Chapter 160: The Sound of Something New
15 March 1974 — Shergill Cinema Offices, Pedder Road, Bombay
The letters had gone out in February.
Not through industry channels — not the standard communications of the film business, which travelled through agents and secretaries and the network of professional intermediaries that the Bombay film world had built over decades to manage the flow of opportunity and negotiation between the people who needed things done and the people who could do them. Karan did not use those channels for this. He had learned, from four years of building things that had not previously existed, that the channels which existed were built for the things that had been done before, and that the thing he was trying to do had not been done before.
He had written the letters himself.
Seven letters. Seven addresses. Seven composers who had been identified over four months of listening — not casual listening, not the listening of a man browsing a catalogue, but the specific listening of someone who understood exactly what he was looking for and was going through the available body of Indian musical work looking for evidence of its existence.
The letters were not long. They said: I am working on a film project that requires music unlike anything that has been composed for Indian cinema before. I would like to meet with you at your convenience to discuss it. I cannot tell you more in a letter. The discussion must happen in person.
The letters were signed: Karan Shergill.
Five composers had responded within three days.
One had taken a week.
Chiranjit Singh had taken two weeks, during which time two follow-up letters had been sent and finally a phone call had been made to his home in Chandigarh by Priya Verma's assistant, who had said: Mr. Singh, Karan Shergill has called you personally and asked for a meeting and would very much appreciate a response.
Chiranjit Singh had said: he wants to meet me? Karan Shergill wants to meet me?
Yes, the assistant had said.
Chiranjit Singh had been on the train to Bombay the following morning.
They arrived at the Pedder Road offices at different times and from different directions, which was the specific geography of seven significant people converging on a single location from the scattered points of their professional lives.
Vanraj Bhatia came first, at nine-fifteen. He was forty-eight years old, trained in classical European composition at the Vienna Academy, the man whose work on the NCPA productions had been described by European critics who attended the Bombay performances as "the most serious compositional mind working in India today," which was the kind of description that the Indian film industry noted and did not know what to do with because the Indian film industry had not yet developed the specific institutional language for seriousness in music that was not melody-driven and mass-accessible. He was lean and wore wire-rimmed spectacles and had the quality of a man whose internal life was conducting a constant, complex piece of music that only he could hear.
He had received Karan's letter and had read it three times and had then sat in his study for two hours before responding. He had responded because the letter described a problem — the problem of a music unlike anything composed for Indian cinema before — in terms that suggested the letter's author understood what music was, which was rarer in a film producer than it should have been. He had also responded because Shergill Cinema had never used music. This was a paradox that had been in his mind since 1971: the most significant film studio in India did not use songs. He had been waiting, quietly, to understand why. He suspected the meeting might tell him.
Salil Chowdhury came at nine-thirty. He was fifty years old, the composer who had created the specific sound of Bengali cinema and had then created the specific sound of Hindi cinema when nobody expected him to succeed in Hindi, and who had proved that the specific sound of musical storytelling — the choral architecture, the unexpected melodic shifts, the classical Indian voice used in ways that were neither classical nor popular but something between them — was not regional but universal. He was rounder than Vanraj and wore the rumpled dignity of a man who had been famous for long enough that the need to perform famousness had worn off. He had come because of the phrase "music unlike anything composed for Indian cinema before." He was fifty years old and he was a little bored, which he would not have admitted to anyone, and the phrase had made him less bored.
R.D. Burman — Pancham — came at nine forty-five, which was slightly late, which was approximately on time for him. He was thirty-three years old and the most successful film composer in India by most commercial measures and by some artistic ones as well, and he had the quality of someone who occupied that position with genuine ease because success had arrived for him as the natural consequence of being exactly who he was rather than as the product of effort to be someone else. He was compact and energetic and looked at everything with the specific curiosity of a man for whom sound was the primary sense through which the world was experienced — he had been noticed, by colleagues over the years, to sometimes close his eyes in conversations not from inattention but from the opposite: from listening more completely.
He had come because the letter made no sense and he wanted to understand why it made no sense. A Shergill production wanted music? He had been mystified for three years about the no-music policy. He was going to find out what was different.
