The Crisis of Voice in the Songs of Pyaasa

Actor-director Guru Dutt’s 1957 film Pyaasa ( The Thirsty One) is about a poet, Vijay, and depicts his increasing despair over the world and loss of faith in the power of poetry. This political and artistic crisis is dramatized in the songs that Vijay performs as well as in the three women’s songs in the film. Through Stanley Cavell’s writings on voice, language and community, I argue that an idea of the poetic voice, identified literally in the case of Vijay and latently in the women’s songs, is used to explore political and gendered issues of voice and language. The film’s investigation of voice is enabled by its reflexive treatment of the formal convention of the song sequence, the defining feature of Bombay cinema, particularly of the playback convention, which denotes the practice of lip-syncing and the use of professional singers.