CHAPTER ONE
When the Musicâs Over: A History of the Romantic Duet
In the final sequence of Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008), Jamal and Latikaâs lips freeze in a brief screen kiss. Almost immediately, Boyle goes to credits intercut with a Bollywood-style song-and-dance numberââJai Hoââthat enacts how this kiss feels to the long-suffering, long-separated sweethearts. This couple is twice constitutedâfirst through a kiss and then in the performance register of the romantic duet. By formally separating the kiss from the song, Boyle evokes the uneasy relationship between these modes of affection in popular Hindi cinema. By locating the kiss in the diegesis but consigning the song to the credits, this Bollywood-inspired global blockbuster revises the aesthetic codes of Hindi cinema where the song sequence rather than the kiss has historically functioned as an engine of couple-formation. I start with Boyleâs film because it captures fundamental shifts ongoing in New Bollywood cinema whereby the kiss, banished from the screen since the 1930s, is making a reappearance, while the song sequence, which has long served as the primary expressive device for constituting the romantic couple, is being sidelined. If âJai Hoâsâ extra-diegetic location references this gradual disappearance of the romantic duet as an engine of couple-formation, Jamal and Latika resemble a New Bollywood couple in other regards. Though he is Muslim and she is Hindu, their relationship is not thwarted by parental interdiction (they have none); nor do societal norms (they are waifs and command no social capital) inhibit their union. What temporarily comes in their way is chance and Salimâs (Jamalâs brother) illicit desire for Latika. Once a global game-show and Jamalâs âstreet credâ turn the slumdog into a millionaire, he can have the girl and kiss her too. Slumdog Millionaire thus cites the coupleâs emergence in New Bollywood cinema as private, nuclear, and typically located in urban space with weak links to family and community. This couple-form, I argue here, conjugates with an unfolding project of aesthetic reform whereby the song-and-dance sequence is no longer as ubiquitous as it once was. I explore two important periods in the conjunction of song and dance and couple-formation in the history of popular film. I track the emergence of the romantic duet in the first decade of sound and explore how it illuminates Hindi commercial cinemaâs relation to modernity, nationalism, and public culture. I then turn to a number of recent films to see how they, in turn, modify the song-and-dance sequencesâ relation to couple-formation. In brief, this chapter examines why the couple-form once conjugated with song and how this tie is now dissolving.
Sealed with a Song
From its very beginnings, the song-and-dance sequence has been a feature of Indian popular cinema. Rationales for the persistence of the performance sequence range from the culturalist (song and dance in Indian tradition) to the sociological and techno-industrial, though no single approach may be fully capable of explaining this enduring phenomenon.1 Song sequences come in a wide varietyâdevotional songs, songs celebrating festivals and rituals, âcabaretâ numbers staged in nightclubs, and so on. While such song situations can be naturalized (people after all do sing at parties, temples, or weddings) and thus folded into the narrative, the romantic duetâwhich is our focus hereâtends to break entirely free of the narrative milieu. It operates as an adjunct module within whose space sovereignty is accorded to the couple by means of the formal characteristics of the song sequence itself, its mode of production, and the extent of its circulation. These include the containment of the song sequence (it has a beginning and an end); its disregard for realist codes (it is not subject to the laws of continuity); its mode of production (highly diffuse with composer, lyricist, singers, musicians, actors, choreographer, director, and producer contributing to the end product); the convention of playback singing (the stars on-screen lip-synch to songs recorded by playback singers); and finally, its extra-cinematic life (on radio, TV, cassettes, CDs, as ringtones, in nightclubs, weddings, on the web).2
So while the song sequence might appear paratactical, excessive in relation to the narrative, I would suggest that what the song adds is so much more than a kiss. I make my case by tracking the emergence of the romantic duet in certain key films of the 1930s alongside critical and fan discourse around the celluloid fashioning of conjugality. In these discussions, the couple and their figuration become the grounds for debating broader issues such as cinemaâs implication in nationalism, its commercial imperatives, its âpublicnessâ as technology and art form, and its social effects as an agent of the modernity. In this decade, Indian cinema sought to legitimate itself by participating in the mainstream nationalist project; thus cinematic discourse was recast from âthe cosmopolitan mode of the 1920s to an increasingly bourgeois nationalist mode in the 1930s.â3 As a ânative enterpriseâ trying to competeâin the face of a colonial state hostile to itâwith imports from Hollywood and Britain, the film industry had impeccable swadeshi (lit., âof the nationâ) credentials. Yet, the nationalist elite were wary of the industryâs output on two counts: first, films were viewed as frivolous, sensation-based instances of a debased modernity; second, the increasing popularity of cinema as a mass medium made the colonial state and its nationalist adversaries alike anxious about its mobilizing power. One way to fix this public-relations problem was to improve the product and make it a worthy bearer of national culture, so that cinema could redirect its technological prowess to not only entertain but also enlighten the masses. One must view the debates around the aesthetics of coupling (i.e., song-versus-kiss), in the context of this quest by the film industry for greater legitimacy, while keeping in mind that the shape and extent of reform was also set by cinemaâs status as a profit-making enterprise.
