Abstract
Amanda Weidman, Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 270 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-37706-6
Amanda Weidman’s scholarship on the voice and the politics surrounding it in modern South India needs no introduction. Her first major foray was about the emergence and use of the violin in modern concert classical music in southern India and the staging of a classical voice and a modern tradition from the late nineteenth century. Her new work continues to engage with the theorising of the voice, but situated this time around within the domain of Tamil film music and more specifically of playback singing. Her concerns remain the same: to look at how voicing indexes a complex set of social relations and is an integral part of a complex economy of meaning making. The semiotic economy, as it emerged, was based on a very particular division of labour between singing and speaking that playback embodied and one that produced a new auditory regime determining what must be heard and what needed to remain silent. Playback was, thus, not just about whose voice it was, but about whether it was only a voice or much more.
While the argument is persuasive, especially in relation to the making of a specific Dravidian male voice, and to that of a range of idealised female singing voices, its elaboration is complicated by the excessive juxtaposition of theoretical concepts with ethnographic description. The ethnography is brilliant, but its flow is too often interrupted by the insertion of theoretical notions, leaving no space at all for reflexive reading. The book covers a huge span of playback singing from the 1940s to the 2000s, when the social context for playback singing was transformed beyond recognition, and it is to Weidman’s credit that she fleshes out the materiality and affective reach of playback singing in a range of innovative ways.
Weidman argues that playback singing—ubiquitous in the Tamil film industry from the 1950s—was not simply a technological feat separating and synchronising aural and visual tracks, but that it stood for a complex set of practices. These divided acting and singing as discrete units with significant implications for staging a very specific ethnolinguistic affective identity as well as for fixing moral and political conceptions of the self, and more crucially of gender roles. Taking her cue from Jean Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, she argues that playback produced a very specific range of aesthetic values and expectations. These made for a particular appreciation of the singing voice that was distinct from the speaking one (in this case the actor on screen) and yet did not appear incongruous. The voice was also able to resonate with both a sense of identity and alterity, marking sameness and difference. This was particularly evident in the 1950s and 1960s when the male playback singing voice became a vehicle for the Dravidian political project of ethnolinguistic identity. In one of the finest chapters of the book, titled ‘A leader for all song, the making of a Dravidian voice’, Weidman tracks the life and labour of T. M. Soundarrajan—the undisputed king of playback for two decades, who lent his golden voice to the superstars Shivaji Ganesan and M. G. Ramachandran—and demonstrates how the singer’s voice got endowed with the affective power to stand for Dravidian political identity. Not only did Soundarrajan construct his own middle-range, non-virtuosic style as a new masculine everyman’s voice, but he was also part of a larger process that made full use of playback to bridge the gap between oratorial Tamil and everyday Tamil to realise the Dravidian political ideal. Here, the insertion of Tatva pattukkal (philosophical songs) made a big impact, helping diffuse Dravidian ideology as it was broken down in simple and appealing sonic terms. This was markedly different from what happened with the female singing stars during the 1940s and 1950s, when older notions of chastity and purity continued to prevail.
Initially, the iraval kural (the voice on loan) was viewed with suspicion, but this soon gave way to an appreciation of the female playback singer. The female voice continued to remain the site of debates on feminine virtue and modesty. It could only be debated and partially resolved by both singer and listener by decoupling lyrics from singing in a way that the content of the song was transformed by its musical interpretation and rendering, and which in the process helped iron out ambiguities. Within this overall framework, film directors experimented with different voices. Here, Weidman makes the familiar argument that certain voices, classically trained stood for different kinds of protagonists than those for whom non-trained voices were lent. However, listening to a variety of female voices in a film like Ratha Kaneer, which Weidman analyses closely, it is difficult to follow the logic of her argument about classical voices and non-classical ones. The exceptional rendering of a song like ‘Kadavai Satta di’ by M. L. Vasantakumari, redolent with classical overtones, makes it impossible to slot it or to associate it with any form of crass sexuality; instead, it is playful, a feature that guaranteed the reception of the song among a wider public on and off screen. I am also not entirely convinced that All India Radio’s programming schedule reinforced the divide between classical and non-classical film songs; there was a strong pedagogic emphasis that directed AIR ventures, wherein all kinds of musical material was used to augment the taste of the public.
In developing the story of female playback through the lives of individual singing stars like P. Susheela and L. R. Eswari, Weidman raises the central question that animates the whole work, namely, what it was to be just the voice, while simultaneously suggesting that it was never just the voice. She elaborates on the kind of training that self-taught playback singers were expected to undergo so as to remain ‘nonbodily, nonagentive and nonauthorial’. Only by remaining unmoved could the female playback singer exercise the effect of endowing her voice with distinct affective power that could then move the listener. When this was jettisoned and the playback singer participated in an excess spilling out of the singing frame, then boundaries between the sacred and the profane were transgressed, something which Eswari embodied. What is compelling about the story is how Eswari constructed her singing persona and how she not only responded to a craze for new types of songs—club and cabaret—but how she aggressively projected her Tamilness to stand for a new kind of vocal agency. The chapter is brilliantly written and conceptualised, and there is just one aspect missing, which is to do with the reception of the songs, how listeners responded to them and whether the new aesthetics was dialogically formed.
The afterlives of playback are explored in a sensitive epilogue where Weidman analyses the neoliberal context of media practices that threw up very different post-millennia singing heroes where the latter could sing his own songs, in contrast to the female singer, in whose case the division of labour between writing, singing and acting persisted. Thus, notwithstanding the altered status and persona of the singing female star participating in reality shows, the author reminds us continually of the disciplinary practices accompanying the dubious, neoliberal agenda of personhood and emancipation.