Sound Revolution

This year happens to be the 75th year of the Indian talkie. On March 14, 1931, Ardeshir Irani released Alam Ara, the first full-length Indian sound film in Bombay.
In the next four years the transition from silent cinema to sound technology was complete. The coming of the talkie was not simply silent films learning to talk ��� it was a technological revolution that transformed film industries the world over.
In India, it brought about changes that gave the film industry its lasting features. Most crucially, it made Bombay/Hindi cinema synonymous with Indian cinema through relegation of other language cinemas to the status of 'regional cinemas'.
The ubiquitous Bollywood phenomenon was, in many ways, rooted in the talkie revolution. At a very basic level, talkie production was a more expensive proposition than silent films and called for an overhauling of existing systems of production and greater professionalism in business.
New sound studios were built, technology and technical personnel imported from the West, movie theatres updated with latest sound systems and a new lot of 'singing stars' contracted at unheard of prices.
Bombay being the country's commercial and industrial capital with the largest concentration of merchant capital, best handled the transition. The coming of the talkie not only made film-making more expensive, but also fragmented the film market.
While in the silent era the same production could be recycled in various parts of the subcontinent with different language sub-titles, the regional language talkie could find a substantial audience in specific sectors and pockets.
A Bengali talkie made in Calcutta, for instance, found its primary markets restricted to Bengal itself or to those areas outside Bengal which had a concentration of Bengalis.
The largest sweep of the market could now be made by talkies made in Hindi/Urdu, which were spoken and understood across much of north and north-western India.
For Bombay, which was already catering to the largest proportion of north Indian and Punjab markets in the silent era, the transition to an Urduised Hindi was the easiest.
In the 1920s, however, Bombay's primacy was keenly contested by Calcutta, the second most important centre of the Indian film industry, a competition which was increasingly marginalised with Bombay cinema assuming the stature of 'Indian' after the coming of sound.
During the transition to sound, some of the biggest established production houses of the silent era lost ground and new studios with entirely new approaches to popular culture became prominent in the first decade of the talkies.
The three most important new names of the talkie era were Bombay Talkies, New Theatres in Calcutta and Prabhat Films in Pune, whose distinctive styles gave Indian cinema some of its enduring categories.
New Theatres' 1935 hit Devdas, for instance, immortalised the figure of the lovelorn hero, which has since been reworked in almost every genre of popular cinema.
Bombay Talkies evolved a formula of sorts for a standardised Hindi film, which has since more or less held sway as the ubiquitous masala film. Of course, the talkie revolution was as much about film music.
Singing stars, such as Saigal and Noor Jehan, who became famous during this time, gave birth to a parallel music industry which has since become the biggest grosser in the Indian music market, with music rights now constituting one of the biggest revenue sources for the industry.
Today, this history of sound in cinema becomes all the more relevant because we seem to be poised at a turn of events when sound technology is setting itself up as an innovative resource for a globalising Bollywood.
In contemporary Bollywood, the category 'music designer' has fast caught up with the revered figure of music director.
In the words of an upcoming music composer, the designer is someone who works with international musicians and music groups to produce a cross-cultural fusion for the new brand of stylised Bollywood cinema aimed at the multiplex generation.
This music has its own life in nightclubs and discos, and is a large part of Bollywood's growing international presence. The University of Miami, for instance, has something called Global Rhythm devoted to Hindi film music, which has chosen three songs from Rang de Basanti for their upcoming A R Rahman special.
Rahman introduced the stylised soundtrack to Bollywood, and was responsible for initiating a cross-culture in film music, much before the Hollywood-like stylised films of the 2000s.
The current cross-culture of Bollywood has produced a reworking of the mandatory virginal voice of the Hindi film heroine, now occasionally reminiscent of the sensuous throatiness of the likes of Mukhtar Begum, who ruled the roost as the first generation of singing stars.
In many ways, the talkie revolution in Indian cinema seems to be reliving its past. Like in the early sound era, when the soundman was always on his toes to devise new techniques, experiment with sound has suddenly become the buzzword in an industry which is rewriting its rules.
The writer is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago.