Abstract
Amanda Weidman, Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021, 270 pp., $34.95 (Paperback). ISBN: 9780520377066
A defining feature of mainstream Indian cinema since the mid-twentieth century, playback singing has received nowhere close to the scholarly attention it deserves. What has been published to date mainly focuses on Hindi cinema. What a pleasure, then, to read Amanda Weidman’s Brought to Life by the Voice, a nuanced and clear disquisition on the cultural politics of singing in Tamil cinema. Just as she did in her first book, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern (2006), Weidman treats extant scholarship in ways that illuminate that body of work, even as she extends its latent possibilities and reframes the topic altogether. Brought to Life is a book I will frequently return to, both for its specific arguments about Tamil playback and its broader claims about gender, visibility and audibility.
Influential treatises on voice and dubbing revolve around a version of what Nina Sun Eidsheim calls the ‘acousmatic question’: ‘who is this [who sings]?’ (Eidsheim, 2019, p. 1). Playback helps construct the fantasmatic unity of body and voice visible on screen. While apparent cracks in such unified cinematic representations draw the most comment, lurking behind even the smoothest of ‘fits’ of sound and image are worries about authenticity. To direct attention away from this preoccupation with singularity (of identity, presence and so forth), Weidman offers a theoretical scaffolding built from a range of intellectual traditions, including cinema and media studies, philosophy, linguistic anthropology and sociology. This introductory framing is remarkable for the ease with which Weidman invites in readers unfamiliar with discipline- and field-specific vocabulary. Three concepts lie at the heart of her recasting of playback singing: animation, voicing and performativity. Each of these terms undermines the notion of a singular and cohesive self, whether onscreen or off, and puts into play multiple (ways to conceive of) bodies. They make room for other sets of categories that pertain to playback besides voice/body, such as speaking/singing/dancing, acting/imitating/voicing, stage/studio/screen and actor/singer/music director. They gesture to the numerous modalities, strategies and relationships through which singers conjure presence (different sorts of presences). They also home in on the structuring tensions that make playback possible and that it, in turn, makes possible. This conceptual reorientation brings forth other questions besides the acousmatic one:
[W]hat if we started, as Indian playback does, with the … [assumption] that the dissociation of body and voice, the division of labor between appearing and sounding, is the ideal? What if we assumed that it is … the embodying of voice that is the artifice, the strategic achievement that provokes anxieties and thus requires careful management? (p. 8)
Weidman’s answer unfolds over the course of seven chapters, organised into three sections that span eight decades of cultural, political and industrial developments. She presents playback not simply as a technological phenomenon but as ‘a culturally specific institution that has generated novel forms of celebrity, publicity and performance, and affective attachments to voices’ (p. 2). The book’s tripartite structure allows her to pause over key historical figures and developments, and to unpack socio-political ideas about gender, class, caste, nation and ethnolinguistic identity so commonplace as to be taken for granted in a particular zeitgeist. Weidman has a wonderful eye and ear for detail. She offers excellent close readings of song sequences, and in example after ethnographic example, she reveals how dense worlds can be packed into the slightest of gestures, the most casual turns of phrase.
Part I, ‘Prehistories’, consists of a chapter on ‘trading voices’ (iraval kural), a concept in use in the 1940s, prior to the establishment of playback as the norm. This framing of voice as something that could be bought and sold, borrowed and lent, clarifies that voice is a consumable and mobile entity. It makes palpable that, for women singers, the circulation of voices was as productive in aesthetic and monetary terms as it was dangerous. In this early period, the technological affordances of playback allowed for many filmic experiments with women’s voice-body combinations; however, men’s voices and bodies were not similarly fragmented and recombined. Weidman reminds us that the history of social reform in India – the classicisation of music and dance, in particular – is a crucial backstory to playback. It helps explain not just the asymmetrical gendering of the playback’s early years but also the increasing regimentation of voice in subsequent decades.
Part II, ‘Playback’s Dispensation’ covers the consolidation of the playback system in the 1950s and 1960s. In Chapter 2, Weidman focuses on T. M. Soundararajan (TMS) to illustrate how cinematic speech and song together gave rise to the ideal, masculine ‘Dravidian voice’. This analysis is crucial given both the paucity of scholarship on men’s playback and the inordinate importance of oratory in Dravidian politics. Weidman demonstrates that the power of the Tamil hero’s voice lay not simply in the oratorical speech of star-actors like Sivaji and MGR. It also stemmed from the ‘natural’ vocal style that TMS developed, one that embodied the populist didacticism of the Dravidian movement and that distinguished him from Hindi film singers, Karnatic classical musicians and stage artists who were his predecessors and contemporaries. For women in playback, respectability and morality were of primary importance; by contrast, it was ethnolinguistic identity – being heard as a Tamil voice, or, more precisely, as Tirāvita kural (Dravidian voice) – that was fundamental to TMS’ star text.
