Religion, gossip, narrative conventions and the construction of meaning in Hindi film songs

Abstract

Introduction

The commercial Hindi language cinema is among the largest and oldest music film traditions on the planet. One of the most widely remarked and inflexible conventions of this highly stylised popular film genre is the regular appearance of song and dance scenes in almost every commercial Hindi film. A huge body of over 40,000 film songs (filmī gīt, as they are known in Hindi) has grown along with the thousands of Hindi sound films produced since 1931; unlike the more recent development of music video in the west, Hindi film songs have been intimately connected with larger narrative traditions and visual images from their very inception. Filmī gīt comprise one of the most intensely consumed popular music repertoires on the planet. Across the range of visual and sound media and on into live performance, the audience for film song must be numbered in the hundreds of millions throughout the South Asian subcontinent and diaspora.