Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios. (review)

Gregory Booth’s Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios is a unique and valuable contribution to our understanding of Hindi language film songs from the cinema of India. Hindi film songs comprise the largest segment of India’s popular music industry, and for decades this music has been enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people around the world. While the music itself is widely known in Indian culture, comparatively little is known among both the general public as well as scholars about the individual musicians who perform this music, their creative processes, and working conditions in the studios. Booth aims to fill this gap by presenting and analyzing accounts by musicians of their experiences and perceptions of their work in “making the popular music of the nation” (12).

The Indian film industry has major centers of production in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, and elsewhere. Many films are made in regional languages such as Bengali, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Tamil, Assamese, and others (Central Board of Film Certification 2009, 5), and are chiefly aimed at audiences that speak those languages. In most years, Hindi language films from Mumbai account for the largest number of films, and often have the biggest budgets. Moreover, the Hindi cinema has a far wider audience in part since Hindi is a second language to many people. There are also growing international markets for Indian cinema, with films exported to diasporic Indians as well as to non-Indian communities. Recently, foreign investments in Indian cinema have increased, and there is a growing film animation industry. Hindi film songs are thus an important component of a major global popular entertainment industry. Booth limits his study to the Mumbai film studios, commonly known as Bollywood, though we do learn of some musicians’ connections to other places.

Hindi films usually have a half-dozen or so music sequences, in which the narrative is interrupted with song and dance. These songs also circulate outside of the film, through television, radio, the Internet, games and contests, wedding bands, and other contexts. Many fans of Hindi film songs are likely to be able to associate a given song with the acting stars seen on the screen, as they dance and appear to sing the song. Audiences can probably also identify the singer whose voice is actually heard, and may know the name of the music director who is credited with composing the song, and perhaps that of the lyricist. “Playback” is the term for the process by which music is recorded separately, and then played back on the set as the song is filmed. While the playback singers are “the dominant musical voices of Indian popular culture” (46), the instrumental musicians are largely unknown and invisible, working and existing “behind the curtain” of the production of India’s foremost popular culture expression.

The main focus of Booth’s study is on the lives, social interactions, technology, and music associated with the musicians who composed, arranged, and performed music for Hindi film songs in Mumbai studios. The book’s title was suggested by several interview subjects who referred to their work as happening behind a curtain, out of view of the consumers of films and film music. For example, a tabla percussionist spoke of how their audiences do not perceive the efforts of film musicians in the “line” of studio work:

Sharafat Khan: You know the thing about being a musician in this line is that people never know what happens. We do such good work, but the public never sees behind the curtain, so they never know what we’ve done.

(5)

Through interviews and oral history, Booth aims to give voice to these otherwise anonymous studio musicians, and to show how they created playback music for...