The disparities between men’s and women’s playback become clearer further in Chapter 3, where Weidman discusses P. Susheela and S. Janaki, women whose performative and discursive labours were directed at figuring themselves as ‘just the voice’. They projected respectable, middle-class femininity through their ‘sweet’, ostensibly effortless vocal style and their contained, unglamorous comportment, especially their bodily stillness while singing (whether in the studio or on stage). Crucially, Weidman shows that voice recognisability and visibility mattered to this generation of women singers. It is not that they needed to be invisible so much; rather, they needed to be visible in a particular way in order to cultivate a ‘modest’ image of themselves. Chapter 4 delineates the rather different way in which L. R. Eswari managed expectations about women’s emotional and artistic involvement in singing. She created a niche for herself by mastering ‘effects’, moments of affective and performative excess in song (crying, laughing, gasping, etc.). Blurring the boundary between acting and singing, and between representing and embodying feeling, effects constituted the outside of both ‘singing’ and ‘good womanhood’. Even as she sang for comics, vamps and other modern (read out-of-control) characters, Eswari made a name outside of cinema by singing devotional songs to the goddess Amman. In confounding ‘the sacred and the profane’, and asserting a strong creative presence in all her stage performances, L. R. Eswari forever changed the way women’s voices could inhabit the public sphere. Fittingly, it is she who graces the beautiful cover of Weidman’s book.
Part III, ‘Afterlives’, brings us from the 1970s into the neoliberal present, illuminating how playback singing has been transformed in the post-liberalisation era. Chapter 5 probes the emergence of ‘the aesthetics of ‘husky’ and ‘raw’ [which] embody different but still gendered orientations to Tamil ethnolinguistic belonging’ than the feminine kuralinimai (voice sweetness) and masculine ganam (weight) of yesteryear (p. 132). This shift is rooted in the dissolution of the virgin/vamp binary as well as the emergence of new modes of masculinity in 1970s and 1980s Tamil cinema. From the 1990s on, ‘husky’ would encompass a range of vocal qualities, including breathiness, chestiness, low pitch and Westernised pronunciation of Tamil, and signify a global cosmopolitanism. ‘Rawness’, meanwhile, would be associated with the genre of kūttu, which calls up rural folk performances and urban street culture. Weidman argues that although these post-millennial vocal ‘qualia’ may be audible in both men’s and women’s performances, the publicness they signify is distinctly gendered. The ‘anxieties of embodiment’ these new sounds provoke are also writ large in live stage shows and studio sessions, the subject of Chapter 6. Here, Weidman brilliantly theorises ‘liveness’ and ‘deadness’ as semiotic phenomena with technical and social dimensions. While both the studio and stage are now imagined as spaces of artistic ‘freedom, spontaneity and self-expression’, it is the stage that exemplifies the ‘live’ aesthetic privileged today (p. 159). Where once live shows required singers to stand still and reproduce their recordings note for note, contemporary artists must sing, dance and banter with the audience and the cool, English-speaking emcee. The act of recording film music is also very different. Today’s studios are much smaller, fragmented spaces, allowing far less social interaction and, according to the music director (and his soundboard), more importance than ever.
Thus, we arrive at what Weidman terms ‘antiplayback’, a new conception of voice that directly implicates the ‘self, body, and intention of the singer’ (p. 187). The concluding chapter addresses two recent media phenomena: the popularity of music reality TV shows and the rise of male actors singing playback. As in live stage shows, singing in televised competitions entails more than ‘just the voice’. Singing is conceived as an embodied performance that can be worked on, improved and endlessly commented upon by coaches and judges – experts who are themselves performing this new orientation to voice and body. The gendered logics of the erstwhile playback system are also undercut by the collapse of the roles of actors and singers (for men) and the concomitant ‘devoicing’ of star-actresses in recent years. (Many contemporary actresses are north Indian and not fluent in Tamil, and so their dialogues are routinely rendered by Tamil-speaking dubbing artists.)
The arc of Weidman’s book drives home the dramatic historical changes in the kinds of voices audible in the Tamil public sphere – in the sensuous qualities of the voices that come to be heard at particular historical moments, as well as the social meanings ascribed to those voices, and the social ‘types’ they are understood to embody. Even as she charts vocal shifts chronologically, Weidman manages to stave off a sense of teleological inevitability. Be it in L. R. Eswari’s command of vocal ‘effects’, TMS’s projection of an ‘everyman’ persona or reality TV contestants’ suggestive dance moves, what comes through loud and clear are the choices that individual singers make as they navigate their historical circumstances. By cultivating certain oral skills, making deliberate sartorial and performance choices and leveraging the specific affordances of the technologies, genres and media platforms available to them, singers shape the cultural institution that is playback. This emphasis on singers’ choices does more than underscore individual artists’ agency and professional savvy. It draws out shifting conceptions of embodiment and the gendered implications thereof. These insights temper the triumphalism underlying the claim that the ‘opening up’ of the Indian economy since the 1990s has allowed many more and different voices to enter the industry. While there is no denying the recent expansion of playback opportunities, what is also true is that the politics of respectability continue to structure who can sing and how. Weidman thus complicates our understanding of the work of playback singing – the work it takes to be a playback singer (which differs depending on one’s social location), and the work that playback performs culturally, as singers encounter and negotiate various social mores.
Brought to Life by the Voice teaches us how discursive and institutional structures bring voices to life – how they make certain voices audible and visible at given historical moments – and how myriad sociocultural ideals are themselves ‘brought to life by the voice’. Apart from its important interventions into sound studies, voice studies and cinema studies (of the subcontinent and beyond), this book is invaluable for the way Weidman elucidates theoretical concepts. The semiotic framework she brings to bear on Tamil playback explicates this complex assemblage of industrial and discursive practices. The reverse is equally true: Weidman’s ethnographic and historical examples clarify her conceptual frames like few other studies do. Brought to Life by the Voice is indeed a wonderful text to ‘think with’, and I hope it enjoys the wide reach and influence it deserves.