Ilaiyaraaja arrived at ten o'clock from the airport — he had flown from Madras that morning, having refused the offer of the previous evening's flight and the hotel room in Bombay it would have enabled because he preferred to travel in the morning and arrive fresh. He was twenty-nine years old, the youngest person who would be in the room, and had been composing for Tamil films for three years with a combination of classical Carnatic structure and Western orchestral technique that critics struggled to categorise because it did not fit comfortably into any existing category. His English was functional, his Hindi was basic, and he carried about him the specific quality of a very young man who was extremely good at something and who was still in the process of learning that he was extremely good at it — the specific quality of capability that had not yet been fully confirmed to itself.
He had come from Madras because the letter from Karan Shergill was unlike any letter he had ever received. It was addressed to him specifically, which meant someone had listened to his work specifically, which meant someone had found him when he had not yet fully found himself. He had sat with the letter for three days before responding, and the three days had been spent trying to understand what it meant that this specific person had sought him out.
Pandit Vijay Raghav Rao arrived at ten-fifteen. He was sixty-one years old, a classical flautist and composer whose work in experimental music and soundscape composition was known primarily to a small audience of people who cared about such things deeply and was unknown to most people who cared about film music at all. He had composed for documentaries, for experimental films, for installations, for radio programmes, for a body of work that was almost entirely invisible to the commercial music world and that was, by any honest assessment, among the most formally innovative music being composed in India. He was the person in the room who had the least commercial profile and the most compositional courage, and he wore both of these facts with the equanimity of someone who had long ago stopped caring which audience found him.
He had come because the letter asked for something he had been waiting for someone to ask for. He did not know yet what the project was. He knew from the asking that it was serious.
Bhaskar Chandavarkar came at ten-twenty. He was forty-three years old, a composer whose background was academic — he had taught music theory at universities, had written about music, had composed in forms that were neither purely classical nor purely popular but occupied the experimental territory between them. He had scored Shyam Benegal's recent films, which was the context in which most people in the room knew of him. He was the person in the room most accustomed to thinking about music analytically rather than intuitively, which was not a limitation but a different kind of instrument. He came with a notebook.
Chiranjit Singh arrived last, at ten-thirty, seventeen minutes after the meeting was scheduled to begin, which was not rudeness — he had gotten on the wrong bus from the train station and had been briefly lost in Bombay, which was a city he had visited four times in his life and which he found simultaneously magnificent and incomprehensible. He was thirty-eight years old, from Chandigarh, a composer of Punjabi classical and semi-classical music who had done occasional work for Punjabi films and had not yet done anything that explained why Karan Shergill had sought him out. He came into the room slightly breathless and looked at the assembled composers and the Pedder Road conference room and was visibly doing the thing that people did when they found themselves in a room they had not expected to be in: running a rapid and partially successful assessment of whether they were in the right room.
He sat.
He was in the right room.
Karan was not in the room when they arrived.
This was deliberate.
Priya Verma had greeted each of them as they came in — Priya, who was the face of Shergill Cinema in every professional context and whose quality of professional warmth was the specific kind that made people feel seen rather than managed. She had offered tea, which all of them accepted, and coffee, which two of them also accepted. She had arranged them around the conference table with the specific art of someone who understood that how people sat relative to each other shaped the texture of the conversation that followed.
They sat and they looked at each other.
They were seven composers who did not all know each other and who came from different regions and different traditions and different relationships to the commercial film industry, and they were sitting in a room in the offices of the most significant film studio in India waiting for the studio's founder to arrive, and none of them had been told what they were there for.
Vanraj Bhatia, who had been waiting the longest and whose patience was the specific patience of a man who had spent his career in the long company of difficult problems, looked around the table and said: "Does anyone know what this is about?"
"I was told a film project," Salil Chowdhury said. "That's all."
"Music unlike anything composed for Indian cinema," Pandit Raghav Rao said, quoting the letter. He said it with the quality of someone who had been turning the phrase over.
"He said that in your letter too?" Burman said.
"The same phrase," Vanraj said.
"Mine too," Chandavarkar said.
Ilaiyaraaja, who had been listening to the conversation in the focused way of someone slightly outside their linguistic comfort zone but entirely able to follow the content, said: "Mine also. Same words."
They looked at each other.
Chiranjit Singh, still slightly breathless from his Bombay navigation difficulties, said: "What does Shergill Cinema need with music? They don't use music."
