Somewhere between shrinking attention spans and streaming-driven storytelling, an old Bollywood staple has quietly gone missing: the duet. Composer Shankar Mahadevan believes it is a loss worth reversing.
The vanishing duet
In an interview with Variety India, Mahadevan pointed to songs such as ‘Jane Kyu Log Pyaar Karte Hai’ from Dil Chahta Hai and ‘Agar Main Kahu’ from Lakshya as examples of duets once written as genuine lyrical conversations between two characters. “We don’t see duets anymore. Well, we don’t see lip-sync songs anymore. Earlier, every film used to be a musical. So somewhere that has changed. Which is pretty sad. But I feel that it should come back,” he said. He added that the way songs are treated on screen has also changed. “When a song is played in a film, right when the main hook line or lyrics are about to come, the dialogues can be heard. Everybody is talking on top of the song. So you don’t know whether to listen to the song, which you probably love, or to listen to the dialogues. They do it because they want to make the songs shorter so that the film is shorter,” he said.
Too many composers, too little unity
That same push for efficiency, Mahadevan said, has changed how soundtracks are built. Albums such as Bunty Aur Babli, Dil Chahta Hai and Kal Ho Na Ho once carried a single sonic identity, whereas today five or six composers are often credited on one album. “Everything is fine as long as you do it properly. If a director feels, ‘This guy can do only classical, this guy is an amazing person who can do rap, hip-hop, or rock, so I need four composers for my four different situations,’ that is fair,” he said. He was more critical of albums driven purely by turnaround time. “If they say, ‘Yaar, in one week you will get five songs. What is your problem?’ then they are not thinking for the film. This is probably the thought process of music companies. I am not a big fan of that,” he said.
A return to devotional roots
Mahadevan recently turned to a more personal project, Anandam, The Symphony of Devotion, featuring Sonu Nigam, Shaan, the Nandy Sisters, and his sons, Siddharth and Shivam. It took place on June 27. “Naam Sankirtan is a very simple form of music where you sing a line and the listener repeats it. This is the simplest but the most joyful experience. I’ve done many things in music, but I always wanted to do a devotional concert because our country’s heritage, and languages like Sanskrit, Hindi are so rich,” he said. On whether modernising devotional music dilutes it, he said, “It all depends on how you present it. You may be sitting there with a tanpura, but you can be very out of tune. Or you can have a modern synthesizer, but you are so pristine that you give that meditative experience. I don’t believe there is only one way to listen to music.”
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