


In India, the nexus between the film, music and radio industry ensured that every film included several songs, which in turn were broadcast on the radio. By aligning their commercial interests, the broadcast media endorsed each other and propagated the same content. Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar B Dar (1985) and Vipin Vijay’s Hawa Mahal (2003) subversively employed this repetitive audio- visual excess produced by the mass-media industries to trace the impact of economic liberalisation and the uneasy transition of India into a capitalist society. In both films, the radio is used as a metonym to critique the aural experience in broadcast media. Whereas commercial cinema emphasises the visual, in these experimental films the acousmatic nature of the radio (as an unseen sound) helps to concentrate the focus on the auralscape. By inverting the conventions of commercial cinema and exploring different permutations, Swaroop and Vijay disrupt any possibility of synchrony between the audio and the visual track. This article intends to listen for the ways in which both films upend the hierarchies that plague film sound, allowing instead for a reduced mode of listening as theorised by Pierre Schaeffer and Michel Chion.



application/pdf
2036-461X
16180
33
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Tuning into the Radio in Experimental Films from India
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
19
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2019-10-01
2021-09-02
2019-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Gauri Nori
2019/10/01
English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
2036-461X
33
en
Tuning into the Radio in Experimental Films from India
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16180/16655
19
Tuning into the Radio in Experimental Films from India
Gauri Nori, English and Foreign Languages University,
Hyderabad




Abstract

   In India, the nexus between the film, music and radio industry ensured that
   every film included several songs, which in turn were broadcast on the radio. By
   aligning their commercial interests, the broadcast media endorsed each other
   and propagated the same content. Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar B Dar (1985) and
   Vipin Vijay’s Hawa Mahal (2003) subversively employed this repetitive audio-
   visual excess produced by the mass-media industries to trace the impact of
   economic liberalisation and the uneasy transition of India into a capitalist society.
   In both films, the radio is used as a metonym to critique the aural experience in
   broadcast media. Whereas commercial cinema emphasises the visual, in these
   experimental films the acousmatic nature of the radio (as an unseen sound)
   helps to concentrate the focus on the auralscape. By inverting the conventions
   of commercial cinema and exploring different permutations, Swaroop and Vijay
   disrupt any possibility of synchrony between the audio and the visual track. This
   article intends to listen for the ways in which both films upend the hierarchies
   that plague film sound, allowing instead for a reduced mode of listening as
   theorised by Pierre Schaeffer and Michel Chion.


Introduction

   Although the sense of hearing is first activated in the womb and vision
becomes possible only after birth, in the evolution of the cinematic medium,
this order was reversed. Films remained ‘silent’ for more than three decades
and when sound was finally synced to the visuals, it was regarded as a mere
accompaniment. Now, after a century of filmmaking, we cannot imagine a film
without sound and yet the audience continues to pay more attention to visual
storytelling than to auralscape. While it is profitable for conventional films
to preserve this status quo, avant-garde and experimental filmmakers have
sought to explore the possibilities of the medium (both visual and aural, often
separately) by challenging these preconceptions of the cinematic audience. For
instance, Mani Kaul, a pioneering avant-garde filmmaker, sought to formulate

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 33, Fall 2019
                                           Gauri Nori


a visual design that was deeply entrenched in the musical tenets of Dhrupad
(one of the oldest styles of Hindustani classical music).1 The next generation of
experimental filmmakers in India was more aware of the hegemony of ‘classical’
aesthetics and instead focused their investigations on the persuasiveness of
popular culture propelled by mass medias.2 Kamal Swaroop’s fictional film Om
Dar B Dar (1985) incorporates numerous radio tropes including film songs along
with their farmaishes,3 snippets of film dialogue and advertisement jingles to
evoke the emptiness that lies at the core of capitalistic excess. Similarly, Vipin
Vijay’s film essay Hawa Mahal (2004) tunes into various histories, memories
and events that are associated with the radio. More importantly, Vijay’s film
interrogates the evolution of broadcast media like the radio and film in the way
that each incorporates the conventions of the other. Through the trope of the
radio, both films critique the hierarchies and limitations of the aural experience
in commercial cinema. Adopting Pierre Schaeffer’s understanding of acousmatic
sounds and reduced mode of listening, along with Michel Chion’s theory of film
sound, this paper seeks to listen for ways in which both films effectively address
the lacuna of aural studies of cinema.
   Film studies has primarily been concerned with the visual aspects of cinema
and has rarely articulated an analysis of sound design.4 One reason for this may
be that the human mind tends to spontaneously fuse the audio and visual content
when they are played together, making it difficult for us to concentrate solely on
the aural track of the film. Swaroop and Vijay sought to prevent this synchresis5
by creating a disjunction between the audio and the visual. Their films also
address the emphasis on the verbal and the musical in commercial film sound.
Most films tend to depend on the dialogue to convey the story while music is
often used to cover up the visual flaws, drowning out any possibility of creatively
using ambient sounds. Instead, the cinematic experiments of Swaroop and Vijay
creatively reuse the audio-visual excess produced by commercial mass-medias to
produce a critique of it. Furthermore, conventional cinema encourages either a


