The Audible Past, or What Remains of the Song-Sequence in New Bollywood Cinema

Jia zhangke’s platform (2000) is a film set in the late 1970s–1980s, the decade in which Den Xiaoping’s new economic policies were transforming coastal China but outlying provinces like Shanxi were still geographically, economically, and culturally distanced from these seismic changes.¹ This uneven development is vividly grasped in a scene, early in the film, where a group of townspeople along with the protagonists are in a darkened auditorium, their faces transfixed with enjoyment during a screening of Raj Kapoor’s 1951 classic Awara (Vagabond). Playing onscreen is the celebrated title song from the film—“Main Awara Hoon” (I Am a Vagabond)—where Raju (the Chaplinesque tramp protagonist), newly released from prison, picks a pocket, is seen doing so, and escapes in the duration of the song from an upscale urban neighborhood of bustling businesses and art deco mansions to the overcrowded and derelict slums at the outskirts of the city. The song’s lyrics assert the drifter hero’s right to wander, flouting laws and conventions, forsaking material well-being, in search of a deeper and more meaningful “freedom.” Zhangke’s skillful citation of the transgressive subjectivity performed by Raju during this song (legend has it that “Main Awara Hoon” was one of Chairman Mao’s favorites) comments on the plot of Zhangke’s film in which the protagonists, members of Peasant Culture Group of Fenyang, in the light of changing times and China’s imminent entry into the accelerated temporalities of global capitalism, need to reinvent themselves as the All-Star Rock ’n’ Breakdance Electronic Band. This song provides an interesting frame for the protagonists’ subsequent discovery of the ambiguous power of popular music simultaneously to express the affects of disenfranchised youth and subject the artist to commodity logic. At the same time, this citation from Awara also registers the diminishing value of older, not yet fully rationalized forms like the 1950s Hindi “social” and its disintegrated song-dance sequences in a world dominated by industrialized popular music.²

But this is not Zhangke’s only reference to Indian popular cinema. His 2004 film The World, set at a theme park that exhorts its visitors to “see the world without ever leaving Beijing!” opens with a scene in which migrant women entertainers dance in front of a fake Taj Mahal to the beat of “Jimmy Jimmy Aaja Aaja” (Jimmy, Jimmy, Come, Come), an infectious dance number from the 1982 Bollywood hit Disco Dancer (B. Subhash).³ The image of young Chinese women dressed in ghagracholis and Indian jewelry dancing nonchalantly to Bappi Lahiri’s pop masterpiece for the enjoyment of theme park visitors conjures no particular time or place but only registers a deracinated evocation of global exotica. Zhangke, an exquisite chronicler of post-globalization China, also captures in these two citations of the Bollywood song/song-dance sequence a historical transformation of this aesthetic feature of Hindi commercial film, its narrative agency, and its social effects.

Once an invariable formal element of popular Hindi cinema, the song/song-dance sequences that routinely punctuated the narrative (five or six times per film) are increasingly rare in New Bollywood cinema.⁴ In the films of the last decade or so, lip-synced song-sequences either have disappeared from the storyworld and retreated into the soundtrack to heighten emotional states or evoke moods, or else are diegetically staged in a highly self-conscious, nonconventional mode as if to underscore the song’s status as an extra/paratextual object meant to produce multiple circuits of value such as mobile ringtones, music downloads, or playlists in dance clubs. In the parlance of the industry, they are called “item numbers.” This aesthetic relocation of the song-sequence is accompanied by a reorientation in its temporality: where once it functioned as an agent of futurity, the song-sequence is now an engine of history—evoking social and cinematic pasts discarded by contemporary film. As New Bollywood cinema—so long an outlier by dint of its musical “excesses”—races to align itself with the globally dominant forms of Hollywood, the song...