We were having lunch in a village near Jodhpur when we saw the pretty village belle wearing a colourful mirror-work skirt and lots of silver jewellery. Tattooed wrists, musical anklets and all, she sashayed past us with the aplomb of a superstar on the red carpet. “I just love the way Rajasthani women carry off their clothes,” said my friend admiringly, “isn’t she gorgeous?” Just then, a young man with a luxuriant moustache walked in. Dressed in traditional local garb with a majestic turban, he looked like a proud king of yore. “I really didn’t expect to get so much eye candy here,” I sighed, “they just don’t make people as good-looking in the city anymore!”
A tinny Punjabi ringtone ended the day dream. The village belle picked up her phone: “Hello?” she purred in a throaty yankee accent. Call finished, she stuffed the phone into a yellow-flowered handbag and sat down revealing bright red platform heels. “How long do we have to wait for the camel?” she asked, “this place is boring, it doesn’t even have mobile connectivity!”
And so it turned out that they weren’t real village people, but actors, shooting for a Rajasthani pop music album. Given that I wasn’t aware that such a genre of music even existed, I was all agog. “They are basically peppy Marwari songs on contemporary themes that young people in the cities as well as villages here enjoy,” said Anamika, the actress doing the village belle act. She’d been given a bus ticket to reach this village from the small town in Haryana where she lived. “I’ve done many such videos as I’m still struggling to make it into films,” said she adding, “I’ve just finished one with Jackie Shroff. If it’s a hit then it’s bye bye to these crummy videos!”
The shooting began, and we decided to watch a while. The hero and heroine danced and bantered with one another next to the camel, their disgruntled-looking prop. The next song they shot was a comic one, for which a portly lady in full Rajasthani attire danced with a spindly man in a baseball cap, glasses and dhoti. All in all, they shot five songs in a day. The songs themselves were a quaint mix of local and exotic, with Marwari lyrics set to disco beats. “Our hero here,” said Anamika as she flounced back after the shooting, to wipe her face, “has sung, produced and starred in almost all of them!”
Shot on a low-budget and priced between Rs 35 to 50, these music albums seemed to be very popular with local youths wherever we went. “Many villages here don’t have dish antennas,” said Kailash a young boy from Luni, a village near Jodhpur, “so people mostly watch these music videos.” In fact, he said, even in villages with cable connections, these videos were played continuously on local cable channels. I was curious about the fact that these songs sounded so modern, some even remixed by local DJs. “Don’t people like listening to traditional folk songs any more?” I asked Kailash. He replied, “Of course they do! But these sound and look so much better…”
Later, I walked into a local music shop in Luni. A glitzy Anamika was simpering on the cover of one of the best-selling CDs — “when people can listen to music in their own language that’s remixed by a DJ, why’d they want songs from their grandparent’s era?” said the shopkeeper, “nobody wants old fashioned Rajasthani folk music — except the tourists!” I’d nothing to say to him. All I knew was that I was, beyond doubt, a tourist in a changing land.