"That," Burman said, leaning back in his chair with the ease of a man who was genuinely interested in the puzzle, "is the question."
They sat with it.
The wait had a specific quality — not the impatient wait of people who had somewhere else to be, but the attentive wait of people who understood that what was about to happen was going to be significant and who were paying attention in advance.
Then the door opened.
Karan came in at ten thirty-five.
He was twenty-four years old.
This was the first thing that every person in the room registered when they saw him, the people around that table ranged in age from twenty-nine to sixty-one, and because every one of them had come to this meeting carrying a version of Karan Shergill built from what they knew of him — from his public presence, from the things they had read, from the industry stories that moved through professional circles and that had a specific and accumulated quality. The version of him that each of them had carried into the room was a version that matched the achievement: the aircraft, the petroleum, the films, the factory. The achievement had a size to it that the room's expectation had shaped.
He was in a white kurta. He moved through the room with the economy of motion of a man who had learned not to waste energy on gesture, who had distilled every physical expression down to what was necessary and nothing beyond it. He sat at the head of the table not with the performance of authority but with the settled quality of a man who was in the right place doing the right thing and knew it.
He looked at them.
They were seven composers who had come to Bombay from seven different points of Indian musical life, and he looked at all of them the way he looked at everything important: with complete attention, without performing the attention, the gaze of a man for whom the people in front of him were the most interesting thing in the room.
"Thank you for coming," he said. He said it in Hindi, which was not everyone's primary language but was everyone's shared professional language, and he said it without the excess warmth of professional ceremony. He meant it, and meaning it was sufficient.
"I asked you here," he said, "because I have a problem. The problem is a film. The film requires music. The music doesn't exist yet. And I believe that the people who can create it are in this room."
He paused.
"Before I tell you what the film is," he said, "I want to tell you something about what I've heard."
He looked at Vanraj Bhatia.
"The NCPA production. October last year. The string quartet work in the third movement — the way you used the absence of melodic resolution as a structural principle rather than as a temporary tension. I've been thinking about that for five months."
Vanraj looked at him. "You attended?"
"I was in the audience," Karan said.
Vanraj was quiet. He was adjusting something in his model of the man across from him. Karan Shergill had been in the audience at a contemporary classical concert at the NCPA in October. This was not the information the model had contained.
He looked at Salil Chowdhury.
"Do Aankhen Barah Haath," he said. "Not the songs. The background score. The specific thing you did in the scene where the prisoner writes the letter — the way the orchestral swell arrives three beats late, after the action, rather than on the action. Most composers put music on the action. You put it three beats after. The effect is completely different."
Salil Chowdhury said nothing. He was looking at the him at the head of the table with the expression of a man hearing his own work described by someone who had actually heard it.
He looked at Burman.
"The sound design in Yaadon Ki Baaraat," he said. "Not the songs. The texture between scenes. You used synthesised sounds in the background in a way that nobody would notice explicitly but that changed the emotional register of every scene they appeared in. I've listened to it three times with the specific purpose of identifying where you placed them."
Burman's eyebrows moved. He was not a man who was easily surprised. He was, at this moment, surprised.
He looked at Ilaiyaraaja.
"I went to Madras in November," he said. "I attended a recording session for a Tamil film whose name I'm not going to mention because the film is not significant. But the background work you did in that session — the counterpoint between the mridangam and the bass strings — I sat in the back of the recording room and listened for forty minutes and I couldn't leave."
Ilaiyaraaja, who had not known that Karan Shergill had been in Madras in November, said nothing. His expression had the quality of someone who has been seen by a person whose seeing matters.
He looked at Pandit Raghav Rao.
"The radio composition," he said. "From 1971. The All India Radio commission. The piece that used the bansuri against recorded natural sounds. It was broadcast once and then not again. I have a recording."
Pandit Raghav Rao looked at him steadily. "How do you have a recording?"
"I asked someone to record it when it was broadcast," Karan said.
"That was 1971," the Pandit said. "You were—"
"Twenty years old," Karan said. "I know how old I was. I was also paying attention."
He looked at Chandavarkar.
"Your theoretical writing," he said. "The paper on Indian music and European form — the argument that the raga structure and the sonata structure are solving the same mathematical problem from different directions. I've read it twice."
Chandavarkar, who had published the paper in an academic journal with a circulation of perhaps three hundred people in India, said: "Where did you find that?"
