If India had one film song as its soundtrack, what would it be? Jinhe naaz hai Hind par woh kahaan hai from Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa? It gets my vote, but it is a tribute to the richness of Hindi film music and to the depth of Note by Note: The India Story 1947-2017 by Ankur Bhardwaj, Seema Chishti and Sushant Singh, one of the most innovative books I’ve read recently, that it doesn’t figure as the song of the year in 1957. Another song from Pyaasa does, however, the brilliant Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai, also written by the great Sahir Ludhianvi.
The book takes us through the hopeful 1940s to the 1950s, which are increasingly dipped in moral disgust to the carefree emerging cosmopolitanism of the 1960s. As the national mood changes, so does the music, until it becomes merely serviceable in the 90s, where the three forces—Mandal, Masjid and Market changed India forever to the dark times of 2010s where the spectre of corruption emerged uncontested by UPA-2 to legitimize one of the most toxic establishments of its time.