The Sounds of Obsession: Subtle Menace in the Music of Yash Chopra’s “Darr”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/d7npv-9gn02
The classic Hindi film, Darr (1993), directed by Yash Chopra, is the story of the stalker Rahul, played by Shah Rukh Khan, wreaking havoc on the lives of the innocent lovers, Kiran and Sunil (played by Juhi Chawla and Sunny Deol respectively). As Rahul stalks Kiran, declaring his love for her, the audience is shown a window into the derangement of his psyche: the loss of his mother at a young age, unsent love letters during college, a shrine filled with pictures of Kiran, carving her name into his chest with a knife. His obsessive love turns to violence toward Sunil, and the lovers try to evade his sinister advances as Rahul chases them across the planet.
Originally advertised as “a violent love story” on its movie poster, the film largely follows the conventions of 1990s Bollywood, but Chopra and screenwriter, Honey Irani, create distortions of genre expectation through Shah Rukh Khan’s character. One of said genre conventions is the inclusion of original song sequences, composed by Pt. Shivkumar Sharma and Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia (as the duo “Shiv-Hari”), with lyrics by Anand Bakshi. Despite their non-threatening surface exteriors, various musical devices combine with the filmmaking to give the songs a layer of menace that elevate them above the standard fare of contemporaneous Hindi film music. This creates a multi-tiered listening dynamic wherein the pleasant becomes grotesque in context.
The songs of Darr have become classics in the world of ’90s Bollywood film songs. But, behind the catchiness and fulfillment of industry expectation lies a multi-layered psycho-drama created by the songs’ interactions with Darr’s story and characters. This interaction exists not solely in lyrical concerns but also in the subtle musical gestures crafted by the minds of Shiv-Hari. At a surface level, listening to the film’s soundtrack is enjoyable; there are catchy melodies, lush orchestrations, and timeless performances by now-legendary singers. However, the deeper one listens with an analytical focus, the more disturbing, intriguing, and artistically edifying the songs become.
While the film begins with an idyllic, romantic tone, the music soon introduces an element of the sinister. After a brief introductory scene of Kiran, who is seen alone reading a letter from her fiance Sunil (although Yash Chopra already hints at Rahul’s presence in this scene), we find her with her friends at their school. We hear “Kiran, I love you” announced through the school’s public address. The music of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” (roughly “Your look is magic”) then begins diegetically, sung by Shah Rukh Khan’s Rahul (unbeknownst to Kiran).
By today’s standards, the early lyrics contain a definite romantic red flag in the lines “Tu haan kar, ya naa kar / Tu hai meri Kiran” (“whether you say yes or no, you are mine Kiran”), but in the world of early 1990’s Bollywood, this type of courtship is nothing out of the ordinary. However, Shiv-Hari’s orchestration implies something more sinister, ending the song with a repetition of the line “tu hai meri Kiran” with aggressive orchestral chords.
The actual nature of the song and truly the thesis statement of the entire film is then revealed. Kiran is seen on a train which enters a tunnel and becomes pitch black. We hear a voiceover say the words “Pyaar jab had se guzar jaae to pooja ban jaata hai, aur pooja bhatak jaae to junoon” (“when love crosses a boundary it becomes worship, and when worship goes astray it becomes obsession”). Upon emerging from the tunnel, “Jaadu Teri Nazar” begins again non-diegetically featuring more obviously sinister lyrics, such as “bekhabar meri taqdeer hai tu / tu kisi aur ki ho na jaana / kuch bhi kar jaaonga main deewaana” (“unaware, you are my destiny / don’t you become someone else’s / I am crazy and will do anything”). With this, “Jaadu Teri Nazar” becomes a cipher for the film’s stated theme of love turning into obsession.
Another thematically important part of Darr‘s soundtrack that directly connects to “Jaadu Teri Nazar” is an instrumental track labeled “Obsession (Dance Music)” on the film’s commercial soundtrack release. After proceeding to terrorize the lives of Kiran and Sunil in various episodic scenes, we see Rahul in his apartment, playing the melody of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” on his harmonica. Chopra then cuts to a fantasy sequence scored by “Obsession (Dance Music).” We see Kiran dancing in a shapeless void, assumedly in Rahul’s imagination.
