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Democratizing Indian Popular Music: From Cassette Culture to Democratizing Indian Popular Music: From Cassette Culture to
the Digital Era the Digital Era
Peter L. Manuel
CUNY Graduate Center
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14
Democratizing Indian Popular Music
From Cassette Culture to the Digital Era
Peter Manuel
e history of Indian popular music constitutes in itself a signicant
development in modern culture, as this set of genres—especially but
not only in their Bollywood forms—have been cherished by hundreds
of millions of listeners not only in South Asia but internationally
as well. At the same time, the trajectory of Indian popular music
represents a dramatic case study of media culture as well, as its patterns
of ownership, consumption, and even musical structures themselves
have been conditioned by technological changes. Most striking is
the way that a highly monopolized, streamlined, and homogeneous
popular music culture dominated for several decades by Bollywood
gave way in the 1980s and 1990s to a dramatically decentralized
and heterogeneous commercial music culture due to the impact of
new technologies—initially, cassettes. As India entered the digital era
in the new millennium, other media, from VCDs to YouTube, have
intensied the general process of democratization, while adding their
own distinctive dimensions. is chapter (drawing extensively on an
earlier publication
1
) surveys the trajectory of Indian popular music
culture through the cassette era and makes brief observations about
more recent developments in the digital age.
From the early 1970s the advent of cassette technology began to
profoundly aect music industries worldwide. is inuence was
particularly marked in the developing world, where cassettes came to
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 357
replace vinyl records and extended their impact into regions, classes,
and genres previously uninuenced by the mass media. Cassettes served
to decentralize and democratize both production and consumption,
thereby counterbalancing the previous tendency toward oligopolization
of international commercial recording industries.
POPULAR MUSIC AND MEDIA CULTURE IN INDIA
BEFORE 1980
An outstanding feature of the Indian music industry until the 1980s was
its relatively undemocratic structure, as control of its production was
concentrated in a tiny and unrepresentative sector of the population.
From the mid-1930s until the advent of cassettes, commercial lm
music accounted, by informed estimates, for at least 90 per cent of record
output. e dominant entity throughout was the Hindi lm industry,
whose production itself lay in the hands of a small number of rms,
producers, actors, and music producers. Given the vast output of lm
songs, a certain amount of stylistic and regional variety was naturally
evident. Nevertheless, the stylistic homogeneity of the vast majority
of lm songs was far more remarkable, and was most conspicuous in
the overwhelming hegemony, for over 30 years, of ve singers—Asha
Bhosle, Kishore Kumar, Mohammad Ra, Mukesh, and above all, Lata
Mangeshkar. Since vocal style in music is such an essential and basic
aesthetic identity marker, the stylistic uniformity of these singers—
especially of Lata’s several thousand songs—stands in dramatic contrast
to the wide diversity of folk music and singing styles throughout north
India.
2
Further, while regional folk music did contribute to many lm
songs, most lm composers and musicians avoided recognizable folk
elements in an attempt to appeal to a pan-regional market (Chandravarkar
1987: 8). As a result, the overwhelming majority of songs adhered to a
distinctive mainstream style, which, although itself eclectic, was hardly
representative of the variety of North Indian folk music. Song texts
were equally limited in subject matter, dealing overwhelmingly with
sentimental love, again in contrast to regional folksong. In this respect,
however, they were suited to the romantic and escapist nature of Indian
movies themselves, which generally avoided realistic portrayals of the
harsh poverty so basic to much Indian life.
Popular music was apprehended largely through cinema and the
radio; only the urban middle and upper classes had extensive access to
records, due to the expense and power requirements of record players.
358 Ravi Sundaram
His Master’s Voice [(HMV, of Electric and Musical Industries Ltd
(EMI)] enjoyed a virtually complete monopoly in the record industry,
having absorbed or eliminated regional rivals in the early decades of its
appearance in India.
While charming melodies, moving lyrics, and professional production
standards abounded in Indian popular music, what was largely missing
was any sort of armation of a sense of community, whether on the
level of region, caste, class, gender, or ethnicity. It is such a sense of
community that may be said to be an especially vital aspect of folk
songs, which celebrate collective community values through shared,
albeit specic performance norms and contexts, musical style, textual
references, and language. Insofar as lm music succeeded in appealing
to, if not creating, a homogeneous mass market, it did so at the expense
of this armation of community, thereby, it could be argued, reinforcing
some of the alienating aspects of the cinematic fantasies in which it was
embedded.
ALTERNATIVES TO HIS MASTER’S VOICE
While commercial Indian music cassettes began appearing in the early
1970s, it was not until a decade later that they appeared in such quantities
as to restructure the entire music industry. In India as elsewhere, cassettes
and players were naturally preferable to records due to their portability,
durability, low cost, and simple power requirements. Aside from
these advantages, the timing of their spread in India was attributable
to another set of factors. First, the number of Indian guest workers
bringing ‘two-in-ones’ (radio-cassette players) from the Gulf states had
by the 1980s reached such a level that luxuries of this kind had become
familiar throughout the country. More importantly, in accordance with
the contemporary economic liberalization policies pursued by the ruling
Congress Party from around 1978, many of the import restrictions
which had inhibited the acquisition of cassette technology in the 1970s
were rescinded, thereby permitting the import of players and, more
importantly, facilitating the local manufacture of cassettes and players
with some foreign components. irdly, indigenous industry itself,
after decades of infant-industry protection, had improved to the point
that Indian manufacturers were belatedly able to produce presentable
cassettes and players, whether using some imported components or
not.
3
Finally, the aforementioned economic liberalization policies
considerably enhanced the purchasing power and general consumerism
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 359
of the middle classes and even some sectors of the lower-middle classes,
in the countryside as well as the cities. is development, among other
things, greatly contributed to the proliferation of televisions and cassettes
in slums and villages throughout the country.
e advent of cassette technology eectively restructured the music
industry in India. By the mid-1980s, cassettes had come to account
for some 95 per cent of the recorded music market, with records being
purchased only by wealthy audiophiles, radio stations, and cassette
pirates (who preferred using them as masters). e recording industry
monopoly formerly enjoyed by HMV (now Gramophone Company of
India, or ‘GramCo’) dwindled to less than 15 per cent of the market as
over 300 competitors entered the recording eld. While sales of lm
music remained strong, the market expanded so exponentially—by a
factor of 10 in the rst half of the 1980s
4
—that lm music came to
constitute only about half of the market, the remainder consisting of
regional folk and devotional music, and other forms of non-lmi, or in
industry parlance, ‘basic’ pop music.
