Bollywood For Beginners: Parts 11-13

Note: This series was originally posted to my Bollywood blogspot blog and represents the cumulation of the wisdom of a decade or so spent in the Bollywood trenches. It would have last been edited in about 2014.

Bollywood for Beginners 11-13

MUSIC AND SONGS: 

Basic Song Types 

These posts were originally comprised of big lists of youtube links, a format that doesn’t translate well to text. I have combined and edited them down. Things like festival songs and dance club songs and mothers’ laments and ‘guys getting drunk and hanging out’ songs are all pretty self-explanatory, so I cut those parts.

Song type: “Hello, Audience, I’m the Hero! Cheer for me!”

The entrance of the hero is not quite as a big a deal in mainstream Bollywood as it used to be but hero entrance songs are still used from time to time and are worth knowing about. These songs typically come towards the beginning of a film and have the hero singing and dancing with hordes of junior artists (the filmi word for the professional extras who work in Bollywood) to a very energetic number set in the hero’s town or village. The point of these songs is to put the hero in some sort of context--Is he a college student? A layabout? A beloved member of the community?--and to get the audience all pumped up for the movie to come. Sometimes the amping up is helped along by friendly appearances (or cameos) from other stars.

Although the type of song isn’t used as regularly as it once was in Bollywood, it remains a key part of South Indian masala where the hero entrance song is a signal for audiences to get up and dance and whistle and throw confetti in the air. South Indian director Prabhudeva, who has been working in Bollywood for the last few years, has sparked a small resurgence of the song type with extremely catchy results. The onomatopoeic hero entrance songs “Chinta Ta Ta Chita Chita” (Rowdy Rathore, 2012), “Hud Hud Dabangg” (Dabangg, 2010) and “Tattad Tattad” (Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela, 2013) are all a direct result of his influence.

There is also a subgenre of “Hello, I’m the Heroine!” songs. Although they serve the same narrative function as “Hello, I’m the Hero!” songs, “Hello, I’m the Heroine!” songs typically differ in style and content. The heroine is usually at home or in a fantasy setting instead of being set in a town or village and she typically sings about her goals or dreams for the future rather than how great she is, a frequent theme of “Hello, I’m the Hero!” songs. As one might expect, these are typically used when the protagonist of the film is the heroine, although occasionally there is both a hero and heroine entrance song, like in the 2012 Tamil film Vettai. Because so much of that film revolved around the sibling bond, it ended up featuring both a hero entrance song with the heroes, a pair of brothers, and then followed it up with a heroine entrance song with the heroines, yes, a pair of sisters. 

Song type: “I’m in love with a girl who doesn’t know I exist!”

Another type of song that comes in the first part of a Bollywood film is the song about how the hero has just spotted this amazing girl who doesn’t know that he exists or does know he exists and hates him. Either he will follow her around and tease her or he will just fantasize about her. It’s important to remember this distinction because the fantasy element will not always be explicitly stated. Bollywood audiences are able to tell which is which from the way the heroine is treating her paramour but a viewer unused to the song type might get confused as to why a woman who had previously looked at the hero like he was garbage is now falling over him two seconds later.  

These teasing songs can seem like harmless fun but the harassment of women on the real city streets of India is a terrible problem and these types of songs, as well as the plots they are tied to, have come under a lot of criticism. Given the cutesy name of Eve Teasing, the term encompasses behavior ranging from catcalling to groping and worse. Girls who are subjected to this behavior not only have their freedom of movement severely limited--imagine waiting for the bus while men tried to grope you--not only have a miserable time trying to get from place to place but they can also have their reputations ruined, something that can have serious consequences when it comes to finding a job or even a marriage partner.

Some of the more aggressive courtships depicted in Bollywood films do border on this type of harassment and, to these Western eyes at least, sometimes it seems like the heroine gives into the romance not because she likes the hero but because she gets tired of his pursuit. But, to be fair, Bollywood films do take place in a heightened reality and the hero’s actions are not meant to be replicated in real life.

Heroines can also have a version of this type of song, although the “I’m in love with a guy who doesn’t know I exist” is usually set in a fantasy world where he not only does know she exists but is also quite fond of her particular charms.

Song type: "We’re In love!"

The modern stereotype for this kind of song has the couple transported into an unpopulated fantasy land that looks remarkably like the Swiss Alps. (The popularity of Switzerland as a filming location for these songs in the 1990s, lead directly to the uniquely Indian perception of Switzerland as a romantic paradise.) The secular world melts away and the couple becomes Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. These songs aren’t meant to be realistic and it is very important to remember that the couple hasn’t actually teleported from Mumbai to a nature reserve. The idea behind these songs is to capture the feeling of the first blush of love when you feel like you and your lover are the only two people in the universe. Where a Hollywood film focuses on the exterior of the relationship and might show a soft-focus sex scene or the couple walking on the beach, this style of Bollywood song shows us the couple’s inner feelings.

These songs are typically duets.

There is another subgenre of the “We’re in love!” song that could more accurately be titled “We’re having sex! Right now!” This type of song was more popular in older films made for broader audiences. Sex happened in those older films but because the market hadn’t yet fragmented, all the grannies and kids would have been watching the films so it couldn’t be shown explicitly. The solution was the “We’re having sex! Right now!” song, which tend to feature a lot of phallic looking flowers.

Song type: The item song

Item songs are sexy cabaret dance numbers done by guest performers called “item girls,” who were discussed in the section on Vamps. These can be placed almost anywhere in a film depending on the narrative needs but generally an item song will happen towards the end of a film, right before it ramps up into the climax. Item songs are typically just called “items,” a term that can also be used to describe any hot girl.