An Audio-visual Diptych: The Female Playback And Cinematic Sensorium

Early musical materials had two distinct ‘problems’ with technology: firstly, in representing themselves as artefacts (that the voice was new material in relation to the body, detached from it); secondly, in understanding the relationship of the part to the whole: how did various elements—voice, recorded instrument, speech, orchestra, resonance, text etc. come together as a whole? Shikha Jhingan’s book The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema (Orient Blackswan, 2025) is an effervescent and resourceful stop to gain insights into the playback musical materials, the artifice of screen performance, from within a specific context of Bombay cinema.

A couple of quick coordinates.

Western technological innovations arrived in pre-Independence India. One of the most delectable of them was the gramophone, which came alongside a retinue of apparatuses of recording and disseminating of voices—the microphones, recording systems, loudspeakers and radio—that became instrumental in producing what we now see not only as the early encounters of vernacular music, but also the very cultural phenomenon of women’s voices in public sphere in an unprecedented way. The voices enabled ‘new’ markets of songs in the early 20^th century but disturbed the conservative notions of women’s performance in real time and space—at salons, soirees, gatherings and ritualistic congregations. Cinema as an industrial art form further complicated the notions of the female body and its ‘tuneful’ voice. The dual allure dovetailed into the new popular cultural form of film song, incumbent upon its industrial indispensability with mainstream narrative form with songs of all kinds. If there was one technology that propelled the material forces of Indian cinematic screen performance in new directions, then that would be the playback device of voice production.

It is in this reckoning of substantial developments that Jhingan’s book offers a fresh focus on the aural-visual diptych of female screen performance, pretty significantly etched into the subcontinent’s popular culture and memory. Jhingan’s effervescent account of the manifestations of this technology affords us a wing view of specific film texts, interviews and archival materials. She unravels the mysteries of the disjuncture of voice and body and their obscure connections to the surrounding phenomena—the orchestral support, lip-syncing, histrionics, imitation, enactment and camera’s visual cues to the spectator. For example, her analysis of street-singing or singing at construction sites evokes our memory of participatory singing and the indexical nature of leisure time—a time of savouring voices and lyrics because of the peculiar conditions in which they manifest through multiple associations.

Jhingan traces the various epistemic positions of scholars from across the Western and Indian scholarship on music, cinema, voice, sound technologies, performance and the implication of various methods in understanding the playback device. We see her persuasive powers across all chapters of the book, imbricated in industrial chronologies and the changing meaning of the spectacle of female performance on screen as an actor and singer. The author invites us to study the body-voice connect of specific playback voices such as Lata Mangeshkar and the registers of narrative purport. Her keen observations on the influence of specific aural legacies in the pre-neoliberal era with ideas of “being like Lata” or “singing like Lata” or “Woh Lata waali baat…” signify the long-standing influence of specific techno-cultural trajectories. What sense do we make here? The trail that the female playback leaves—her inscription on the cultural landscape and industrial practice—preempts specific tonalities and a unique timbre. Future singers would be possible because of the historicity of the star singer. These imbrications are peculiar to Indian popular culture’s aural landscape and Jhingan attentively advances our understanding of its contours. Technically, although the film song’s identity is endemic to film text, its floating quality reiterates the sonic bond that it creates for aspiring singers, critic-biographers and film-spectator/listeners out of all its media assemblages. These analyses make an important contribution to understanding the sound and image and the voice and body— not respectively, but through the maintenance of unique calibrations of voice and body.

The book offers delightful examples of songs and situations, often inspiring us to migrate to the repositories of YouTube, where we are tempted to listen to the song while reading Jhingan’s astute analysis. It also takes the curious self to places beyond the Bombay cinema —with, for example, a music composition of Salil Chowdhury in Hindi to a Bengali version in Sandhya Mukherjee’s voice or S. Janaki’s in a southern language. These knowledge-seeking personal travels across YouTube and other online portals open new sensoria of gleeful soaking of music-making and careful unhinging. I was particularly excited by such promise of the book and its inherent scope for listening. The book’s invitation thus is beyond the realm of textuality and is multimodal.

Jhingan’s book also alerts us to the diverse contours of aural mapping along the axis of “the middle class,” “new India” etc. The malleability of space and its coordinates through voice enactment—breath, sensual laughter, beckoning, confessional pining across long distance, sometimes using complex musical phrases without words—are all an encomium to the cinematic duality of the female playback, her inhabiting of the Bombay industry, its market, the transient circulations, attached to the screen performance of different female characters/actors.

Jhingan’s analysis draws us into personal temptations of locating orchestral motivations, specific instruments of a song closely accompanying the lead singer. Our search goes expansively beyond the song, into orchestral contributions of musical instrumentalists such as Kersi Lord playing a certain instrument or Pt Shiv Kumar Sharma’s early connections to Bombay film music and retrospectively fathom the scaffolding of the edifice of playback vocal production.

Western film soundtrack accounts, as complex as they are, have often relayed to us the authorial contributions of, say Thomas Newman or John Williams or scores of composers such as Carter Burwell. But the dazzling rise of female playback singers and any account of their cinematic artistry in Indian cinema is not merely about popular forms of singing, but about instituting a voice device for heterogeneous music production, for the causality of cognitive perceptual fields to thrive. And Jhingan’s book reminds us of that multiplicity.

The Female Playback enables us to take a rightful direction to the intersections of vocal mediation and virtuosity across cultural, acoustic and linguistic factors and helps us with the cognition of the voices we hear. The book critically examines the timbre and talent of the playback and everything that surrounds it, including the listener.

More than on production practices of playback recording, Jhingan engages us on film form, stardom and the changing relationship between body and voice and advances our understanding of how songs enable specific universes for characters in narratives across vast geographic space and for us the listener-reader across different registers of pleasure and participation. The ‘entanglement’ that the female playback offers with multiple modes of listening, which is a material practice, is of importance here.

The Female Playback affirmatively joins the rich corpus of work on film reception, sound production and historical performance studies involving music and media. Do get the book if you want to understand better why something musical sounds the way that it does in Bombay cinema. Ever luminously!

Trained as a filmmaker and researcher, Kiranmayi Indraganti's work includes Telugu fiction film "Rallalo Neeru" (2021) based on Ibsen's "Doll's House," a few documentaries, and a book titled Her Majestic Voice (2016, OUP), among others. She is a faculty member at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design and Technology on the Bengaluru campus of Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) and leads their PhD Program.