Shiv-Hari’s music starts out calmly, almost entirely with percussion instruments. The fervor of the percussion increases, as does the intensity of Kiran’s dance and the rate of cuts in the visuals. Frenzied imagery and intense music combine to reflect Rahul’s increasingly spiraling self-control. Kiran’s titillating movements to the music in Rahul’s mind further showcase his derangement. The inclusion of the melodic material of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” in “Obsession (Dance Music)” helps to create the idea in the listener’s mind that this melody represents Rahul’s obsession over Kiran. After a brief guitar interlude, the music grows to a climax characterized by wordless choir singing and crashing percussion. At its highest dramatic point, the men in the choir sing the same melody as the line “tu hai meri Kiran” from “Jaadu Teri Nazar” three times before the music ends with Kiran standing in the rain with open arms.
Yash Chopra zooms in towards Kiran as the sound of Rahul’s harmonica playing “Jaadu Teri Nazar” intercedes into the audio of the film, signaling the end of Rahul’s fantasy. Screenwriter Honey Irani’s choice of the harmonica for Rahul’s instrument further clarifies his character. Its sound is tied to classic cinematic images of loneliness. The 1975 Hindi film, Sholay, sees Amitabh Bachchan’s character Jai playing the harmonica while observing Radha (Jaya Bachchan). In Sholay, Radha is a widow—for her to remarry would be a social taboo. Jai’s circumstances have forced him into a life of crime for survival—his playing the harmonica while simultaneously falling into a love that is doomed from the start is paralleled in a contorted way in Darr‘s Rahul. Sholay is one of, if not the most, famous film in the history of Indian cinema—such a comparison would likely occur to contemporary viewers of Darr. This association is triggered sonically through the harmonica’s strained timbre. The instrument even at a physical level could represent Rahul’s frame of mind: it is a rare instrument where one has to both exhale and inhale in order to produce sound. The song “Tu Mere Saamne” echoes this action as it features Rahul heavily breathing in and out at a menacing cadence.
“Tu Mere Saamne,” the final song in the film, sees a dangerous evolution in Rahul’s obsession. It occurs after Sunil and Kiran steal away to Switzerland for their honeymoon, where Rahul finds them and befriends them, as they have never seen his face. His now face-to-face intervention in their lives triggers another fantasy of Kiran in his mind. Despite being a love song on its surface, Shiv-Hari begin the song with forceful orchestral bombast and men’s chorus (which precede the aforementioned heavy breathing), akin to the ending of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” and parts of “Obsession (Dance Music).” Anand Bakshi’s lyrics draw parallels between Rahul and Sunil. “Tu Mere Saamne” (“You are in front of me”) is eerily close to the first words heard in the entire film: Sunil’s words in Kiran’s mind as she reads the love letter he had sent to her (“Jaan, main tumse door hoon. Lekin, tum mere saamne ho.” This translates to “Love, I am far from you. But you are in front of me.”). Sunil’s love is true, but Rahul’s love has crossed the threshold.
Rahul’s early fantasy of Kiran picturized in “Obsession (Dance Music)” did not include Rahul in her presence. This new fantasy changes that dynamic. The line “Tujhko dekhoon ke pyaar karoon” (“Should I gaze at you or make love to you?”) is intermingled with lyrics indicating disbelief yet confirmation that Kiran is now his possession. “Jaadu Teri Nazar” stated “Tu hai meri, Kiran”–simply “You are mine.” The iteration of this sentiment in “Tu Mere Saamne” reaches a point of completion with the line “Tu meri ho gayi”–literally, “You have become mine.” The mukhda (a term that translates literally to “face” that refers to the initial memorable portion of a song) finishes with the line “Kaise main aitbaar karoon” (“How can I trust [this reality]?”). Udit Narayan’s vocals, as well as the contour of the melody line, are fairly simple, unadorned, reflecting the single-minded arrested development at play in Rahul’s psyche (the same could be said for Narayan’s vocals in “Jaadu Teri Nazar”).
Lata Mangeshkar’s vocals in the next stanza overlap with the ending of Udit Narayan’s stanza with considerable echo effects added. This adds to the dream-like, imagined quality of the song—Rahul’s brain at the height of delusion. Mangeshkar’s vocals are shallow with an almost child-like lilt, fitting the simplistic melody. Shiv-Hari composed a tune paralleling the simplistic logic at play with Rahul’s derangement. The Kiran that sings in the song is a cheap imitation—a tulpa in Rahul’s mind. His imagined Kiran sings “Toot gayi tootke main choor ho gayi / Teri zid se majboor ho gayi / Tera jaadu chal gaya…” (“I am broken, I am shattered / Your persistence has compelled me / Your magic has worked”)—a twisted and delusional perspective on romance befitting a murderous stalker.
