You've Read the Book . . . Now Buy the Cassette

The hottest-selling recording in the thriving cassette stalls of Banaras in 1984 was not, as I would have supposed, the soundtrack to any of the then-current crop of Hindi film musicals or a local hit by any of the city's popular biraha or qawwali groups. Instead, according to Scott Marcus, an ethnomusicologist conducting research on popular music in the city,^[172] it was a boxed set of eight cassettes comprising an abridged version of the Manas sung by the popular film singer "Mukesh," accompanied by other soloists, chorus, and orchestra. These recordings were

[172] See his essay "The Rise of a Folk Music Tradition." The information on the Manas recording was a personal communication, February 1984.

made between 1972 and 1976 in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the composition of Tulsi's epic (1974) and were initially released as records by the Gramophone Company of India. They represented, it was said, a nostalgic labor of love by the aging Punjabi singer, who had made a fortune as the offscreen "playback" voice of numerous Bombay film stars and had set out late in life to rediscover the styles and melodies of Manas recitation he had heard in his childhood. The resulting recordings, although presented in modernized "filmi" idiom, faithfully preserved a number of traditional melodies of Manas chanting and offered a sequential (though heavily abridged) musical version of the epic.

The records enjoyed modest success but were too expensive to reach a mass audience. However, the advent of inexpensive cassette recorders during the late 1970s revolutionized the music industry in India, creating for the first time a mass market for recordings. The Mukesh series was rereleased on cassette by the original distributor and then quickly pirated by smaller companies working outside the limits of the poorly enforced copyright laws. Given the shadowy nature of major pirate distributors such as "T Series,"^[173] it is impossible to say how many of the sets were sold, but by 1984 their impact was both visible and audible. One could scarcely attend a public or private religious function in Banaras that year without hearing, over the obligatory loudspeaker system, the familiar strains of Murli Manohar Svarup's orchestration and Mukesh's mellifluous chanting. And when a consortium of artists and recording companies decided to take out a series of full-page newspaper advertisements to protest the unlawful duplication and sale of recordings, their choice of a symbolic and readily recognizable release was obvious: beneath the banner heading, "Save Music—Kill Piracy," was a large photograph of the ubiquitous "T-Series" Tulsi-Ramayan.^[174]