A new book reveals the life and worth of the anonymous musicians who made Bollywood’s golden melodies
In 1977, a man in a ridiculous top hat burst out of an Easter egg as Kishore Kumar trilled, “My-name-is-An-thony-Gon-saal-ves”. The movie was a hit and Amitabh Bachchan’s rap act entered the gallery of Bollywood golden moments. But who was Anthony Gonsalves? The answer lies in Majorda, a village in Goa, where Gonsalves lives with the memories of the years (1943-1965) he spent in Mumbai’s film industry, making and teaching music. A violinist who taught Pyarelal Sharma, one half of the famous Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo of composers, Gonsalves worked as an arranger for many film scores. He is also the starting point of Gregory D. Booth’s new book Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios.

Gonsalves is at the heart of this book, says Booth, because he represents both the anonymity of the musicians who played the signature music of Bollywood films and their presence in our lives. Gonsalves’s name has instant recall (its place in the song was Pyarelal’s ironic tribute) but his contribution remains unacknowledged. The melodies performers like him made spilled over into our lives and became markers of our memories while they remained—as so many told the author—behind the curtain. This book, in some ways, is their curtain call.

Booth introduces you to Chic Chocolate (a.k.a Antonio Vaz), one of Bombay’s leading jazz musicians in the 1940s who composer C. Ramchandra spotted at a restaurant and hustled into the industry. The result of this musical encounter was the first Latin percussion sounds in Bollywood . Listen to Cawas Lord drumming up some fun on his bongo in Shola jo bhadke from the film Albela (1951) to know what Chic and his band brought to the music. And if you can hear the strains of the oboe in any score from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, you are listening to Lallu Ram Indorkar, the only oboist of the industry in that period.

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