In eect, the cassette revolution had denitively ended the hegemony
of GramCo, of the corporate music industry in general, of lm music,
of the Lata–Mukesh vocal style and of the uniform aesthetic of the
Bombay lm music producers which had been superimposed on a
few hundred million music listeners over the preceding 40 years. e
crucial factors were the relatively low expense of the cassette technology,
and especially its lowered production costs, that enabled small, ‘cottage’
cassette companies to proliferate throughout the country. e new
small labels tended to have local, specialized, regional markets to whose
diverse musical interests they were able and willing to respond in a
manner quite uncharacteristic of the monopolistic major recording
companies, which, as we have seen, prefer to address and, as much
as possible, to create a mass homogeneous market. In the process, the
backyard cassette companies have been energetically recording and
marketing all manner of regional ‘little traditions’ which had been
previously ignored by HMV and the lm music producers. Rather than
being oriented toward undierentiated lm-goers, most of the new
cassette-based musics were aimed at a bewildering variety of specic
target audiences, in terms of class, age, gender, ethnicity, region and, in
some cases, even occupation (for example, Punjabi truck drivers’ songs).
e smaller producers themselves have been varied in terms of their
region, religion, and insofar as many are lower-middle class, their class
backgrounds as well. Ownership of the means of musical production
360 Ravi Sundaram
thus became incomparably more diverse than before the cassette era. As
a result, the average, non-elite Indian is now, as never before, oered
the voices of his and her own community as mass-mediated alternatives
to His Master’s Voice.
By the early 1990s the cassette producers had come to vary greatly in
size, orientation, operating practices, and other parameters. On the one
hand have been the handful of major rms, namely, GramCo, which,
hampered by ineciency and inability to compete, relied primarily
on its back catalogue of lm music; CBS and a break-away rm,
Magnasound, which specialized in releases of Western music; Polygram’s
Music India Ltd (MIL, formerly Polydor); T-Series/Super Cassette
Industries (SCI), and a newer business founded by the entrepreneur
Gulshan Kumar (murdered, gangland-style, in 1997), with a diverse
catalogue now including much current lm music; Venus, a Bombay-
based concern with a similarly diverse repertoire; and TIPS, which
specialized in cover versions of pop songs. On the other hand have
been the smaller regional producers, which probably came to number
between 250 and 500 nationally.
5
ese themselves range in size from
regional folk/pop producers like Delhi’s Max, Sonotone, and Yuki, with
over a thousand releases each, to operations like Chandrabani Garhwal
Series, whose series, as of 1989, consisted of a single cassette. Beyond
this level emerged numerous provincial entrepreneurial individuals who
would record music and sell copies upon request out of their residences,
dubbing them with simple one-to-one setups.
TECHNOLOGY, FINANCING, AND PIRACY
e expenses and technical resources of the cassette producers naturally
varied in accordance with their size, audience orientation, and other
factors. Both large and small companies would have their own recording
studios and dubbing facilities, and/or they could rely on rented studios
and other duplicators. While a few of the better studios had such features
as 16-track recorders, in the 1990s most professional studios had only
four-track technology. Recorders were almost all imported; dubbing
machinery could be either imported, or might consist of one-to-four
duplicators made by indigenous and generally unlicensed companies.
Similarly, blank tape and cassette shells could either be imported, acquired
from indigenous makers, or, in the case of larger companies like T-Series,
manufactured by the rm itself; smaller producers could assemble the
cassettes by hand. Cassette recorders themselves would range from high-
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 361
delity products of Japanese-Indian ‘tie-ins’ (for example, Bush–Akai
and Orson–Sony) to locally made players, in which only the heads and
micro-motors would be imported.
Recording expenses varied widely. With studio charges and fees
for engineers and musicians, production of a 60-minute tape of mass-
market lm songs and Hindi pop in the 1990s music might on occasion
cost up to Rs 200,000. While the average recording expenses would be
closer to Rs 20,000, many recordings of folk music were produced for
considerably less. Cassette duplication would then proceed in accordance
with demand, with retailers often being able to return unsold tapes to
the manufacturer for re-recording (hence the absence of labels on many
regional cassette shells). Most cassettes would sell for around Rs 18;
HMV’s tapes typically ranged from Rs 24 to Rs 36. Tape delity ranged
from acceptable to worse, with poorer cassettes leaving oxide deposits
on tape heads and wearing out after a few listenings; customers learned
to request to listen to tapes before purchase to ensure that they are not
already defective.
Piracy, or the sale of unauthorized duplications of recordings,
plagued the cassette industry from its inception. e rst half of the
1980s was the worst period in this respect. Extant copyright laws were
unequipped to deal with cassette piracy, while the government showed
little interest in prosecuting oenders. HMV’s inability to reissue its old
lm hits provided the pirate producers with ample repertoire to market.
New companies faced onerous bureaucratic obstacles in legitimately
obtaining licences, including absurd export requirements. Due to high
government taxes on blank tape, and the myopic pricing policies of the
large cassette companies (especially HMV), legitimate tapes cost nearly
twice as much as pirate versions. Further, while most pirate cassettes were
of inferior quality, some, such as the tapes of Goanese music produced
and purchased in the Gulf states by guest workers, were actually superior
to the legitimate cassettes. By 1985, pirate cassettes were generally
estimated to account for 90 per cent of all tape sales. While most of the
piracy was perpetrated by small producers, the edgling T-Series was
widely accused of being a major culprit. Meanwhile, cassette stores and
dubbing kiosks proliferated throughout the country, recording favourite
songs selected by individual customers.
In the latter half of the 1980s, the situation improved somewhat.