1
  Mani Kaul, Uncloven space: Mani Kaul in conversation with Udayan Vajpeyi, trans. by Gurvinder
Singh (Quiver: New Delhi, 2013).
2
   Shai Heredia, ‘In conversation with Kamal Swaroop’, in The Cinema of Prayoga: Indian
Experimental Film and Video 1913-2006, ed. by Brad Butler and Karen Mirza (London: Wallflower
Press, 2006), pp. 101-106.
3
  Traditionally, in live music performances, farmaish were requests made by patrons for songs
they wished the artist to perform. Subsequently, radio listeners were encouraged to send in their
requests via postcards. The RJ would often read out the sender’s name and address before playing
the film song that was requested.
4
  For examples of studies having theorized aspects of film sound extensively, see James Buhler,
David Neumeyer, and Rob Deemer. Hearing the movies: music and sound in film history (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Brian Kane. Sound unseen: Acousmatic sound in theory
and practice (Oxford University Press, USA, 2014).
5
  ‘Synchresis’ is a term coined by Chion, who combined the words synchronism and synthesis, to
suggest the forging of an immediate relationship between something one sees and something one
hears at the same time.

94
                   Tuning into the Radio in Experimental Films from India


‘causal listening’ which seeks to connect the sound to its source or a ‘semantic
listening’ which allows languages to be decoded. Alternatively Schaeffer and
Chion have sought to adopt and analyse what they have called a ‘reduced mode
of listening’, which “focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of
its cause and of its meaning”.6 The term ‘reduced listening’ was first coined by
Schaeffer (2004 [1966]) who, inspired by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological
reductions, sought to build an awareness about and subsequently reduce our
dependency on causal and semantic listening.7 To encourage this reduced mode
of listening, Swaroop and Vijay highlight acousmatic sounds, like that of the
radio, where the source of the sound is hidden from the spectator’s sight, making
the soundtrack independent from the visuals. By inverting the conventions of
cinema, their films become an exercise in film phenomenology, pushing their
audiences to question their cinematic conditioning.


From Classical Music to Popular Film Songs on the Radio

   During the silent film era, American studios established their monopoly
over the Indian market through the construction of cinema theatres that only
screened foreign films.8 Within this context, the advent of sound challenged this
monopoly and contributed immensely to the development of the Indian film
industry because Indian audiences wanted to ‘hear’ films made in their own
languages.9 India has always had a strong oral tradition and songs were vital
to any kind of performance including religious ceremonies, folk drama and
staged theatre. Recognising this commercial potential, the music industry hired
musicians to produce box-set gramophone recordings of popular theatrical
musical dramas. The musicians in these recordings became prominent celebrities
overnight. Stephen Putnam Hughes demonstrates how the Tamil film industry
appropriated this celebrity status of the musical stars and borrowed the heritage
of classical music to gain popularity amongst the Indian upper classes.10 With
the rise of the talking films, the Indian film studios collaborated with the music
industry to produce filmed versions of the box set recordings. While the actors
of silent cinema required considerable training to adapt to the advancement in
technology, musicians were already used to having their voices recorded. Hence,


6
  Michel Chion, Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, trans. by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), p. 29.
7
   Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Acousmatics’, in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. by Christoph
Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 76–81.
8
   Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907-34,
(London: British Film Institute, 1985), p. 144.
9
   Kaushik Bhaumik, The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry,1913-1936 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
10
   Stephen Putnam Hughes, ‘Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone,
and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema’, The Journal of Asian Studies. 66.1 (2007), 3-34 (p. 25).

