Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema

During the first half of the twentieth century, new mass media practices radically altered traditional cultural forms and performance in a complex encounter that incited much debate, criticism, and celebration the world over. This essay examines how the new sound media of gramophone and sound cinema took up the live performance genres of Tamil drama. Professor Hughes argues that south Indian music recording companies and their products prefigured, mediated, and transcended the musical relationship between stage drama and Tamil cinema. The music recording industry not only transformed Tamil drama music into a commodity for mass circulation before the advent of talkies but also mediated the musical relationship between Tamil drama and cinema, helped to create film songs as a new and distinct popular music genre, and produced a new mass culture of film songs. THERE CAN BE LITTLE doubt about the popularity and prominence of film songsas a defining and enduring characteristic of commercial Indian cinema. From the first production of Indian sound films in 1931, film songs have been a heavily featured component of cinematic entertainment, both within films and in wider public circulation.1 Tamil films, a south Indian regional cinema, share this musical proclivity. During the first decade of Tamil cinema, it was common for a film to devote two hours out of a total running time of three hours to accommodate fifty or sixty song sequences. Some early Tamil films boasted as many as a hundred songs in their advertisements. Though the number of songs in Tamil films has gradually decreased over the last century to about five or six at present, they are still an indispensable part of all commer-cially viable films. A Tamil film without songs is a rare exception. Out of a total of Stephen Putnam Hughe