Dosti · Sholay · 90s
The friendship song is a Hindi film invention and nobody else copied it
Western soundtracks have love songs and breakup songs. The dosti song - two people, no romance, one melody - is almost entirely ours.
Try to name five Hollywood songs about friendship written for a film and sung by the characters in it. It is harder than it should be. In Hindi cinema the category is so well established it has conventions: two voices, usually male, trading lines rather than harmonising, and a melody simple enough that the audience is expected to sing it back.
Yeh Dosti set the template so completely that everything after it is measured against it. What people forget is how the recording is built: Kishore Kumar and Manna Dey do not sing together for most of it. They alternate, one finishing the other's line, which is a musical joke about the thing the lyric is claiming.
The nineties took the form somewhere else. Pal and Yaaron came from an album, not a film, and KK sings both alone. The friendship song had become retrospective: not two people declaring something, but one person remembering it. That is a different genre wearing the same clothes, and it is the version that ended up at every Indian school farewell for twenty years.
Manja closes the loop. Amit Trivedi writes it as a kite metaphor for three friends pulling in different directions, and the arrangement keeps threatening to come apart. It is the first one in the tradition that admits the friendship might not hold.
All of them are on the दोस्ती station.