Conclusiones

during which sound and image were simultaneously recorded. I also locate transitions at the end of earlier periods rather than at the beginning of later ones.

Earlier research on Hindi films and film music has adopted a range of periodic structures. Writing during the latter years of Old Bollywood, Skill- man (1986) notes the importance of synchronous sound recording as a landmark event but proposes two subsequent historical periods: “the for- mula” (1940s and ’50s) and “the trend” (1960s and ’70s). Only a few years later, Arnold (1991) organized her study of film song around three major overlapping transitions: from silent to sound films (1930s), from si- multaneous recording to playback (1930–1940s), and from the studio sys- tem to independent production (1940s). She followed this with a vague post-Independence period (1948–1950s), roughly the first five to ten years of Old Bollywood. A final chapter summarized events since 1955 but of- fered no theoretical rationale for 1955 as a significant marker of historical difference. Most of Arnold’s study focused on aspects of cultural and sty- listic transition in the ten or more years that it took for the industrial and cultural responses to synchronous optical dubbers to crystallize into the playback system.

Manuel referred in passing to “the film era” (1993, 54) but largely avoided the pitfalls of periodization. The only chronologic distinctions he made were based first on the dominance of film music and second on the advent of cassettes in South Asia. By the early 1940s, he suggests, “Film music had come to be the predominant popular-music idiom in India, and remained virtually unchallenged in that capacity until the advent of cas- settes in the late 1970s” (ibid., 41). In fact, the challenge to film music was minimal; the introduction of cassettes and the new cassette companies led directly to a period of enormous prosperity for the film-music industry.

Writing as both fan and amateur historian, Premchand uses personal preference as the basis of his periodization and states that between 1947 and 1970 “Words, tunes, playback and sound techniques came together in an exceptional, never-to-be-repeated manner” (Premchand 2003, 7). De- spite his personalized justification, Premchand clearly defines the period dominated by the first generation of Old Bollywood music directors (e.g., Shankar-Jaikishan, S. D. Burman, O. P. Nayyar, Naushad, Roshan) while de-emphasizing the generation that succeeded them, including much of the work of Kalyanji-Anandji, R. D. Burman, Laxmikant-Pyarelal, and so on, whose careers continued to the end of the Old Bollywood period. Although Ashish Rajadhyaksha resists the temptations of periodization as such, he suggests that “the film industry in India assumed something like its current form” during almost the same years (1946–1975) that Premchand prefers (Rajadhyaksha 2004, 120).

Upperstall, a website that offers one of the Internet’s more serious criti- cal examinations of Indian cinema, Hindi and otherwise, provides a highly narrativized “Evolution of the Hindi Film Song,” which, like Premchand and Arnold, focuses largely on the biographies of film singers and com- posers. The detailed account is divided into six parts, beginning in 1931 and ending at roughly 1950, although its author, Karan Bali, describes his history as unfinished. As do most scholars, fans, and even casual listeners, the Upperstall account specifies “the golden period of Hindi Film Music [as] the 1950s and 1960s” (Bali n.d.), the core years, one might argue, of Premchand’s slightly longer “golden period.”

Morcom’s recent study is not primarily historical. Nevertheless, in con- sidering developments in orchestration, she proposes that “around 1950, the quantity and scale of background music in Hindi films significantly increased, with many aspects of Hollywood scoring entering Hindi films, such as large symphony-style orchestrations. This is easily traceable to di- rect Hollywood influence and also to technological advances around 1950 that made the recording of large ensembles more feasible” (2007, 138).

Ashok Ranade (2006) divides the first fifty years of Indian sound film into early (1931–1947) and later (1947–1980) composers, although he con- centrates mostly on those who were active at the beginning of his “later” period. Ranade thus focuses roughly on the same composers that other scholars highlight. He groups preplayback composers with those of the Studio Period, however, and stops rather arbitrarily ten or more years be- fore the end of Old Bollywood as I describe it.