"NCPA library," Karan said. "They have a good archive."
He looked at Chiranjit Singh.
Chiranjit Singh was sitting very straight. He had come from Chandigarh slightly breathless and slightly uncertain, and he was now sitting very straight and looking at the man at the head of the table with an expression that was trying to be composed and was not quite managing it.
Karan said: "Teri Mitti Vich Milaan Ge." A Punjabi composition. Not a film song. A composition Chiranjit Singh had recorded in 1972 for a private album that had sold perhaps five hundred copies in Punjab.
"I've heard it," Karan said. "Specifically what you do with the harmonium in the second half — the way you use it as a drone rather than as a melodic instrument. The effect is monastic. It's ancient and contemporary simultaneously. I've been listening to it since 1972."
Chiranjit Singh's composure, which had been holding with considerable effort, did something specific. His jaw tightened and his eyes went briefly somewhere else — not away from the room, to a place inside the room that was for him rather than for anyone watching — and then he came back.
"How did you find it?" he said.
"Someone in Chandigarh heard it and told someone in Delhi who told someone in Bombay who sent me a copy," Karan said. "Good music travels. It's slow sometimes. It travels."
He looked at all of them now.
"I told you that before I explain the film, I would tell you what I've heard," he said. "I've told you. The reason I told you is this: I am going to ask you to do something that requires trust. The trust has to go both ways. You need to trust me with something you haven't built yet. I want you to know that I am someone who hears what you have built."
The room was quiet.
Not uncomfortable quiet. The quiet of people who have received something they didn't expect and who are adjusting.
Then Karan said: "Now let me tell you about the film."
He spoke for forty minutes.
He spoke about Star Wars the way he had spoken about it to no one except Vikram Kumar Nair and, briefly, Sakshi. He spoke about it the way you described something you knew completely — with the economy of genuine familiarity, the compression of a person who had been thinking about something for so long that the compressed version contained the full weight of the uncompressed one.
He told them about the universe. The empire and the rebellion. The desert planet. The farm boy. The old warrior. The princess who was also a general. The villain in black armour who breathed like a machine. The mystical energy that ran through all living things and that certain people could learn to perceive and to use. The spacecraft. The battles. The moral architecture: not good versus evil as a simple binary but the question of whether the darkness you came from defined you.
He told them about the opening. The screen black. The words appearing: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. And then the spacecraft — the small ship fleeing, pursued, and then the enormous vessel arriving, filling the frame, its scale communicating an empire's confidence in its own power without a single word of dialogue.
He told them about the specific quality of the universe — used, old, real, a place that had been lived in for thousands of years by many different kinds of life and that looked it. Not the clean chrome of science fiction imagination. The worn, patched, functional aesthetic of a place where people had been trying to get things done for centuries.
He told them about the Force. The energy. Not magic — something more specific and more natural than magic. Something that connected everything to everything else and that the Jedi — the warriors and mystics who served the Republic before the Empire — had learned to perceive and to direct through practice and through something that was not quite faith but was adjacent to it.
He told them about the hero's journey. The young man who discovers he is connected to something larger than what he was told his life was. Who loses his home and his foster family and has to decide whether to respond to loss by retreating or by going forward. Who finds his teacher and his companions and his purpose. Who faces the final confrontation with the darkness not through superior power but through the specific act of choosing to trust something he cannot fully see or understand.
He told them about Darth Vader. The breathing. The presence. The darkness that was darker because it had once been light.
He spoke for forty minutes.
And during those forty minutes, the room did something.
It became something different from what it had been at the beginning. The seven composers had come in as individuals — as the specific, differentiated professional entities they each were, with their different musical languages and their different professional positions and their different relationships to what Shergill Cinema and Karan Shergill meant. They had sat around the table with the polite attention of serious people at a meeting of potential professional significance.
During the forty minutes of Karan's description, something happened to the specific membrane between them and the thing being described. The membrane thinned. The description was not a pitch — it was not the description of a product being offered to buyers. It was the description of a world, and worlds, when described with sufficient completeness and conviction, did the thing that worlds did: they opened. They created the specific sensation of entering something rather than viewing it.
By the time Karan stopped talking, the seven people around the table were in the galaxy far, far away.
