When I worked for a short and interesting time at an infocom company, the vice president in charge of quality control picked up a mobile phone and waggled it at me. ?There are 84 different services and facilities on this phone. And do you know the one that gets used most, other than calling and texting? The ring tones.?
This was around the time the first polyphonic ring tones had come into existence. Now, it is quite ordinary to call the professor of English literature and be startled by Allah ke bande (Waisa bhi hota hai part II) or the fashion photographer and wonder at her choice of the title song from Khoya Khoya Chand as her ring tone.
Anna Morcom has written interestingly of these alternative lives of a Hindi film song. You will find no mention of her work in Ganesh Anantharaman?s Bollywood Melodies: A History of the Hindi Film Song. Greg Booth has done extensive work on the musicians. Not in. Naresh Fernandes has unearthed the identity of Anthony Gonsalves from the Amar Akbar Anthony song. Not in. Do you want to know the name of the idiot minister who banned the Hindi film song from All India Radio? Not to be found here. But then Anatharaman says it upfront: ?The effort is not so much to provide complete or objective information to the reader, as much as to convey my own subjective experience of the music all these people made. The opinions are mine, the choices on (sic) the personalities included in this book and those left out are mine too.?
We know this already. The 20th century rid us of the illusion that there can be an apolitical, disinterested and objective observer of events. Thus the history of an art form is going to be subjective. But when this subjectivity is not placed in its historical context, when the self is not implicated so that we can see the processes by which the choices were made, that?s when we wonder at the enterprise. All that we know about Anantharaman?s relationship with Hindi film music is contained in a single sentence: ?I myself woke up to Hindi film music way back in the early 1980s as Geeta Dutt?s Thandi hawa kali ghata (Mr & Mrs 55) hit me like a thunderbolt one evening, simultaneously ending my fascination for western pop music and beginning my enduring romance with Hindi film music.? But we can guess a few things.
?Here I come and there you hum,? Raju Bharatan wrote in what Anantharaman calls an incisive biography of Lata Mangeshkar. This seems to be the idea here. Anantharaman calls up a composer or a lyricist or a singer. He gives you a potted biography. He tells you his favourite songs by the person in question. You hum them in your head. You move on to the next person.
Oh yes, sometimes he tells you the raag on which it is based. This is the raagpatti school of writing about Hindi film music. Once the members of this school have decided that this song is Bhairavi and that song is Malkauns, the deed is done. Nothing else matters. Not the social history of the song, not the context in which it appeared, not the way in which it was consumed.
Of course, when melody vanishes, when the raag evaporates, they lose interest as well. Anantharaman dutifully works his way through the 1980s (as anyone would, they were a painful time) and the 1990s and the 2000s. He is happiest pottering around with Saigal and his imitators. But there?s not much you can learn from him that you haven?t already read in Ashok Da Ranade?s Hindi Film Song: Music without Boundaries or Manek Premchand?s Yesterday?s Melodies, Today?s Memories.
But if you haven?t got hold of either of those, if you already love Hindi film music and if you want to hear what Dev Anand (the least musically inclined of the Anand brothers since his films had rotten songs once he broke away) has to say about S D Burman, Anantharaman is your man.