The historical shift about which these scholars most clearly agree is the change that took place some time toward the late 1940s or the early 1950s, roughly coinciding with Indian independence. Bali (n.d.) describes the 1940s generally as a period that witnessed “the collapse of the studio sys- tem and the freelance system taking over.” The late 1940s and early 1950s are “usually seen as a low moment in Indian film history, when a whole range of independent financiers and producers jumped into the fray” (Ra- jadhyaksha 2004, 126). Arnold additionally differentiates the years after Indian independence, but throughout these studies, most of the attention centers on Bali’s “golden period,” the first twenty years of Old Bollywood. Ashish Virmani also sees a clear break during the late 1940s. He is the only writer who offers the chronologic perspective necessary to suggest a realistic end to the period that all agree began around 1947. “The old days,” he suggests, persisted in some parts of the film industry “as recently as 2002” (Virmani 2004, 77). It is a distinctive feature of Virmani’s chronol- ogy that he defines these periods largely in terms of industrial structure rather than musical style or technological change, but as Braudel (1984, see introduction) argues, each area changed at its own pace.

By 1998, life had changed for musicians. What is more, the two defining music directors whose careers had been perpetuating the practices and styles of late Old Bollywood—R. D. Burman (who died in 1994) and, even more important, Laxmikant-Pyarelal (Laxmikant died in 1998)—were effectively inactive by that point. Sometime near the end of the twentieth century the cumulative changes in sound-film technology seem to have co- alesced as the film industry finally abandoned optical film as its defining re- ality. As the following chapters show, sometime in the mid-1990s certain musicians began to recognize or accept that things were changing for good. It may be ironic in this regard that 2005 saw the opening of Mumbai’s first new producing studio in approximately fifty years. Yash Chopra’s Yash Raj Studios contains six recording theaters, a recording studio large enough for a full orchestra (figure 3.1), and all of the necessary postpro- duction facilities. Chopra describes the new studio as “a project of a dream, a thing which I have not had for all these years as a producer.” However, he also admits the risk of such an investment: “It may not be a viable proposition.” Viable or otherwise, Chopra’s enterprise embodies the changes in business attitudes (regarding distribution, copyrights, budgets, etc.) and in technology (a fully digital, world-class studio) that define New Bollywood.

The Studio Period

In the 1920s, Indian filmmakers began organizing film production follow- ing the industrial patterns of the West. The earliest companies—Madan Theatres, Wadia Movietone, Imperial, Bharat Movietone, and so on—were privately owned, vertically integrated commercial enterprises that invested in the physical and technical facilities (e.g., studios for filming, costumes, cameras, lights, microphones) and human resources (e.g., scriptwriters, actors, composers, musicians, directors, technicians) necessary for film production. Some established private distribution structures as well. Fol- lowing models in the United States and Britain, as Raina (1983) suggests, these were film factories in structure and practice, as well as name. Mum- bai and Kolkata were home to more than 90 percent of these film factories. Many produced multiple films per year and managed their profit and loss as a cumulative result of the sale of their many products, hoping to out- weigh the negative consequences of any flops with the profits derived from hits. This characterization of industry no doubt appears simplistic and quite unnecessary, but it has significant comparative implications later.

From 1931 on, the larger studios employed musicians as part of their salaried staff. The size of the musical establishment varied, but the practice was standard. Vistasp Balsara worked as a keyboard player, arranger, and

conductor at Filmistan Studios, which was founded in 1942 as an offshoot of Bombay Talkies. As a salaried employee, he oversaw the work of other musical employees:

Vistasp Balsara: Filmistan had fifteen musicians; they were the Filmistan orchestra, you can say. I hired them, and they were on salary. They came every day from ten o’clock to five o’clock, whether there was work or no work. That was a good system.

Anil Biswas, one of the most important music directors of the Studio Pe- riod, came to Mumbai from Kolkata late in 1933. He worked as a salaried employee at four different film studios: Eastern Art Syndicate, Sagar Movie- tone, National Studio, and finally Bombay Talkies:

Anil Biswas: For quite some time, until I was in Bombay Talkies, studios used to maintain a complete coterie of musicians [on salary] along with the music director. There was no freelancing at that time or [at] least not very much. All the good ones [musicians] were cornered by the big studios. Biswas was working as a music assistant and later as a composer in these studios; he left Bombay Talkies, his last studio job, in 1946.

Like musicians, composers were sometimes salaried, but others worked on a more itinerant basis, contracting to act as music directors for a fixed number of films with a series of different studios. Ghulam Haider was ap- parently traded between Mehboob Khan, who established Mehboob Pro- ductions, and S. Mukherjee, the cofounder of Filmistan:

Vistasp Balsara: Ghualm Haider had come [to Filmistan] from Mehboob to make Humayun [1945]. Mr. S. Mukherjee took Ghulam Haider as a loan from Mehboob-saheb for two pictures. Ghulam Haider normally used to direct four pictures at a time in Bombay.