Not literally. Not in the way of confusion between fiction and reality. In the way that anyone who has encountered a story of sufficient completeness knew: the story had arrived in them. It was real to them now. It had taken up residence.
Salil Chowdhury said: "The hero. On the desert planet. Looking at the two suns setting."
"Yes," Karan said.
"What does he feel?"
"He feels," Karan said slowly, "like someone who knows the world is larger than what he's been told it is. And he is desperately afraid that he will never reach it. That the larger world will remain forever just past where he is."
"The longing," Salil Chowdhury said.
"The specific longing," Karan said. "Of someone who can see the horizon but cannot reach it yet."
Salil Chowdhury was quiet for a moment.
"I know that feeling," he said.
"Everyone knows that feeling," Karan said. "That is the feeling the music for that moment needs to carry."
Burman leaned forward. "The villain," he said. "The breathing."
"Yes."
"What does the breathing communicate?"
"That something was lost," Karan said. "That what is inside the machine was human once and chose not to be. The breathing is the sound of a choice that cannot be taken back."
Burman was quiet for a moment, his eyes slightly closed, listening to something internal.
"That sound," he said, "is — the machine is the consequence. The breathing is the sound of living inside your own consequence."
"Yes," Karan said. "Exactly that."
Ilaiyaraaja said: "The Force." He said it carefully, in English. "This energy — it connects. It is not separate from the world, it is the world's connection to itself?"
"Yes," Karan said.
"We have a word," Ilaiyaraaja said. "In Tamil. In Sanskrit too. Prana. But prana is breath — it is the individual's vital energy. This is something larger. This is—"
"The connection between all vital energies," Karan said.
"Yes." Ilaiyaraaja looked at him. "What does this feel like when a person first perceives it?"
"It feels," Karan said, "like being seen by something very large and very old that has always been watching and has simply been waiting for you to look back."
The room was very still.
Vanraj Bhatia, who had been listening with the quality of attention he brought to the most complex orchestral scores — complete, architectural, tracking the structure simultaneously with the surface — said: "What do you want from the music?"
Karan looked at him.
"I want the music to do what the best Indian classical music does," he said. "I want it to tell the audience what they are feeling before they know they are feeling it. Not by telling them — by being it. By creating the emotional state rather than commenting on it." He paused. "Western film music in the tradition that currently exists — the Hollywood tradition — is written to accompany. To underscore. To amplify what is already visible on screen. What I want is something different. I want the music to be a parallel experience to the film. To tell its own story alongside the film's story. So that the film and the music together create something that neither can create alone."
Vanraj Bhatia was quiet for a long moment.
"That is not how film music is made," he said.
"I know," Karan said.
"Making film music that way would require—" Vanraj paused, working through the implications. "It would require a compositional relationship between the music and the film that is developed simultaneously. Not the film first and then the music. The music and the film growing together."
"Yes," Karan said. "That is what I want."
Vanraj looked at the other composers. Then back at Karan. "That is not how any of us work," he said. "That is not how anyone in Indian film music works."
"I know," Karan said again. "I'm asking you to work differently."
Pandit Raghav Rao said: "The soundscape. Between the music. The sounds of the world — the spacecraft, the desert, the alien environments. Who is responsible for those?"
"That is a separate conversation," Karan said. "There is a sound designer — his name is Ramesh Iyer. He is already part of the production. The sound design and the music will need to be developed in relationship to each other."
"An integrated sound world," Chandavarkar said. He had been making notes. "Not music and sound effects as separate domains."
"Correct," Karan said.
Chandavarkar was quiet for a moment, his pencil moving. "You're describing something that doesn't exist in Indian cinema," he said. "You're describing what Gesamtkunstwerk meant to Wagner. The total artwork. Every element — image, music, sound, narrative — serving a single unified aesthetic intention."
"I don't know that word," Chiranjit Singh said.
"It means everything working together," Chandavarkar said.
Chiranjit Singh looked at Karan. "I have a question."
"Ask," Karan said.
"Why me?" Chiranjit Singh said. "I am the smallest person in this room. My work is Punjabi classical music and a few small films. Everyone else here has done major work. Salil da, Vanraj ji, Pancham — they are — they are mountains. Why am I at this table?"
The room was very still.
Karan looked at him directly.
