Among the thousands of songs that used to play on Vividh Bharati in my childhood was a Mohammed Rafi one I liked: ‘ Tere naam ka deewana tere ghar ko dhoondta hai ’ . At that point or even later in life, I never gave a thought to the lyrics – it was just a hummable song by a favourite singer.
A few months ago, I heard the song again after a gap of many years. And absurd as it might sound, this time I was almost creeped out by the first two lines. Blame it on the changed social templates that alter one responses, but shorn of its cinematic context ‘ Tere naam ka deewna tere ghar ko dhoondta hai ’ sounded horribly like the kind of sentiment a fixated psychopath would express about the object of his obsession. In other words, a ‘stalker song’.
Bollywood has a long history of stalker songs, a genre that has social reality as its base and the work of lyricists, choreographers and directors as the increasingly unpalatable icing. A month ago, the genre zoomed back into media consciousness after BJP minister Babul Supriyo shamelessly cited it as a defence for a party member’s son who, along with a gang of cohorts, had murderously chased a lone woman at midnight. Supriyo, who’s also a Bollywood singer, tweeted that this was merely the boy-follows-girl scenario that we’ve seen umpteen times in Hindi cinema – so what was the big deal?
Sanctioned practice
Supriyo’s comparison may not be totally apt but Bollywood’s obsession with the act of stalking/pursuing is an undeniable fact. What accounts for it? Well, I’m no sociologist or academic but my guess is that the stalking song had roots in the real-life societal response to the emancipation of Indian women in the mid-1900s. The novelty of female company on campuses and workplaces was elating to many young men but their patriarchal mindset also led them to view women in public spaces as fair game – contradictory emotions that led to the interaction known as chhed-chhaad in Hindi or eve-teasing in quaint Indian English. Chhed-chhaad is also a sanctioned practice in Hindu mythology (read Krishna’s teasing of the gopis), with many traditional Hindustani bandishe s dwelling on it. Ergo, from bandish to film ditty, it was a short step.
The chhed-chhad film song may have been a product of social circumstances in the last century but it developed a life of its own and stayed on even when women in public spaces were no longer a rarity. Dozens of songs continued to be produced where the heroine was brazenly stalked on foot, cycle, car, bus and even helicopter by an admirer; one who wouldn’t take no for an answer and who basked triumphantly in the woman’s ultimate relenting. Sangam ’s ‘ Bol Radha bol sangam hoga ki nahin ’ is a prime example of this kind of acquiescence – here, the hero tenaciously pursues a woman who clearly dislikes his advances but finally marries him. True, the wedding has to do with a script twist, but the song situation is an early manifestation of the ‘ Tu haan kar ya na kar’ sentiment that has coloured many film songs, spurred the male sense of entitlement and sent out every wrong signal possible into the real world.
A darker turn
In the initial years, the chhed-chhad song in Bollywood was innocuous and playful. Melodiously tuned, written by evolved poets and enacted by lead characters who were gentlemen, it was neither an eyesore nor an assault on the ears – think Dev Anand wooing Nutan with ‘Maana janaab ne pukara nahin’, Shammi Kapoor pursuing Asha Parekh with ‘Deewana mujhsa nahin’ or even a comedian like Johnny Walker singing that delightful ditty ‘Suno suno Miss Chatterjee’. Gradually, however, the cinematic mix began to change: though lyrics remained clean and poetic, the picturisation shifted one step towards harassment. The romantic Main kahin kavi na ban jaaoon, for instance, has Dharmendra getting physical and semi-leery with Vyjayanthimala in a closed lift space while Rajendra Kumar accosts and hustles Babita in Anjaana and Vyjayanthimala in Ganwaar to melodious Rafi numbers. Indeed, almost every hero worth his salt in the sixties did the same.
The gradual descent into indecorousness reached its nadir in the noxious ’80s and ’90s – an age by which poets and gentlemen had vanished, and cheap lyrics lip-synced by louts and set to vulgar choreography became the norm. Numbers that were the epitome of sexual harassment like ‘O laal dupatte waali tera naam to bataa’, ‘What is your style number’ and ‘Gori gori o baanki chhor’i sprang up for the boy-chases-girl scenario; some, picturised on women who were not leading ladies, were even worse. In ‘Ladki hai kya re baba’, Anil Kapoor, cheered on by a hundred men, pursues a girl, stripping off her articles of clothing as the song progresses. The transition from chhed-chhaad to full-fledged sexual harassment was complete.
Toxic stalkers
As I see it, there were two distinct kinds of stalking songs in Bollywood. One was a serenade of sorts, though often crass; the other was far more toxic, with bullying and manhandling replacing ‘romance’. This ‘threat song’, full of Taming Of The Shrew phrases like ‘Khud ko samajhti hai kya’, ‘Iska guroor tod denge’ and Isko sabak sikhaenge’, was reserved for the ‘uppity’ emancipated woman who perforce needed to be put in her place. As I discovered recently, the threat song was around as early as 1971 – in a little-known number, ‘ Sher se ladne aayi hai’ from Preetam, Shammi Kapoor and his four minions paw and shove the heroine around, deriving much pleasure from her helplessness. There’s a string of similarly distasteful songs in every decade from Dharm Veer ’s ‘ Main mehlon ka raj’ to Dil ’s ‘ Khambe jaisi khadi hai’ to Sabse Bada Khiladi ’s ‘Zeher hai ki pyar hai tera chumma’; the last one in real life would probably have got the malevolent hero thrown into a prison cell.
Shamefully, the stalker song is alive and kicking even in millennial cinema: check out ‘ Chaand sifarish jo karta hamari’, ‘Tu mere agal bagal mein’, ‘Jumme ki raat hai’ or ‘ Hans mat pagli’, numbers that cover the gamut of harassment from the stalker lifting his victim’s skirt with his teeth to photographing her on the sly to emphasising that he has a divine right to pursue her. In all these, as in every stalker song earlier, the offence is laughingly endorsed by others – in ‘ Chand sifarish…’ , I was gobsmacked to see a tourist guide’s inappropriate touching of a blind girl and her protective friend being indulgently looked upon by not only her other friends but also her teacher. And of course, in every stalker song, the woman, however creepy the treatment meted out to her, always falls in love with her harasser – often in the space of that very song.
Instead of getting into the déjà vu of how lethal all this is sociologically, I’ll focus on a recent attempt by an NGO to creatively challenge the stalker song. Called Song Rewrite and hashtagged #BollywoodCanChange, the campaign by Akshara Centre invited people to subvert the lyrics of misogynistic film numbers, and urged the film industry to be more accountable in its portrayal of women. Well, I for one wouldn’t wager money on the latter but there’re no two ways about the fact that Bollywood needs to chuck the stalker song into the garbage bin. After half a century of irresponsibility, it’s about time.
