Seventy years of Hindi cinema at the bar

The first thing to understand is that the Hindi drinking song is almost never a celebration. In American music the drink is a party; in Hindi film music the drink is a witness. Somebody is telling the truth for the first time in the film, and the glass is the excuse the script needed. That is why the genre produced so much good writing - the drunk scene is where a lyricist is allowed to be direct.

Mohammed Rafi's era set the template. Mujhe Duniya Walon Sharabi Na Samjho, from Leader in 1964, was composed by Naushad to Shakeel Badayuni's words and sung on screen by Dilip Kumar, and the whole song is a denial - do not call me a drunk, you do not know what I am carrying. Din Dhal Jaye from Guide followed in 1965, S. D. Burman's tune, Rafi again, a man drinking his way through the evening because the night is worse. Neither is played for laughs.

Kishore Kumar changed the register in the 70s and 80s by learning to sing drunk. Not slurred - timed differently, leaning late on words, an audible smile going in and out of the melody. Thodi Si Jo Pee Li Hai, from Namak Halaal in 1982, is the demonstration piece: Bappi Lahiri's tune, Anjaan's words, Prakash Mehra directing Amitabh Bachchan. Mehra then made an entire film about it. Sharaabi, in 1984, swept the playback category at the Filmfare awards with every nomination going to Kishore Kumar for that one soundtrack, and won Bappi Lahiri his only best music director award. Between Namak Halaal, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar and Sharaabi, the Mehra-Bachchan-Kishore combination produced most of what an Indian bar still plays after eleven.

The 90s largely lost interest, and the ghazal singers picked up what Bollywood dropped. Pankaj Udhas made a career of the drinking ghazal, and Chitthi Aayi Hai in 1986 put him on screen in Naam as himself, singing at a concert - Anand Bakshi wrote it, Laxmikant-Pyarelal composed it, and he had to be persuaded to appear at all, having assumed he was being asked to act. Jagjit Singh worked the same room from a different angle. Neither of them is what you would call party music, and both of them are what actually plays in a theka once the quarter is open and it is past midnight.

Then Dev.D in 2009 reopened the subject by making the drunk pathetic rather than romantic, and Emosanal Attyachar became the biggest thing on the soundtrack, credited to a brass band that does not exist. After that came the Honey Singh and Badshah years, which took the genre back to the party: Chaar Botal Vodka, Party All Night, Chhote Chhote Peg, Angreji Beat. It is a fair criticism that these are stupider than what came before. It is also true that they are the first drinking songs in decades that a twenty-year-old and her father will both sing, which is a harder thing to write than it looks.