                                                                                             95
                                         Gauri Nori


early sound films of the 1930’s were almost entirely composed of songs. In this
way, traditional live musical performances were commodified into gramophone
recordings which in turn were incorporated into cinema in the form of film songs.
   Gregory Booth’s study of the evolution of the Hindi film song industry shed
light on the immense competition that existed between lyricists and musicians,
who were constantly expected to produce songs that could fit into any narrative.
Booth suggests that the aim to make songs fit outside of their initial filmic setting
was so that they could: ‘live an independent existence and take on personalized
emotional meanings that might supersede or simply ignore their dramatic
context’.11 This independence of the film songs from their role in the cinematic
narrative also proved useful when they were played on the radio which became
more widely available from the 1950’s onwards. Bhaskar Chandavarkar also found
that repetition was a key factor to the success of film songs. 12 The lyricists tended
to use a small set of words over and over, each time adding another connotation
that would broaden its definition. Chandavarkar further observed that the form
of the film song required that the first two lines called the mukhda or refrain
be repeated after each of the 3-4 antharas (three-line verses) and the last words
of each line had to rhyme. This constant repetition within the song with the
addition of a catchy melody made it possible to commit the lyrics to memory.
Unlike classical music, the repetitive formula of the film song also allowed for
repeated broadcasting on the radio. Since radio was present in a large number
of home, the songs reached a much larger audience. The radio could also be
consumed less attentively and so it became the constant background score to
household chores or social gatherings. If the song was popular among radio-
listening audiences then the film could be guaranteed success at the box office,
suggesting a direct correlation between the radio and the film audience. This
nexus between the radio and the film industry further established the popularity
of Hindi film songs.
   In 1953, the newly appointed minister of the Information and Broadcasting
Division (IB), Dr. B. V. Keskar, made the unpopular decision of banning film
songs from being broadcast on the All India Radio (AIR). Film songs were deemed
unworthy because of their innuendo-ridden lyrics and incorporation of Western
melodies. Instead, Keskar envisioned the radio as a tool to spread awareness of
and an appreciation for Indian classical music. According to David Lelyveld,
this decision reflected a desire, on the part of the government, to compensate
for the neglect that Indian music faced during the British colonisation as well
as a move to clampdown on musicians of the erstwhile Muslim rulers who, in
Keskar’s view, had diluted the religious force of Carnatic music by creating the



11
   Gregory D. Booth, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 31.
12
   Bhaskar Chandavarkar, ‘The Power of the Popular Film Song’, Cinema in India 4.2 (1990), 20-
25. (pp. 23-24).

96
                   Tuning into the Radio in Experimental Films from India


more secular variant Hindustani.13 Lelyveld identified that Hindi film songs often
mimicked the Hindustani rhythms, thereby fuelling the perception that this ban
was an attempt by the subdominant Hindu upper class to (re)assert its ideology.
14
   The new government also took complete control of the market by nationalising
all industries and levying heavy taxes on the private radio and film studios. In her
article ‘Re-embodying the Classical’, Shikha Jhingan identifies how the industry
officials pushed back against this ‘highbrow’ attitude of the state, arguing
instead that films finally made ‘classical’ music available to the common man.15
As it turned out, the radio audiences summarily rejected Keskar’s ‘educational’
impetus and switched over to a station that catered to their film song requests,
the privately-owned Radio Ceylon. The shift in popularity from public to private
radio stations was so pronounced that AIR’s ban lasted only five years (1953-
1957) before it was once again forced to play the week’s most popular film songs.
The immense popularity and the social impact of film songs could no longer be
denied.
   Previously, classical musicians depended on the patronage of the wealthy,
performing mostly to private audiences, and were expected to perform any
farmaish requested. The tradition of the farmaish continued with the patrons of
the radio sending their requests via postcards on which most often only the first
line of the film song was written. The radio jockeys would then announce the
name of the sender and the place from where it was posted. This democratisation
of the farmaish allowed everyone to have a few seconds of relative fame. Privately-
owned radio companies also favoured following the countdown system or song
requests format because it enabled them to play advertisements between two
songs. Here, broadcasting classical music presented an additional practical
problem: the compositions were not of fixed length and each piece was unique
to the person rendering it. Unlike set compositions in Western Classical music,
Indian Classical music encouraged a more fluid approach where the interpreter
of the piece, considered a maestro, would spontaneously meditate on a raaga
(melodic mode). AIR’s solution to this problem was to commission renowned
musicians such as Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustad Amjad Ali Khan to compose short
and light Hindustani pieces that were primarily aimed at displaying artistry.16
This approach proved popular among radio audiences, and from adhering to
the time limitations of gramophone recordings to composing light classical


13
   Carnatic is a system of music associated with the southern part of the Indian sub-continent
while Hindustani music is considered a North Indian musical style. Carnatic was developed in
the fifteenth and sixteenth century during Bhakti movement, while Hindustani synthesizes Vedic
chants with Persian Musiqu-e-Assil traditions.
14
   David Lelyveld, ‘Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All-India Radio’, Social Text
39 (1994), 111-127 (p.117).
15
   Shikha Jhingan, ‘Re-embodying the “Classical” The Bombay Film Song in the 1950s’, BioScope:
South Asian Screen Studies, 2.2 (2011), 157-179 (p. 160).
16
   B. N. Goswami, Broadcasting: New Patron of Hindustani Music (New Delhi: Sharada Publishing
House, 1996) p. 20.

