my school and college years I was an avid consumer of all forms of popular culture: Hollywood films at the Globe or New Empire; western pop on Radio Ceylon and Musical Bandbox; Bengali adhunik songs on Anurodher Asar, the films of Amitabh and Rajesh, the songs of Shankar-Jaikishen and R.D. Burman, and of course cricket, hockey and football. I was unaware then that these passions of mine could become the object of academic study. Most young males of my generation were preparing to be engineers, doctors or studying “serious” subjects like Physics, Economics or English Literature. I would have laughed if someone told me that it was possible write a thesis on Hindi films.

While doing my Ph.D in the United States in the 1980s, I was introduced to the discipline of “cultural studies”, a new theoretical approach which argued that culture needed to be analyzed if we wanted to make sense of contemporary life. In other words Rambo or punk music deserved our attention as much as Shakespeare or Beethoven. That’s because analyzing Rambo teaches us something about American masculinity, and analyzing punk instructs us about alienated teenage culture. I became convinced of the validity of this new approach and when I became a professor I taught a number of courses that focused on various aspects of American popular culture – comedy shows, detective stories, reality television and rock and roll.

Although I have been living abroad for the past 25 years, I have continued to be in touch with what is happening in India. That has been difficult because of the Web and the easy availability of DVDs and satellite television. Given that media and cultural analysis was my profession, it seemed natural to write about the scene in India as well. So I began to write occasional pieces on various aspects of Indian popular culture – sports, Hindi films, modern Indian music, and the Internet. Most of these articles appeared in The Telegraph, Kolkata. A friend of mine who enjoyed my writing suggested that I expand these pieces into a whole book and proceeded to put me in touch with a publisher he knew – and that is how the book was born. I started the project in 2002 and because I needed to do quite a bit of research, it took four years before it came out in print in July 2006.

The book consists of five separate essays – two on sports, two on Hindi music and one on NRI culture. I chose these topics not just because I am fan of cricket or Kishore, or because I happen to be a NRI myself. Rather, I was motivated by some questions, which have puzzled me for a while. When I was young, all sports fan were equally crazy about the three major team sports. Yet by the 1990s, cricket had become the national obsession whereas hockey and football suffered what I call a “sudden death” and turned into second-class sports. In the first two chapters of the book I try to come up with an explanation for this unexpected outcome. Regarding Hindi film my guiding question was the following: Almost all film critics and “intelligent” viewers have held that the inclusion of songs and dance in Bollywood movies is an example of silly escapism. Yet, it is also a fact that these songs and dances are perhaps the most loved aspect of Hindi film not just with Indians but with a global audience as well – in Africa, in South East Asia, in Latin America and in the Middle East. It was my feeling that so many people could not be so wrong and that it was the critics who had somehow failed to properly understand the meaning of song and dance.

I try to provide what I hope is a richer analysis in two ways – by tracing the evolution of Hindi film music from the 30s to the present. My argument here is that Hindi film music is one of the crucial agents of Indian culture. In the other chapter, I analyze sequences from classics like Sangam and contemporary hits like Kal Ho Na Ho to argue that these song and dance sequences play a very important role within the filmic text by providing a space where both public and private desires can be played out. Finally, I address the global phenomenon of “desi” culture: artists like Apache Indian or Punjabi MC, movies like Bend I t Like Beckham or Where’s the Party Yaar, and genres like bhangra and chutney music.

Popular culture needs to be taken seriously because it is increasingly becoming the source of our identities. Obviously, I have not said the last word on these issues – it will need many heads to figure out the meaning of cricket or Bollywood in contemporary India. But if people start thinking more seriously about Tendulkar or Shah Rukh Khan after reading my book, my labour would have been worthwhile.

by Biswarup Sen

Biswarup Sen received a Doctorate in Communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He taught for several years at the Department of English, SUNY-Binghamton. He has worked as a marketing and communications consultant in both the corporate and non-profit sectors. He currently teaches courses in Mass Communications and Popular Culture at the University of Oregon, USA. He has also been writing frequently on popular culture in newspapers and journals.

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