Behind the Curtain:
Making music in Mumbai's film studios
by Gregory D Booth
Oxford University Press, 2009
If the high technology that governed the making of A R Rahman's Oscar-winning "Jai-Ho" in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is taken to be the tipping point of Indian music, the "Mozart of Madras" (as Time magazine referred to him) has put an end to what can be thought of as the arcadia of Indian music. Rahman has been ushering in a radical change in the sound and production process of film music right from his first film, Roja, in 1993. By utilising digital files, Rahman freed himself from the need to write out parts for oboes and other musical instruments; from having to schedule rehearsals and recordings; and from the expense of hiring orchestral musicians. In so doing, he might also have put a final end to the traditional studio system. Though digital musicians were already used in Bollywood before the advent of the 'magical technician', Rahman was the first to garner widespread critical and commercial acclaim for doing so. In this sense, as Gregory Booth puts it in this new work, Rahman's "use of that technology no doubt added momentum to the impetus for innovation, as those who saw him as either competition or a role model sought to imitate his success."
A telling story is that of Shankar Indorkar, an oboe player belonging to the old-world music school of R D Burman and Laxmikant-Pyarelal (the legendary duo of Laxmikant Shantaram Kudalkar and Pyarelal Ramprasad Sharma). At one point, Indorkar came to Rahman to get his playing sampled; Rahman asked him to play for about a half-hour, and kept the recorder on the entire time. At the end of the session, Indorkar was asked to pack up, never to be called again – Rahman now had him on his sampler, forever. Furthermore, a sampled oboe sound can play in ranges and at speeds that human players cannot. Booth, a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, considers Rahman's use of technology to be a crucial point in the evolution of Bollywood film music. In this case, new technology means less employment; but in a larger sense, Booth suggests that it has also helped Bollywood film music to 'arrive'. This is to say that, with greater access to Western musical instruments and technology – also keeping in mind the globalisation of Bollywood and the existence of a significant Indian diaspora – there is a larger audience for its music.
Heavily researched and much of it an oral history, Behind the Curtain offers a comprehensive account of the Bollywood film music industry from the late 1940s to the mid-1990s, the period before the advent of digital recording technologies. The central merit of the book is epitomised by the story of Anthony Gonsalves, one of the three fictional brothers in the 1977 film Amar Akbar Anthony, directed by Manmohan Desai. Anthony was played by Amitabh Bachchan, who bursts forth from a huge Easter egg at a Goan celebration, dressed in a caricature of Goan formal dress and sporting an absurdly large top hat and tails. In one of the comic scenes, Anthony sings "My name is Anthony Gonsalves", a song composed by Laxmikant-Pyarelal, with lyrics by Anand Bakshi.