                                                                                           97
                                          Gauri Nori


compositions for the radio, classical musicians were ultimately forced to cater to
populist demands.
   In the 1960’s and 1970’s, filmakers like Satyajit Ray sough to counter the
commercial impetus of the entertainment industries that threatened the space
in which classical arts could flourish. Ray’s Jalsagar (The Music Room 1958)
was one of the first films to feature performances of renowned artists of Indian
classical music, including Ustad Vilayat Khan who composed the film’s score. The
narrative follows a former landlord losing everything in one last chance to host
a grand soirée. To convey the society’s sudden shift from tradition to modernity,
Ray includes various audio metaphors such as the grating noise of the young
neighbour’s electrical generator that interrupts the feudal protagonist’s enjoyment
of the sombre classical notes of the surbahar (a plucked string instrument played
by the renowned Ustad Imrat Khan). While Western audiences were enthralled
by the refinement that the classical performances offered, Indian audiences
found it tedious and Ray was criticised for indulging in bourgeois nostalgia.17
By contrast, avant-garde filmmakers of the time, such as Mani Kaul and Kumar
Shahani, sought to apply the tenets of classical music to the cinematic medium.
Having studied the way Dhrupad emphasises each note, Kaul’s camera would
force his audience to meditate on a single shot and by doing so achieved a non-
representational mode of cinema. Additionally, Shahani aspired to synthesise the
various elements of sound in cinema including the musical, verbal and ambient
sounds as observed in the tradition of Khayal Gayki music.18 However, these
avant-garde auteurs were accused of indulging in elitist experiments and were
criticised by both the commercial industry and ironically, by Satyajit Ray.19
Learning from these experiences, Kaul and Shahani’s successors chose instead to
interrogate the persuasiveness of popular aesthetics.


The Trope of the Radio in Experimental Films

   By the end of the 1980s Rajiv Gandhi had set in motion the liberalisation of
the economy and soon foreign goods flooded the market. After years of being
denied access to these items, Indian consumers enthusiastically started going after
them. Kamal Swaroop, once Kaul’s assistant, recognised that at the heart of this
consumerism was a never-ending desire for more and dealt with these pressing
issues of modernity in his films. In Om Dar B Dar, Swaroop traces the India’s
society shift from Gandhi’s model of swadeshi (self-reliance) and satyagraha
(non-violent resistance) to a model of heady capitalist consumption through the


17
   Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye: The Biography Of A Master Film-Maker, (London:
IB Tauris, 2004) p. 113.
18
   Kumar Shahani, ‘Notes for an Aesthetic of Cinema Sound’, Framework. The journal of Cinema
and Media, 30-31 (1986), p. 91.
19
   Satyajit Ray, Our Films, Their Films, (New York: Hyperion, 1994) p. 105.

98
                   Tuning into the Radio in Experimental Films from India


life of a small-town family. The film loosely follows the adolescent adventures of
the protagonist Om (played by Aditya Lakhia and Manish Gupta) whom, the
spectator learns, has a special ability to hold his breath for hours under water.
He runs away from home after misplacing diamonds that were given to his father
for safekeeping, only to be trapped by priests who use his talent to advertise
a water-resistant electronic watch. Through surrealist imagery, witty metaphors
and Dadaist style, Swaroop exposes the fallacy of capitalism that offers material
products as a solution to spiritual problems.
   As its title suggests, Om Dar B Dar highlights the life and struggles of those
who are close to Om, all of whom are tragically trapped in their petty desires.
In doing so, the film evokes themes of small-town aspirations and the uneasy
shift from the neo-modernity of the independence movement to the capitalist
modernity ushered in by the opening up of India’s economy. The protagonist’s
sister, Gayatri (Gopi Desai) desires independence but is only able to achieve
it superficially. As she boldly goes to the movies on her own, she attracts the
attention of Jagdish (Lalit Tiwari). Jagdish is introduced as a private tutor who
hails from Jhumri Telaiya, a small city that radio audiences would immediately
recognise as the place from which the greatest number of film song requests
were sent: Rameshwar Prasad Barnwal, a mica-mining tycoon from Jhumri
Telaiya, sent numerous postcard requests to radio stations, leading to the city’s
name being announced on the radio and generating enthusiasm from a large
number of its residents.20 This episode established Jhumri Telaiya’s reputation
in the popular imagination across the country and while residents from other
towns tried to compete with Jhumri Telaiya’s fame by sending as many post-
cards, many urban audiences assumed it was a fictional place that symbolised
small town aspirations. In the film, Jagdish portrays a typical radio fan, whom
film scholar Aswin Punathambekar has characterised as being the median
between a rowdy character and a rasika (aesthete).21 From the film dialogue, it is
evident that Jagdish identifies with the tragic-fatalist lover more than the macho
hero of popular Hindi cinema. By revealing the way in which these characters
consume popular culture, Swaroop reminds his audience of its pitfalls: Jagdish’s
mediocrity stems from his limited exposure to Hindi cinema while Gayatri’s
curtailed aspirations epitomises the empty promise of the capitalist consumer
culture.
   Kamal Swaroop used the excess of sounds and images produced by
commercial cinema and radio to reveal its inherent banality. This kind of
experimentation opposes popular aesthetics by using its raw materials to


