Book Review: The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema- Voice, Body, Technology by Shikha Jhingan

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.

One of the book’s most compelling contributions is its refusal to treat playback singing as a static phenomenon.

Jhingan situates this transformation within a wider media ecology, moving deftly from the studio microphone to the cassette player, from radio broadcasts to television appearances and digital platforms. One of the book’s most compelling contributions is its refusal to treat playback singing as a static phenomenon. Instead, the female playback voice is shown to be continually reshaped by technological infrastructures and modes of listening. The microphone, for instance, does not simply record the voice. It disciplines it, encourages softness, intimacy, and a certain purity that would come to define the ideal female playback sound. Later, the cassette revolution enabled new forms of circulation, democratizing access while also generating derivative practices such as version recordings, where songs are re-performed and re-consumed in altered forms.

At the centre of this sonic history are figures like Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle, whose voices became synonymous with the emotional life of Hindi cinema. Jhingan’s reading of their careers is attentive to both their dominance and their difference. Mangeshkar’s voice, often described as ethereal and chaste, helped consolidate a normative model of femininity as it was considered to be youthful, restrained, and morally legible. Bhosle, by contrast, occupies a more ambiguous space, her voice associated with sensuality, experimentation, and genre fluidity. Jhingan does not reduce these singers to oppositional archetypes. Rather, she shows how their vocal identities were produced through a complex interplay of industry expectations, technological mediation, and audience reception.

The book’s central insight lies in its exploration of the relationship between voice and body. Playback singing allows the female body to be widely disseminated while simultaneously withholding it. The voice animates the on-screen figure, lending it emotional depth and interiority, yet remains detached from it, circulating across contexts in ways the body cannot. This disjunction produces a peculiar form of presence where the female voice is everywhere, and yet its source is obscured. Jhingan is careful to show that this is not merely an aesthetic condition but a deeply gendered one. The disembodied voice is afforded mobility, but it is also subject to regulation, expected to adhere to norms of propriety even as it participates in circuits of desire.

What emerges is a nuanced account of how the female voice becomes a site of negotiation between visibility and invisibility. The voice stands in for the body, animates it, and yet remains detached from it. This detachment, Jhingan suggests, is not neutral. It is deeply gendered. The disembodied female voice can circulate freely, but it is also subject to intense regulation and was expected to conform to ideals of respectability even as it traverses spaces of desire and consumption.

Methodologically, the book is ambitious. Jhingan brings together close readings of film songs, ethnographic engagement with singers and listeners, and a sustained analysis of print archives. This allows her to move beyond production histories and attend to reception and practice. Listening, in her account, is not passive. This triangulation allows her to map not only how playback singing is produced, but how it is heard, interpreted, and lived. The book’s methodological range is striking. Amateur singers, for instance, engage in acts of imitation that blur the line between consumption and performance. Version artists reinterpret canonical songs, creating parallel sonic economies that challenge the authority of the original. Fans, meanwhile, develop deeply personal relationships with voices that they may never see, investing them with emotional and moral significance.

This attention to listening practices aligns Jhingan’s work with broader developments in sound studies, a field that has increasingly sought to move beyond visual-centric analyses of media. Scholars such as Michel Chion and Jonathan Sterne have emphasised the importance of sound as a structuring force in audiovisual culture, while Veit Erlmann’s work on listening has foregrounded the embodied and affective dimensions of sonic experience. Jhingan extends these conversations into the specific context of Indian cinema, where the song has always occupied a central role. Her contribution lies in showing how listening itself becomes a culturally and historically situated practice, shaped by technologies, institutions, and social norms.

At the same time, the book engages with questions central to gender and performance studies. The female playback voice, as Jhingan presents it, is both enabling and constraining. It allows women to achieve a form of public presence without the risks associated with physical visibility, particularly in a society where respectability politics have long governed female participation in the arts. Yet this very separation of voice and body also reinforces a division that can be limiting. The singer’s labour is often rendered invisible, her contribution subsumed under the star persona of the on-screen actor. Recognition is uneven, and authorship remains contested.