Most legitimate producers lowered their prices, making pirate tapes
less competitive. e government, under increasing pressure from
the industry, reduced its various taxes and bureaucratic hindrances to
362 Ravi Sundaram
registration of new companies; more importantly, realizing the extent
of its tax losses, it enacted a more eective copyright act in 1984 and
intensied attempts at enforcement. Legal cover versions of the classic
hits became widely marketed. Consumers gradually became aware of
the advantages of buying legitimate tapes. As a result of these changes,
piracy, although still open and widespread, diminished considerably, at
least in relation to the market as a whole. In the absence of accurate
gures, in the early 1990s I estimated its share at roughly one third of
the market.
THE IMPACT OF CASSETTES ON MUSICAL TRENDS
e cassette vogue played a central role in the owering of a number of
commercial music styles of north India, especially the ‘non-lmi’ genres
that came to rival, if not surpass the popularity of lm music. Film
music, of course, has continued to be the single most dominant North
Indian genre, and cassettes naturally served to disseminate it considerably
more widely than before. Nevertheless, as I have suggested, by making
possible more diverse ownership of the means of musical production,
cassettes came to serve as vehicles for a set of heterogeneous genres
which have provided, on an unprecedented level, stylistic alternatives to
lm music. In the process, relatively new genres of stylized, commercial
popular musics arose in close association with cassettes. e following
discussion, rather than attempting a descriptive survey of these styles,
endeavours to outline the connection between their emergence and
cassette technology.
Ghazal
e Urdu ghazal has played an important part in North Indian culture
since the early eighteenth century. As a literary genre (consisting of
rhymed and metered couplets employing a standardized symbology and
aesthetic), it has been and remains widely cultivated among educated
and even many illiterate north Indians, especially Muslims. As a
musical genre, it emerged as a rich semi-classical style, popularized by
courtesans and, in the twentieth century, by light-classical singers of
‘respectable’ backgrounds. With the advent of lm music, a lmi style
of ghazal emerged, distinguished from its semi-classical antecedent by
characteristics typical of lm song in general, namely, ensemble interludes
between verses, occasional use of Western instruments and harmony,
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 363
absence of improvisation, and a standardized vocal style epitomized by
its main exponents, Talat Mehmood and a handful of other singers,
including, of course, Lata Mangeshkar. While the lm ghazal had
declined after Mehmood’s heyday in the 1950s, in the late 1970s a
new style of ghazal-song owered which was at once commercially
popular, distinct from the earlier lm and light-classical styles, and
lacking direct association with cinema. Indeed, the new crossover
ghazal, as popularized rst by Pakistanis Mehdi Hassan and Ghulam
Ali, was the rst widely successful popular music in South Asia which
was independent of cinema or, for that matter, radio. With its leisurely,
languorous tempo, its vaguely aristocratic ethos, its sentimental lyrics,
and soothing, unhurried melodies, the new ghazal, though disparaged
by purists as restaurant ambient music, came to acquire an audience
far wider than ghazal had ever had before. Much of the new ghazal’s
audience consisted of devotees of the formerly melodious lm songs
who were alienated by the recent lm music trend toward disco-oriented
styles more appropriate to the action-oriented masala (‘spice’) lms of
the 1980s. In the hands of the subsequent ghazal stars—Pankaj Udhas,
Anup Jalota, Jagjit and Chitra Singh, and others—the crossover ghazal
style became even more distinct, with its diluted Urdu, often shallow
and trite poetry, general absence or mediocrity of improvisation, and a
silky, non-percussive accompaniment and vocal style which rendered
it immediately recognizable. As the genre became ever more remote
from its semi-classical antecedent, ‘pop goes the ghazal’ soon became a
journalistic cliché.
What is signicant for the present study is the role that cassettes
played in the popularization of the crossover ghazal. e ghazal vogue
had gathered momentum by the late 1970s, but reached its apogee in
the rst half of the next decade, in tandem with the cassette boom. e
two trends, indeed, reinforced each other, at the expense of vinyl records
and lm music in general. Cassette producers in the rms most closely
associated with the ghazal vogue—GramCo and MIL—saw themselves
as not merely responding to popular demand, but actively promoting, if
not creating the trend. us, MIL vigorously pushed ghazal tapes partly
in order to outank cassette pirates by creating a market for a genre
distinguished by relatively high delity and an auent, yet mass audience
(unlike pirate cassettes, most of which consisted of poor-delity tapes of
lm hits aimed at lower-class buyers).
6
Similarly, a GramCo executive
related, ‘What became necessary [after the decline of melody-oriented
lm music] was to take ghazals and bhajans to a wider market, thus
364 Ravi Sundaram
simplifying them and making them more universally accepted.... Many
such trends can be created.’
7
While our informant was no doubt overstating the ability of the
music industry to create trends outright, it is clear that the deliberate
promotion of ghazal cassettes by the larger recording companies actively
helped popularize both the medium and the music. In the wake of
these developments, commercial cassettes were established as the most
dynamic sector of the music industry by the early 1980s, such that future
developments in the realm of Indian popular music were closely allied to
the new medium.
Devotional Music
If the crossover ghazal boom conrmed the transition from vinyl to cassette
recording, it was the unprecedented vogue of commercial versions of
devotional music that accompanied and fed the extension of the cassette
market beyond the urban middle classes. e devotional music trend did
not, of course, emerge from a vacuum. India, with its vast, diverse and
intensely religious population, continues to host an extraordinarily rich
variety of devotional music traditions. e most widespread of these have
been the various, often collectively performed songs associated with the
Hindu bhakti traditions, which celebrate personal devotion rather than
karma, caste, or formal ritual. Commercial lm versions of bhakti git had
been familiar for decades, and several lm bhajans and artis had acquired
the status of hits, being subsequently sung by devotees throughout the
country (such as the arti ‘Om Jai Jagdish Hare’ from the lm Purab aur
Paschim). Filmi versions of Muslim qawwali had also become a common
feature of Bombay movies. Further, record companies (primarily, of
course, GramCo) had traditionally come to time new releases with the
main Hindu festivals (especially the simultaneous Bengali Durga Puja,
Gujarati Navratri, and Maharashtrian Ganesh Puja), when the public
goes on gift-buying sprees. Nevertheless, the extent of the commercial
bhakti vogue in the early 1980s was quite unprecedented.