20
   Sanchari Pal, ‘Of Music, Mica and Mithai: The Fascinating Story of How Jhumri Telaiya Became
a Legend’, in The Better India, https://www.thebetterindia.com/91535/jhumri-telaiya-koderma-
jharkhand-mica-radio-kalakand/ [accessed 7 December 2018].
21
   Aswin Punathambekar, ‘Between Rowdies and Rasikas: Rethinking Fan Activity’, in Fandom:
Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. by Jonathan Gray, Sandvoss Cornel, and C.
Lee Harrington, 2nd edn (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 198-209 (p. 198).

                                                                                            99
                                         Gauri Nori


produce a radically subversive alternative. Although sound is more abstract
than images, conventional filmmakers tend to solidify the aural track by
synching it to the corresponding visuals in their films. In critiquing the
limitations of sound design in conventional cinema, Chion experimented with
creating a wholly different musical genre. His practice of musique concrète
liberated mundane recorded sounds from their concrete causal connections to
compose highly abstract pieces that necessitate a reduced mode of listening.
Similarly, Om Dar B Dar can also be read as Swaroop’s objection to commercial
films, whether aimed at entertaining or advertising, for creating a surplus
of repetitive audio and visual materials. His riposte was to take this excess
and recycle it in order to understand it.22 The film is replete with the surplus
created by mass medias including film songs, radio farmaishes, over-the-top
film dialogues and advertisement jingles, so as to reveal how persuasive their
illusion is. The film continuously parodies the marketing of religious miracles
and capitalist commodities. Just as the farmaish shows were often named after
their brand sponsors such as Binaca Geetmala and Colgate Cibaca Sangeetmala,
the film repeatedly alludes to the Promise toothpaste brand that became very
popular in India (and was second only to Colgate in terms of the market share)
because it claimed to include clove oil which is traditionally used to treat dental
ailments. While this parodies the oral hygiene product placements that used to
take place on the radio, the choice of brand conveys Swaroop’s insight into the
rise of capitalism in a society that is still deeply attached to traditional values.
   Jagdish and Gayatri’s romance is advanced primarily through the radio and,
accordingly, the film is continuously punctuated by a radio jockey (RJ) announcing
the request for their favourite song Babloo from Babylon. The way in which the
radio farmaish expresses exactly what the characters are thinking and feeling
is aimed at representing a near-telepathic connection between the characters.
Chion observed that on-the-air sounds that are electronically transmitted via
acousmatic devices such as the radio do not need to adhere to the ‘natural’
laws of propagation in cinema and, especially in the case of broadcast music,
offer filmmakers the freedom to transcend the limitations of the onscreen and
offscreen space.23 Since the radio is often heard but rarely seen in the film, the RJ
takes on the role of the omnipresent and omnipotent narrator of the film. After
their encounter at the movies, the RJ notes that Jagdish changed his address
from Jhumri Telaiya to Ajmer, in an obvious attempt to have his name read-
out alongside Gayatri and Om. The lovers seem to be convinced that they are
soulmates simply by requesting the same song and hearing their names together
on the radio. Here Vebhuti Duggal’s investigation of the farmaish phenomenon



22
   Kamal Swaarop, ‘Kamal (Om) Dar B Dar’s Googlies and Life in General’, Deep Focus, 2.1
(1989), 12-20 (p. 16).
23
   Michel Chion, Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, trans. by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), p. 77.

