Dear Reader,
A few things this month set me thinking about pop music. Michael, the Antoine Fuqua biopic with Jaafar Jackson playing his famous uncle, opened in cinemas last week. Asha Bhosle died, and we ran two tributes in Frontline. And on April 13, we marked the birth anniversary of Pattukkottai Kalyanasundaram, the Tamil lyricist who would have turned 96 this year.
A few years ago, on a bus winding through Kerala, I watched a song stop a fight. A man on a seat near the front had spat out of the window. The wind carried it back and it landed on another passenger in a rear seat. The wronged man stood up cursing, his fist half-raised. The driver leaned over and turned up the speakers. Out came Vidyadharan’s tune and P. Bhaskaran’s words: Swapnangalokkeyum pangu vekkam; “Let us share all our dreams”. Loud, filling the bus like a cool breeze. Then the strangest thing happened: the man with the fist paused and his hand dropped. Ah, potte, he muttered—leave it—and slumped back into his seat. The other man called out, shyly, “Sorry brother.” The bus rattled on.
The Malayalam poet and storyteller Alankode Leelakrishnan once said in a speech that he suspected there were people in their 60s, 70s, and even in their 80s, scattered across small towns and villages, who have not yet taken their lives only because the radio or the speaker on their verandah sooner or later delivers Yesudas, a Vayalar lyric, a Mohammed Rafi, or Manna Dey. I think he is right. Most of us know someone who has been lashed to the world, however loosely, by a few minutes of song.
Music moves us. But the reach of popular music—film songs, ghazals, mappila pattu, baul, qawwali, the sentimental light music that plays in barber shops and toddy shops and in the cabs of long-distance lorries—is of a different order from what an evening of Carnatic, Hindustani, or Western classical offers. Those forms have their power, but they ask you to bring something to them. The popular song asks nothing, and it finds you in the queue at the ration shop.
Theodor Adorno, the German thinker who fled Hitler’s Europe and watched American radio do something else to it, was famously suspicious of this. He thought popular music standardised the listener, sedated him, and sold him counterfeit feelings on the hire-purchase system. There is something in what he said. The culture industry he warned about has not exactly disappeared. But Adorno was writing from a seminar room, not a Kerala bus.
Another book on the subject, and one too few people read, is the American ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel’s Cassette Culture (1993). Manuel went into north Indian towns and small cities in the 1980s and traced what happened when the cheap audio cassette broke the monopoly of HMV and All India Radio. Sufi songs, regional dialects, devotional traditions, women’s songs, working-class music—all came pouring back. The cassette did to Indian music something close to what the printing press did to scripture. It put it in the hands of the people who could not afford the gramophone. Manuel was careful to note the darker side too: the same technology carried regional factionalism, religious chauvinism, fresh kinds of vulgarity. But the underlying change was real. It was a small revolution.
This is the part of the story the highbrow critics tend to leave out. The reason a film song can disarm a man on a bus is that it belongs to him; he grew up with it; his mother sang a phrase of it while she was getting ready for work. The auto driver who took him to his sister’s house was playing it. It is woven into his life in a way that the conservatoire arts, for entirely material reasons, are not.
And because it belongs to him, the song can also speak for him. On the night of February 13, 1986, in Lahore’s Alhamra Arts Council, the ghazal singer Iqbal Bano walked onto the stage in a black sari—the colour of mourning and a garment General Zia-ul-Haq had banned women from wearing in public—and sang Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Hum Dekhenge” to a crowd of 50,000. Faiz’s poem had been banned too. The audience kept interrupting her with chants of Inquilab Zindabad; she had to pause, wait, begin again. A technician hidden in the booth taped the encore, and that smuggled cassette is the version we still listen to.
Nearly four decades later, the poem was being sung in universities and protest sites and street-side gatherings during the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act. An IIT panel was solemnly convened to decide whether it was “anti-Hindu”.
The people who write these songs come from where the listeners come. Consider Pattukkottai Kalyanasundaram, to whom Frontline paid tribute this month. Born into rural poverty in 1930, he joined the communist movement and wrote songs for early MGR films that made garment workers and field labourers feel, perhaps for the first time, that cinema knew they existed. He died at 29. The lines he left behind are still sung at union meetings in Tamil Nadu.
Or take Salil Chowdhury, who came out of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India, and brought peasant rhythms from rural Bengal into Hindi film music without announcing what he was doing. R.D. Burman, his junior, would later borrow from rickshaw bells, factory whistles and Cuban records to produce a sound that no music school had taught him. Ilaiyaraaja, a Dalit boy from a Theni village, picked up the classical guitar and the symphonic palette of European music and folded them into the Tamil ear. All these men came up through the cracks.
Lata Mangeshkar supported her family after her father’s early death and recorded in more than 36 languages over a career spanning eight decades. Asha Bhosle took on the cabaret song, the disco number, and the daring murmur to become a rage. Mohammed Rafi sang the bhajan and the qawwali with the same pain. Kishore Kumar, who could not read a notation, walked into a studio and made the song his own. S.P. Balasubrahmanyam recorded more than 40,000 songs across 16 languages. Yesudas, a Latin Catholic boy from Kerala’s Fort Kochi, became a beloved voice in the Hindu bhakti tradition.
What music does to us, neurologically, is something the researchers Daniel Levitin and Oliver Sacks have been writing about for two decades. Sacks’ Musicophilia is the gentlest and most useful book on the subject. He observes, again and again, that music reaches places in the human brain that language and even memory cannot. “Music can also evoke worlds very different from the personal, remembered worlds of events, people, places we have known.” Patients with advanced dementia who can no longer recognise their children will sing every word of a song they learned at 15. There is a circuitry we do not understand, and it does not seem to wear out.
Whether today’s music leave a similar deposit in some nephew’s mind 40 years from now? Every generation thinks the new gen’s music is noise. A generation thought R.D. Burman too modern, too radical, even vulgar. Within the streaming economy there is a flattening, no doubt—the algorithm rewards a certain three-minute average, a certain hook, a certain coldness. Watching Michael last week, with its sanitised arc and its careful avoidance of the difficult questions, you can see what the same logic does to the biopic.
But within and around that economy, in the hill towns of the north-east, in the Sufi gatherings of Sindh and Punjab, in the home studios of young Malayali producers who know more about Hindustani ragas than their grandfathers did, music is being made with care. The good stuff is still there. It is just less centrally distributed.
And at any rate, if not one new song is recorded from tomorrow morning, if the studios shut down and playback singers lay down their microphones, and the algorithm eats itself, there is still enough Rafi, enough Lata, Yesudas, Asha, Balamuralikrishna, Bhupen Hazarika, SPB and Pattukkottai, recorded across the last hundred years, to outlast any one human ear. We will not get through it. We don’t have time. That, when one thinks about it, is the small consolation of a short life. The library is bigger than the reader.
Wishing you a week that stays in tune and full of music, laughter, and the odd pop moment you can’t shake off. After reading our Asha tributes, tell me your favourite song. Mine is “Chain se humko kabhi”.
Jinoy Jose P.
Digital Editor, Frontline