Abstract
In the decade of the 1920s, when sound was beginning to be incorporated as part of the cinematic apparatus, most historical accounts observe an aesthetic rupture as silent films made the transition to talkies. This rupture is highlighted as a discontinuity in visual aesthetics as films moved away from pure visual representation. In these accounts, theater became a defining paradigm for incorporating sound within the cinematic frame and providing actors, writers, singers and others for this new need that had arisen. Wherever the form had already stabilized, any new elements in the technological apparatus could easily be explained in terms of its assimilation in the new form. Take the case of the American film industry: this moment of interruption, when new sound recording technologies were being incorporated in the mode of production, is historicized as the period when sound is adapted and stabilized in the classical narrative form, the form which had already become an industry standard by the late teens. But what about film industries where the form was still in the process of being imagined and realized, as in the case of Indian silent cinema? Critics like Ashish Rajadhyaksha1 attribute the development of a neotraditional cinematic form to the ongoing negotiations between local aesthetic and modern technologies of representation.
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Notes
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, in Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir and Vivek Dhareshwar (eds.) Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993): 47–82.
One important example is the indigenization of the violin in Carnatic music whose extensive history and evolution in the country is documented by Amanda Weidman. See Amanda J. Weidman, Singing the Classical Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007).
Kaushik Bhaumik, The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936 (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2001): 7.
Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005): 51.
The baijis were known by different names across the country, and Maciszewski mentions the problematic usage of the term ‘courtesan’ to describe these women. Before the early twentieth century, these traditions were known by a variety of names across India, names either representing their song and dance repertoires or the women themselves … Among the colonisers and, by early twentieth century, the reform-minded, urban Indian upper and middle classes, these women became generalised as courtesans, often synonymous with prostitutes. See Amelia Maciszewski, ‘North Indian Women Musicians and Their Words’, in Amlan Dasgupta (ed.) Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Calcutta: Thema, 2007): 161.
Stephen Hughes, ‘The Music Boom in Tamil South India: Gramophone, Radio and the Making of Mass Culture’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22 (2002): 445–473.
Urmila Bhirdikar quotes an incident concerning the way the patron— musician relationship was evolving in traditional spaces like the royal courts. Alladiya Khan, the maestro of Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, narrates an incident in the royal court of Baroda where his potential employment as a court musician was no longer dependent solely on his performance but on his ability to answer questions about music. ‘To survive in Baroda it seems was only through negotiating with the new forms of pedagogy … as well as the mler’s westernized administration and bureaucracy.’ Urmila Bhirdikar, ‘The Spread of North Indian Music in Maharashtra in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: Sociocultural Conditions of Production and Consumption’, in Amlan Dasgupta (ed.) Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Calcutta: Thema, 2007): 223.
During each of these periods, a number of systems of representation of moving images are in favor, depending on, among other things, the site and type of exhibition …[The] second period cinema ... qualifies as a period in terms of screening conditions, because it witnessed the gradual consolidation of practices that resulted in the organisation of the sound space of the theater. Jean Chateauvert and Andre Gaudreault, ‘The Noise of Spectators, or the Spectator as Additive to the Spectacle’, in Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds.) The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001): 183–191 (184).
Bhaskar Chandravarkar, ‘Sound in a Silent Era’, Cinema Vision India: Pioneers oflndian Cinema, The Silent Era 1 (1980): 117–119 (118).
Vikram Sampath, My Name Is Gauharjaan! The Life and Times of a Musician (New Delhi: Rupa, 2010): 82.
Gerry Ferrell, ‘The Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India: Historical, Social and Musical Perspectives’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology 2 (1993): 31–53 (39).
Satyajit Ray, ‘I Wish I Could Have Shown Them to You’, Cinema Vision India: Pioneers of Indian Cinema, The Silent Era 1 (1980): 6–7 (6).
G.N. Joshi, ‘A Concise History of the Phonograph Industry in India’, Popular Music 7 (May 1988): 147–156.
Yatindra Mishra, ‘The Bai and the Dawn of the Hindi Film Music (1925–45)’, Book Review XXXIII (Febmary 2009): 46–47;
and A Niazi, ‘Cinema and the Reinvention of the Self’, (2011).
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© 2014 Olympia Bhatt
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Bhatt, O. (2014). Musical Beginnings and Trends in 1920s Indian Cinema. In: Tieber, C., Windisch, A.K. (eds) The Sounds of Silent Films. Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410726_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410726_8
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