The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema : Voice, Body, Technology – Shikha Jhingan

Description

The arrival of playback technology in the 1940s had far-reaching consequences for Bombay cinema, leading to a wider dispersal of films, film songs, and film stars. Jhingan moves across a shifting media landscape to focus on the role of the female voice in making the corporeal female body available in the public domain. The book follows the rise of playback stars like Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle in the aural domain as they intersect with a diverse range of listening bodies—on-screen stars, music critics, fans, version artists, and amateur singers.

Combining a formal analysis of film songs with ethnographic research and a close reading of print archives, the book invites readers and listeners to engage with their own media-driven memories. This is a nuanced investigation of how the female singer’s sonic production is intertwined with devices such as the microphone, cassettes, television, and digital technologies, and is located in the interstices of material, cultural, musical, and cinematic environments.

The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema is an authoritative addition to the field of sound studies with implications for gender studies, music and performance studies, and cinema studies.