e immediate forerunner to the trend was the widely successful
series of recordings by Mukesh consisting of tasteful musical settings of
Tulsidas’s version of the Ramayanaa epic. Although rst released on LP
format, it was not until it was issued on cassette in the late 1970s that
this series achieved mass sales. e phenomenal popularity of subsequent
television serials of the Mahabharata and Ramayana epics played an
even more important role in promoting mass-mediated realizations of
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 365
religious works, including cassette recordings of devotional musics. As
with ghazals, however, the cassette medium itself played the crucial role in
popularizing commercial bhakti git. Cassette producers recognized that
a successful devotional cassette may enjoy a considerably longer ‘shelf
life’ than most other pop music releases, whose sales generally dwindle
after a few months. Further, producers saw that the country’s extant
devotional music traditions constituted a relatively untapped gold mine
of inestimable commercial potential. Accordingly, several commentators
opined that the vogue of pop bhakti music was due primarily to the
advent of cassettes rather than to any resurgence of religious fervour in
the country. us, for example, veteran bhajan singer Purshottam Das
stated: ‘Bhajans have always been popular in certain segments of our
society. But now the catchy tunes have been successful in attracting the
youth. Essentially, it is the cassette medium which is responsible for the
growing sales rather than growing interest.’
8
Similarly, a music journalist
argued, ‘Perhaps the real reason for this manic following of bhajans was
the spectacular rise of audio-visual electronic consumer goods and the
rise of the ghazal’.
9
e variety of commercially marketed devotional musics that
emerged in North India is remarkable. e most conspicuous genre has
been what may be described as a ‘mainstream’ or ‘stage’ bhajan style,
sung by a solo vocalist with light instrumental accompaniment. It
was this genre that started the bhakti boom, in the wake of Mukesh’s
Ramayana and, more importantly, the ghazal vogue. Hence it is not
surprising that in style, instrumentation and leading performers (Anup
Jalota, Pankaj Udhas), the mainstream pop bhajan had marked anities
with the crossover ghazal. While this sort of bhajan continues to enjoy
mass appeal, cassette producers subsequently marketed an extraordinary
variety of religious musics, which, needless to say, come incomparably
closer to representing the rich diversity of Indian devotional musics
than lm musics ever attempted to do. Predominant in the eld,
naturally, are sub-genres of Hindu devotional music, including musical
settings of traditional prayers (for example, Hanuman Chalisa, or the
epics), bhajans devoted to various cult leaders (such as Sai Baba), or to
deities (such as Santoshi Ma), bhajans sung in light-classical style by
classical vocalists like Kumar Gandharva, and all manner of old and
new songs in regional languages. Musics of other religions also came to
be well represented. Qawwali cassettes continue to sell, as do tapes of
semi-melodic discourses by Muslim religious leaders. Sikh devotional
songs—especially shabd gurbani—came to enjoy a large market (and are
366 Ravi Sundaram
remarkable for their avoidance of the stylistic commercialization typical
of many other devotional musics). Christian hymns, Jain bhajans, and
even Marathi Buddhist songs also established their own customers.
While most cassettes, including the mainstream bhajans, are
essentially for recreational listening, others are more functional in
intent and usage. Housewives, for example, may routinely play a
cassette of the Satyanarayan Katha during their occasional ritual
fasting, in place of inviting a pandit to chant the story, or reciting it
themselves. e important thing, in terms of spiritual benet, is that
the story be heard, regardless of whether one recites it oneself or listens
to it while doing housework.
Smaller cassette companies would frequently produce tapes for
specic festivals celebrated annually at shrines or temples. In the years
around 1990, for example, a edgling company in Lucknow would
produce a tape of songs connected with the annual festival in nearby
Deva Sharif, selling some Rs 12,000 worth at the event every year. Such
prots, of course, might be too small to interest the larger recording
companies, but would suce to keep many smaller producers in the
market. Indeed, aside from the appeal of bhajan superstars like Anup
Jalota and Hari Om Sharan, it is the ability of cassette producers to
represent the innumerable ‘little traditions’ that have accounted in
large part for the extent of the devotional music vogue. Perhaps due to
the virtually inexhaustible nature of these traditions, the commercial
bhakti boom, unlike that of the ghazal, shows no signs of abating
at present.
Versions and Parodies: Recycling the Classics
A third important genre in the contemporary cassette-based popular
music scene comprised cover versions of prior hit songs. Such recordings
could be grouped into two broad categories: in one case—that of
the cover version proper, or in modern Indian parlance, a ‘version’
recording—an extant song is re-recorded, generally by a dierent label,
with dierent vocalists; the second category consists of cases where a new
release uses the melody of an extant hit, but set to a new text. e latter
instance, of course, constitutes ‘parody’ (and is commonly referred to as
such in India). Parodies (a term in this usage lacking any comedic sense)
substituting new texts in the same language—a common practice in
modern lm music—are generally not classied in the ‘version’ category,
and lacking direct association with cassettes, will not be discussed in this
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 367
article. Of greater relevance here are those parodies substituting a new or
translated text in a dierent language from the original.
10
Like ghazal and devotional songs, cover versions and cross-language
parodies were neither new nor unique to Indian commercial music; for
that matter, the use of stock tunes is basic to folk music in India and
many other countries. Furthermore, since the mid-twentieth century
Indian folk musicians throughout the country have freely borrowed and
adapted lm melodies. Nevertheless, the extent of the current popularity
of commercial versions and parodies was quite unprecedented in India
and, to my own knowledge, unparalleled in any other country (with
the possible exception of Indonesia, for which see Yampolsky 1989).
e deluge of ‘version’ recordings covering classic lm hits came to
constitute a separate market category that occupied a sizeable niche in
most urban cassette stores. Further, every major hit song of recent years,
regardless of its original language, would spawn several parody versions
in regional languages.