100
                   Tuning into the Radio in Experimental Films from India


provides insights into the relationship between the RJs and their audience. 24
The audience not only forms a personal connection with generic songs but,
through the farmaish, also hopes to gain public acknowledgment from the RJ.
The farmaishes most often came from small cities and towns and would be
ornamented or written in verse as if addressed to a lover who lives in a faraway
city. The mostly urban RJ had to rally together this large dispersed audience while
simultaneously bestowing on each individual farmaish the recognition that they
sought. As a result, tAt a result, through this practice, radio as a form produced
a peculiar intimacy in anonymity.
   While their physical courtship is constantly being frustrated by Om and his
father (L. Shastri), the lovers use the radio for their private communication, albeit
broadcasting it throughout the country. For instance, when Jagdish pretends to
teach Gayatri to ride a bicycle, Om abruptly throws it off a cliff, presumably
embarrassed by their silly courtship rituals. As proof that Gayatri took the
hint, the next time the song request is read out, Om’s name is left out. This
conveys to Jagdish that Gayatri is finally comfortable being alone together with
him. Although this means of communicating their love is seemingly ludicrous,
the conservative norms of Indian society forces lovers to find circuitous ways
of being together. In the scene when they finally consummate their love, their
gender roles are comically inverted, with Gayatri taking the lead and Jagdish
looking distraught by the end of their physical union. When he bursts into the
room, Gayatri’s father finds her sleeping alone, and she curtly tells him to turn
off the radio, indicating to the viewer that the charade of romance is over. The
intention of this over-the-top tragic parody is to liberate the viewer from the
superficial tropes and conventions of popular cinema. Swaroop clearly equates
the lover’s film-fuelled fantasy with the naïve faith that consumers have when
they buy into the capitalist promise. Both bubbles will burst, only leading to
further alienation. Jagdish is not seen again until the last few minutes of the film
when the spectator discovers that Gayatri has a child who she claims is a ‘paying-
guest’. Jagdish feebly tries to assure her that he continued to send song requests
to the radio when he was in Dubai. Simultaneously, we hear the rest of their song
on the radio that plaintively bemoans the cost of progress.
   As it were, the lovers must advertise their love in the same way that the film
songs were aired on the radio to advertise and maintain the popularity of Hindi
cinema therefore adhering to the growing consumer culture of the time. To
mirror the circuitous flirtation of the couple, the film chooses to substitute the
directness of dialogues with the radio farmaishes. While conventional cinema
adheres strictly to synchrony, experimental filmmakers like Swaroop found
that synchresis could take place between audio and visual elements that are not
directly connected to one another. Chion argued that the illusion of synchresis
between these audio-visual counterpoints challenges conventions of film sound.


 Vebhuti Duggal, ‘Imagining Sound through the Pharmaish: Radios and Request-postcards in
24

North India, c. 1955–1975’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 9.1 (2018), 1-23 (pp. 16-18).

                                                                                           101
                                          Gauri Nori


Even though a synchresis occurs, the disjunction between audio and visual
elements remind the audience of the manipulation involved in combining the
audio with the visual.25 By replacing the dialogues with sound bites from the
radio, the fallacy of the romantic relationship and the capitalist society that it
represents is exposed. In this way, Swaroop’s film disturbs the complacency of its
audience and necessitates a more attentive mode of listening to the film.
   Although radio is usually consumed as a form of distraction, in the film, the
characters pay so much attention to it that all other sounds are drowned out. By
giving the radio more prominence, the film works to decentre the emphasis on
comprehending its narrative through the visuals and diegetic dialogues, as typically
found in conventional cinema. Since the radio is heard but not seen, the synchresis
between the radio and the mind of the characters is made possible. However,
the outlandishness of the song reminds the viewer of the inherent disparateness
between the sound and the image. The song itself is not romantic and the lyrics
are seemingly nonsensical at first but soon we realise that it epitomises the
futility of their relationship as reiterated in the refrain, ‘Hero, zero, pass or fail’.
The prominence given to English words is not only reminiscent of the British
colonisation but also points to the rise of American capitalism that once again
made English the language of commerce.26 While it is obvious to the spectator that
their favourite song is a parody of Hindi film songs, it is charged with tremendous
personal significance for the lovers. Yet the absurd lyrics of the song disrupts the
viewer’s expectations of a romantic duet. This moment of disorientation is crucial
since it thwarts the process of synchresis, encouraging reduced listening instead.
The reputation of the film for being impenetrable may be justified if one focused
only on the visual aspects of the film (by doing so the narrative becomes highly
confusing), but the audio track provided by the radio announcements, jingles and
the songs clearly conveys the film’s thematic focus. When we put all the pieces of
the song together, we realise it encapsulates the tragedy of the character’s trapped
existence. Through such audio-visual counterpoints the film employs the excess
that mass media produces to simultaneously critique it.
   Examining the nature of different media in India and tracing their trajectories
over the last century – their birth, evolution and eventual decline – is also a
constant theme in Vipin Vijay’s film essays. Hawa Mahal (2004) focuses on
the radio, Videogame (2006) examines the shift from celluloid to digital
filmmaking while Chitrasurtam (2010) explores the internet’s virtual realms.
The films investigate what is particular to a medium while also making universal
connections between different media. In doing so, they force viewers to put aside
their conventional expectations of a documentary, and instead allow them to
participate in its carefully curated sensory experience actively. Far from tracing


25
  Chion, p. 63.
26
  Harish Trivedi, ‘From Bollywood to Hollywood: The Globalization of Hindi Cinema’, The
Postcolonial and the Global, ed. by Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C Hawley (Bristol-Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 200-210 (p. 201).

