Borrowed, adapted, stolen: how Hindi film music actually worked

There is a whole genre of Indian internet content devoted to catching composers out. Song A is "copied" from song B, here are both, case closed. It is satisfying and it is mostly missing the point.

The economics first

A Hindi film composer in the sixties and seventies might deliver six to ten full soundtracks a year, each with five to eight songs, often with the film already shooting. Nobody writes fifty original melodies a year from nothing. Composers drew on folk traditions, on classical raags, on each other, on Latin dance records, on Greek pop, on whatever a returning traveller brought back on vinyl.

Copyright enforcement across borders barely existed in practice. Nobody in Nicosia was going to hear a Hindi film song in 1975, let alone sue over it.

The useful distinction

Reproducing a recording is one thing. Taking a melodic idea and rebuilding everything around it is another. When R. D. Burman took a Greek melody for Mehbooba Mehbooba, he changed the tempo, sang it himself in a voice nobody would have cast, added a couplet that exists in no earlier version, and scored it to a scene about saboteurs planting explosives. What comes out is not the Greek record.

The same composer's most-loved song opens with a fork struck against a wine glass. That is not borrowing. That is somebody in a Bombay studio deciding a glass is a percussion instrument.

Where we stand on it

This station plays original film recordings only, and where a song has a documented ancestor we would rather tell you than let you find out from a list. Knowing that Mehbooba came from Cyprus by way of Athens does not make it smaller. It makes it a song that travelled three thousand kilometres and got better on the way.