Film song has permeated the socio-cultural life of modern India in deep and impactful ways. The collective and individual consumption of film song, which is a critical component of the larger popular culture, has come to signify the bridging of an otherwise polarised society and its tradition of the appreciation of fine arts along the lines of class, caste, geopolitical and gender divide. How does the film song stay afloat? A quick and simple reckoning can be: it is a major force that packages star energies in it effectively. Film song has become a defining experience of film viewing and its attendant issues relating to the ‘star persona’, singing or miming the song onscreen. It is no exaggeration to say that film song has become the face of many Indian film stars such as Dilip Kumar, Meena Kumari, Amitabh Bachchan, NT Rama Rao, Savitri, Uttam Kumar, Sivaji Ganesan and several others from various linguistic and exhibition circuits of Mumbai, Chennai and other industries. The expansion of the audio industry (alongside film) has benefited stars since the 1940s, each era befittingly with a technology that sustained and extended their influence beyond the movie theatre, and in relocating them across cultural spaces. If one were to understand Indian film stars’ engagement with film songs as an indication of stardom inflected with musicality, then it might prompt one to investigate the layers that this ‘musical stardom’ portends to forms of music and the uniqueness of stars. More particularly, it allows one to understand musical stardom beyond the traditional understanding of aural material and the materiality of song.

This chapter traces the historical formation of Indian film industries’ masterful use of song as a distinct vehicle to deploy stardom, and argues that film song since 2000 has begun to fulfil specific functions of entertainment in mapping masculinities and femininities through the visual realisation of song (‘picturisation’).

So why is this investigation important? The way film performative stardom is mapped onto the form of song and has established critical links between the production of the visual (face) and aural (voice) is a unique phenomenon peculiar to Indian cinema, and its investigation can explain ways in which the diffusion of this stardom happens. In the more recent times of new digital platforms, this stardom has diversified into various channels of entertainment.