A primary impetus for the vogue of cover versions was the inability
of GramCo to meet the demand for releases of its vast catalogue of past
lm songs. GramCo, by virtue of its longstanding virtual monopoly,
held the rights to essentially all lm songs recorded until the early
1970s. While many of these were forgettable and forgotten, many
others were still in demand, but were not being re-issued, largely due
to the company’s monopoly-bred ineciency. e advent of cassettes
and the subsequent emergence of competing producers provided, for the
rst time, a means of meeting this demand. T-Series founder Gulshan
Kumar was the rst to capitalize upon this situation; since the original
recordings were copyrighted by GramCo, he set out to produce ‘versions’
of the most popular classic lm hits. As the original vocalists were either
prohibitively expensive (Lata), deceased (Kishore, Talat, Mukesh), or
bound by contract obligations to GramCo, Kumar scouted college
talent shows for clone singers, coming up with a stable of inexpensive,
undiscovered vocalists. He then released an ongoing series of ‘version’
tapes entitled Yaaden (‘Memories’), whose labels acknowledged, in
small print, that the singers are not those of the original recordings.
e versions were recorded in stereo, using modern technology, and
thus oered considerably better delity than the originals. Other labels
followed suit, and the category of ‘version’ recordings boomed. Most
of these have been based on Hindi-Urdu lm songs, but some labels
specialized in oering regional-language versions of non-Hindi songs
(such as Sargam’s version series of past Marathi hits). While GramCo
368 Ravi Sundaram
belatedly began reissuing some of its back catalogue, its cassettes, as
noted above, remained considerably more expensive than those of other
labels, including versions.
Critics and acionados often complained that the version singers
were inferior to their models. Nevertheless, the wide sales of these
recordings suggest that the public, when given an alternative, was not
as exclusively xated on Lata and Kishore as lm producers have been.
e vogue of versions also illustrated how cassettes can contribute to
the decentralization of the music industry even where ownership of the
repertoire remains monopolized.
e boom of parody songs in regional languages is another
development intrinsically tied to cassettes and the diversication of
music industry ownership. Of course, Bombay lm music producers
had often borrowed melodies from regional folk music and given them
new or translated texts, generally in Hindi. But the advent of cassettes
and the decentralization of the music scene enabled this process to
occur on an unprecedented scale, and in reverse. First of all, the new
parody recordings were marketed independently of cinema, whether the
borrowed hit melodies originated in lm music or not. Secondly, the
parody songs generally contain new texts in regional languages, rather
than mainstream Hindi–Urdu. us, they have been aimed at regional
markets (Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, etc.) and in that sense have served
to promote linguistic diversity rather than the hegemony of Hindi–Urdu
in pop culture.
Regional Musics
While pop ghazals, bhajans, and version songs came to form new and
important components of the Indian popular music scene, it was the
commercial recordings of regional folk musics that came to constitute
the most signicant development within the music industry. By 1990,
regional folk musics or stylized versions thereof appeared to account for
around half of all cassette sales in north India.
11
Moreover, it was the
emergence of regional commercial musics which most clearly illustrated
and derived from the decentralization and democratization of the music
industry at the expense of Hindi-Urdu, corporate-produced lm music.
As with the other genres discussed above, commercial recordings of
non-lmi regional folk-pop musics had been extant for several decades
before the cassette boom, but they were limited in quantity and variety,
and their audience was largely restricted to urban middle-class consumers
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 369
who could aord record-players. Mostly they consisted of short, stylized
settings of lively folk songs, or new songs in folk style, accompanied
by instrumental ensembles playing pre-composed interludes between
verses. With the advent of cassettes, modernized versions of such songs
continued to sell, but then came to compete with an unprecedented
variety of other genres. Styles popular primarily among the lower classes,
previously largely ignored by the record industry, came to be represented
on cheap cassettes. Further, unrestricted by the time limits of 78 or 45
rpm records, cassettes could oer a wide diversity of genres which require
longer time to present, and are in many cases more representative of folk
music genres than the short songs formerly marketed on records. us,
for example, western Uttar Pradesh residents could purchase dozens of
cassettes of their cherished kathas, or narrative song-stories (especially
Alha and Dhola), representing dierent episodes sung by dierent
performers. Meanwhile, Rajasthani and Haryanvi listeners could choose
from a few hundred cassettes of old and new kathas in their own dialects.
Extended, narrative genres like Bhojpuri birha also came to be widely
marketed, along with shorter song forms like the Braj-bhasha rasiya,
which had previously been represented by fewer than a dozen records.
Even more dramatic was the vogue of commercial cassettes in
regional languages which had been essentially ignored by the record and
lm industries. For instance, Garhwal, Haryana and the Braj region,
all within 150 miles of Delhi, came to constitute lively markets for
cassettes in their own languages, with several producers, large and small,
issuing new releases each month. Most of these tapes consisted of either
traditional folk songs, or more often, new compositions in more or less
traditional style. Needless to say, while lm music sought to homogenize
its audience’s aesthetics, the cassette-based regional musics were able to
celebrate regional cultures and arm a local sense of community. Unlike
lm songs dealing exclusively with amorphous sentimental love, regional
song texts abound with references to local customs, lore, mores and even
contemporary socio-political events or issues.
Much of the new cassette-based regional music has resisted easy
classication into ‘folk’ or ‘popular’ categories. Many cassettes have
consisted of traditional genres recorded in straightforward traditional
style. Others are ‘modernized’ or ‘improved’ (as producers put it) by
the addition of untraditional instrumental accompaniments. Once
marketed, even traditional songs can sometimes be ‘discovered’ and
enjoy the ephemeral mass popularity of pop hits; for instance, the
Punjabi nonsense song ‘Tutuk Tutuk’, as recorded by the UK-based
370 Ravi Sundaram
Malkit Singh, sold over 500,000 copies. Such sales, however, are
highly unusual for regional folk music, and some indications suggest
that recordings of traditional folk music have declined since the early
boom of the cassette era. Several producers of regional folk cassettes told
me that the majority of their customers were of the older generations,
who were less interested in lm music than the young.
CASSETTES, STYLE, AND FILM MUSIC AESTHETICS
us far, this article has emphasized the ways in which the cassette-based
music industry diered from the lm music industry in oering a much
greater diversity of musics and styles, which more faithfully represented
the variety of north Indian genres and aesthetics. Nevertheless, the
eects of cassette technology were complex and contradictory, and in
some respects could be seen to reinforce, rather than negate, tendencies
manifest within the earlier, corporate-dominated Indian music industry.
