Hindi Music

The year 1931 was the year that marked the starting point for Hindi movie composers and singers in the Hindi music arena. This was the year that marked the beginning of the talkie movies in India and hence it also naturally led to mark the phenomenal starting point for Hindi music.



As soon as the section was started, the playing field was immediately populated and hence dominated by a few strong production studios. Most of these production studios had their legacy that was firmly rooted in the silent era of the Hindi Movies.

Ardeshir Irani and R.S. Choudhury who were incidentally also Mehboob Khan's mentors were the duo that was responsible for carrying forward the Imperial Studios banner.

On the other hand Himansu Rai who was the consummate English nobleman managed to leverage his experience with the British and the German moviemakers.

Also Shantaram and Master Vinayak combined their forces to further endorse the name of Prabhat Films. And in addition to these prominent production houses, a large number of other houses were set up by people such as B.N. Sarkar, Homi Wadia, Sohrab Modi, Chandulal Shah etc.

In the initial stages of the Hindi music, the dominant musical tastes in the country were still the one-dimensional melodies that drew largely and almost entirely from the structures of classical and folk music.

In the initial stages the performance of the Hindi music could be termed as simple at best. Most of the singers in the Hindi music industry were either from "singing families" and had distinct delivery styles which were strongly set in the tradition of their familial traditions of singing or were theatre performers who tried very to just get by with by delivering simple straight-line approximations of the stated melody.

This was the state of affairs in the Hindi music industry in the period of the early to mid '30s. Somewhere during the period of the mid-'30s, grandmasters like Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam tried and sought to use the movie medium to spread the messages of literature, music, national integration, the independence movement, and so on.