The danceable, but somewhat menacing instrumental interludes of the song also connect with the earlier sequence set to “Obsession (Dance Music).” The use of a prominent clarinet solo, an uncommon occurrence in Bollywood film songs, adds to the phantasmagorical quality of the song by introducing a foreign timbre. The visual is that of a strange liminal space, a place with no coherent scenery but with raining rose petals. Rahul plays piano as Kiran writhes suggestively. This particular visual shows that Rahul has now placed himself next to her in his own fantasy as opposed to just seeing her. He is no longer simply declaring that she is his—she has become his.
(The following two paragraphs contains significant spoilers)
Throughout the finale of the film, where Rahul is found out and killed by Sunil, Shiv-Hari’s background score is dominated by a particular theme that had been first introduced earlier, always connected to Rahul’s fixation with Kiran. It is characterized by two notes constituting a rising major sixth interval which morphs into a rising perfect fifth interval before deteriorating into a winding chromatic melody that eventually loses intelligibility. The first mentioned interval, the major sixth, traditionally has a romantic quality, especially at its iterated tempo in Darr–a soaring, almost Wagnerian yearning. The second interval, the perfect fifth, is acoustically at rest. But, with the pitch level at which it is presented in relation to the earlier major sixth, it is contorted–it implies a different musical key, an incompatibility. This particular interval happens to be the same as the beginning of “Jaadu Teri Nazar.” This theme’s association with Rahul indicates its mirroring of his emotional incapacity. What he views as love, in this case represented by the major sixth, becomes contorted into his obsession with Kiran, the perfect fifth that connects to “Jaadu Teri Nazar.”
The melody that succeeds these two intervals is simultaneously chaotic and tragic—chaotic in light of his murderous actions, tragic as Rahul’s final end symbolizes a human life wasted on mental derangement. At the end of the film, Shiv-Hari use the theme to paint this tragedy, iterating it twice, first with a subdued muted trumpet, then with a wordless female chorus, as Rahul utters his last words. Yash Chopra reiterates the overarching theme of the entire film one more time by playing an a cappella version of “Jaadu Teri Nazar” over one final shot of Rahul’s lifeless body.
Both the songs and background score of Darr showcase an approach to soundtracking wherein the sonic content not only operates in close coordination with the mood and atmosphere of the film, but with the characters, storyline, themes, and intrinsic reference points orchestrated by Yash Chopra and his crew. Shiv-Hari’s music is not simply color and vibe, but multi-faceted content that rewards close listening just as repeat viewings of the film can illuminate the finer nuances of the plot. It is music that contains a sub-surface circuitry that, even when the listener is unaware of its complexities, creates a richer artistic statement than music that has a similar surface (a similar color and vibe) without the same profound approach to its unseen infrastructure. Shiv-Hari’s soundtrack’s rich subterrain integrating with and projecting onto the visual and narrative elements of Darr creates a rare cinematic totality.
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Featured Image: Still from “Jaadu Teri Nazar” by SO!
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Zane Merritt is a composer, guitarist, teacher, and scholar. He holds a PhD in music composition from the University at Buffalo (SUNY). His recent activities include designing and teaching a course on Bollywood and its music, collaborations with Nepali poets, setting their recitations to original music, and releasing a classical guitar album that places arrangements of Indian film music alongside the western classical canon.
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“So Jao”: Sound, Death and the Postcolonial Politics of Cinematic Adaptation in Vishal Bhardwaj’s “Haider” (2014)—Abhipsa Chakraborty
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“So Jao”: Sound, Death and the Postcolonial Politics of Cinematic Adaptation in Vishal Bhardwaj’s “Haider” (2014)
The beginning of this year witnessed a significant reportage on films inspired by the Kashmir conflict in India, occasioned by the release of Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files on March 11, 2022. The polarized reaction to the film, which single-mindedly focuses on the exodus of Kashmiri pandits from the valley and the violence they were subjected to at the hands of their Muslim counterparts, makes visible the complexity of the understanding of Kashmir’s political history in contemporary India. While Agnihotri’s film, whose propagandist agenda in favor of the state won approvals from the ruling political party in India, Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 film Haider, despite its extremely sensitive and responsible treatment of the problem of militancy in Kashmir was targeted for passing over the plight of Kashmiri pandits. But eight years after its release, Haider, which won five National Awards in 2015, still wields the power to move its audience regardless of their religious and communal bearings through its portrayal of a terrible human tragedy in the wake of Kashmir militancy in the 1990s.