Cassettes, after all, are commercial commodities whose production is
subject, in varying degrees, to the same constraints and incentives of
capitalist enterprises in general, such as goals of maximization of prot
and economies of scale. Accordingly, if lm music can be accused of
distorting consumers’ aesthetics by superimposing values deriving from
the inherent structure of the music industry, cassette-based musics could
be seen to perpetuate some of the same tendencies.
An initial constraint is that cassette producers, whether small or large,
will only market those genres that prove protable. us, for example,
because a market must have a certain minimum size, within a given
region it may be only certain genres, or certain styles of a given genre
that were marketed on cassette. A case in point is the commercial music
scene in the Braj area, around Mathura. Most cassettes here consisted of
rasiya, the single most popular folk music genre. Rasiya itself is rendered
in a variety of styles, including village women singing informally in the
evening, a dozen or more devotees singing responsorially in a temple,
a dangal (‘competition’) between two professional groups, a chorus
singing in the Hathrasi style inuenced by nautanki theatre, or a solo
professional accompanied by drum and harmonium. Rasiya commercial
cassettes, with a very few exceptions, presented only the latter kind of
format. Further, while many traditional rasiyas are devotional portrayals
of Krishna and Radha, the vast majority of rasiya cassettes have been
secular, spicy (masaledar) erotica. Some of the best singers continued
to go unrecorded because they sing in styles other than that favoured
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 371
by cassette companies. Producers also tended to avoid vocalists who
perform in peripheral, lesser dialects (for example, Mevati) with smaller
potential markets. us, while cassettes were able to oer incomparably
greater regional and stylistic variety than did lm music, there are limits
to the degree of diversity they could represent.
A particularly conspicuous characteristic of Indian cassette-based
popular musics was the tendency to eliminate improvization. is trend
is especially apparent in ghazal, whose traditional light-classical style was
based on bol banao, or improvized textual-melodic interpretation. While
several cassettes of Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali, and others did feature
some improvization, the majority, like earlier lm ghazals, have consisted
of purely pre-composed renditions whose appeal lay in the xed tune,
rather than in the singer’s skill at improvization. Similar trends could
be observed in other commercialized north Indian genres, suggesting
that the more a genre becomes dependent on the mass media, the less
improvization will be tolerated.
Similarly, cassettes tended to perpetuate the aforementioned practice
of ‘improving’ or ‘decorating’ songs with instrumental interludes
and accompaniments (frequently including chordal instruments). Of
course, many cassettes employed purely traditional instrumentation,
in cases where producers think their more traditional-minded listeners
would disapprove, or when they were disinclined or unable to pay for
extra musicians, arrangers and rehearsal time. But the trend toward
non-traditional instrumental accompaniments, already established in
lm music and radio broadcasts of folk music, was clearly being spread
by cassettes.
Another tendency of Indian popular musics that was reinforced by
cassettes was the promotion of short songs. While as mentioned above,
lengthy narrative song genres were widely marketed on cassette, other
more exible genres (for example, qawwali, rasiya, bhangra, ghazal, and
bhajan) tended to be compressed into four to six minute formats. One
producer of qawwali cassettes told me that in his experience, this format
was the rst thing customers looked for in a cassette. Whether deriving
from the inuence of record format, or from the desire to acquire
several tunes in a single purchase (the favourites of which can always
be replayed), the perpetuation of this custom on cassettes reinforces
the ‘sound bite’ aesthetic in popular musics and extends it to genres
previously uninuenced by the mass media.
While reinforcing a degree of stylistic and formal standardization,
cassettes provided a remarkable stimulus for the creation of new texts
372 Ravi Sundaram
and, in some cases, melodies. Many cassette companies, from T-Series
to several smaller producers interviewed, insisted that their performers,
regardless of genre, sing primarily new material, that is, material with
new lyrics. In the case of regional folk genres like rasiya, a considerable
amount of the familiar traditional repertoire may have been exhausted
in the rst years of the cassette boom, such that the producers’ demand
for new material kept several lyricists occupied (while generating
much verse that acionados nd forgettable). Insofar as novelty is a
virtue in itself, this aspect of cassette impact should not be regarded
as unwelcome.
Similarly, certain genres appeared to have acquired markedly greater
melodic variety in recent decades, although it is dicult to attribute this
development solely to the cassette boom, or, for that matter, to any other
specic factor. Modern renditions of Rajasthani kathas and the Braj-
bhasha dhola are both said to be considerably more sophisticated and
varied in their styles and melodic content than a generation ago. While
professionalism and mass media inuence in general appear to have
contributed to this development, the cassette-based commercialization
of these genres may well have accelerated the process. Another factor
related to this phenomenon was the aforementioned borrowing of lm
tunes, which, of course, had also become a common practice in north
Indian folk music well before the advent of cassettes. Cassettes not only
served as vehicles for such parody tunes, but may have intensied the
practice by increasing demand for new material.
In discussing how cassette technology may reinforce, rather than
oppose certain features of lm music and other related tendencies
within the Indian music industry, we may also reiterate that cassettes
were vehicles not only for the spread of lmi aesthetics and borrowed
lm tunes, but also of lm music itself. In the 1990s lm music still
accounted for around half of cassette sales. Even in stores in provincial
towns, roughly half the shelf space would often be devoted to lm
music. While cassette technology enabled other competing genres to
ourish, some of the same virtues which enabled this development
to occur—low cost, portability, etc.—also promoted the increase of
lm music sales, especially among the lower-middle classes and rural
dwellers. us, while lm music’s share of cassette sales as a whole
dropped signicantly, lm music sales themselves do not appear to
have declined, as the entire market for recorded music has expanded
so dramatically. In this sense, the impact of cassettes was contradictory.
(See Figures 14.1 to 14.3.)
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 373
Fi g u r e 14.1 Some Typical Regional Music Cassettes from the
1980s–90s
Source: From author’s personal collection.
Note: Bhojpuri sohar, sâvan, songs to Durga, and a volume of Mukesh’s Tulsi
Ramayana.
374 Ravi Sundaram
Fi g u r e 14.2 Lewd Bhojpuri Cassette Covers from around 1990
Source: From author’s personal collection.
Fi g u r e 14.3 A Typical Bhojpuri VCD Cover, Featuring the
Titillating Image of the ‘Mobile Wali’
Source: From author’s personal collection.
