Foreword: about the Hindi Song Book.

This project is the result of a collaborative effort of Hindi teacher and undergraduate students at the University of Washington in Seattle, with the simple goal of sharing the work and the fun of taking Hindi songs seriously. While many people have a general sense of what Hindi songs are about, especially when performed with gestures and mime, it is not always easy to know precisely what is meant. Popular songs tend to be in registers different from standard modern Hindi, whether older or regionally diverse ones, which makes them harder to access for the average Hindi speaker. On top of that, songs in movies are often not subtitled, leaving room for misunderstandings. And yet there is so much to be gained by listening carefully. Besides acknowledging artists and working on a more precise understanding, we also aim for a better appreciation of the aesthetics and rhetorics behind the lyricists’ craft.

The project finds its origin in the class leadership and final presentations of students of Hindi 317 (Popular Hindi Song), 502 (Readings in Classical Hindi Literature: Avadhi) and 494 (Ramayana in Comparative Perspective) during Winter Quarter 2025, when the shared theme of these classes was the Ramayana. As part of our classes we worked through several songs, with a special focus on the lyrics, looking carefully at lyricists’ word choice and employment of literary tropes employed to convey their messages, as well as how characters, episodes, and themes related to the Ramayana story are mobilized in different contexts. We have a wonderfully diverse range of songs, including classical devotional and folk songs, and of course Hindi film songs from golden oldies to more recent ones. Some are more narrative, others more meditative, and they represent a variety of different approaches to the subject. This is an experiment, and we beg your patience and forgiveness with this first trial and most importantly ask our readers for their feedback, so we can hopefully improve in a second instalment.

Finally, some technical considerations: we provide lyrics in both Devanāgarī script and transliteration. While we give official Roman titles of films, for the transliteration of the Hindi song texts, we follow with one exception (transliterating nasals as n) the conventions of The Oxford Hindi English Dictionary (R.S. McGregor, ed. Oxford University Press 1993). Unless otherwise specified, we also use that dictionary as the major source for our wordlists, because it has the advantage of giving etymological notes, which are helpful in understanding the lyricist’s word choices. We cite this dictionary’s full list of possible meanings but underline the ones we consider closest to the meaning in the context of the selected song. Still, this provides our readers with the full range to make up their own mind. As always, there remain ambiguities and alternative possibilities. Translations are works in progress, vetted in class workshops, but always with scope for improvement. We see our work as invitations to engage with the songs, not closures with the final interpretations. The individual song entries are not intended as formal papers: we simply provide some major points on the basis of our own analysis and what we read, cited under “Sources/Further Readings.” The book includes two more extensive papers that engage with the broader context of Ramayana inspiration for popular cinema, one at the beginning and one at the end.

We hope our readers will enjoy this fruit of our labor as much as we enjoyed researching.