Here is what Punjabi Music Industry contributed to Bollywood

Months ago, a video was released on varun Grover’s youtube channel, title of the video was “hme credit de do yaar”, that video featured 15 contemporary lyricists of Bollywood such as manoj muntashir, swanand kirkire, Sameer anjan, Amitabh bhattacharya, kausar munir, and Varun grover also.

According to the description of video “on official youtube channels of every big music company, hundereds of song videos have wrong or missing credits of lyrics writers.” So they urged to music streaming apps/ platforms to give proper credit to lyricists also. According to them, currently no music streaming apps/platforms has any algorithm of prominently displaying lyrics credits or making a song searchable by lyricist’s name.

Some days ago, when my cousin asked me “why almost every Punjabi songs have “jaani” word”. That time, I thought that this question could be the best answer to that video.

Punjabi music Industry has done a great job of recognizing not only their singers but also lyricists and even their studios. A Punjabi song is a combination of lyrics, lyricist name, musicians, and many times studio also. When we listen Punjabi songs we can easily know which song is written by Jaani or which is by someone else?

Jaani

Jaani has given many super hit songs to Punjabi industry and that’s why, he is known as “lyrics machine”. “Titliyaan” song released and broke records, Jaani got proper credit and appreciation as it was received to singer “Afsana khan” and its cast. These all things compelled music streaming platforms to feature Jaani with his separate album. All these happened because he always mentions his name in his songs as shayars do in their gazhals.

Mentioning their name does not decrease the quality or beauty of words in their songs.

People know how much Punjabi songs are popular among Hindi-speaking Indians all over the world. And nowadays, Bollywood is blindly adopting Popular Punjabi songs in its movies as it did with the stories of South Indian movies. Even Bollywood also taking such songs in movies which are not relevant to the story of movies. They are just using Punjabi words to make that song popular and no matter if that song matches the story of the movie or not. Perfect example is “care ni krda” song from “chhalang”.

Crux of the story is that Hindi music industry should learn from Punjabi songs to also sing lyricists' names in their songs.

Let’s talk about another contribution. Old songs are beautiful, melodious but they are not free from criticism. Earlier in most of the songs, beauty's definition was “white beauty” or “chand sa chehra” (face like moon), and what these songs did? These songs just helped to increase the color complex in girls who were not “white beautiful”. People know how much discrimination non-white girls faced in their life and they still do. 

However, this thinking is changing at present time but still, this thinking has its feet at the down level of society. But the trend is changing, apart from “black lives matter” movement which changed people’s perspective against white beauty, special thanks should also be given to Punjabi music industry in India.

In India, Punjabi songs popularizing terms like “sanwli sloni” “badami rang” “color creamy” and male singers also do not hesitate to recite their colour as black or brown. You can listen this in “Badshah’s Song”, in the song “All black’, and also recently released song “Libas's' popularity broke all perspective against black. If we say they are sensitizing society against these color perspective then it would be perfectly right. In fact, they almost quit using ‘white beauty’ in their songs.

As I said Bollywood is using Punjabi songs blindly, so they will also start to use these words. And I am sure this will affect people’s minds also. 

And one more contribution which Punjabi music industry did, that is to not leave their desi words in songs. They introduce ‘Pind’ word to the world, either it is rap or contemporary songs they use those words. They popularized their traditional dress “kurta pajama” or “salwar suit” in their songs and popularized their traditional life style in their songs and made it famous in the world.

Everyone know how much Punjabi songs are popular among Hindi-speaking people and as people know “cinema is the mirror of society”, Punjabi songs actually showing mirror to society. However Punjabi music industry is not free from criticism. Their use and extra show-off of weapons should be criticized. But let’s adopt positive attitude for now.