Haider (who was Sindhi by birth) was working in both Mumbai and La- hore in this prepartition period, when such travel was not a politicized pro- cess. Balsara is listed in Humayun’s credits as the music assistant (see chap- ter 5). He also acted as a source of continuity by connecting visiting composers like Haider to the studio’s infrastructure. Salaried musicians such as Balsara provided music and support for whichever composer had been hired to work on the film of the moment:

Vistasp Balsara: In Filmistan I was the permanent orchestra leader, but the picture director and maybe the scriptwriter would decide about the music director. Whoever would come to Filmistan for music direction, I would be his assistant.

Both Balsara and Biswas (despite his earlier comments) recognized that not “all the good ones” (musicians, that is) were employed by studios. The

alternative to working on salary is freelancing. Three early and important freelance musicians were cellist Alfonso Albuquerque, saxophone player Ram Singh, and violinist and guitarist Peter Sequeira, who were collec- tively known by the initials of their first names as “A-R-P.” In addition to their performing skills and other significant contributions to early film scores, A-R-P also acted as orchestral brokers by organizing other musi- cians to perform in the small orchestras of the period. [ Video 3.1]

Ernest Menezes: Mr. Albuquerque started working in the film industry much before partition [1947]. His group was the A-R-P party. They used to call the other musicians and manage it so that everyone would come to the right place at the required time.

Thus, studio orchestras were often reinforced by freelancers or musi- cians working directly with freelance music directors. In his earlier com- ments, Anil Biswas seems to suggest that by the time he had reached Bom- bay Talkies, salaried jobs for musicians were gradually becoming less common. Salaried positions in studio orchestras indeed decreased gradu- ally in the 1940s, but some persisted into the 1950s. J. V. Acharya came from Bangalore to work on salary as a sitar player at Bombay Talkies in 1937. Thirteen years later Acharya, after a stint on salary at HMV and some freelance work with music director Vasant Desai, returned to salaried studio work in 1950:

J. V. Acharya: I joined Raj Kamal Studio. I was a staff artist there. They paid me two hundred rupees per month. But being a music staff artist, I had to work with whoever would come.

Acharya remained in that position until 1954, when he joined composer C. Ramchandra at A. R. Kardar’s studio, but began freelance work two years later.

Studio Investments

The fact that both sound and image were recorded on the same medium (celluloid film) may have produced poor-quality sound recordings, but it saved studios from having to invest in two different sets of technology. The sound camera was a multipurpose tool, used separately for recording both image and sound. That separation was a matter of time, however, not space; there were no dedicated music-recording studios in the film industry of the 1940s:

Kersi Lord: There were no recording studios when I joined the line in late 1947 or ’48. We had to record in the shooting sheds, which meant we had to put some blankets or cloth [on the walls] to help the acoustics.

The acoustics in these studio spaces were not always ideal, as Lord points out, and they had other drawbacks as well. Vistasp Balsara regret- ted the disadvantages of the metal roofing that covered some of the shoot- ing studios in the late 1930s, especially during Mumbai’s monsoon season:

Vistasp Balsara: They used to record on the shooting floors themselves at that time. We used to have to stop when it rained because of the noise. Despite their drawbacks, the shooting floors were actually an improve- ment over the earliest recording spaces for film music, especially back- ground music. Cawas Lord played percussion in some of India’s earliest sound films, working for Adeshir Irani’s Imperial Movietone studios in the early 1930s:

Cawas Lord: In those days, the recording used to happen in the open air. We used to wait for the trains to go by. In the night we recorded, especially background music.

Like other early musicians, Lord grew used to playing all night when the noise of the city had died down. Even though Naushad Ali’s first job as a composer of background music was some years later, he faced similar problems:

Naushad Ali: They were making a picture, Prem Nagar [1940], and they gave me a chance in that picture to give the songs and also the background music. We recorded all the songs in one night at the Siri Sound compound [in Dadar]. There were no facilities with suitable acoustic treatment that were big enough, so we recorded in gardens at night. After ten o’clock the traffic would stop and we would record. Around six o’clock or seven o’clock [in the morning] the traffic would start again, and we would stop. Recording studios—that is, permanent spaces with suitable acoustic treat- ment and permanently installed recording equipment—appeared in the early 1950s. They appeared, however, not as additions to the infrastruc- tures of producing film studios but apparently as afterthoughts to newly built film-processing laboratories.

