Bollywood: Encyclopedia II - Bollywood - Dialogues and lyrics

Bollywood - Dialogues and lyrics

The film script (frequently credited as "dialogues") and the song lyrics are often written by different people. The dialogues are mostly written in Hindi, with use of Urdu in situations which require poetic dialogues. Contemporary mainstream movies also make great use of English. Dialogues are often melodramatic and invoke God, family, mother, duty, and self-sacrifice liberally.

As an example, below is a dialogue from the 1975 film Deewar, between the gangster brother Vijay and his policeman brother Ravi:

Music directors often prefer working with certain lyricists, to the point that the lyricist and composer are seen as a team. This phenomenon is not unlike the pairings of American composers and songwriters that created old-time Broadway musicals (e.g., Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, or Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe). Song lyrics are usually about love. Bollywood song lyrics, especially in the old movies, frequently use Urdu or Hindustani vocabulary which has many elegant and poetic Arabic and Persian loan-words. Here's a sample from the 1983 film Hero, written by the great lyricist Anand Bakshi:

Another source for love lyrics is the long Hindu tradition of poetry about the mythological amours of Krishna, Radha, and the gopis. Many lyrics compare the singer to a devotee and the object of his or her passion to Krishna or Radha.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Dialogues and lyrics", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki