Book Review: The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema- Voice, Body, Technology by Shikha Jhingan
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Namrata reviews The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema: Voice, Body, Technology by Shikha Jhingan (Orient Blackswan, 2025), observing how it is both an academic study and an invitation to listen differently.
The history of Bombay cinema is often told through its stars, whose carefully framed bodies circulate across screens and cities. Yet, as Shikha Jhingan’s The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema makes clear, this visual emphasis obscures a parallel history: one shaped not by faces but by voices, not by presence but by a carefully engineered disembodiment. Jhingan’s study enters this sonic archive with precision and sensitivity, tracing how the female playback voice emerged as one of the most influential and paradoxical forces in Indian cinema.
The arrival of playback technology in the 1940s marked a decisive break in film practice. No longer tethered to the physical capacities of actors, the cinematic voice could now be separated, refined, and redistributed. This technological shift, as Jhingan argues, did not merely enhance production efficiency; it reconfigured the very ontology of stardom. Voices could travel where bodies could not. Songs could circulate independently of films. And singers, particularly women, could attain a kind of ubiquity that was at once intimate and strangely abstract.
