Abstract
Shikha Jhingan, The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema: Voice, Body, Technology (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2025), 296 pp.
Shikha Jhingan’s book intervenes in the field of Indian film studies through an examination of the sonic elements of cinema, namely the film song, the playback voice and aural stardom. In one of the few book-length studies on the playback voice in Indian cinema, Jhingan brings sound studies into conversation with film studies, using it as a frame to refract popular Hindi cinema. The playback singing voice has previously been framed in terms of a verb that participates in acts of trading and animation in Tamil cinema, and through work on the female playback singers of the 1940s and 50s in South India. Alongside these, work on the voice as corporeal, mobile and bearing the weight of race, class and gender informs Jhingan’s object, frame and method of study. Jhingan’s book takes up, as one of its main elements of study, the work and voice of the doyen of the Hindi film music industry, Lata Mangeshkar. Mangeshkar’s voice becomes a synecdoche through which her vocal craft, her labour and her stardom are situated within the matrix of industrial practices of singing, media technologies of recording and playback, and circuits of the film song’s transmission. In so doing, Jhingan displaces Lata Mangeshkar and her voice as a ‘natural’ thing to examine it as constructed across and amidst the microphone, the cassette and the listener’s ear. Mangeshkar’s voice, like those of other popular playback singers, has long been considered ‘god-given’—in fan and industry discourses alike, including film criticism and journalism, fellow singers’ and musicians’ commentary, and broadcast media, from radio announcers to television personnel—making it a significant revision of how a playback singing voice is understood. The playback singing voice becomes, in Jhingan’s arguments, an assemblage of several elements arranged provisionally and transforming historically. Thus, for her, the voice becomes a ‘dispersed object’, cohering through the figure of the aural woman star singer, the changing technologies of playback, recording, market forces, diegetic narratives and frames, as well as the range of listeners.
If the voice itself is an assemblage, then the ways in which it participated in the national-cultural project are also deconstructed. Jhingan notes that the timbre and tonality of Lata Mangeshkar’s voice have been seen as playing a critical role in fashioning the modern Indian female identity, middle-class femininity and the discourses of nationhood. Jhingan’s intervention thus displaces cultural assumptions that are woven into the sound of the woman’s voice, especially Mangeshkar’s, but also those of other playback singers, allowing us to examine the ways in which different timbres, tonalities and pitches sounded ‘gender’, ‘class’, ‘identity’ and so forth. She demonstrates how voices were deployed for mujra songs, cabaret songs, mela and bazaar songs, and for heroines’ and vamps’ registers—and how Mangeshkar’s voice sits within this range, in relation to other singers like Geeta Dutt and Asha Bhosle. In this way, Jhingan positions the female singing voice within an inter-textual, inter-medial framework and within a matrix of various sounds. In her first two chapters, Jhingan focuses on the production of the voice and the body. In the first chapter, the singing voice is produced as one that can carry emotion and sonic intimacy through the microphone and the control of breath while singing, significant insofar as it is this kind of voice that is specifically crafted by cinema, radio and the gramophone against other kinds of publicly available sound in rallies and theatre in the early playback period (1930s–1940s). Building on this, Jhingan argues that we need to see how the female playback voice and different kinds of songs and sounds are deployed to articulate women’s subjectivities and their bodies on screen in her second chapter.
One of the most valuable interventions that Jhingan’s book makes is to identify the precise nodes through which sound intersects with gender, or rather, how gender is voiced or sounded; not as metaphor but as material. This tells us how sound, often seen as ephemeral, embeds and embodies gender, more commonly associated with the biological body or socio-historical and cultural processes. In the first two chapters, even as Jhingan engages with the representational, that is, the voice and body on screen, her approach brings us into the realm of the non-representational by drawing on archival (film magazines) and ethnographic (interviews with singers and musicians in the industry) research, in turn making room for the affective and the social. The female playback voice is composed through the relay between singing and listening, and emerges not only through production but through consumption: a movement she stages across the book. Thus, we have the production of the intimate voice and the voice as part of a moving, ‘musicking’, mode of listening in the first two chapters, and then the voice as heard by two listening bodies and figures within the industry: the male critic and the female dubbing artist, who also become representatives of the listening public, alongside depictions of audiences on screen. Listening here emerges as primarily an affective process—intersecting with questions of taste, as in the descriptions and discussions by male critics, and with bodily memory, as in the case of female dubbing artists and new entrants to the industry. Both these figures become specialised listeners tuned into the female playback voice. These figures codify and amplify the manner in which gender is crafted through the voice: through imitation in the case of the dubbing artiste, and through interpretation and moral commentary in the case of the critic. Jhingan quotes Raju Bharatan’s writing:
The critic turns into a fan, allowing the “multiplier effect” of the voice to invoke collective listening as a scaffold for collective memories. However, it is important to add that throughout his writing, Bharatan’s accounts evoke aural perceptions, mediated through sound technologies intersecting with social imaginaries. (p. 140)
Jhingan also discusses this constellation with regard to the dubbing artist’s voice, her recreation of Asha’s and Lata’s voices and the importance of cassette technology. Nostalgia becomes an important frame in which Lata’s voice is ensconced. Nostalgia, here, is crafted through music industry practices of marketing, such as advertisements and cassette covers featuring Mangeshkar and the idea of aural heritage/legacy. It is also figured within a public with a strong aural cultural memory.
Jhingan closes her book by discussing the way in which the playback singing voice, otherwise so central to cinematic and sociocultural imaginaries and regimes of audition, recedes into the sonic background in the contemporary moment, with sound increasingly becoming data. This she demonstrates in her closing chapter through the recession of the frontally staged song-and-dance sequence into the film’s background score in contemporary Hindi cinema. The book’s most compelling insight lies in showing that voices actively produce gendered identities through historical regimes of listening, imitation, criticism and memory. In moving between the microphone, the cassette, the dubbing studio and the listening subject, Jhingan demonstrates how playback singing was central to the making of modern sonic femininity in the twentieth century, especially between the 1940s and 1990s. The book is particularly astute in its evaluation of the role the cassette played, as a recording and playback medium, in reconstituting female playback voices through aural legacies of nostalgia even as it sustained continuities across performative traditions and industrial practice. For all the excellence of Jhingan’s book, one wished for a greater and more detailed engagement with the present and what the industry after Mangeshkar and Bhosle looks, sounds and feels like through the range of voices, technological manipulation and new modes of sonic circulation that have emerged. However, that may well be the ground on which to write a new book.