Tag Archives: Detective

It’s All About Context: Ten Songs

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When I create song lists, I always include only songs form films that I’ve watched. This is a rule I’ve imposed on myself, and it’s something that’s drawn questions, sometimes even accusatory. Why would I do that? I am asked.

Besides the fact that this is my blog (and so I get to govern it!), I have usually responded to that question by saying that some songs are best known in context.

Some songs. In fact, not very many. Most Hindi film songs—whether romantic, or depressed, or philosophical (or whatever other emotion)—are almost invariably neatly stitched together with the picturization. What’s happening onscreen is what’s echoed in the song.

Not always, though. There are a few songs where the song’s lyrics, or the picturization, are deceptive. If you don’t know the context, you may well end up interpreting the song as something very different from how it appears in the film.

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Ten of my favourite ship songs

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Many years ago, on this blog, I’d posted a list of boat songs. Boats happen to be fairly popular ‘platforms’ (so to say) for songs. For philosophical songs, for romantic songs, for songs of everything from despair to hope. There are songs on motorboats, on rafts, on rowboats and shikaras and whatnot. Many of Hindi cinema’s most famous songs from before the 70s were boat songs.

Much rarer, though, have been ship songs. Ships, after all, aren’t usually a part of most narratives (they’re less easily accessible, plus of course require a greater outlay on the part of whoever’s financing the film). Shipboard songs, I’ve realized, fall into a few fairly specific brackets. Either the singer(s) is/are employed on board a ship (as naval officers, deck hands, even pirates), or they are wealthy people travelling overseas. The latter, especially, became a more common theme in the late 1960s, when several films had a cruise as an important part of the storyline, invariably as a setting for a blossoming romance.

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Ten of my favourite Pradeep Kumar songs

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This post is ten days late. January 4, 2025 marked the 100th birth anniversary of an actor who, in an industry dominated by Punjabis, was one of just a handful of Bengali leading men. And, unlike—say, Biwasjit or Joy Mukherjee—to have a respectably long innings as an actor, playing lead roles right through the 50s and 60s, and then continuing as a character actor up to the last years of the 1900s. Impressive.

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Ten of my favourite ‘secondary romantic couple’ songs

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Think of ‘Hindi film song’ and chances are, you will think of a romantic song. A hero and a heroine, in a garden or under a moonlit sky, singing of their love for each other: the quintessential Hindi film song. But besides the heroes and heroines, there were often, too, the secondary couple. The man was often the hero’s sidekick, the best friend who helped him defeat the villain, overcome the objections of the disapproving father, and so on. The comic best pal’s love interest, too, was often of a similar bent of mind: good-hearted, nutty, comic in her own way. Also (oh so stereotypically) often an Anglo-Indian or a Goan, a girl who had few inhibitions about dancing and singing with her man.

The secondary romantic pair served several purposes. They provided, if not comic relief, at least some moments of light-heartedness (think Johnny Walker’s and Kumkum’s characters in the otherwise so grim Pyaasa). They brought a ray of hope, a refreshing change from the melodrama and seriousness that might plague the hero and heroine; they often helped in very concrete, practical ways. And, thankfully for us, they invariably had at least one romantic song to lip-sync to, and it was often just as good as the ‘main’ romantic songs. Some of these, in fact, are iconic songs in their own right.

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Ten of my favourite wind instrument songs

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This is a post that’s been in the works a long time. Several years back, I’d compiled a list of string instrument songs—songs where the person lip-syncing to the lyrics is also shown ‘playing’ a guitar, sitar, ektara, mandolin or other stringed instrument. I also did a post featuring, in a similar vein, percussion instruments of different kinds: castanets, tabla, bongos, and more. Here, then, after a very long gap, is the third post in the series. Wind instrument songs.

Wind instruments, as the name implies, are instruments that create a sound as a result of wind: mostly (not always) the player blows into them—the wind in the player’s lungs produces the sound, which is amplified, made to resonate, and varied by the use of various devices built into the instrument, such as resonators, holes, the length of the air column in the instrument, and so on. Or, in some cases, the player doesn’t use his or her breath but uses his or her hands to work bellows that draw air into the instrument.

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Ten of my favourite philosophical songs

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This post has been in the pipeline for a while. I had been thinking about compiling a list of philosophical songs from classic Hindi cinema, and blog reader Kamini Dey’s request for a post with that theme served to spur me on. I got distracted midway, and decided to do a cynical songs post, but here it is, finally: a list of ten philosophical songs from old Hindi cinema that I especially like.

Capture

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Ten of my favourite Geeta Dutt duets

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This was not the post I’d got planned for this week. But then, when so many people commenting on my Geeta Dutt solos post began writing about Geeta Dutt duets, I decided I may as well compile my list of the Geeta Dutt duets I love the most. After all, I knew I’d do this post, sooner or later. So why not now?

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Celebrating the Uncelebrated: Ten of my favourite songs by lesser-known composers

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This blog hosted a ‘Classic Bollywood Quiz’ a while back. In true film awards style (and we have pacifist to thank for this idea), everybody who submitted answers got a prize. The winner, Anoushka, got a tangible prize, and our runner-up, Anu Warrier, got the ‘dictate-a-list’ prize. For the others, I decided I’d dedicate one post each. This is the first of those posts; it’s dedicated to Karthik, who won the Just for the Heck of it Award (I assume full responsibility for that ghastly name; my creative juices had run dry by the time I got to naming this prize).

So, Karthik: this is for you, because though I’d thought vaguely that I’d do this list sometime, it was your suggestion (that comment on a long-ago post…) that spurred me on to get down to it. Enjoy!

Now, a few words about what this post entails. I’ve noticed that a lot of people, including those who do like old Hindi films and their music, tend to equate good music direction with the ‘greats’: Salil Choudhary, S D Burman, Shankar-Jaikishan, Madan Mohan, Roshan, O P Nayyar, Naushad… and so on. I did, too, till not too long ago. But a spate of watching some rather obscure films over the past decade or so has made me more aware of music directors who may not have made it big, but who certainly did not lack talent. In some cases, a couple of their songs became runaway hits. In some cases, the songs may not have been huge hits but are nevertheless very melodious.

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Ten of my favourite Hemant songs

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My maternal grandfather used to work in the Gramophone Company of India. Mummy grew up in a house full of LPs, and a lot of those—including dozens of albums from Hindi films of the 50’s and 60’s—ended up in our house. I grew up listening to music; but for a long time, I couldn’t tell one singer from another. The first singer whose voice I learnt to identify (I must have been about 11 or 12 at the time, I think) was Hemant.
Hemant Kumar Mukherjee was born on June 16, 1920, and went on to become one of Hindi cinema’s great music directors—and a singer with a very distinctive voice, rich and deep and sonorous.

So, as a birthday anniversary tribute: my ten favourite Hemant songs. These are all from the 50’s and 60’s, from films that I’ve seen, and in no particular order. Frankly, each song is a masterpiece in itself.

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Ten of my favourite Johnny Walker songs

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When I first began blogging about old cinema, my husband asked me, “So will you do a list of Johnny Walker’s songs sometime?” I thought about it (not long; I didn’t need to) and decided yes. Badruddin Jamaluddin Qazi, aka Johnny Walker, definitely deserves a ‘top ten’ list all his own. This, therefore, on what would have been his 83rd birthday, is a list of songs through which he frolics and flirts, teeters and tumbles—just, generally, keeps me glued to the screen. These are all from films of the 50’s and 60’s that I’ve seen, in no particular order.

Johnny Walker (ne Badruddin Jamaluddin Qazi)

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