Arnold argues that film composers creatively united diverse intra- and international styles into one that had pan-national appeal, resisting both Western hegemony and traditionalist rigidity to 234ĭigitizing the national imaginary construct an ‘integrated, eclectic music … drawing upon native forms of music, dance and drama with a new outlet for musical experimentation and syncretism’ (Arnold 1988: 187). Arnold’s (1988) and Booth’s (2000) accounts are more fruitful in this respect. There is no real analysis of how the pre-1975 studio system fostered this hybrid aesthetic to garner a transregional appeal before the advent of cassettes. The Bombay studio system gathered music directors from diverse regional backgrounds who adapted many ‘folk’ and light classical styles (Arnold 1988: 186 Ranade 2006: 151). This analysis, however, largely ignores the syncretism of older film music.
In Manuel’s account, the first period created a homogenized national style that mar- ginalized folk styles, linked to a disruption and decay of community, while the second period is more heterogeneous and democratically oriented, linked to the propagation of plural regional identities and community affiliations (ibid.: 37). Peter Manuel offers a dualistic chronological schema that locates the 1970s as a period of change from the oligopoly of a few producers, music directors and singers, centrally based in Bombay, to a looser system with diverse regionally located producers enabled by the advent of cheap cassette technology, which challenged the hegemony of Bombay film music (Manuel 1993: 2). The history of Hindi film music evidences shifting relations with other musical styles or genres. The same aesthetic tendency may situationally correspond to different narrative strategies, and the relation between the semiotics of music and the politics of narration is contextually variable.
As I hope to demonstrate, this differential approach is useful to analyze how film songs evidence varying tendencies and strategies of hybridization, but these modalities cannot always be fixed in terms of political valences (like ‘forced assimilation’ vs. Shohat distin- guishes between ‘diverse modalities of hybridity,’ such as ‘forced assimilation, internalized self- dejection, political cooptation, social conformism, cultural mimicry and creative transcendence’ (ibid.: 110). While Homi Bhabha reads hybridity in terms of the subversive mimicry of dominant colonial discourse (Bhabha 1985, 1994), Ella Shohat critiques overly generalized conceptions of hybridity, which ‘must be examined in a non-universalizing, differential manner’ (Shohat 1992: 110). A debated term within postcolonial studies, hybridity has been broadly defined as ‘the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization’ (Ashcroft et al. Technology and musical hybridity across pre- and post-liberalization periods An elucidation of hybridity as an analytical concept may be useful here. This could be seen as continuing the long-standing attempt of Hindi films and music to fashion (trans)national styles that could also be marketed as authentically Indian, encompassing a variety of locations through their stylistic hybridity.
The popularity of remixed north Indian ‘folk’ styles such as bhangra, the reincarnation of the Sufi classical traditions such as qawwali as ‘Sufi rock’ and its incorporation into Hindi film music,9 and the cinematic success of ‘folk’ singers like Ila Arun or Kailash Kher could all be cited as examples of this phenomenon. Music directors, while using the latest studio technologies and updating themselves vis-à-vis globally disseminated genres like hip hop and techno, have yet turned to ‘folk’ or semi-classical genres both to market their appeal in terms of indigeneity or tradition, and to fashion hybrid musical styles. This is evidenced in the aforementioned ‘multiplex’ films dealing with metropolitan contexts within India,7 as well as films set among NRIs in Western metropolitan centers.8 While this seems to indicate an aspirational integration into global capitalism and mediascapes of the post-Cold War neoliberal period, we also see the simultaneous reappropriation of musical cultures and styles marked as ‘folk’ or ‘regional,’ with many film songs and singers projecting markers of indigeneity, rusticity and tradition. Aniruddha Dutta metropolitan lifestyles (Mazzarella 2004: 1).