Gregory D. Booth's (Reference Booth2008) work on the history of making music in Mumbai's film studios is actually the only book-length study of the industrial conditions and technological transformations of the Bollywood recording studios. The book has now become a significant collection, which is supported by web resources. It has successfully raised pertinent questions regarding methodology and the ways in which one may approach cinema histories. The present volume explores an interdisciplinary framework and collates a series of essays which read film texts in all their complexities.
Divided into three sections, the anthology offers ‘Perspectives on film song’, ‘Audio cultures, music videos, and film music’ and ‘Live music, performance cultures, and re-mediation’. The first part highlights the powerful regional industries (for instance, Tamil and Malayalam film industries), which have had momentous influence on mainstream Hindi cinema. Especially notable is the perceptive article entitled ‘Global masala’ (pp. 38–59) by Natalie Sarazin. This essay draws our attention to A.R. Rahman's popular musical compositions, and shows how the film Roja (Dir. Mani Ratnam, 1992) functioned like a bridge via which regional cinemas took a global leap and introduced and altered the sounds of Tamil and Hindi cinema. Roja, in effect, changed the cinematic idiom of popular Hindi cinema, and created both a new global language as well as re-establishing the worldwide reach of Indian films.Footnote 1 Sarazin writes, ‘[d]igitalization not only allowed sound to be manipulated one instrument at a time, but also one note at a time – a piecemeal approach to recording that increased musical precision, intimacy, and nuance’ (p. 41), and analyses the ‘sonic visualization’ of the film, along with the manner in which a particular kind of ‘traditional fantasy meets postmodern nostalgia’. Moreover, Booth's reading of the ‘moment’ (1948–1952) of ‘historical conjecture in Mumbai’ shows how:
[t]he transformation of the Hindi song scene from a relatively static emotional soliloquy or staged performance to a component with a potential to serve as a unifier of both cinematic and narrative content as was implemented during 1948–52 … (p. 35)
Booth illustrates how technological changes and the rise of the playback singers were ‘complexly conjunctural’ (p. 34).Footnote 2 In fact, taking up engaging interdisciplinary approaches, the essays in this section may indeed initiate fresh arguments on methodology within film and cinema studies, cultural studies and media anthropology.
However, notwithstanding the thoroughness of research, certain articles in Part 3 of the book in terms of their methods, by and large, reinstate (and at times repeat) the arguments initiated by Alison Arnold (Reference Arnold1988), followed by Anna Morcom (Reference Morcom2007) et al. Nevertheless, Shope's essay on the influences of Latin American music productively examines the complicated tracks of Indian film music by first showing how jazz became part of Indian mass culture through American movies and cabaret performances and, second, through a close reading of the film texts and composers (like C. Ramchandra). By looking into the fashion in which the particular genre operated in India, Shope shows how:
[t]he turn of the century witnessed the proliferation of gramophones, radio broadcasting, and moving picture exhibitions, and in the 1920s, entrepreneurs took advantage of the business opportunities in the pro-profit jazz entertainment industry and built new clubs and hotel dance spaces to support a growing demand for dance bands. (p. 204)
In a similar vein, Booth's second essay, which is on the incorporation of the rock music genre into the Indian soundscape, analyses how the image of ‘rock and roll’ appeared on the scene through popular stars and films. The latter sections of the essay comprehensively present this development and the processes though which jazz became a mainstream form. Furthermore, the study of the ‘livenesses’ of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi's abhangas (by Anna Schultz) not only explores a new field, it demonstrates the densities within Indian popular music by problematising the binaries between popular and classical, recorded and live music and so on. It also shows the fashion in which music operates in between and across diverse zones.
The second section of the book brings together essays (by Anjali Ghera Roy, Stephan Foil, and others), which show the modes through which music is produced in the contemporary contexts of digital mediations. The section includes one of the most engaging essays in the volume – Stephen Hughes’ exhaustive enquiry into gramophone records and religious iconography. Hughes establishes how:
[t]he gramophone alongside other contemporary and parallel new media, such as proscenium stagecraft (Hansen 1992), chromolithography (Pinney 2004), photography, and film (Rajadhyakhsha, 1993; Hughes 2005) in offering a particularly ambiguous enunciation of modernity. At the beginning of the 20th century, the image of Saraswati playing the gramophone brought into play an unstable and unsettling set of cultural and political dichotomies. … (p. 120)
By using fascinating images of advertisements, record covers, brochures, catalogues and cartoons, this essay elucidates the ways in which – during the 1930s – the field was opening up for new forms of cultural transactions. In addition, the essay shows how, beyond the heterogeneous structures of the musical scores, the cinematic form itself is considerably mutable and shares its margins with a host of other practices. The anthology underscores the fact that Indian film and popular music are certainly beyond ‘Bollywood’ and thereby presents a repertoire of essays which study the rich field of cinema along with other media and music produced in many languages.
While Gopal and Moorti's Global Bollywood (Reference Gopal and Moorti2008) primarily addressed histories, modes and travels of Hindi film songs (and dance), this volume successfully unsettles the very notion of ‘Bollywood’, even when it illustrates the import of Hindi film songs within the Indian contexts. Moreover, More than Bollywood tackles a range of issues and revisits ‘many industries’, music in ‘many languages’ and forms. It also accentuates the significance of live performances and considers the multiple registers of music industries in India and abroad. In this regard, however, the book is somewhat ‘eclectic’ both in terms of its content as well as the depth of investigation. Nevertheless it is an effective volume which may provoke new debates.
