#ILAYARAJA 1980 MOVIE#

So what happens to Hindi music after the tornado named Raja makes a landing? RD BurmanвЂ™s slow decline and the generally uninspiring quality of 1980s Hindi film music (even though I recall the songs of Ek Duuje Ke Liye were a megahit in Chennai), and above all, the matchless prolificity of Raja - I think all these pushed Hindi music aside.Д®ven so, the Hindi music-listening population - whether then or now - was/is always a small bunch of multilingual urbanites. (Check out VijayabhaskarвЂ™s Anbu megame ingu odi vaa, or DakshinamurthyвЂ™s Nandha en nila.) But our own composers were also giving melodic hits - with new singers like SPB. A few films every year would be celebrated (say, the Nasir Hussain productions scored by RDB) - because that kind of вЂњhard-coreвЂќ Western pop/rock music was rare in Tamil music.

#ILAYARAJA 1980 MOVIE#

(MSVвЂ™s brilliant one-off nod to the counterculture was Kaettukodi urumi melam, where he used Western beats for the villager played by Sivaji Ganesan and village beats for the foreign-returned Jayalalitha.) So Hindi movie-watching had a spike.Д®ven so, it wasnвЂ™t exactly like a tidal wave of Hindi movie music had washed away Tamil music.

Never before had a non-Hollywood heroine been seen in anything but a chaste one-piece swimsuit. So вЂњcool teensвЂќ (who, till then, only had rock вЂnвЂ™ roll Ravichandran and Jaishankar film songs) now had an anthem, along with the arrival of Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi on the big screen, happy to pose in bikinis. Yes, itвЂ™s true that Bombay embraced hippie-dom more easily than Chennai but cafes in Chennai were playing Beatles music and - above all - RD Burman lobbed a ten-ton bomb into the city with Dum maaro dum. So for probably the first time in Chennai (and I still doubt this was an allвЂ“ Tamil Nadu phenomenon), Hindi music began to rival Tamil music. So people went to see the star and came away humming the songs, which were probably etched in their minds further by Vividh Bharti. He became an instant heart throb.вЂќДЄnd most of Rajesh KhannaвЂ™s films had pretty good music. We knew all his songs by heart, even if we didnвЂ™t understand the lyrics. We sawВ AradhanaВ and he was unlike any other actor we had seen. Senior journalist Sushila Ravindranath said: вЂњAt that time, not too many Hindi movies were screened at ChennaiвЂ™s theatres.

(Audio cassettes landed in India only in the late 1970s.)Д«ut thereвЂ™s another fact, and itвЂ™s a bit of a googly: The superstardom of Rajesh Khanna (beginning with Aradhana, which ran for something like a year in Chennai, if not more). Tamil hits were constantly being made (a ton of songs like V KumarвЂ™s Vaazhvil sowbagiyam vandhadhu, GK VenkateshвЂ™s Then sindhudhey vaanam, which is not including MSVвЂ™s hits like Yedho oru nadhiyil or Malligai en mannan mayangum or Malare kurinji malareвЂ¦.) Even I, in my childhood, have heard these songs repeatedly on the radio. Like most social/cultural phenomena, the answer is a little complex and involves several variables.

So here are some questions: Was Hindi music popular all over Tamil Nadu before Raja came? Or was it just Chennai? So we want them to have performed superhuman acts not just in their field (music, in this case) but in the cultural space of the times. I donвЂ™t doubt where and how this urban myth comes from: we like to deify our deities. And as I began to explore non-MSV 60s/70s Tamil music, my doubts grew further. I have asked many people born in the 1950s and 60s about this - family and others. So this comes from a recent comment from a reader (as it keeps coming up) that in the 1970s, Tamils were under sway to Hindi film music until the arrival of Ilaiyaraaja brought them back to Tamil music.

Ilayaraja 1980