindu would not act in
a film."
Partly because of these regional and community variations and
partly because Hindi has too many sounds that don't have Roman letters,
Malaika Arora dancing to "Chaiyya Chaiyya" in Dil Se |
transliteration
is hard. Even in Hindi, variant spellings are common; hardly anyone
observes the differences between the two kinds of "n," and people mix
up the three kinds of "s" all the time. "A" might sound like "b
ut" or "st
ar," "u" might sound like "b
ook" or "b
ut" or "b
oot," and those are just the sounds that are
possible
to spell like English. Hindi has "s" and two kinds of "sh," four kinds
of "t" (two front, two back, two with an "h" afterward, two not), six
kinds of "d" (the same four kinds, plus two flips that are sort of like
"r," but you try making an "r" while breathing hard and with your
tongue flipped back [a retroflex aspirated flap, for linguistics
nerds]), etc. Sometimes "kh" is just pronounced like it looks, and
sometimes it's pronounced like the German "ch," when it's an
Urdu/Persian word. Sometimes "n" is "n," and sometimes it's just a
nasalized vowel. And some letters are the same in Hindi but different
in English. "V" and "w" are the same letter (and in Urdu, "v," "w," "u"
and "o" are all the same letter), and it's a matter of taste or dialect
how which you pick. "Th," though, never sounds like "
the."
Some Words that Show Up a Lot in Bollywood Songs
Hindi has a somewhat complicated grammar, but without trying to teach
sentence structure or anything (except to note that prepositions in
Hindi are actually postpositions, so "Dil Se" means "From the Heart,"
not "Heart From"), these words might be useful in understanding the
gist of Bollywood songs. Most of them are love songs, which right away
makes things easier. If a word ends in "a," it can often also end in
"on" (one of those nasal vowels), "i" or "e." Like I said, it's hard to
transliterate, and a lot of the spellings below are the common ones
rather than the consistent ones ("suraj" sounds like "soo-ruhj," but
"sub" sounds like "sub," not "soob"). But anyway, I've listed them by
the English alphabetical order of the Hindi words. I'm not sure if that
makes sense, but it was a lot of work, so I'm not changing it.
Actually, it hasn't been a lot of work yet, because right now, as I'm
writing this, I haven't done most of it yet, but I can't think of a
better way.
