The soul of a song

Through the example of the Lord family, the film highlights the lives of neglected foot-soldiers of Indian music

In the Introduction to his book Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai's Film Studios, Gregory D Booth evokes two men named Anthony Gonsalves: the hugely popular fictional character played by Amitabh Bachchan in Amar Akbar Anthony, and the real-life Gonsalves, an arranger and composer who worked prolifically in Bombay's film-music industry between the 1940s and the 1960s but was little known outside those circles. "The dual identity of Anthony Gonsalves is at the heart of this book," Booth says.

Behind the Curtain emphasises the role of the neglected foot-soldiers of Hindi-film music: the people who played the instruments, arranged scores and, in many cases, made as vital a contribution to the final product as the music directors did, without getting a fraction of the recognition. Booth covers the transition from the studio system of the 1930s to the independent-producer system, and the concurrent shift from salaried orchestras to freelance orchestras, often made up of musicians who had enjoyed prior careers in jazz bands (among them Cawas Lord, who introduced Latin beats to songs such as Shola jo Bhadke in the early 50s). He also casts a sympathetic but practical look at the changes wrought by new technology in the 1990s, which made recording a much more impersonal process and led to a generation of old-school musicians being swept away by the winds of change.

Now we have Rudradeep Bhattacharjee's moving documentary The Human Factor, which was inspired by Booth's book, but narrows its focus to the Lord family - the late Cawas, referred to here as the "Bheeshma Pitamah of film music", and his two sons, Kersi and Buji Lord. This approach could have made The Human Factor a limited-scope project, but it works - first, because the Lords were important figures in the music industry for over four decades, and second, because this particular family is used to illuminate a larger universe. Through the Lords, we understand the personal histories, whimsies and disappointments of hundreds of others working in those studios in the pre-synthesiser world. Back when singers and musicians recorded a song in unison, a small mistake made by a single member of the orchestra would be mortifying; the whole recording had to be started again. "The unity achieved in that short period when no one makes a mistake," says musician Enoch Daniels with visible pride, "is what creates the soul of a song."

The documentary reveals Kersi Lord as consistently jovial, ending his sentences with a distinctive, musical little "na". His brother Buji is more reserved, and somewhat embittered by his professional experiences: old photos and video footage show a dashing youngster on drums, touring the Caribbean with Mohammed Rafi and getting newspaper headlines to himself ("Buji Lord Steals Limelight"), but in the present day one sees an old man who has put his past behind him, to the extent that even his little granddaughter doesn't know that he once played for movies. The most obviously poignant scenes involve their father Cawas: fragments of interviews with the octogenarian looking confused and vulnerable, unsure about why these people want to ask him so many things. Did he participate in the scoring for India's first sound film Alam Ara? He can't be sure - he worked on the second sound film, he knows that. Did he enjoy his work? "We enjoyed it while we were playing," he says, but he didn't go to movie halls to see the songs. In fact, as Naresh Fernandes - author of The Taj Mahal Foxtrot -points out in the documentary, many of these musicians didn't even know which song would appear in which film.

Those who love Hindi film songs usually think of their favourite numbers in terms of the contributions of the music director, the playback singer or the star. For instance, most viewers associate the classic Main Zindagi ka Saath Nibhaata Chala Gaya with Dev Anand's upbeat, twinkling star persona. But try imagining its effect without the mood-setting opening bars that were played by Kersi Lord on a Glockenspiel freshly imported to India. And then watch Kersi in The Human Factor - an extroverted, unruffled man at most times - saying he felt flustered when he had to go up on a stage recently to collect an award, because he had never experienced live applause during his working days.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer