Borrowed melodies · R. D. Burman · 1975
Mehbooba Mehbooba travelled from a Cypriot village to Sholay
The most famous campfire song in Hindi cinema has a paper trail: a Cypriot folk tune, a Greek singer, and R. D. Burman singing it himself in a voice like gravel in a tin.
Ask anyone in India to name a song from Sholay and most will say this one. It plays at the bandit camp while Jai and Veeru plant explosives, Helen and Jalal Agha dance, and R. D. Burman sings it himself rather than handing it to a playback singer. Fifty years later it still opens wedding sets.
It also has one of the clearest borrowing trails in Hindi film music, and unusually for this subject, the trail is documented rather than argued about.
The chain, in order
The song immediately preceding it is Say You Love Me by Demis Roussos, the Egyptian-born Greek singer, released in 1974, a year before Sholay. Wikipedia's own disambiguation page for that title lists Mehbooba Mehbooba as a remake of it. The melody and the structure line up almost completely.
Roussos did not invent it either. His version is built on Ta Rialia, a Cypriot folk song associated with the singer Michalis Violaris. Roussos, raised in Alexandria before his family moved to Greece, cranked up the tempo and added a heavy percussion section, keeping the folk pattern where a chorus repeats each line.
Burman's version sits at a pace between the two. He makes the melody undulate where Roussos climbs and descends in steps, and he and Anand Bakshi add a couplet that appears in neither earlier song. There is no chorus on the Hindi recording at all: every line is Burman.
What that actually tells you
The interesting thing is not that it was borrowed. It is that a Cypriot village tune reached a Bombay recording studio in about a year, through a Greek pop record, and came out as the song a hundred million Indians associate with a campfire in a ravine. Music moved faster in 1974 than the people who moved it.
It is also worth being precise about the word. This is not a cover: the lyric, the arrangement, the vocal and the added couplet are new. It is not original either. Adaptation is the honest word, and it was completely standard practice in an industry that produced hundreds of soundtracks a year on impossible deadlines.