Musical beginnings and trends in 1920s Indian cinema

Olympia Bhatt

pp. 123-138

in: Claus Tieber, Anna K. Windisch (eds), The sounds of silent films, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

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.