102
                 Tuning into the Radio in Experimental Films from India


a linear history of the radio in India, Vijay’s Hawa Mahal (named after a popular
AIR program) plays with the fluidity that the acousmatic radio offers, resulting
in a film that has a stream-of-consciousness style rather than adhering to a fixed
narrative. Vijay invites us to appreciate the inner workings of the radio by taking
us through the process of production as well as reception while continuously
interrogating our relationship with sound. From its very beginning, the film
reminds us that, unlike our eyes, we cannot close our ears. Vijay addresses the
imbalance of sound’s secondary status in conventional cinema by syncing the
visuals to the audio track. This means that if a sound is distorted in the film,
so is the visual. At various times, we hear the audio track of the film trying to
focus on a sound, as one would when tuning the radio to a particular channel,
and simultaneously we are shown the shift from a blurry image to the object
in complete focus. In this way the film becomes the means for the audience to
experience the way sound is modulated tangibly.
   While the popular film songs broadcast on the radio were consumed as a type
of distraction, Hawa Mahal compels its audience to be attentive to every aspect
of its aural composition. Like Chion’s Musique Concrète, it highlights ambient
sounds rather than verbal or musical cues, manipulates the visuals as per the
aural distortions, and incorporates ‘unusable’ or unpleasant sounds such that the
audience’s attention is continuously drawn to the soundtrack. By focusing on the
sound design, the film upends the visual bias of cinema to produce an aesthetics of
sound as an evanescent material. Vijay further breaks down the illusion of synchresis
by distorting the film’s dialogues / narration, making it seem like the voices are
coming from a distance or by choosing not to show the source of the sound.
This distortion and disembodiment of the voice and sounds is also an obvious
allusion to the experience of listening to the radio. At one point, we witness the
recording of a Bengali radio play where the actors manipulate their voice, filling
it with the required emotion but without their facial expressions changing. The
radio audience would hear their melodramatic dialogue delivery and automatically
imagine it visually but by observing the actual process of recording this play, the
film’s audience is made to see through their theatrics. Similarly, the film pays
homage to the famous radio prank in which Orson Welles’s narration of H. G.
Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds caused panic amongst listeners who believed
that a real alien invasion was taking place. In this way, we are made to acknowledge
that sound can be as powerful and persuasive as the visual.
   Hawa Mahal also makes us acutely aware of the hierarchy of sounds in cinema.
While dialogues and songs are given prominence in conventional cinema, Vijay
includes several ‘unusable’ sounds that often erroneously occur during recording
and playback. Unpleasant sounds such as shifting from one radio frequency to
the next, ambient noise, echoes, delays, and feedback would normally be cleaned
and edited out of film soundtracks. By incorporating them into the sound design,
the film also plays the role of an audio archive.
   In the same way, Vijay saved the pieces of celluloid that were thrown away
at the editing table from his 1999 short film shot and reused them in his next

                                                                                 103
                                     Gauri Nori


film Videogame (2004). Shots that were considered NG (not good) takes for
one film became the means of interrogating media obsolescence in another film.
Although both audio and images have the capacity to record and preserve the
past, there is clearly a bias in what is allowed to survive. The fact that most of
early silent cinema is lost while the few fragments that have survived are not
being adequately preserved is evidence of such hierarchy. The film cautions us
against deleting things that are not useful to us at a specific moment as there may
be no trace or memory of that moment in the future. Accordingly, in his films,
Vijay seeks to create a palimpsest of sounds and visuals that encapsulate the
experience of media that have become outdated even before their possibilities
have been fully explored. When something new comes about, it pushes the old
out. The film uses the metaphor of a football field turned into a mall. As a man
walks through the aisles of the mall, he recollects the victories that he shared with
teammates on the erstwhile field, while his son watches a football match on the
screens of TV waiting to be sold. All media eventually become outdated and all
that remains is fragments of their existence.
   The film is not merely an archive of memories associated with the radio
in India, it also is a critique of its limitations. The film recounts the story of
Janaki, one of the first singers to have her songs recorded by the Gramophone
Company. She was brutally stabbed 56 times by her jealous lover and, from then
on women were discouraged from singing on the radio. To compensate for the
loss of female vocalists, recording companies employed young boys like Master
Madan who became immensely popular but also tragically died at the age of 14.
Although several of his records exist, no photograph of him has survived. Just
as human life is transient, the evolution of technology will at some point make
the radio obsolete. In investigating the nature of these recording devices, Vijay
finds that like our memories, any kind of recording will always be incomplete.
Many people share the common memories of distractedly listening to the radio
while doing household chores. There are many shots of the radio providing
company for women of different ages, alone inside their homes. This is one of
the few moments in the film that includes popular film songs, but the feeling is
of stifling claustrophobia rather than of nostalgia. The scene goes on to draw
a direct connection between the loneliness of these women and the alienation
that the one may feel in modern day discotheques where party-goers might be
dancing alone in a room full of strangers. Vijay seems to suggest that while mass
media like radio, film and television cater to a large group of people, they cannot
offer them a sense of community.