Bharadwaj’s Haider completes his trilogy of cinematic adaptations of Shakespearian tragedies: Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet translate as Maqbool (2004), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014) respectively, in their Bollywood avatars. Bhardwaj, in his unique style, imports the original tragic plots into an identifiable and contemporary Indian context, through the assimilation of the plot material with the personal life stories he tells in his films. The plot of Haider centers around the disappearance and death of Haider’s father, which exposes the dark menagerie of political corruption and murders that Haider’s uncle is embroiled in. The pursuit of this traumatic truth sets the stage for Haider’s alienation from his mother and the motherland.
Integral to Bhardwaj’s style is the use of music in a typical Bollywood blockbuster formula, with song and dance sequences interrupting the linearity of cinematic storytelling. While certain film adaptations of Shakespeare operate simply as vehicles for the transmissions of ideology, Graham Holderness argues in “Radical Potentiality and Institutional Closure” (published in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism), others “block, deflect or otherwise work on ideology in order partially to disclose its mechanisms.” Holderness evaluates the possibility of the film form to be a radical medium to challenge dominant ideologies or value systems. Analyzing Akira Kurosawa’s film adaptation of Macbeth—Throne of Blood (1957)–he argues in favor of the film’s dynamism to be able to liberate the original text.
Holderness’ reading of Kurosawa raises important questions for the postcolonial film importing from the English literary canon to speak uniquely to a postcolonial audience. In Bhardwaj’s undertaking, this import is singularly anchored and strengthened in a powerful musical idiom. Instead of containing the meanings of the original text, Bhardwaj’s Haider expands and pluralizes the levels of signification that Hamlet produces. By making the stock Hamlet plot be the medium for staging the tragic history of Kashmir, Bhardwaj’s film is a direct address, on one level, to the former imperial master discourse. On a more immediate and radical level, the film hits back very strategically at the Indian state and the numerous killings that have been sanctioned in the name of controlling terrorism in the recent past. In this capacity, the film liberates the textual Hamlet, making its echoes reverberate in a new sound and a new linguistic register.
Through a strategic integration of dance and music–both diegetic (within the frame of the film) and non-diegetic (for the audience’s listening only)– Bhardwaj’s film not only succeeds in delivering its radical political message to a popular film audience, it also speaks back to the former imperial discourse. Non-musical sounds are also key to Haider (2014) as a careful sonic anchoring of the story. The abstract potential of musical and non-musical sounds open up new horizons of meaning in the film, exceeding the confines of the original verbal register of the literary text. The loud, blaring and constant sound of the army car’s horn, for example, signals the death of Hilal in the beginning scenes of the film triggering the tragic plot. The unsettling tones of despair, melancholia and death which open the film remain a haunting and pervasive presence throughout.
“Jhelum” the song that sings the lament of Hilal’s tragic loss, invokes the river that passes through the valley. The song describes the elemental quality of the river into whose womb-like depths Hilal’s body receded till it was posthumously discovered by villagers. The fading melancholic melody of the song seems to suggest the slow disintegration of Haider’s sanity, as he is seen staring into blankness in several shots as well as attempting to merge with the river in an act of suicide. The opening sounds evoke a song that comes later in the narrative, “Bismil,” that stands in place of the play within a play sequence in Hamlet and expands the affective reach of the themes of death, love and betrayal.
One of the most intriguing moments in the film is the musical rendition of the gravedigger scene, an archetypal commentary on human mortality in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Performed by three old men in a snow-covered graveyard in conspicuously tired voices, the song “So Jao” (“Sleep!”) has a deceptively bare and sparse quality. The song opens with the rough, scratching of the gravedigger’s shovel scraping the cold hard ground, a sound that becomes the acoustic base for the bizarre lullaby-like deathsong. The choppy, staccato-like rhythmic impact of the metal on the resistant icy ground announcing “the final rest” is executed with a disturbing sonic clarity and certitude. This gritty foreground sound is supported by the reverberating sound of the rubab that transports the tune from an immediate closed verse recitation into an expanded musical interlude, as the vocals echo “Arey ao na…!” (O come…!) stretching the last syllable into a dying, falling note. “So Jao“‘s loaded simplicity dispassionately delivers this bare truth: that all life is inevitably moving towards its end, or as Freud says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) towards its inanimate origin.
