Low Brow: A column by Pranavesh Subramanian
A reel pops up on my Instagram feed: a clip of the actor Rajkumar Rao from the show Guns and Gulaabs, wearing a white-checkered shirt and a brown sweater. He is on a bus, sitting by the window. He stares outside pensively, before he breaks down crying. The clip is overlaid with the song Mujhse Mohabbat from the 1993 Bollywood film Jhankar: we hear a familiar traditional beat pierced by the shriek of an electric synth as the singer Kumar Sanu pines for a woman — any woman — to love him. A text appears on the reel: ‘Bus driver’s playlist >>’’. The caption for the reel reads: “Bus driver ki playlist se relate karne laga hoon😭” [sic]. (I’ve started relating to the bus driver’s playlist.) At the time of writing, the reel has over a hundred thousand likes.
The ‘bus driver’s playlist’ has emerged as a cultural phenomenon—not just on my Instagram feed as I learned—but on several others’. Its popularity is perhaps best encapsulated in a reel posted by Alien Sports Management, an travel company that arranges sports tours of north India for overseas amateur cricket and hockey teams. This reel is shot in a bus with young members of a foreign amateur cricket team the company is ferrying. A text overlay reads: ‘POV: You are on a bus in India”. We move through close-up shots of several members, each increasingly faking despondence to the heart-rending tunes. The soundtrack switches between several tracks: Dil Ne Yeh Kaha Hai, Hum Pyaar Hai Tumhaare, Jeeta Tha Jiske Liye — all composed and sung, at least in part, by Kumar Sanu; notably similar to Mujhse Mohabbat in their use of the electric synth and a traditional beat. The reel ends with one of the young white men handing his phone to the driver and asking him to transfer these songs onto his phone. This reel has close to a million likes.
Several Spotify playlists have emerged along these lines: one playlist, titled ‘Indian bus driver’s playlist’ has around 75 tracks, with almost 50,000 saves: a majority of the tracks are from Bollywood films of the late 80s and the early-to-mid 90s, composed by Kumar Sanu. This is not just a phenomenon with Hindi music, but across regional languages. Illayaraja, the Tamil music composer, for instance, has a playlist on his official YouTube account that predates this Instagram phenomenon by almost half a decade, posted in 2020: titled “Ilaiyaraaja Town Bus Songs Jukebox”. There are several playlists – and reels — that situate Indian film music from the late 80s and early 90s with other working class professions: barbers, construction workers. With this in mind, I wish to contend with two questions: what does it mean that some songs are categorised as ‘bus driver music’; and what does it mean to be consuming this on Instagram?
The answer to the first question lies in Sanu and Illayaraja’s music being at the heart of this subculture. M.S.S Pandian notes that Illayaraja’s music is a syncretic concoction of Indian classical, traditional, and Western classical music forms. Sanu’s music can be positioned similarly, where he blends several elements of Indian classical music with electronically manipulated instruments; Westernising a defined Indian-ness. Tamil film scholar Kumuthan Maderya argues that through this genre of music that emerged in the late 80s and the early 90s, Indian classical, Western classical and Western pop music—the access to which is dictated by various socio-economic barriers—became more accessible in daily popular culture. That this emerged in the late 80s and early 90s is not insignificant—a period where India was dismantling its protectionist economic policies and embracing global financial markets—Sanu and Illayaraja’s music can be seen as emblematic of the optimism of this time in their fusion of the global and the regional.
This fusion can also be thought in terms of the mainstream and the experimental—elements of global pop adding an experimental layer to the mainstream Bollywood track. It is in the flux between the mainstream and the experimental that the cultural theorist Mark Fisher locates popular modernism. For Fisher, music that played between the two was actively looking to get rid of the conventions of the past, and create a new meaning of the future, the modern. The popular modern, in this way, contained an inherent optimism for Fisher: music, and indeed other forms of popular culture thus looked to imagine a new future, slowly shedding the constraints of the present.
