The Golden Era of Playback Singing

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In most film cultures, a singing star sings. In India, from the mid 1930s onward, the person you watch and the person you hear are usually two different people, and the second one is often more famous than the first. Playback singing, in which a song is recorded in a studio and then mimed to on camera, is not unique to India, but nowhere else has it produced a parallel celebrity system, a national record industry and a body of music that outlives the films it was written for.

How the technique arrived

India's first sound feature, Alam Ara, appeared in 1931 and was immediately followed by a flood of song heavy films, one of which is reported to have contained dozens of numbers. In those early years the actor sang live on set while musicians crouched just outside the frame, an arrangement that dictated everything: casting favoured trained singers over trained actors, camera movement was constrained by the microphone, and a single fluffed note ruined a take.

The solution came from New Theatres in Calcutta, where the sound recordist and director Nitin Bose worked out that the vocal could be pre recorded and played back on set. The technique was used in the studio's 1935 Bengali film Bhagya Chakra and its Hindi version Dhoop Chhaon, with music by Rai Chand Boral. The consequences were immediate and permanent. Actors no longer needed to sing, so the acting profession opened to people with no musical training, and singers no longer needed to be photogenic, so the singing profession opened to people who would never have been cast. Within a decade the two careers had separated almost completely, though hybrids such as K.L. Saigal and Suraiya, who both acted and sang, persisted into the 1940s.

The voices

The period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s is generally treated as the peak. Lata Mangeshkar, who began recording as a teenager and broke through with Aayega Aanewala from Mahal in 1949, established a high, clear, almost vibratoless tone that became the default sound of the Hindi film heroine for four decades. Her sister Asha Bhosle built a deliberately different career on rhythmic and cabaret material, particularly with the composer O.P. Nayyar and later R.D. Burman. Among men, Mohammed Rafi's flexibility let him serve the dignified register demanded by Dilip Kumar and the yelping athleticism required by Shammi Kapoor; Mukesh's plainer, slightly melancholy voice was attached almost permanently to Raj Kapoor; Kishore Kumar, largely self taught and a comic actor in his own right, sang for Dev Anand and then became the dominant male voice of the 1970s with Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan. Talat Mahmood brought a tremulous ghazal sensibility, Manna Dey handled the classically demanding pieces, and Geeta Dutt and Shamshad Begum supplied earthier textures that the industry gradually stopped asking for.

Voice matching became a craft in itself. Composers cast singers by star as much as by song, and audiences learned to accept a fifty year old singer emerging from a twenty year old face without a flicker of doubt. The southern industries developed their own parallel pantheon: Ghantasala in Telugu, T.M. Soundararajan in Tamil, P. Susheela and S. Janaki across several languages, and later K.J. Yesudas and S.P. Balasubrahmanyam, both of whom recorded in a remarkable number of languages.

Machines, radio and credit

The sound of the era is partly a product of its technology. Until multitrack recording became common in Indian studios in the 1970s, a song was captured live in one pass: singer, chorus and an orchestra that might run to dozens of players, all balanced in the room by the placement of microphones and by the engineer's judgement. Naushad, S.D. Burman, Shankar and Jaikishan, Salil Chowdhury, Madan Mohan and Roshan wrote for that constraint, and arrangers such as Sebastian D'Souza, working out of Bombay's Goan Catholic musical community, translated a composer's hummed tune into scored parts for a Western style orchestra. The reverberant halls used for recording, particularly the stage at Mehboob Studio, contributed a bloom that later digital productions have tried and failed to imitate.

Radio decided what became a hit. All India Radio under its information and broadcasting minister B.V. Keskar restricted film songs on the state network in the 1950s on the grounds that they were vulgar, with the entirely predictable result that Indian listeners tuned to Radio Ceylon instead. Binaca Geetmala, the film song countdown presented by Ameen Sayani, became a national institution broadcast from Colombo. All India Radio eventually capitulated and launched Vividh Bharati as a light entertainment service in the late 1950s.

Credit and money were contested throughout. Gramophone labels for years listed only the film and the character, not the singer, and it took sustained pressure, in which Lata Mangeshkar was prominent, before singers were named on records and in radio announcements. A separate and better documented dispute concerned royalties: Lata Mangeshkar argued that singers should receive a share of record sales, Mohammed Rafi took the view that a singer was paid for the session and had no further claim, and the disagreement was bitter enough that the two stopped recording duets together for a period in the 1960s before a reconciliation. The producers, unsurprisingly, sided with Rafi.

The golden era is usually said to close somewhere in the 1970s, as synthesisers, disco arrangements and a new generation of composers changed the texture, though R.D. Burman's best work belongs to that transition and is now as revered as anything that preceded it. The more consequential change came later, when the industry moved to digital recording, remixes and a system in which a film may use half a dozen composers and a dozen singers. What survives from the earlier period is a repertoire that Indian listeners still know by heart, sung by people most of them never saw.

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