Music Pirates

Music Pirates

On May 21, a program: Dhun Hamari Tumhare Naam Hui was shown on Pakistan Television. It alleged that top music directors of India's Bollywood and Pakistan's Lollywood unabashedly plagiarized each other's tunes to make name and fame for themselves. Almost all big names in Bollywood film music including S.D.Burman, Rajesh Roshan, Anand Milind, Bappi Lahiri, Annu Malik, and Nadeem Shravan were guilty. Some of Hindi films best tunes are actually lifted verbatim by these maestros of Indian film music. This two-part PTV program was hosted by Zia Mohyuddin and produced and researched by Shoaib Mansur. Producer Shoaib Mansur had seemingly done much homework before shooting the well-documented stint. It was not an easy task to cull so much relevant information from different sources and put them together to make a case in defense of Pakistani composers and film makers, who have unnecessarily been maligned by the Indian media for indulging in the act of piracy. However, the program showed that the crime was committed more by the Indian composers than their Pakistani counterparts.

The program was all about how the Indian and Pakistani musicians have been lifting tunes without ever acknowledging the source. It alleges that tunes ranging from semi classical, ghazals to folk are used without a qualm, often doing "gross injustice" to the original. Shoaib Mansur argued quite convincingly that the creative works of several Pakistani composers, especially the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, were pilfered by the dozen and used in Indian movies. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's famous Sufi chant "Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu has been converted in to a Bollywood song as "I love you, I love you, I love you…" in film Auzaar. According to the program, Pakistan's "Dum mast kalandar mast mast" was made into a sensuous dance number: "Tu cheez bari hai mast mast" featuring actress Raveena Tandon in the film 'Mohra'. The song, which was on the lips of every Indian, was lifted without even a slight change of tune and words, it claimed.

The program also points out that one of India's popular Hindi film song of the 1950s. "Aao bachchon tumhe dikhayen jhaanki Hindustan ki" was later turned into "Aao bachchon tumhe karayen sair Pakistan ki." The story of the similarity of this great song from the famous Indian film 'Jagriti' is equally fascinating as the creator of the song, Ratan Kumar, who first composed the song while he was in India and replaced the word India with Pakistan, when he later migrated to Pakistan and remade 'Jagriti' into 'Bedaari' in Urdu. They said Ratan Kumar belonged to an era where people took pride in their work and only re-mixed their own popular tunes. But the trend he pioneered came to stay. If ever there was a cultural exchange between the two neighbors it was in the field of films and more specifically film music, says the program.

The lifting, or plagiarism, has become so blatant that the people concerned have even stopped taking note. In Bollywood this is called "inspiration". What began as "inspiration" from the ghazals and local music here has over the years become an unabashed lifting of tunes and even words. According to the program, almost all big names in the Indian music stand guilty. The songs they showed sound very familiar – "choli ke peeche kya hai..." "kinna sona tujhe rab ne banaya...", "mera piya ghar aya...", "yaraa seeli seeli, biraha ki raat ka jalna," "achcha sila diya tune mere pyar ka..." and the list goes on.

The cultural needs of the people remains, and fulfilling these needs on either side created a rather warped exchange, at least in the field of popular music. However, the age-old culture of the people is often difficult to stifle. The legendary singer Noorjehan, who left India at her peak, dominated the Pakistani music scene for decades. Many others, however, went back to India to gain recognition. Classical music maestro Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was followed by almost several big names in the music industry. Mehdi Hasan, Ghulam Ali, Abida Parveen, Mallika Pukhraj, Reshma, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and recently the pop group Junoon and singer Ali Haider have all performed in India and have made their mark there.

Music critic, Saeed Malik from Lahore writes "that perhaps, after Shoaib Mansur's expose' of Indian music pirates, the governments in both the countries will do something which will be mutually beneficial for Indian and Pakistani creative artistes, to combat this unethical business practice. They should enact effective anti-piracy laws and strictly enforce them to check infringement of intellectual property rights". [Source: Dawn/The Nation & Asian Age]