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 375
INDIAN POPULAR MUSIC GOES DIGITAL
Since the late 1980s the Indian popular music scene has entered the
digital age—unevenly and idiosyncratically, but with prodigious eects.
e impact of digital technologies on Indian popular music culture has
been diverse and profound, and merits expansive scholarly treatment.
is chapter will limit itself to a few cursory observations, relating in
particular to the core themes of decentralization and democratization.
In India, as elsewhere, the initial presence of digital consumer
technology came in the form of music compact discs. By around 1990
CDs had become the dominant audio format in the developed West,
replacing both vinyl and audio cassettes, which had exerted a less
dramatic impact on music culture than in India. Since that period
audio CDs have occupied a stable niche in Indian music culture.
However, their relatively expensive nature has tended to limit their
domain to upper- and middle-class milieus, and to the associated
music genres, such as classical music, high-end Hindi pop, and of
course, lm music. CDs never established much presence in the realm
of regional folk-pop hybrids.
Instead of standard music CDs, two new digital formats came to
dominate the Indian popular music scene, with diverse sorts of eects.
One of these is audio CDs of MP3 les of songs. MP3, as most readers
are aware, is a digital audio format in which audio les are compressed
without excessive loss of delity. An MP3 disc can contain several times
as much music as a normal CD, and its audio delity is considerably
superior. Moreover, both production and duplication costs as well as
consumer playback equipment costs are even lower than those of audio
cassettes. A typical MP3 disc, whether of qawwali or regional folk-pop,
might retail for around Rs. 20–40, and contain a few hours of music.
Accordingly, MP3 discs have increasingly come to replace cassettes,
and many cassette companies (for example, ‘Gathani Cassettes’) have
switched to MP3 production, while retaining their original names.
Audio cassettes are still marketed for purchase by consumers who still
own cassette players, but cassettes are clearly going the way of vinyl.
MP3 discs can be seen essentially as occupying the place formerly held
by cassettes in the market, and being equally conducive to industry
decentralization.
Even more widespread than MP3 discs, and more strikingly new in
their ramications, are video compact discs, or VCDs. VCD consumer
technology started to be marketed in the late 1990s. In the more auent
376 Ravi Sundaram
developed world, VCDs could not compete with DVD video format,
which oered higher quality and longer run time. However, in the
developing world—especially Asia—VCDs became well established in
the early 2000s. In India, VCDs themselves are cheap, typically retailing
for Rs. 25–45, and ‘Walkman’-style players are themselves cheaper than
cassette players, and are easily plugged into the inexpensive televisions
that now abound throughout the country, including in lower-class
communities. While discs can be damaged by being scratched, both
they and players are tolerant of high humidity and generally well-suited
to Indian climate and conditions. ey can also be viewed in regions
or during periods when and where there are no television broadcasts
available. Most advantageous, of course, is that VCDs oer visual as well
as audio data. Music producers have thus found themselves able—and
indeed, obliged—to produce music videos. Unlike in the West, these
videos are not conceived primarily as promotional tools for audio
recordings, but as commercially marketed products in themselves. One
might think that video production costs would signicantly impact
retail prices, but surprisingly, such has not been the case. Rather, VCDs
market for roughly the same prices as MP3 discs, typically Rs. 30–50.
Essentially, video producers have been able to use digital production
techniques and cheap labor to generate picturizations that entertain
viewers without raising retail prices.
Indian VCDs can be seen to some extent as perpetuating trends
established earlier in popular music culture. On the most general level,
the videos themselves perpetuate the well-established tradition of song
picturization standard since the inception of Indian sound lm in
1931. Like cassettes and MP3 discs, they are inexpensive to produce
and purchase, and lend themselves well to decentralized, democratic
production by diverse regional and religious ‘cottage’ industries. A VCD
production company, indeed, might consist of no more than a producer
with a mobile phone, who contracts performers, rents studios, and
orders mass duplication of discs, colorful paper cover labels, and the
like. Just as cassettes could reinforce and revitalize diverse, specialized
forms of Indian vernacular music, so have VCDs enhanced this trend
by adding visual dimensions. A regional-language folksong tradition,
unprecedentedly disseminated on cassette, could now be marketed with
visuals portraying local garb, dances, scenery, and the like. Further, the
VCDs, like cassettes, are at once appreciated as democratic, decentralized
forms of cultural expression while disparaged for their often shoddy
quality and vulgar orientation.
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 377
In other respects, however, the ramications of music video format
inaugurated by VCDs are new. While Bollywood song and dance
scenes might constitute a sort of ideal model for many VCD producers,
most of the latter operate on shoestring budgets obliging them to be
more modest in their picturizations. As might be expected, standard
formulae soon emerged, such that most VCDs, especially on the lower-
budget end, follow what has become a set of familiar norms. A few
VCDs present live concert or stage footage, but the quantity of such
productions is limited by the preference for studio-recorded audio tracks.
More standard is to have the singers, or more photogenic dancers and
models, mouth the lyrics in lip-sync, Bollywood-style. Hence, a qawwali
VCD might show the group singing, with appropriate gesticulations,
in some ‘virtual’ studio setting, with various sorts of computer graphics
interspersed with stock footage of shrines, Mecca, and other religious
imagery. A regional-pop video could portray the vocalist ‘singing’
in various picturesque sites. Often, the video shows the one or two
supposed singers cavorting in a park, perhaps accompanied by dancers
gyrating predominantly in Bollywood style, though perhaps with some
choreographic elements more typical of regional tradition. Dancers’
attire might vary from traditional to contemporary Western, depending
on whether the VCD is a ‘family-oriented’ production or one aimed at
consenting adults, especially young men. Perhaps most engaging are
the various videos that dramatize the narrative content of the lyrics.
For example, the country bumpkin encountering the sophisticated,
scantily clad city girl, or the amorous newlyweds chang under the lack
of privacy in their village home.
