Indian song

All music from India is produced basically by Bollywood. This I learned from an acquaintance today.

As for the Bollywood song, this Wikipedia article provides more information:

• "Bollywood is the Indian Hindi-language film industry, based in the city of Mumbai[;]


• "Bollywood represents 43% of Indian net box office revenue, while Telugu and Tamil cinema represent 36%, and the rest of the regional cinema constitute 21%[;]


• "Linguistically, Bollywood films tend to use a colloquial dialect of Hindi-Urdu, [called] Hindustani, [which is] mutually intelligible to both Hindi and Urdu speakers[.]"

Regarding the Gujarati, Tamil and Telegu film industries, for example, I found some Wikipedia pages, but they didn't say much about the songs.

However, Wikipedia has a list of Indian "playback singers" (whose performances we actually hear in the films) categorized by language.

These two interesting articles explain the fact that Hindi and Urdu are closely related.

Of course, Bollywood didn't create its music out of whole cloth.

Instead, I suppose that Bollywood merely pasted a relatively thin layer atop an already rich, multifarious, living musical culture—multifarious, because it arose from multiple locations and traditions in India.

My favorite album of Indian music is perhaps "In Concert Vol. 1 (Live)" by Ghulam Ali, who sings accompanied by harmonium.

Most of its numbers can be streamed in full with Amazon Prime.

Copyright (c) 2018 Mark D. Blackwell.