The Decline of the Studio System

Film studios in Kolkata may have had an early lead in the production and distribution of films (as Madan Theatres did) or in the technology of play- back (New Theatres), but Kolkata’s studios and films were outnumbered by Mumbai’s increasing dominance of Hindi film production and its high output of films in general. This was clear in 1936, when playback became the dominant song-production model, and it became increasingly apparent as the 1930s and ’40s went on. Of the 120 films produced in Mumbai and

Kolkata in 1936, 72 percent were created by a Mumbai studio; ten years later Mumbai was producing 98 percent of all Hindi films. The city’s domi- nance was virtually complete and unequivocally permanent. Mumbai was thus the only place where workers in that industry could be assured of a reasonable income.

Clarinetist Devi Lal Varma was one of many musicians who began their careers in Lahore’s film industry, where Hindi films were also being made, as his son, Prakash Varma explains:

Prakash Varma: Daddy joined the line in 1936, but he joined at Lahore, at Pancholi Studios. He migrated to Bombay in 1944. He came on his own and went from door to door. In those days, there were film companies, and they used to give salary. So my daddy joined Chitramandir as a salaried musician.

Pancholi was the most important producing studio in prepartition Lahore and often employed composer Ghulam Haider.

Figure 3.2 shows a young Devi Lal Varma outside the gates of Chitra- mandir studios with his friend, guitarist Hazara Singh, who moved from Bombay Talkies about the same time. Singh went on to work on salary at Ranjit Movietone until approximately 1955, as his son explains:

Thakur Singh: My father worked on salary at Bombay Talkies with [music director] Khemchand Prakash. Later he also worked at Ranjit Studios; that was in the 1950s.

Another salaried musician at Ranjit in the early 1950s was a young vio- linist named Pyarelal Sharma. As he reflects on this early experience with the benefit of his enormous professional hindsight, Sharma distinguishes between the studio system and the procedure that was later adopted in Old Bollywood:

Pyarelal Sharma: I joined Ranjit in 1952; I was only twelve years old, but I was getting a salary like everyone else. They paid me fifty-seven rupees per month and later that became eighty-nine rupees. Rajdhani [1956] was the first movie I played for. There were three studios all close together: Ranjit (where I worked), Siri Sound, and Rang Mahal. Every day we went there from ten to five. It was different then; everyone was on salary: Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor [star actors], everyone. Heroines, side characters, villains, music directors, musicians, lyricists, they would get five hundred rupees, five thousand rupees, something. The producers were real and they had empires. Chandulal Shah, Sohrab Modi, Mehboob, they did the sets; they did the recordings, everything.

The 1940s were years of increasing political tension in South Asia, as agitation for independence intensified. The political struggle, the aftermath

of the Great Depression, the Bengal famine, and World War II all had an impact on film production and content. “Film productions were ‘licensed.’ A maximum length of 11,000 feet was imposed. . . . The inordinate num- ber of songs that had gone up to nineteen and twenty came down to five or six” (Abbas 1985, 239). The wartime shortages and regulations surround- ing access to film stock were lifted briefly after the war, but were reimposed in 1948 by a newly independent but impoverished Indian government due to “the limited availability of foreign exchange” (Dayal 1983, 55).

From 1935 to 1948 the Mumbai industry averaged 112 releases per year, but the number varied greatly—from 73 films (in the war years 1941 and 1945) to an exceptional 183 in 1947. The biggest single-year increase occurred between 1945 and 1946, when production more than doubled to

Figure 3.2

Salaried musicians Devi Lal Varma (left) and Hazara Singh outside the gates of their employer, Chitramandir Studios, ca. 1945. Courtesy of Prakash Varma.

155 films. In 1947, one of the last good years for the producing studios, the three most prolific (Ranjit, Mohan, and Filmistan) produced 18 films among them. Overall, 1946 through 1949 were enormously productive years for the Hindi cinema; output reached heights that would not be matched for forty years.

Figure 3.3 shows the importance of the Indian producing studio in the