People and cultures sometimes define themselves in terms of their others: the people or cultures that they see as “different” or “foreign” to themselves. That difference emerges in a wide range of ways, some of which are musical. From time to time, this has been true of the music in Hindi cinema. 

This was called to my attention by the soundtrack to Khuda Gawah, Mukul Anand’s 1992 blockbuster starring Amitabh Bachchan and Sridevi, set in Afghanistan. The music was the work of the great composers Laxmikant-Pyarelal, then the highly successful seniors of Mumbai’s film music world, ruling from the fading glory of Mehboob Studios’ sound stage. For some of that soundtrack, they borrowed musical instruments and musical content from Afghanistan. Pyarelalji has explained to me that this was part of his ongoing interest in new musical instruments and sounds. The duo wanted to get the right sound for the Afghani setting and even called some local Pathan musicians to play Afghani music for them. The results of those sittings can be heard in the song-scene ‘Tu Mujhe Qabool’, among others.

Pyarelalji also borrowed music from another “Afghanistan”—the exotic, oriental mirage of the “Middle Eastern” or Arab world to which the composers of Hollywood background scores had contributed, over many decades, in films such as Casablanca (1942) or The Wind and the Lion (1975). Afghanistan is not the Middle East or even Arab; but the makers of background scores have never worried about those kinds of distinctions, nor have they worried unduly about cultural accuracy. The background music of Khuda Gawah is filled with the musical signs of an exotic “orient”. Those signs include a reliance on oboes and other double-reed instruments, rebabs/ouds, ornamented melodies and a consistent use of a distinctive mode/raga/maqam that has large gaps between the second and third (re and ga) and sixth and seventh (dha and ni) notes of the scale. Pyarelalji labelled such features “Hollywood Arab”. 

Another famous film composer, Ravi (Shankar Sharma), told me that musical materials (modes, instruments and so on) were the spices that flavoured music in particular ways. “Just like in Chinese food they use certain kinds of spices, so if you put that spice in, it has a Chinese taste. Instruments are also like that. If you have an Arab scene and you use [an] oboe, then it becomes Arab-sounding.” Ravi’s song, ‘Yama, Yama, Yama, Tu Parwana, Main Shama’, in China Town (1962) offered listeners another exotic “other” by borrowing spices considered to be Chinese, such as the Bhoopali-like mode that Hollywood and Bollywood both use to mean East Asia. In Love in Tokyo (1966), Shankar-Jaikishan used that same spice in ‘Sayonara’ to mean Japan, reinforcing the message with the use of the xylophone, a musical instrument that has often symbolised East Asia, in the same stereotypical way that oboes have evoked the Middle East. Other songs that paint musical pictures of India’s others will occur to fans of Hindi cinema. 

India’s commercial cinemas were among the most prolific and influential global cinemas of the 20th century; but they were also a cultural filter that absorbed all manner of materials and sounds from the rest of the world and presented them for Indian consumption. Sometimes in the process, they absorbed the stereotypes of the West along with the music. Mumbai’s composers, then, were involving themselves and their audiences (however indirectly) in the power dynamics of cultural representation. This was true no matter how many twists and turns the process took before it reached Indian cinemas. One of the more complex examples of this was explained to me by the late composer and arranger, Kersi Lord, who told me that the Shankar-Jaikishan hit, ‘Bin Dekhe Aur Bin Pehchane’, picturised on Dev Anand in Nasir Hussain’s 1961 Jab Pyar Kisi Se Hota Hai, had been borrowed from the oriental fantasies of a British composer named Ron Goodwin, whose 1959 LP, Music for an Arabian Night, was something of a hit, at least in Mumbai. Ironically, Goodwin had borrowed the music for his compositions directly from another LP featuring the Arabic songs of the Lebanese composers, the Rahbani Brothers, who themselves might have borrowed melodies from more traditional Arab sources. 

The melodies of this song, then, went from Lebanon to Britain to India and pulled this bit of India into the commercial and cultural dynamics of world culture and relationships. 

Gregory D. Booth is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Auckland and has been engaged in the study of Indian music and culture for more than 40 years. He is the author of two books, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios (OUP 2008) and Brass Baja: Stories from the World of Indian Wedding Bands (OUP 2005), as well as numerous articles on music and film industry in South Asia. He co-edited the 2014 OUP publication More than Bollywood – Studies in Indian Popular Music. He is currently studying India’s music and film culture-industries, focusing on a wide range of factors including intellectual property, technology, industrial structures, and the music-film relationship.