The trend in the Hindi film music today set by composers like A.R. Rahman — where orchestration overwhelms lyrics — is pushing Urdu poetry out of Hindi films, regretted playwright Girish Karnad.
Presiding over a writers’ meet, he said Rahman was a “great genius and one cannot grumble about it”, but one does miss the beauty of lyrics of the earlier period.
“You listen to a Gulzar song, but you don’t understand what is being said because of the orchestration,” he said.
Mr. Karnad hoped that this was a trend that gets controlled over time. Urdu has always retained a place in the “psychic life” of people, even when the language is on the decline in public life for political reasons, because of the lyrics of Hindi films, he said.