The songâs emergence as an instrument of couple-formation, I suggest, helped resolve this push and pull. I illustrate this by examining in some detail song sequences from three early sound films, Nitin Boseâs Chandidas (1934), Franz Ostenâs Achhyut Kanya (The untouchable girl, 1936), and V. Shantaramâs Admi (Life is for living, 1939) to demonstrate that even though the song sequence has always been critiqued for its mimetic deficitâpeople do not sing and dance in real lifeâit enabled Hindi popular cinema to capture the particular stakes of couple-formation in India. In all three films social problems like casteism are approached through the framework of cross-caste romances, and although such transgressive conjugality might not always find a happy narrative resolution, the song sequences allow us to sensually experience the stakes of such coupling. Made by the three leading studios of the 1930sâNew Theatres in Kolkata,4 Bombay Talkies in Mumbai, and Prabhat in Puneâthese films tackle the most urgent social issue of decade, caste discrimination, and thus reveal the reformist leanings of the social film. Though, as shall see below, each film embraces a different ideology (from the uncompromising romanticism of Chandidas through the sentimental idealism of Achhyut Kanya to the radical realism of Admi ), their use of the song sequence to enact modes of conjugality whose time has not yet come coexists with a tragic narrative conclusion in which such couples do not find social sanction. Interestingly, the later films enter into intertextual relations with song sequences in the formerâthus illustrating the progressive consolidation of the romantic duet as well as the song sequencesâ tendency to break free of and circulate apart from the film. Indeed, the very fact that these couples find fulfillment only in song and dance points to the failure of the reformist film to enact a truly democratic union, thus reinforcing the conformism of a commercial cinema structured by elite nationalist ideologies. At the same time, the pleasure offered by the romantic duet, its extra-cinematic reach, and the citational relation of these sequences to each other ensure that the vision of conjugality offered by the song survives the narrative conclusion. By assembling the couple through the two representational modes of narrative and performance, popular film form provided a nationalist resolution to the âcouple questionâ even as it continued to draw upon cinemaâs technological capacity to figure modernity and conjure for the public the pleasure and promise of romantic love.
As a quintessential sign of the modern, romantic love is a favored subject of cinema globally, since film, a technology of modernity par excellence, is especially suited to embody couple-formation in a sensuous mode. The centrality of romance in Indian cinema must therefore be viewed in this light: as the technology was introduced to India, so was the celluloid couple. Cinematic explorations of love would serve as excursions into the ideas, concepts, habits, and techniques, as well as the sights and sounds of modernity. From the early days of sound (the first sound film was Alam Ara [Ardeshir Irani, 1931])âand even in the silent periodâcouple-formation emerged in Indian cinema as a key site for negotiating the still unconstituted national body.5 For instance, in the 1921 Bengali film Bilet Pherat (Foreign returned, N. C. Laharry), the Westernized heroâs unique views on love and matrimony make for some trenchant satire, while the Gujarati production Telephone Ni Taruni (The telephone girl, Homi Master, 1926) explores an interethnic marriage between a working girl and a leading lawyer. Films like Bhaneli Bhamini (Educated wife, Homi Master, 1927) and Gunsundari (Why husbands go astray, Chandulal Shah, 1927) connected womenâs education to more egalitarian conjugal relations, while Andhare Alo (The influence of love, Sisir Bhaduri and Naresh Mitra, 1922) and the silent Devdas (Naresh Mitra, 1928) put forth in the figures of the childhood lover and courtesan competing models of romantic desire.6 The reformist social filmâset in the present and dealing with contemporary problems like caste discrimination, modernization, female emancipation, urban life, alcoholism, gambling, and divorceâwas the emerging bourgeois genre of the 1930s and 1940s, and conjugality occupied its thematic core. Couple-formation across the lines of caste and ethnicityâthough doomed in the endâwas a way to imagine a more democratic social body, while romantic choice modeled not only subjective freedom but also forms of political sovereignty.7 Though the cinematic couple-form expressed what Madhava Prasad has called the âdesire for modernity,â it also had to figure in issues of cultural difference, that is, it had the charge of being simultaneously modern and Indian.8 What pressures did this double charge exert on Indian cinemaâs representation of conjugality? One might approach this question by looking at the face-off between the kiss and the song that occurred in the first two decades of the sound film.
