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Abstract
"Sounding the Nation" examines the construction of identity in mainstream Hindi cinema, or Bollywood. I combine musical, textual, visual, and historical analysis to reveal how the soundtrack of a recent Bollywood blockbuster, Lagaan (2001), constructs India. Taking this film as a case study, I situate it in the broader history of Bollywood and of populist discourse on nation, and I analyze the ideological work of song lyrics, timbres, melodies, rhythms, and orchestral arrangements. I contend that such musical elements work both in conjunction with, and independent of, this film's visuals and narrative to construct a national utopia. The Lagaan soundtrack reinscribes familiar nationalist rhetoric in at least three ways: by literally giving voice to Indian femininity, disciplining the male homosocial body in its militaristic fight songs, and marking time musically so as to render the nation modern.
My chapters on these three topics demonstrate how the music of Lagaan at times corroborates the film's depiction of a diverse and progressive India, but also, in other instances, contradicts and undermines the apparent multiculturalism of the film's visuals and dialogues. Thus, for instance, the soundtrack polices racial and national boundaries, allowing only modest upper-caste Hindu women to represent the nation. It portrays the Indian men, rather than the British, in charge of musical and national time; in doing so, it also endorses a narrow—muscular and upper-caste Hindu—ideal of masculinity.
The disjuncture here between visual and musical narratives attests to music's ability to communicate beyond, or even beneath, words and images. The subtle and "invisible" influence that music exerts on audiences makes its messages all the more powerful. In the case of Lagaan, music forwards a politically conservative, hegemonic national ideal that values able-bodied, upper-caste, heterosexual Indian men over all other groups. It thereby undercuts the progressivism of the rest of the film. "Sounding the Nation" thus demonstrates that music is far from innocuous. In articulating the silences and fissures of filmic narratives, Hindi film music can reproduce the violence of the larger sociopolitical domain wherein Muslims, lower-castes, ethnic and sexual minorities, and disabled people are marginalized.
