Readers Write In #835: Play, Pause, Stop, Rewind : What Happened To Indipop Music?

By Pranav Jain

Pranav Jain is an incoming civil servant and also a columnist.

“Gori teri aankhen kahein, raat bhar soyi nahin…chanda dekhe chupke kahin, aur taare jaante hain sabhi…” – Lucky Ali

Once upon a time, long, long ago, Indian music existed outside the long shadow of Bollywood. Neither was it tailored for the big screen, nor did it carry the burden of the film’s plot. It was not lip-synced by heroines in chiffon sarees running through Swiss fields. It was raw, catchy, magnetic, and strangely intimate. And in the late 1990s and 2000s, we called this genre of music – Indipop.

Indipop was an entire mood which characterised a newly liberalised nation’s musical adolescence. It allowed millennials and gen-z to jump from the era of Doordarshan to MTV and rebel against the  cloistered monopoly of playback singing. Its earliest stars were not known names but musicians working outside the confines of the film industry.

Baba Sehgal rapped “Dil Dhadke” before India even understood what rap was. Alisha Chinai sang “Made in India” with a boldness not heard or seen before in India. Hariharan and Leslie Lewis blended Carnatic classical with English hooks as the enviable ‘Colonial Cousins’ to give us the earworm: “Something about the way you smile, I may never know the reason why…Sa Ni Dha Pa Ma Ga Ma Ga Re Sa…Oh Jaana…”.

Daler Mehndi’s “Bolo Ta Ra Ra” brought Punjabi folk into the mainstream with a kind of swagger that refused to apologise. Shaan’s voice in “Tanha dil, Tanha Safar” became the motto of teenage loneliness. KK’s “Hum, rahein ya na rahein kal, kal yaad aayenge ye pal” became the anthem of drifting from friends you did not know how to say goodbye to.

Falguni Pathak was everyone’s big sister, and her songs like “Maine Payal Hai Chankai” gave a gendered perspective to music. Dr. Palash Sen and Euphoria in their chartbuster “Maeri aap hi hansdi, maaeri aap hi rondi, maaeri yaad vo yaad vo aaeri” made an entire generation feel nostalgic and romanticised Indian railways. Silk Route’s “Dooba Dooba” gave us the unique voice of Mohit Chauhan and Rabbi Shergill’s “Bulla Ki Jaana”, rooted in Bulleh Shah’s 18th-century verse, showed that India’s pop sensibility could contain both poetry and philosophy in the same breath.

The Indipop landscape was also populated by experimental music. Neeraj Shridhar, through Bombay Vikings, rewrote the rules of language in music. With loving remixes of retro songs like “Kya Soorat Hai” and “Woh Chali”, he mashed up English and Hindi to bring a new kind of playfulness to Indipop. He knew his audience, the English-educated Indian teen trying to make sense of both Britney Spears and Asha Bhonsle. Viva, India’s first all female band, with their breakout hit “Hum Naye Geet Sunayein”, was equal parts empowerment and bubblegum gloss. Band of Boys, with their hits “Meri Neend” and “Gori”, was imitated by boys across schools in India.

Visually, too, Indipop shaped an aesthetic. The music videos were not elaborate dances but short stories – think Aryans’ “Ankhon Mein Tera Hi Chehra” which explored the pangs of uninfatuation. Bally Sagoo’s “Gur Naal Ishq Mitha” and “Aaja Nachle” set the template for modern Indian weddings. The videos were rich with yearning, humour, storytelling, and most importantly, were not trying to go viral.

So what happened? Where did it go? Why did this era of non-film music vanish almost overnight? The answers are many, and like most elegies, they are not without blame.

One primary reason was the industrial absorption of Indipop. Bollywood, ever hungry, noticed and absorbed these artists who, understandably, took the more lucrative and visible path – playback singing. Over time, the line between Indipop and film music blurred, and what made Indipop special, its autonomy, slowly withered away. Lucky Ali was singing in Kaho Na Pyaar Hai; Shaan became the voice of Saif Ali Khan, and Sonu Nigam became, arguably, the most versatile and soulful singer of Bollywood. 

Next came television and reality shows. With the advent of Indian Idol and Sa Re Ga Ma Pa, a new crop of artists emerged – highly talented but systemically trained to aspire towards playback. The dream was no longer to have your own album, but to sing for Shah Rukh Khan. This marked a cultural shift whereby music became aspirational only when tethered to cinema. Everyone wanted to be the next Sonu Nigam or Shreya Ghoshal. No one wanted to be the next ‘themselves’; and even if they did, the system did not know how to nurture them.

There was also technological disruption. Indipop thrived on cassettes and CDs. Physical media rewarded full albums as you bought the whole thing, not just a single track. But with the rise of digital downloads and streaming, attention spans shrank. Labels stopped funding entire albums, and singles became the norm. Streaming turned listening into shuffle lists, and the slow burn that Indipop thrived on was replaced by the race for the next viral hook.

Worse, there was a philosophical shift. The soul of Indipop did not fit the new world of Instagram bangers. Even the revival of indie music – think Prateek Kuhad and Anuv Jain – feels auto-tuned and algorithmic. Where “Piya Basanti” could play in both a Delhi autorickshaw and a Mumbai convent school, much of today’s indie music is still class-segmented.

And yet, the ghosts of Indipop remain. Ask anyone who came of age in that window, between Nirma ads and Orkut, and they will tell you about a song that still lives in their bloodstream. Every once in a while, you hear Shankar Mahadevan’s “Breathless” or Shubha Mudgal’s “Ab Ke Saawan”, and all background noise goes silent. Indipop may have died as a category, but it will always survive as a sentiment.