Conclusion

  In Swaroop’s Om Dar B Dar, the radio becomes a metonym for mass media
that promote endless consumption. The tragedy of the lovers’ dependence on
mediocre farmaishes, nonsensical film songs and advertisement jingles becomes

104
                   Tuning into the Radio in Experimental Films from India


the cautionary tale against the buying into the capitalistic promise. By revealing
the mechanics behind its illusion, Swaroop hopes to disabuse his audience of the
persuasiveness of the consumer culture. The film demonstrates how everything
has been turned into an advertisement – the lovers advertise their love for each
other on the radio which in turn promotes songs for the film industry that
commodifies culture. Keskar’s failed attempt to restrict the airing of film songs on
the radio proved that any attempt to subdue the industry will be met with equal
resistance and will eventually backfire. Not only is the film industry responsible
for curbing the potential of cinema by encouraging the constant production
of formulaic narratives, it has also limited the role of the radio to broadcasting
popular film songs. The powerful nexus between the radio and film industry
makes it almost impossible for independent and community owned radios to
sustain themselves. Although media activists have worked hard to democratise
the airwaves, the dominance of public and commercial radio drowns out any
alternative.27 Therefore, by staging the parody of both radio and cinema, Swaroop
exposes the hegemony of the industry just as his experimental film liberates the
viewer from the conventional mode of filmmaking.
   With the rise of music television channels like MTV (and of personal, cd and
mp3 players and more recently music streaming apps), the radio was gradually
displaced as the primary source for the consumption of freshly released music.
Before the potential of the radio was fully understood, newer technology had
taken over. Vipin Vijay’s Hawa Mahal, investigates this phenomenon of media
obsolescence caused the rapid change in technology using the specific instance
of the radio. Instead of transforming the medium, the newer digital technologies
are limited to mimicking the structures and processes of the previous technology.
No media exists in isolation, as media scholars like Jay David Bolter and
Richard Grusin have observed, and during the remediation process the new
media borrows conventions of the ‘old’ while at the same time the old media
incorporates aspects of the ‘new’.28 Unlike the narratives of popular cinema that
often pay homage to the ubiquitous presence of the radio, Vijay’s film essay does
not indulge in the nostalgic yearning for the past. Tracing the evolution of the
radio in India and examining the nature of recorded sound allows Vijay to expose
the structures of hierarchy within film and radio production.
   While various Western cultures have tended to emphasise the primacy of the
written word as the vehicle for communication following the democratization of
printing technology, in India the oral tradition of chanting and singing has always
held greater sway over the public. This crucial difference between cultures is
perhaps one of the keys to understanding why it was inevitable for films in India
to include songs. Furthermore, William O. Beeman observes that since cinema


27
   Vinod Pavarala and Kanchan K. Malik, Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India,
(New Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2007), p. 106.
28
   Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 48.

                                                                                            105
                                       Gauri Nori


was a western import, the songs used in Indian films were freed “from the bonds
of both the classical and folk tradition”.29 Although the broadcast media made
classical music more accessible to the general public, the nexus between the
music, film and radio industries limited the scope of the aural dimension. Instead
of exploring new possibilities, each broadcast media simply carries forward the
conventions of the older medium. To counter this hegemony, Swaroop and
Vijay use the trope of the radio to expose the prevalence of the visual over the
audio and the verbal over the musical in commercial cinemas. Their cinematic
experiments challenged the illusion of synchresis and freed the aural track from
its confines to the visual as theorised by Schaeffer and Chion. Hence, their films
require multiple attempts of reduced listening to recognise the various formal
experiments at work. Each time one watches these films, a new aspect of the
auralscape is revealed and yet another preconception of sound design in cinema
is dismantled.




 William O. Beeman, ‘The Use of Music in Popular Film: East and West’, Society for Visual
29

Anthropology Newsletter, 4.2 (1988), 8-13 (p. 11).

106