If there is a limitation to Jhingan’s otherwise rich analysis, it lies perhaps in the relative stability of its central categories. While the book acknowledges shifts in technology and media forms, it is less attentive to the ways in which contemporary digital cultures might be unsettling the very notion of playback. The rise of reality television singing competitions, social media platforms, and independent music production has blurred the boundaries between professional and amateur, original and derivative, voice and image. The playback singer, once hidden behind the screen, is now often a visible performer in her own right. This transformation raises new questions about embodiment, authorship, and the politics of visibility that the book only begins to address.

Similarly, while Jhingan is attentive to the diversity of listening bodies, there is room for a more sustained engagement with regional and linguistic variations. Bombay cinema has always been part of a larger constellation of Indian film industries, each with its own sonic traditions and playback practices. A comparative perspective might have enriched the analysis, highlighting both the specificity and the broader applicability of Jhingan’s arguments.

That said, these are lesser shortcomings than invitations for further inquiry. The strength of The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema lies in its ability to open up new ways of thinking about familiar phenomena. It asks readers to reconsider what it means to hear a film, to attend to the labour and technology that produce the voices that seem so natural, so seamlessly integrated into the cinematic experience.

The recent passing of Asha Bhosle lends an added poignancy to this exploration. Her voice, which traversed decades of musical and cinematic change, stands as a testament to the adaptability and resilience of the playback tradition. In Jhingan’s framework, such a voice is never just an individual achievement; it is a node in a complex network of production, circulation, and reception. To listen to Bhosle, then, is also to listen to the histories of technology, gender, and media that have shaped and been shaped by her work.

Jhingan’s prose is measured and precise, occasionally dense but rarely opaque. She writes with an awareness of her interdisciplinary audience, balancing theoretical engagement with clear exposition. The close readings of songs are particularly effective, demonstrating how careful attention to melody, lyrics, and vocal delivery can reveal layers of meaning that might otherwise go unnoticed. At times, however, the analytical framework risks becoming overly schematic, with certain arguments reiterated across chapters without significant development. A tighter structure might have enhanced the book’s overall momentum.

Even where it falters, the book remains intellectually generative. It offers a vocabulary for thinking about the female voice that is at once historical and contemporary, grounded in specific case studies yet open to broader application. For readers of a literary bent, its emphasis on memory and affect is especially resonant. Film songs, after all, are not merely objects of analysis. They are part of lived experience, woven into personal and collective histories. Jhingan acknowledges this dimension without lapsing into nostalgia, instead inviting a critical engagement with the ways in which such memories are mediated and constructed.

In this sense, The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema performs a delicate balancing act. It is both an academic study and an invitation to listen differently. It challenges the dominance of the visual without dismissing it, foregrounds technology without reducing experience to mechanics, and centres the female voice without isolating it from the networks in which it operates.

For a field that has long privileged the seen over the heard, Jhingan’s work is a necessary corrective. It reminds us that cinema is as much an auditory experience as it is a visual one, and that the voices that animate its worlds carry histories that are as complex and contested as any image.

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About the Reviewer

Namrata is the editor of Kitaab. She is a writer, editor, podcast host, literary critic, and founder of Bookbots India and Keemiya Creatives.

She can be found on X | LinkedIn.

About the Book

The arrival of playback technology in the 1940s had far-reaching consequences for Bombay cinema, leading to a wider dispersal of films, film songs, and film stars. Jhingan moves across a shifting media landscape to focus on the role of the female voice in making the corporeal female body available in the public domain. The book follows the rise of playback stars like Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle in the aural domain as they intersect with a diverse range of listening bodies—on-screen stars, music critics, fans, version artists, and amateur singers. Combining a formal analysis of film songs with ethnographic research and a close reading of print archives, the book invites readers and listeners to engage with their own media-driven memories. This is a nuanced investigation of how the female singer’s sonic production is intertwined with devices such as the microphone, cassettes, television, and digital technologies, and is located in the interstices of material, cultural, musical, and cinematic environments. The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema is an authoritative addition to the field of sound studies with implications for gender studies, music and performance studies, and cinema studies.