@StriderEl on Ishq Bina (Taal, 1999)

Music as a Time Machine

For many of us, songs from the 1990s, including Ishq Bina, aren’t just a piece of music. They are probably the closest thing we have to a time machine, because the minute I think of 1990s music, I’m taken back to the most random memories of my life back then: building cricket with friends, learning Salman Khan’s dance moves, the familiar footfalls of my mother’s anklets as she returns home with groceries, rushing to the living room upon hearing my favorite song playing on TV, the visible change of the seasons over the school year. The mention of Taal transported me to the peak of the 1999 Mumbai monsoon in July, when I saw my dad return home from work with the Taal CD album in his hand. “But dad, a CD costs 100 rupees, while a cassette is just 20. Why pay more for nothing?,” suggested a visibly excited but also rational adolescent me rather matter-of-factly. My dad, ever the early adopter, knew better than I did. With a brand-new Panasonic CD-cassette stereo system installed in our home, there was no way he was going to settle for Taal’s audio cassette. So here I was, looking at the first Bollywood album I will ever hear on a CD: Taal - A Beat of Passion, it said. The square cover featured a willowy Aishwarya Rai in a Shiamak Davar-esque pose. Adolescent me wasn’t complaining, of course. What I should have complained about, though, is how high a bar this AR Rahman album would set, which only a handful would manage to surpass over the next 25 years.

Rahman’s Three-Act Structure

So how does one distill this love ballad, which runs for 7 minutes and 45 seconds, into written prose? I could start with how masterfully AR Rahman blends the voices of Anuradha Sriram and Sujatha into the wordless hook, as if the humming sounds come not from humans but from a musical instrument shrouded in mist. Or how the childlike innocence of their vocals is perfectly suited to reflect Mansi’s naïveté. Or how the sound of cymbals at the start of Ishq Bina ushers us into a bhajan-like trance. Or how lyrically the flute interlude is punctuated with chhan-chhan sounds, in sync with Mansi’s dance. Instead, let me highlight my favorite Rahman idiosyncrasy: Many of his duets aren’t structured conventionally, where both singers croon together, but rather as a three-act play. The lead singer sets the tone in the first act, and after a long, dramatic interlude, the second act starts with the next singer taking charge, almost subverting the established tone, followed by a harmonious, operatic conclusion in the third act that elevates the song to another level altogether. In Ishq Bina, Rahman builds up the anticipation for the second singer’s entry quite regally: After a whole 4 minutes into the song, the Bas ek tamanna - ishq ishq crescendo makes way for the violin version of the chorus hook, and Sonu Nigam’s familiar voice finally fills the air with Ishq hai kya, ye kisko pata? That, my friends, is a Bollywood hero entry scene right there in its musical avatar! I am sure Rahman loves this trope because some of his most celebrated duets feature this second-act surprise: Udit Narayan in Taal Se Taal Mila, Sadhna Sargam in Aahista Aahista, Naresh Iyer in Tu Bin Bataaye, Madhushree in Inn Lamhon ke Daaman Mein, Shreya Ghoshal in Kaise Mujhe.

The Defiance of Sonu Nigam

What sets Sonu Nigam apart from 1990s legends like Kumar Sanu and Udit Narayan is that in service of the song, he is not afraid to bend the rules for the mainstream Indian male singer. If the emotion of the line can be expressed better by a lilt in the voice, a higher pitch than the norm, or even an audible whimper, he owns that transgression like a king and still retains his essence. In Ishq Bina, he enters the song like a rizz-exuding Romeo, the smooth-talking Chad your girlfriend told you not to worry about. But in a matter of seconds, he becomes fragile and vulnerable with such conviction, betraying the very image he built up at the start, in my favorite part of the song:

Tumne ishq ka naam suna hai,

Humne ishq kiya hai.

You have only heard of this thing called love,

But I have loved.

One Love, Two Lenses

The lyrics by Anand Bakshi make Taal stand out from the sea of classic Rahman albums. There was neither Hindi jargon to be shoehorned into a Tamil original here (e.g., Urvashi Urvashi), nor a dozen chaand metaphors to be used as backup (e.g., every Gulzar album ever). No, Anand Bakshi’s lyrics seamlessly wove in the character arcs of Mansi and Manav across all of Taal’s 12 songs. In Ishq Bina, which marks the start of their courtship, he captures the perspectives of both the lover and the beloved. The beloved Mansi, who has yet to fall in love, can only think of the warm and playful elements in her idea of love (meetha, khatta, pakka, kachcha, sona). On the other hand, the lover Manav, who is already besotted by Mansi (and perhaps has also loved and lost before?), knows that along with pleasure, love also brings pain (phoolon ka gulshan, kaanton ka daaman).

Note that Ishq Bina’s placement in the movie is shortly after Manav’s and Mansi’s meet-cute in the lush Taal Se Taal Mila song sequence:

Saavan ne aaj toh mujhko bhigo diya.

Haaye, meri laaj ne mujhko doobo diya.

The monsoon may have drenched me today,

But I have drowned in my own sense of shame.

Mansi associates youth and coming-of-age with a sense of shame, a taboo, a betrayal of her relationship with her father. In the Ishq Bina song sequence, you can see how this emotion evolves from apprehension to curiosity, to acceptance, and finally, to indulgence. Mansi dismisses Manav’s initial antics, only to look at him intently later in that now-historic half-veiled frame, and to finally give in to her own desires and sneakily drink from a bottle of Coke that he offered to share (which, to me, is a more intimate act of desire than the usual shenanigans we are subjected to onscreen). Aishwarya Rai and Akshaye Khanna lived each element of this courtship with so much conviction, making this sequence one of the best in Taal.

Anand Bakshi’s Ship of Theseus

Another great example of the value that Anand Bakshi brought to the Taal table is this couplet he wrote for Kavita Krishnamurti’s rendition of Ishq Bina, which marks Mansi’s epiphany toward the end of the movie:

Kisike ishq ke vaade kahin hum tod aaye hain,

Magar ye dil, ye jaan shayad vahin hum chhod aaye hain.

I have moved on, breaking the promises of my love,

But I have, perhaps, still left my heart and my soul behind.

Interesting how these lines are a contrasting throwback to when love was only an idea in Mansi’s head: The promise of love was supposed to be strong, reliable, unwavering (Vaada ye pakka…ishq ishq), but that unbreakable promise was now broken (…ishq ke vaade kahin hum tod aaye hain). At the surface, the lines above speak about Mansi’s longing for Manav despite her attempts to move on to a better life. But even outside the context of romantic love, aren’t these lines true for us, too? We have come such a long way from who we were in the ‘90s, but in our quest for personal growth and functional adulthood, didn’t we also leave a part of ourselves behind? The part around which you built the new you because you needed thicker skin to survive in the real world. The part that you don’t even remember because it now lives in others’ memories of you, rather than your own. The part that your college best friend still remembers fondly because you barely talk now. The part that your mother still remembers because she can’t express her love for you today the same way she could to the person you were back then.

Somewhere between simply humming these lines along as kids to truly understanding what they mean as adults, all of us grew up.