A SEMIOTIC- CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF ROMANTIC LOVE AND WOMANHOOD IN SELECT HINDI FILM SONGS OF 1950s AND 1960s
One of my special adventures in ‘Dilwalon ki Dilli’, since I have
shifted here, has been traveling by public transport: The Buses. The windows on
the driver’s seat are interestingly adorned to the core with bangles, danglers,
stickers depicting various Gods and aspects of Hinduism, with four speakers for
listening to music, while traveling. This music essentially comprises of
Bollywood songs, sometimes old, sometimes new (either through cassettes or CDs
or FM Radio); as also of regional music.
What I am hinting at is the fascinating affiliation of Hindi film songs
with the process of traveling, which largely remains true of northern parts of India
Talking about Hindi film songs, they are
linked to films not just by appearing in them, but also through the film images
to be found ubiquitously in India
A key link between
tradition and modernity, Bollywood remains a spectacular "carrier" of
Indian culture, parallels the rise of nationalism and its discourses and is
thus a significant medium through which sociocultural and political meanings
are produced and disseminated. It has its own unique visual culture that takes
off from reality but also helps shape our notions of reality. Songs, as
metanarratives, aid in visualizing a fantastic world, in the mind of the
spectator; more specifically in the context of creation of paradigms of
romantic love and thereby gender, in a derived way.
To go a step
further, according to structuralism, our knowledge of 'reality' is not only
coded but also conventional, that is, structured by and through conventions,
made up of signs and signifying practices. This is known as "the social
construction of reality”. The construction of such a space and construction of
meaning through language is the prime focus of the proposal. Words, as a part
of the song, construct an image, which get embedded in cultural memory of a
society over a period of historic time. The songs that construct a particular
image, that of Romantic Love between man and woman here, becomes a part of
cultural memory and engrips the young generation (in a certain cross section of
society. This is the same section, which become the mass consumers of
Bollywood-popular culture.
While this is true
of Bollywood in general, the proposal wishes to focus on the two decades-1950s
and 1960s- the decades of Nehruvian progress and optimism and the golden period
in Hindi music industry, with the likes of Kishore Kumar, Mohd. Rafi and Lata
Mangeshkar.
There is a need to
analyse these texts as representative of the codes and meaning-structures of
the mass-culture. Simple linguistic maneuvers generate extraordinary effects. Imagined,
limited, and constructed; they evoke a strong sense of emotion. They become the
grounds for the relationship between the meaning-conventions of literature and
the way in which a culture imagines reality have been set, and we can speak
more clearly of the relation of literary to cultural (or, 'human', or
'every-day') meanings.
The exercise is relevant because Bollywood is in the remix-phase for
quite some time now, and these old songs have become new for the contemporary
generation.
The various issues that can be addressed in the above context can be
summarized as follows:
- Explore the
various facets of the relationship between traveling and listening to
music on public transport, the buses and autorickshaws. There will be a
bid to understand the impact and effect of these songs-texts on the memory
of the spectator.
- Might this
have something to do with the ways in which ‘public’ memory arranges
itself in the entanglements between the ‘past’ and the ‘present’? In other
words, might this form of film circulation shape, and be shaped by, a
complex relation between cultural time and the image?
- Identify
and isolate relevant songs from the period.
- Investigate
the meaning making process of worlds that get created through these songs.
This is in specific relation to the notion of romantic love between lovers
and thereby construction of notion of womanhood.
- Investigate
the form of these songs as gendered image of cultural nationalism as
asserted as a "true" Indian identity. This nationalism is
ambiguous because, read in its historical and political specificities, it
paradoxically reasserts colonialist perceptions of
These issues will be investigated through relevant interviews with
people across the cross section of society. This will also involve interviews
with relevant personalities in the Hindi film industry. All the findings will
be well rooted in theoretical analysis of structuralism and Marxist Cultural
analysis.
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