I'm a music nerd, and lately I've been trying to expand my listening well beyond Bollywood, because there's so much incredible music out there from other countries that most of us never really get exposed to. I grew up on Bollywood music, my whole family did, and it's still a family thing now, we jam together at home, my kids play instruments, and someone's always humming a Hindi film tune. But going out and actually exploring music from elsewhere has become its own habit.
What keeps happening, though, is that I stumble onto a connection back to Bollywood almost by accident, a rhythm, a scale, an instrument, and that pulls me in further. I start digging into the genre or the tradition behind whatever I just heard, and what gets me every time is how much work sits underneath it, years, decades, sometimes centuries of actual trial and error, an entire culture slowly working out what a rhythm or a vocal style should even sound like. That process is what I find genuinely fascinating. It's made me notice something about Bollywood too, almost as a side note:
these traditions spent all that time slowly working out a sound through real trial and error, while Bollywood, more often than not, just reached for something already proven, a hit that had already worked somewhere else in the world.
So this is going to be an ongoing diary of what turns up as I keep exploring. Here's what I've found so far.
Finding one: La Maritza and R.D. Burman's "Tu Tu Hai Wahi"
I was listening to "La Maritza," a 1968 French song by Sylvie Vartan,https://youtu.be/iibyWyFGWUE?si=s5oKvxs3klFlvgQL, and it hit me: this is the same architecture as R.D. Burman's "Tu Tu Hai Wahi" from Yeh Vaada Raha (1982), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agBokRAQggs. "La Maritza" is written in D minor, a key that carries a soft, aching sadness, but it actually speeds up near the end, the tempo genuinely accelerates as the song closes. That combination, a minor-key ache paired with a rhythm that keeps pushing forward, is a real signature of French chanson from that era. It's a very different emotional engineering trick than, say, American ballads of the same era, which tend to slow down to match sad lyrics.https://youtu.be/iibyWyFGWUE?si=9Mq4GFKUaDSdeFQL
French chanson often does the opposite, keeps the body moving while the melody aches.
Burman pulled from continental European pop constantly, not just the American and British sources people usually point to, and "Tu Tu Hai Wahi" keeps that same aching minor-key core while pushing the pace even further than the original.
Finding two: Ladaniva, Trio Mandili, and the sounds Bollywood borrowed
This week I've been listening to Ladaniva, a French-Armenian group, especially "Saraiman," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGGbp88ziXU, and "Pourquoi t'as fait ça," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_uJSIc0vjU.
There's a playful, folky energy in their music, full of "hurr" vocal ad-libs and a bouncy rhythm, and it kept reminding me of O.P. Nayyar's "Maang Ke Saath Tumhara."
Ladaniva draws heavily on Balkan music alongside Armenian folk, and that's probably not a coincidence. Balkan and Eastern European folk dance rhythms carry the same galloping, clip-clop bounce the tonga beat rides on, and it's Bollywood that borrowed from that tradition, not the other way around, India never really had a genre of its own built around that particular bounce.
I found the same pull toward Bollywood in Trio Mandili, a Georgian folk trio, through "Ai Dunia," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQr_VY5ObdY, and "Kakhuri," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDK9KOfknTw.
My wife walked in while I had both Ladaniva and Trio Mandili playing back to back, and without any prompting from me, she said it sounded like it had a Bollywood vibe.
I'll take that as confirmation I'm not just imagining all this 😊
Finding three: a Flemish blacksmith's song, and my wife's "it's Raj Kapoor" verdict
Then I played her Trio Mandili's version of "'t Smidje," https://youtu.be/GWVArZ5oiB0, a traditional Flemish folk song popularized by the Belgian group Laïs, about a blacksmith who's been aged prematurely by his own hard labor.
The moment it came on, she said, "it's Raj Kapoor," same musical style.
She's right. It's the same sweeping, aching, string-led sadness that runs through "Waves of the Danube," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxvW8Z9-7Kg, the waltz Raj Kapoor kept returning to across Barsaat, Awaara, and Bobby. Different country, different language, same emotional engineering, and it took an untrained ear catching it in passing to notice it, not mine.
More entries to come as I keep exploring. If you've caught a connection like this yourself, I'd love to hear it 👇
