We had to wait till 2009 before someone thought of knitting a song around the ubiquitous sound, dhantaran! This 'expression' does not have a Southasian origin as far as I am able to make out. Its provenance must instead lie in sound effects developed to indicate a dramatic turn of events on the silver screen. Perhaps the live accompaniment to silent film started it; but with the advent of magnetic sound there was no looking back in the manipulative use of audio to supplement the moving image.
The question is, how and why specifically dhantaran? The noise-of-choice of film directors and sound recordists surely has been a subject of research by someone, somewhere. It must have been experimentation of several years that showed that this particular phrase and sound, with its immediacy and tonality, was what was required to generate adrenalin in the sedentary cinema audience. American flicks used it with abandon, and soon Lahore was incorporating it, and Bombay continued the tradition.
What the Bombay director Vishal Bharadwaj has done is to hold up dhantaran – a sound rather than an articulated thought in word(s) – as itself a subject of scrutiny. He has crafted a song and sequence that is central to the dark film Kaminey, the late-summer hit of 2009. The lyrics are by the incredible Gulzar, and it is delivered as a disco number belted out by actor Shahid Kapoor and one other (the actual voices are of Sukhwinder Singh and Vishal Dadlani). What I have written here as dhantaran, the film's literature spells as dhan ta nan, but to each his own.
