Jag mein reh jayenge pyaare tere bol...

Javed Akhtar

Even today, when we make a war movie, it has five or six songs. That’s our style of story telling. But lyrics in story telling wasn’t invented by Hindi cinema. Before the talkie era in films dawned with Alam Ara, our adaptations of Western plays in the urban Parsi theatre had foreign characters like a Helen or a Marcus express themselves in songs. Songs have always been a part of the folk theatre in the form of nautankis, jatras, Krishna leela. Even old Sanskrit plays like Mrichakatika had songs in them. This style of story telling is thousands of years old in our country.

In Indian theatre, songs were part of the drama and were given the same weight as a scene. Some may find it strange or awkward but the same can be said about the opera or kabuki. These are different styles of story telling typical to a culture, just as every language has its own grammar. And there is no need to be apologetic about it — take it or leave it — that’s our style of story telling.

Indian cinema furthered this traditional convention by using music and drama. So as the narratives changed with changing aspirations of their protagonists reflecting contemporary morality, so also did the lyrics of the songs in our films. Hindi cinema may be entertaining but it’s not a circus. Its situations, howsoever exaggerated, have always been reflective of social realities. The relationship between an audience and the cinema is like that between an individual and his dream. Just as a psychoanalyst decodes a dream, you have to go beneath the surface imagery to decode its context and only then can understand it best.

The songs of the 1940s, 50s and 60s and every decade reflect their times, the passion of that era or the lack of it in terms of aesthetics and literary depth. For instance, a Woh subah kabhi to aayegi (Will the new dawn ever break?) could have been composed only in the 1950s or 60s. Its writer Sahir Ludhianvi was a very good poet and took film song-writing very seriously. He wrote on his own terms and was the first to bring the film song closer to the poem. Be it Woh subah or the songs in Pyaasa, most of these are like poems. Sahir wrote lyrics too but he made his mark because of the poems he wrote for the films. Shailendra was another master of saying something emotional and deep in ordinary and simple words.

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