Songs that made the films

There are songs that live on even when the film doesn’t. ‘Nodayya Kwate Lingave’ from ‘Duniya’ is one such

There are fillum-songs, and then there are fillum-songs, but the special kind are those that achieve a life of their own, entirely separate of the film in which they appeared. ‘O Hansini’from ‘Zehreela Insaan’, Puttanna Kanagal’s reworking of ‘Nagara Haavu’, is an example of this charmed life that only some songs achieve.

Another such is ‘Kanimozhiye’ from the doomed Selvaraghavan film ‘Irandam Ulagam’. Almost a film-within-the-film, it narrates the happy pro of a fluorescent-shirt wearing Arya’s purs
of Anushka Shetty across the several weeks of a rural medical camp.

Kannada cinema has several such, but the standalone that continues to haunt me is a little gem titled ‘Nodayya Kwate Lingave’written by Nagendra Prasad for the 2007 film ‘Duniya’.
The film fascinates and disappoints simultaneously. In that, it offers us an Avarna protagonist trying to figure out the big bad pattna, but loses its nerve, and its way around this not-so-simple proposition.

The song, however, is another life-form altogether.

A standalone always hooks you by its ability to get a remarkable turn of phrase to sit on the wing of a miraculous-sounding note. In ‘Nodayya’, that moment is a cascade of phrases —Angayyashtagala goodu/aadru nu darbar nodu/preethili loka marethave (A nest no broader than my palm/ yet look at their lavish joy/the world forgotten as they love).

Nagendra Prasad’s lyrics are written in a demotic that is unapologetic about what it is, and is thus removed from the sabhyathe that demands that filmi lyrics must function by a measured, formal dialect.

Kannada, like other languages with a classical tradition, is diglossic, in that the formal dialect sits at a remove from the many forms of the spoken. The words to this song qualifies the idea of diglossia by offering us words that are marked for the region and a clearly Avarna rather than Savarna identity. Shivlingu, the hero, is a hewer of stone, and these words
return us to the world he comes from.

Watching the song triggers an inevitable question. The flavour of the song clearly belongs to its male protagonist but is given to a female voice. Who then is this invisible commenter, this oracular voice commenting from above, and talking in its turn to some specific, local Siva.

There is also the specific analogy that frames the commentary that the song offers. Here are protagonists, Shivlingu and Poornima ho have not yet fallen in love with each other, but are still playing at setting up home. And there is the world of nature, of a pair of bellakkis caught up in the complicated rituals of the mating dance. The human couple are never near this measure of sovereigny, and yet the words offer a beguiling ew of such freedom in the line Paaye illa, gwade illa/Nodu ivara aramane/Raja, rani, lu kaalu, yellanu ivarene (No foundations,
nor any walls/look at this, their palace/ within which they are king, queen, servants, and such, all in all). The other clinching measure of a standalone is a metaphor or an image that refuses to fade.

There are two such in ‘Nodayya’. One for the hero’s simplicity which goes Sunnada neergu/Govina haalgu/Yatwasa gottilla (He doesn’t know the difference/ between sunna and milk). And another which reads Kogile banna, aadaru chinna (the colour of a koel, but a heart of gold).

Every standalone owes a little bit of its life to the extra that the singer puts into it. MD Pallavi Arun takes to this song like a bird on high, soaring on a thermal. The song remains, and you might forget the film.

(The writer is a professor of English Literature at St Joseph’s College, Bengaluru)