Varun Grover on Lyricists' Fight for Fair Recognition: 'Our Legacy and Future are Endangered'
National Award-winning lyricist, writer and filmmaker Varun Grover talks about the systemic erasure of lyricists in Indian cinema, and demands rightful recognition for the poets whose words shape its soul.
As Dev Anand’s Raju (Guide, 1965) completes his prison term and makes his way back to the world, S.D. Burman’s vocals and Shailendra’s words echo in the background:
"Wahaan kaun hai tera, musafir, jaayega kahaan?"
(Who’s waiting to meet you, O traveller, where do you go?)
Another traveller, this time Balraj Sahni’s Shambhu, leaves his oppressive village to look for employment in the big city in Do Bigha Zamin (1953). The farmers working in the fields sing Shailendra’s words set to Salil Chowdhury’s music:
"Apni kahaani chhorhh ja, kuchh toh nishaani chhorh ja,
Kaun kahe iss oar tu phir aaye na aaye"
(Leave behind your story, your token or charm,
Who knows if you’d ever return to these lands)
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Both these songs, dense with philosophy and foreboding, appear early in the respective films. The words of its poetry allow us to not only read the minds of these characters but also create the worlds they inhabit. They illustrate, like a thousand other songs I can quote, the value lyrics bring to Indian cinema. They don’t just complete a story, but on multiple occasions become a better inquiry into the themes of the film than the narrative of the film itself.
I’d like to propose that an Indian film song is special because it’s one of the very few moving parts of a film where intellectualism is not just rewarded but incentivised.
A film song is allowed to be way more caustic (“Ye Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye Toh Kya Hai”, Sahir Ludhianvi from Pyaasa, 1957), clever (“Agar Saaz Chheda Taraane Banenge”, Anand Bakshi from Jawani Diwani, 1972), childish (“Cheel Cheel Chillake Kajri Sunaaye”, Shailendra from Half Ticket, 1962), and of course, romantic (“Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga”, Javed Akhtar from 1942: A Love Story, 1994) than the films they belong to.
Lyrics are the hidden soul of the Indian film narrative: a voice from the skies or playback that’s not bound by the rules of cinematic reality. This is why the journey of Indian cinema is the journey of our film music.
This is a long prelude just to say: Lyric writers don’t get our due. Our legacy and our future are both endangered because music companies and platforms don’t find it essential for our names to be credited with the songs we write.
Time and again over the last decade, we have hit the streets of the internet to complain about unfair practices of the music business at large: Missing credits from official streaming platforms, missing invitations from the album launch events of our own albums, and being treated like dirt at film award functions have been recurring themes.
What seems like a straightforward ethical practice to us lyricists is made to seem like an unfair demand of a bunch of rabble-rousers when we say it aloud in public. And we are not even demanding anything revolutionary — like fair pay, IP rights, or royalties — but acknowledgment that lyricists need to be credited wherever our works are used.
How difficult would it be to mention the names of the lyricists along with the composers and singers on the official release of a song on YouTube? Very, it seems.
Over the last decade, our community and music lovers on the internet have flagged labels and streamers for erasing the names of not just contemporary lyricists but giants like Sahir, Gulzar, Hasrat Jaipuri from some of their most popular songs. While writing this piece, I quickly checked the official YouTube video of Sahir’s most iconic song, "Ye Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye Toh Kya Hai" on Ultra Bollywood’s official YouTube channel with 43 million subscribers. They haven’t credited him in the title or description of the song.
In our regular meetings at both the Screenwriters’ Association (the body representing writers and lyricists of the industry) and the Indian Performing Rights Society (the body that collects royalties for musical works), we rue: "Bade bade ustaadon ko izzat nahin mil rahi humaari kya hi bisaat?" (If even the greats of our profession are being disrespected, where do we stand?)
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Recently, as the music streaming giant Spotify released their annual ‘Wrapped’ stats, users pointed out that the numbers shown to lyricists were faulty and hence meaningless. To every artist with a page on the app, Spotify shared how many plays of their entire catalogue happened in the year. A cursory dig into their publicly available data showed discrepancies: For instance, newer lyricists like Kausar Munir and Swanand Kirkire have more numbers than Javed Akhtar and Gulzar, both with way bigger bodies of work and reach.
This common-sense betraying statistic exists because of just one reason: In most of the songs or albums of these giants, they weren’t credited as the primary artists and, hence, the song plays didn’t get counted in their annual roundup numbers. Even at the point of writing this piece, Gulzar is not credited as one of the primary artists in either Dil Se (1998) or Bunty aur Babli (2005), two of his most popular works from the last few decades.
This kind of systemic erasure hurts not just our professional standing and moral rights, but the entire music industry too. In the unsaid but smoothly practised hierarchy of the Hindi music industry, a lyricist is seen as secondary to the singers or composers.
Even the most successful among us are not expected to demand our rights, because our work is seen as either small or easy. A pen and paper, of course, are small in front of the huge men running corporations and the acceptance of this systemic oppression kills morale, blurs focus, and, above all, blunts the edge of our words. We suffer along with the music, no matter how many hooks and beats you churn out per hour in your algo-drunk assembly lines.
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Another thing this does — a bigger harm for the listener — is it takes away the curiosity-driven discovery of music. If the music available on your streaming platform is not categorised by lyricists (like it’s done for singers and composers, sometimes even actors) then no one will be able to find that the person who wrote “Jahan dal dal par sone ki chidiya karti hai basera, wo bharat desh hai mera” (Sikandar-E-Azam, 1965) is the same person who wrote “Ek chatur naar, kar ke singaar” (Padosan, 1968).
Of course, we love our angst and demand little and observe more and hence stay silent mostly — like all (aspiring) philosophers do — but that doesn’t mean you can trample us. You might be closer to the stars, but you stand on our shoulders.
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