The Golden Age of Bollywood

Written by Aalap Diwanji

I have very vivid memories of Saturday mornings in my household. After leaving the prayer room, I would usually be greeted with the wonderful smells of my mom’s cooking, usually using ingredients and spices that I could only name in my mother tongue. My dad would play cassettes and CDs he had burned off the Internet on a radio that was probably bought around the same time that my parents bought our house. The glorious love ballads of Kishore Kumar would fill the house as we all sat down to have lunch together as a family. Names like Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bosle, and RD Burman may be completely foreign to most people reading this article, but for me, these names were my household names. These names were my Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin, and Paul McCartney. Before I had even heard my first rap song, I was intimately familiar with the greats of the Golden Age of Bollywood. Every road trip, every ride to my soccer games, or even a quick stop at Keemat Grocers to pick up more spices meant filling the silence with the songs that my parents had grown up with as youth in India.

It is easy to see why this music is considered part of a “Golden Age.” The lush instrumentals and sweet melodies cut straight to the soul, evoking a diverse palette of emotions, ranging from the unfettered joy of spending time with your first love to the harrowing heartbreak of losing a meaningful relationship. The music has a strong theatrical quality in its composition, often times incorporating elements of Western music, such as disco and big band, while still holding uniquely Indian qualities. The beautifully poetic lyrics in Hindi have a way of describing emotions with a tremendous amount of depth in ways that would just come off as convoluted or long-winded in English. This “golden” music is inextricably intertwined with memories and experiences that I hold very close to my heart. Even while making this playlist, it was hard not feel overcome by a wave of golden-hued nostalgia hearkening back to a less complicated and overwhelming time. However, many of these aforementioned memories and experiences came at a time when I was first questioning my identity and where I fit in.

Being a first generation immigrant often times involves feeling like you are caught between different worlds and an enormous amount of pressure to occupy spaces where you aren’t “Indian enough” or “American enough.” This feeling is wholly inescapable because you are going to school with all the white kids, where at lunch you’re scared to open your lunchbox because the food your mom prepared would smell. Or you would answer a question that your parents asked you in Gujurati in English, and you can tell that they really wished that you had responded back in Gujurati. The truth of the matter is that for every beautiful moment of harmony that can come from being an immigrant in this country, there are equal amounts of disorienting and overwhelming experiences that come with never knowing exactly where and how you will ever feel like you completely fit in. You carry these feelings with you every day, trying to strike a balance.

I am eternally grateful for my parents for sharing a slice of India and an integral part of their soul, offering inarticulable insights about who they are as Indians who immigrated to a foreign land for the hope of a better life. And as you go through this playlist, I hope to offer you more insights about who I am: not wholly Indian, not wholly American, but an Indian-American trying to find balance and harmony in the whirlwind experiences of being a first generation child in this country. By listening to this playlist, I hope you are able to tap into your own golden moments, holding dearly to these parts of your soul that say so much about who you are and compound the complicated beauty of the human experience.