Perhaps the most distinguishing features that comprise the identity of “Bollywood” are the conventions that surround the use of songs. The semi-diegetic song scene is ubiquitous in the commercial films produced in Mumbai (or in Chennai, Hyderabad, or Kolkata) and is at the heart of this cinema’s local popularity as well as its global reception. In this talk I argue that the unique dominance and popularity of Hindi film song in Indian culture arose through a specific and inter-connected set of cultural, political, and industrial conditions in which historical and modern aesthetics and narrative conventions operated in a uniquely and oddly favorable environment circa 1940-1990.

During this fifty-year period at least, conventional cinema dominated Indian popular culture. In this period, an amalgam of aesthetic and narrative conventions, adopted from classical Indian and contemporary foreign narrative and musical models, governed the use of song scenes. That amalgam helps explain the early prominence of songs in the Hindi cinema, as well as the nature and quality of their ongoing use. The persistence of those conventions, however, and film song’s long-lasting dominance of Indian popular culture are also outcomes of Independent India’s industrial and regulatory “ecology.” Even as we witness the globalization of “Bollywood” as a conventional song-oriented cinema, those conventions have been rendered obsolete by collapse of their environmental support structures in a newly industrialized and newly global Mumbai film industry.