While the men who perform “So Jao” are past their prime in life, they are far from being incidental characters in the film as they are in Shakespeare. They are woven into the narrative as militants who protect Haider and do not hesitate to wield heavy duty weapons when the time comes. It comes as no surprise that they are digging their own graves, even as the seriousness and fear of death are subsumed in the larger political cause they serve in the plot. The sound of the shovel overlaps with Gazala’s first phone call to Roohdaar, the embodied ghost who brings Hamlet’s father’s message to the son (the Urdu word rooh literally translates as soul or spirit), signifying an ominous anticipation in the narrative at this point. The grave, as the song says, is ultimately where you sleep your longest sleep. The scene is one of the three men lying supine each in his own hole, with one in the center housing the little boy who enters the frame perkily dancing into the gray and barren scene. His sprint-like entry walk carrying bread and sustenance for the gravediggers, the well-choreographed lifting of his body to the beat of the song heightened just very slightly by the clinking bell sound once every four beats is an unsettling reminder of the happy ignorance that we immerse ourselves in being simultaneously aware and oblivious of the inevitable imminent end. These stark juxtapositions in the gravedigger’s song works as a telling sonic metaphor for the state of hopelessness, confusion and despair that has historically assailed Kashmir for many, many decades. The song is also a commentary on the futility of violence instigated in the name of religion, when man must ultimately surrender to one common fate, one common remainder.
Haider’s presence in the graveyard song introduces the inevitable vectors of vengeance and death that awaits his fate following the knowledge of the truth of his father’s institutional murder. The further breakdown of his psyche and the increasing dissociation from his world is dramatized brilliantly in the song “Bismil” that publicly calls out Khurram on his crime (1.44.59). The song marries the allegorical with folk costumes, and incorporates exaggerated and physically intense dance steps to impose the serious weight and inescapable gravity of the accusation of murder that Haider ascribes to Khurram. The song and dance sequence are staged as a public performance, one that happens a few scenes before in the film too, when Haider is seen surrounded by a crowd in a new avatar with shaved head and grown beard (1.25.53). This distinct change in appearance along with the masques he uses later in Ghazala’s wedding (1.40.51) and the “Bismil” song are markers of Haider’s increasing dissociation from his absurd reality—one that he can only make sense of as a character in a play. Khurram’s crimes are not separate from the questionable workings of the Indian state, and Bhardwaj does a good job tapping into the folk idiom and the song-and-dance format to critique what Haider calls the state’s “chutzpah” (pronounced tʃəʊzpə, not ˈho͝otspə), the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). The alteration of the first syllable is possibly to bring in an echo of a popular north Indian abuse word to take a jab at the impunity enjoyed by state officials for the crimes committed on the Kashmiri people.
Haider remains a brave directorial undertaking not only aesthetically but also politically, given that the issue of Kashmir’s independence (azadi) is still a burning issue in India 27 years since 1995, the year in which Haider is set, and 8 years since the film’s release. Bharadwaj’s self-composed music in the film is not simply a placeholder for the dazzling verbal exchanges of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The music in Haider magnifies and intensifies the local mood of the scenes where they feature. This function is not only limited to the background soundtrack which, in its haunting atmospheric quality, renders a hollow despair and anguished hopelessness throughout. The songs additionally step in to carry the expression beyond the register of words and visuals to render a poetic and sonic intensity to the film, making it more memorable and impactful to a wider audience. In Haider, the formula of the Bollywood blockbuster film is effective not only as good entertainment, but also as a means to tie the story together in a haunting soundscape which refuses to fade long after the film ends.
Featured image: screen capture from Haider created by SO!
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Abhipsa Chakraborty is a PhD candidate in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo. She holds a BA, MA and MPhil from the Department of English, University of Delhi, and has worked as an Assistant Professor (Ad-hoc) at University of Delhi. Her research interests include Modernism, Sound Studies, Digital Humanities, and South Asian cultures. She is a trained vocalist in Hindustani Classical Music and hopes to integrate her musical knowledge with her academic research on aurality and narrative styles in 20th-century novels.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Gendered Soundscapes of India, an Introduction“–Monika Mehta and Praseeda Gopinath
“Out of Sync: Gendered Location Sound Work in Bollywood“—Priya Jaikumar
Sonic Connections: Listening for Indigenous Landscapes in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles–Laura Sachiko Fugikawa
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