Kisses were not unknown in Indian filmsâin fact the Bombay Talkies production Karma (1929) was infamous for a four-minute kissing scene between Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai (the film allegedly flopped despite this attraction)âbut clearly by 1940, they had fallen into disfavor, supplanted by the romantic duet.9 In March of 1940, a fan letter to the preeminent English-language film magazine Film India queried this development:10 âWhy is it that kissing is taking place in Western films but not in Indian films?â only to be told that âthe technique of love-making in the East is different. It does not need kisses to express love. Westerners believe love has to be seen to be believed. With the Indian, love does not need so obvious an advertisement.â11Aside from demonstrating the proactive role taken by film journals in using cinema to consolidate a nationalist pedagogy of romance, this exchange is one of many that reads the kiss or its absence in civilizational terms. Thus a nationalist cinema requires an aesthetic that favors, in matters of love at least, the oblique over the direct mode of representation. One should, no doubt, read this preference for the oblique mode as registering elite anxieties about on-screen carnality, enhanced through techniques like the close-up that transform the visual field and redistribute social power in disconcerting ways.12 Whatever the reasons for the disappearance of the kiss, the discursive production of this absence as a distinguishing feature of Indian cinema is significant. Another reader from Natal in South Africa protests that censoring the kiss interrupts narrative flow, âJust when they are so near, the artists are separated and the audience is required to imagine the rest.â13 Such obtrusive editing, he suggests, undermines cinema as a technology of the real, for it forces the viewer to conjure up rather than gaze upon the future course of screen intimacy.14 Since the kiss, in order to be visible and pleasurable, would require that the image be magnified through a close-up, realism is construed here not in terms of verisimilitude but of narrative relay. This reader clearly grasps that such editing is strategic rather than a function of underdeveloped filmmaking. A third reader poses the relation between the kiss and song as one of deliberate substitution, motivated by nationalist drives. He remarks, âIndian films use a duet to express love. Donât you think they would do well to use a kiss instead?â15 Threaded together, these three remarks suggest that the disappearance of the kiss and its replacement by song are somehow linked to the emergence of a national cinematic idiom that deliberately forecloses the kiss while siphoning off into song the visceral pleasures of cinema. This formal move, as indicated above, is linked to cinemaâs desire to recast itself as a nationalist-bourgeois enterprise.
The response of Film Indiaâs editor, Baburao Patil, to such fan queries clarifies that this national style deviates significantly from international norms as defined (mainly) by Hollywood cinema. He writes, âYes, a kiss would be the shortest cut, which perhaps the audience would also like it if it is passionately given. But what about the dialogue writer who wants to spit out love through the painted lips in the shape of senseless words? Then there are the censor boards with their unromantic inspectorsâwonât they fall to pieces if they see a good longwinded kiss on the screen? They havenât even kissed their wives.â16 Indeed, a kiss as an expression of love would not only render more sensory pleasure but would also be more real, rational, and economicalâafter all, song sequences do add considerably to the extraordinary length of the typical Hindi film and make them mimetically deficient. Patil, however, reads the replacement of kiss by song in productive termsâinvoking a mode of manufacture in which the film product is assembled through multiple attractions (âsenseless wordsâ add value to the film). Other commentators, such as Baburao Pendharkar, producer-director of Navyug Chitrapat Limited, also note how songs compromise narrative economy: âMore than often superfluous songs add to the footage. . . Songs must be the outburst of intense feelings, at its [sic] white heat point. . . How many intense spots (which have to be sung out) can there be in a picture?â Though Pendharkar concedes that love, âthe ruling subject of many of our social pictures,â needs songs to express white-hot intensity, he begs for some moderation in the interests of rational storytelling.17 Further, while there is no direct reference to the absent kiss here, Pendharkarâs figuresââintense feelings,â âwhite heat pointââevoke a metonymic relation between sex and song to suggest that the latter can provide the affective intensities of the on-screen kiss. Further, both Patil and PenÂdharkar alert us to the productive aspect of the song sequence, at both an industrial (providing employment to composers, lyricists, musicians) and discursive level. It is important to remember that the industry, already subject to punishing levies, had to keep its eye on the bottom line. Patilâs views on the kiss/song dialectic are noteworthy in other regards. In playfully alluding to the fusty inspector who has not even kissed his wife, he aligns representational interdictions with social habits and a regulatory regime acutely sensitive to the mobilizing power of cinema and thus wary of the âdangerousâ effects of on-screen intimacy on a mass audience. Censorshipâin this case the informal prohibition of the kissâas Ashish Rajyadaksha reminds us, is not only about excising a particular view but also ...