How green was my screen

Why has Bollywood, which gave us so many lovely songs on and amid Nature’s beauty, turned its back on it?

There’s a lovely moment in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Abhimaan (1973) where the village-bred Jaya Bhaduri’s character explains to her urban beau her father’s words on how all of Nature is musically connected. Pointing to the swaying branch of a tree from which emerges an invisible birdsong, she says: “ Tumhein nahin lagta ki yeh aawaz phoolon se aa rahi hai? Shabd mein sparsh, sparsh mein roop, roop mein ras, gandh… shrishti mein sab ek mein ghula-mila hai .”

This extraordinary spiritual paean to Nature came at a point in Hindi cinema when the former was almost at the end of its long tenure on screen. A constant presence in both film locales and lyrics earlier, particularly in the 1960s, it began to dwindle in the ’70s and gradually died by the millennium. Today, panegyrics to the moon, wind, rain, water bodies, hills and trees have virtually been expunged from the vocabulary of lyric-writing; as for locales, they may be far more exotic but miserably fail to give one a palpable sense of Nature’s blessings.

Visually speaking, it was in the ’60s, the decade of the hill station romance, that the great outdoors was almost like a character in the movies. It was that euphoric phase when Shammi Kapoor/Joy Mukherjee/Rajendra Kumar would take off to Kashmir/Shimla/ Manali and sing light-headedly of natural beauty and the beauty of love, both so entwined that it was impossible to think of one without the other. There were mellifluous tributes to the places themselves —

Dil kahe ruk ja re ruk ja yahin pe kahin/Jo baat is jagah hai kahin pe nahin or

Har chehra yahan chand to har zarra sitara /

Yeh waadi-e-Kashmir hai jannat ka nazara — in Mohammad Rafi’s intoxicating voice as the camera swept across the majesty of the mountains and the breathtaking beauty of the valley. (Yes, the lyric latter appears particularly tragic today but that’s another story.)

Call it the wistful tunnel vision of a city dweller living in an environmentally depleted space but the one thing I always noticed when watching an old Hindi film song was the breeze: the fluttering dupatta, the wind in the tresses (as far as hair spray and pomade would allow) and the swaying fronds in the background as the lead pair romanced amid lush greenery. With the real air in urban spaces dulled into stillness by sky-stabbing towers, that on-screen breeze would simultaneously stir a sense of well-being and a sadness for things lost.

This breeze — hawa , saba , pavan , purvayi — has pride of place in so many songs lyrically and visually. Think Shashikala traipsing through the countryside on a picnic (the latter, a once-fixation on the screen, too, has disappeared) in Anupama ’s Bheegi bheegi faza . Or a rapturous Nalini Jaywant singing Thandi hawaein lehra ke aayein in Naujawan . Kishore Kumar warbling Thandi hawa yeh chandni suhani in Jhumroo . Or think of the other lovely numbers woven around other objects of Nature — chand , raat , barsaat , ghata , vaadiyan , nadi , saagar , dharti , aakash — in film after film. It’s an entire panoply of well-being served up in the form of a film song.

Most of Hindi cinema’s Nature songs had to do with romantic love, the connection between the two being made either through comparisons of the beloved’s beauty with elements of Nature or by invoking the Universe’s call to lovers. But a few lyricists like Sahir Ludhianvi and Gulzar went beyond these tropes. Both had a penchant for imparting human qualities to Nature: in Gulzar’s

Hawaon pe likh do hawaon ke naam , sunlight and shade play boisterous games on a branch while a stream becomes a mischievous imp (

Chulbula yeh paani apni raah behna bhool kar /

Lete lete aaina chamka raha hai phool par ). In Sahir’s

Neele gagan ke tale, dharti ka pyar pale , Nature has its own stories of affection within it:

Balkhaati belein, masti mein khelein ,

pedon se mil ke gale or

Shabnam ke moti phoolon pe bikhre, dono ki aas phale . Two years later, Sahir linked this ‘Nature love’ to that between humans in another romantic song,

Neele parbaton ki dhaara, aayi dhoondne kinara ; the line

Jis naate ne unko baandha, woh naata hai tera mera is a beautiful reiteration of the spiritual oneness of the cosmos where everyone and everything is connected.

A few songs — very few — have cast Nature in moulds other than the romantic. Shailendra’s Dharti kahe pukar ke / Beej bichha le pyar ke from Do Bigha Zameen is a poignant exhortation to a poor peasant forced to migrate to the city; Kavi Pradeep’s inspiring anthem Suraj re jalte rehna ( Harishchandra Taramati ) salutes the all-nurturing sun while serving as an allegory for a virtuous mythological king who, to keep his word, became a pauper. Bharat Vyas’s old-world Hari hari vasundhara pe neela neela yeh gagan , a reverential ode in beautiful chaste Hindi, envisions the Creator as an artist; while very many songs in passing use the river and the boatman as a metaphor for succour or life and death.

Why Nature disappeared from the screen in later decades, particularly in the millennium, is a moot point. Perhaps it had to do with its depleting significance in real life or perhaps it was the practical difficulty of shooting outdoors amid crowds that took song picturisations into dark bars and discos and other interiors. However, there was clearly more to it — even when song situations moved to exotic outdoor locales abroad, something core had vanished. Take a song like Suraj hua maddham ( Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham ) as just one example — it had Nature aplenty in both lyrics and locale but looked more like a soulless ad film.

Javed Akhtar, who has often expressed dismay about Nature vanishing from lyrics, has a theory about this phenomenon — namely, that younger generations have a disconnect with it and believe that references to it make a song sound dated. “If you talk of moonlight and rivers and wind and mountains, youngsters don’t relate to it,” he told an academic journal recently. “So, to keep your song modern, you have to first keep Nature out of it. It’s sad but true.”

Three days ago, another World Nature Conservation Day was celebrated globally. Our connection with Nature in this country, meanwhile, keeps dwindling. Not a wonder then that we don’t see it on our screens anymore.

The author is a freelance editor and writer