One of the very few published studies of ‘VCD culture’ to date is Vishal
Rawlley’s (2007) online essay ‘Miss Use: A Survey of Raunchy Bhojpuri
Music Album Covers’, which also oers information on Bhojpuri VCDs
in general. Rawlley notes that much of Bhojpuri VCD production, like
the regional-language folk-pop cassettes I discussed in my book Cassette
Culture (1993), tends to consist of playfully spicy masala quintessentially
oriented toward young male rural migrants to the cities. Liberated from
village restrictions on comportment, exposed to new mass media images,
and yet still retaining aspects of their regional culture and language, the
VCD consumers are fed fantasies of ‘loose’ women in ‘two-piece’ outts,
dancing to chat-pate lokgeet (‘sweet-salty folksongs’) that are at once
fashionably modern and distinctively regional in language and tune.
Such VCDs become components of a ‘B-industry’ of vernacular urban
media comprising ‘cheaply made porn lms, horror icks, cheesy music
378 Ravi Sundaram
albums, pirated foreign lms’, and the like. As he notes, ‘this B-industry
shares a common pool of talent and facilities—music arrangers, editing
studios, publicity designers, etc.’ Accordingly, some VCDs bear an ‘A’
stamp indicating that they are for adult consumption only.
Such videos are unlikely to be shown on the numerous Indian TV
programs that now broadcast a wide variety of regional songs, especially
in the form of Indian Idol-type amateur competitions. In general, the
eects of stations like Zee TV on popular music culture merit further
study and are too prodigious to be considered here. e cheap VCDs—
whether raunchy Bhojpuri songs or pious Sikh shabd-gurbanis—also
contrast with the smaller number of more sophisticated music videos
that are produced, like their Western counterparts, as promotional
items accompanying commercial audio recordings. Rather than being
marketed to consumers, the videos are generally seen on television or the
Internet. ese are typically more glossy and elaborate productions, and
in some cases tasteful and self-consciously ‘arty’. A popular representative
video in the years around 2006 was that accompanying Rabbi Shergill’s
‘Bulla ki jana main kaun’ (‘Oh Bulla, who am I?’).
It remains to consider the extraordinary impact of the Internet on
popular music culture. While the vast majority of Indians cannot aord
computers or even access to them, a signicant minority—constituting
tens of millions of Indians and non-resident Indians (NRIs)—are
as enthusiastically ‘plugged in’ as are any consumers in the world.
Like other global music scenes, Indian popular music culture is now
enlivened by innumerable websites, online fanzines, and chat groups,
peer-to-peer (P2P) le-sharing networks, and global distribution
outlets. Collectively these at once serve to promote musical micro-
cultures while adding a new dimension of unity to Indian culture,
joining as never before the third-generation Sikh graduate student in
Vancouver with the dhoti-clad clerk sitting in some dusty, sweltering
Internet café in Patiala. Perhaps the most conspicuous medium for
such interactions is YouTube, of which South Asians have made
prodigious use. As many readers of this chapter are aware, YouTube
contains thousands on Indian postings, representing a wide variety of
music genres and formats. Aside from camcorder scenes from local
weddings and other festivities, particularly notable are the hundreds
of music shows from Zee TV and other programs, thousands of
Bollywood song-and-dance scenes, and other thousands of regional
folk-pop music videos uploaded from commercial VCDs. Of almost
equal ethnographic interest are the comments that viewers append
Democratizing Indian Popular Music 379
to YouTube uploads. In many cases, belying the cliché that ‘music
brings people together,’ such comments consist of pages of venomous
diatribes (typically Hindu versus Muslim, or Indian versus Pakistani),
set o by some remark, whether innocuous or deliberately provocative.
e YouTube comments, as a quintessential democratic-participant
medium, reect the full range of human thought about music, from
the inspiringly clever and sublime to the staggeringly ignorant and
sociopathic. YouTube, indeed, has come to constitute a quintessential
new medium, characterized by multi-vocal interaction, decentralized
input of content, and a level of diversity that is not only unprecedented
but was until a few years ago inconceivable.
NOTES
1. Manuel (1993 and especially 1991), from which this work draws
heavily. I use the term ‘popular music’ to comprehend all those genres, including
commercialized folk music, which are marketed as mass commodities and have
been stylistically aected by their association with the mass media.
2. us, while Lata may have recorded in over a dozen languages, she
cannot really be argued to have sung in more than one style.
3. Interview, Anil Chopra, editor of Playback and Fast Forward (a music
industry trade journal), March 1990.
4. See interview, Vijay Lazarus, Playback and Fast Forward, June 1986, p. 30.
5. Anil Chopra, in his interview in March 1990, estimated the number of
cassette companies at 500. A 1987 survey (cited in Playback and Fast Forward,
July 1987, p. 27) listed 256 producers. In 1990 I myself enumerated about 200
in selected regions of North India. Note that the record industry distinction
between ‘majors’, who own production and distribution as well as recording
facilities, and ‘indies’, who generally only record, is not meaningful in reference
to most cassette producers.
6. See, for example, interview, Vijay Lazarus.
7. Interview, GramCo manager Sanjeev Kohli, by Anil Chopra, Playback
and Fast Forward, August 1986, p. 31.
8. Interview, Purshottam Das, by M. Upadhyay, ‘e Bhajan Samrat’,
Playback and Fast Forward, July 1985, p. 15.
9. S. Lalitha, ‘e Business of Bhajans’, e Times of India, 1 October
1988.
10. See articles by music journalist and archivist V.A.K. Ranga Rao (1986)
for a sketch of the history of version recordings in Indian lm music.
11. Interview, Anil Chopra, March 1990. Accurate gures were unavailable
due to piracy, the unreliability of sales reports from the major companies, and
the absence of data from the smaller ones.
380 Ravi Sundaram
REFERENCES
Chandravarkar, B. 1987. ‘Tradition of Music in Indian Cinema’, Cinema in
India, March, pp. 8–11.
Manuel, P. 1991. ‘e Cassette Industry and Popular Music in North India’,
Popular Music, 10(1): 175–203.
. 1993. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ranga Rao, V.A.K. 1986. ‘Version Recordings: New Controversy, Old Issue’,
Playback and Fast Forward, 26–7 August and 29 September.
Rawlley, Vishal. ‘Miss Use: A Survey of Raunchy Bhojpuri Music Album
Covers’, in Tasweer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual
Culture. Available online at http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/66/
index_1.html (accessed on 26 September 2012).
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