Sanu and Illayaraja’s music are irrefutably exciting in this way—there is a familiarity in the traditional beats of Mujhse Mohabbat and Dil Ne Yeh Kaha Hai, but a futurism in their electronically manipulated arrangement, an inherent optimism. Yet, there is melancholy: almost all the songs that are deemed ‘bus driver music’ are about yearning, unrequited love, an unplaceable desire. Romance in itself feels significant as a theme—in a society plagued by marriage as an institution of preserving caste, romance and love can themselves be seen as popular modernism: ‘love marriage’, a thread running across several films these tracks are from, encases the utopia of love with the tradition of marriage. And for the young working class Indian man, beleaguered by precarious work, unprotected by labour laws, caring for ageing parents, suddenly finding himself as the sole breadwinner; romance is an oasis. It is therefore, not just in the futurism of the music, but in the melancholy and futurism of romance, that ‘bus driver music’ resonates with its audience.
It is therefore worth considering that while ‘bus driver music’, as an oeuvre, is very much constructed by this cohort of Instagram tastemakers—far away from the realities of the working Indian man, it is still rooted in an organic appeal, which perhaps Illayaraja’s social media team realises, and is apparent in their own creation of a town bus playlist. It is also worth interrogating: why is it that this music is restricted to tracks from three decades ago, a time where a majority of Instagram tastemakers as well as working class young men were not even born? On one level, this could be indicative of the past decade of Bollywood moving towards nationalist biopics and Hindutva myth-building epics — the aspiration created by Bollywood cinema is no longer about romance or a utopian future, but about the desire for a powerful present, of India as a nativist global superpower. A casualty of this shift is romantic music, and as a consequence, leaving Sanu and Illayaraja as the last-standing bastions of romantic optimism.
Another answer to this lies in technologies of distribution, especially in what the Tamil film scholar Anand Pandian calls a ‘fragmented distribution’. He notes that radio, and subsequently private television, widened the audience for Indian cinema. Even those who did not have the leisure of time or the privilege of disposable income could consume cinema in piecemeal, even passively: agricultural workers watching televised music videos on their break at a tea-shop, truck drivers listening to soundtracks while driving. Films were thus consumed in a fragmented way: on comedy television channels, through music on the radio. As a result, films took on a life beyond the confines of the cinema.
Platforms that generate short form video content—Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts—can be thought of as today’s technologies of ‘fragmented distribution’. The one-dimensional nationalist-biopic orientation of Bollywood, combined with the non-linear mode of the Reels feed has given older Bollywood films a new lease of life. The music of Kumar Sanu and Illayaraja were always created for fragmented distribution, it is unsurprising that they have found relevance in today’s technologies of short-form media consumption. Thus, while the cultural stagnation of contemporary Bollywood has brought our attention back to this genre of music, technologies of fragmented consumption and Bollywood’s relationship with them have ensured their revival.
Finally, it is also worth noting what it means that an upwardly mobile section of Instagram’s tastemakers are using the aesthetics of working class ambition. In some ways, it can be argued that this is the closest that upwardly mobile, upper caste young Indians inadvertently show class solidarity: in unrequited love. Love, in its bounties and its pain — all encapsulated in these playlists and reels, goes beyond lines of caste and class. On the other hand, ignoring the material reality of the working class Indian man while fetishizing their aesthetic sensibilities could be considered today’s virtual equivalent of ‘retro-cool’ fashion, much like Dickies trousers and Doctor Martens boots in a Western context. Regardless, it remains to be seen what the next such trend that emerges is made of: will we, perhaps, see a similar revival of Indian ’truck driver’ music, a distinct category considering the solitary nature of driving a truck cross-country filled with industrial supplies, compared to the space of the bus, inherently a social vehicle?
As I write this, I am sent a reel by a friend: a young boy is pretending to drive a bus at home. He sits in front of a window with a toy steering, a water bottle fashioned into a gearbox. There are incense sticks and portraits of several Hindu gods next to him, on a plastic box converted into a makeshift dashboard console. The video is set to Kumar Sanu and Alka Yagnik’s Raah Me Unse Mulaqaat. I join a hundred and forty five thousand others: I hit like on the reel.
About the Author
Pranavesh Subramanian is a writer who teaches critical thinking at Ashoka University. He is @pranavesh on Instagram and @pranxvesh on Twitter.