It's All Geek to Me!

The word 'musical' can connote different things. It could simply mean a movie with a few songs in it. Or it could also mean a series of songs and a plot that embellish each other, produced specifically to showcase the abilities of both singers and actors.

In the first sense of the word mentioned above, Bollywood movies would qualify as musicals. Bollywood movies and Indian movies in general feature songs integrated into the plot of the movie. This practice arises from Indian dramatic tradition which predates Indian cinema by a fair bit. Dramatic art forms like Nautanki and Kathakali tightly weave song and dance sequences into their main narratives, resulting in a production not unlike modern Western opera. Major plot points can occur during a musical or dance segments just as often as during plainer, more recitative segments. This tradition carries over to Bollywood movies, where it isn't uncommon to see plot points happen in the midst of a song. Even if a song doesn't contain plot points, it usually carries some thematic significance or relates to the mood of the character or movie. In other words, songs in a Bollywood movie usually carry meaning and give insights into the plot or the characters. The Indian film industry measures the success of a movie in two ways -- its sales at the box office and in record stores. Some movies, such as Dil Se and Bombay did not impress at the box office, but will still be remembered as great movies because of their music.

In the second sense of the word mentioned above, a movie and its songs may well exist independently of each other. In this case, songs become superfluous distractions that strike you with the incongruity of Julie Andrews breaking into These Are a Few of My Favorite Things in the middle of the von Trapps' escape from the Nazis. More often than not, I have heard 'musical' being applied to Bollywood movies in this slightly derisive sense. Reading over the comments for Bombay at imdb.com, I saw a comment questioning the appropriateness of making a musical about the 1992 religious riots in Bombay. I would counter that assertion by stating that all the songs had relevance to the plot and not one tried to denigrate the seriousness of the riots. I have tried to figure out why songs in a Bollywood movie seem superfluous to a Western audience. The best I can come up with is that the song segments in a Bollywood movie frequently do not have subtitles. To a Western viewer dependent entirely on subtitles to understand the movie, the song segments appear to be incomprehensible blobs of celluloid entirely unrelated to the rest of the movie. Even when there are subtitles, the poetry and cultural connotations inherent in some songs just don't translate very well into subtitles.

As a caveat-emptor, I should mention that Bollywood movies are also sometimes made specifically to showcase music, dance or costumes are also made. In many cases, this showcasing is worked into the movie's setting. For example, a movie made to showcase songs may have a musician as its main character. Given the sheer number of Bollywood movies produced, there are also bad movies where songs are pathetic pieces of duct tape used to buy time and cover up massive plot holes. There are superfluous songs that have the following lyrics, roughly speaking:

I was walking on the street
Eating bhelpuri (a roadside snack)
I was taking my girl out
If a spicy morsel knocked me out, what am I supposed to do?

I was walking on the street
Singing some song
I was flirting with people
If my grandmother died, what am I supposed to do?

There are also Indian movies without a single song. Fire and Black are recent movies of this sub-genre that come to mind.

Music is an integral part of the culture and tradition of Indian film. Much like spices make Indian food rich and flavorful, songs add zing to an Indian movie. As such Indian movies form a distinct genre -- a fact implicitly swept under the rug by applying the term 'musical' to them. To make the generalization that all Bollywood movies are bad musicals with superfluous songs is tantamount to saying, for example, that all Italians are alcoholics just because they commonly have a glass of wine with dinner. Mamma mia -- how's that for a musical?