"Because of what you do with the harmonium," he said. "What you do with the harmonium is something nobody else in this room does. And the film has a character — a creature, an alien — whose musical signature requires exactly that quality. Ancient and human simultaneously. Something that has been alive for a very long time and carries the weight of it." He paused. "Also," he said, "the main character's home is a desert planet. I want Punjabi folk elements in the musical language of the desert world. The specific ache of the Punjabi plains translated into something universal."
Chiranjit Singh looked at him.
"Teri Mitti Vich Milaan Ge," he said.
"Yes," Karan said. "That feeling. Universal."
Chiranjit Singh said nothing for a moment. Then he said, with the directness of someone who had decided to say the precise true thing: "I am very nervous right now."
"I know," Karan said. "So is everyone else in this room. If they say they aren't, they're lying."
Burman made a sound that was exactly a laugh. A real one.
Salil Chowdhury said: "He's not wrong."
Vanraj Bhatia said, with a precision that was his form of humour: "I am experiencing what I would describe as elevated professional anxiety."
Ilaiyaraaja said nothing, but the specific quality of his silence confirmed the sentiment.
They talked for three more hours.
What happened in those three hours was not the standard negotiation of professional terms — the discussion of fees and credit and scheduling that professional conversations in the film industry eventually arrived at. What happened was something more preliminary and more important: the conversation in which seven different musical minds began to understand what they were building and what their specific role in it might be.
Karan told them about the specific moments in the film that required music.
The opening — the Star Destroyer crossing the screen. The specific emotion of scale, of a power so absolute that its instrument was simply size.
"This needs brass," Vanraj said immediately. "Not Western brass — Indian nagaswaram. The ceremonial brass of power and announcement. But with the European orchestral weight behind it. The combination creates something that feels both ancient and present."
"The nagaswaram against full strings," Salil Chowdhury said. He was thinking about it already. "The strings providing the weight. The nagaswaram providing the announcement. Yes."
"The rhythmic structure," Chandavarkar said. "The march underneath. Not a Western march — something more complex. Five beats? Seven?"
"Seven," Burman said. "Seven beats creates the sense of something that is not quite at rest. Not quite settled. Always slightly off the expected pulse. Like an empire that is stable but not at peace."
They were already working.
This was the quality of the room that Karan had understood was possible and had not been certain would actually manifest: the quality of a room where the right people, given the right problem, began to work immediately because the problem was serious enough to take seriously.
He let them talk.
He said: "The hero's theme. The young man. Luke."
"His name is Luke?" Salil Chowdhury said.
"Yes. Simple name. Every word of this film is simple except the universe it exists in."
Salil Chowdhury was quiet for a moment. "The theme needs to be—" He hummed something. A phrase. Four notes. "Something like this but—" He shook his head. "Ascending. It needs to go up. Because he goes up. He starts on the ground and the whole film is about going up."
"Up and unfinished," Karan said. "This is the first film of three. His story is not complete. The theme should feel like it's reaching for something it hasn't found yet."
Salil Chowdhury closed his eyes.
He hummed something else. Six notes this time, the last one suspended, not landing, hanging in the air above a resolution it hadn't found.
Everyone at the table heard it.
Chiranjit Singh, quietly: "That's it."
Salil Chowdhury opened his eyes and looked at him.
"Do you hear it?" Chiranjit said.
"I hear it," Salil said.
They looked at each other — two composers who had never worked together, from different traditions, and had just arrived at the same emotional destination from different directions.
"The Indian element," Ilaiyaraaja said. "In Luke's theme. What is the Indian element?"
"The raag that corresponds to longing and aspiration," Karan said. "I don't know which one. You know."
"Bhairavi," Ilaiyaraaja said immediately. "But bhairavi in the morning form, not the evening form. The morning is anticipation. The evening is what remains after the day."
"Luke is always morning," Salil Chowdhury said.
"Yes," Ilaiyaraaja said. "He is always morning."
Burman said: "The cantina." He said it with the specific quality of a man who has identified the part of a project that speaks directly to what he does. "The alien bar. The alien music."
"Yes," Karan said.
"What do the aliens sound like?" Burman said.
"They sound," Karan said, "like every musical tradition in the universe converging in one room. Like a place that has been a crossroads for a thousand years. The music is recognisable as music but it isn't any music you've ever heard. It's familiar and strange simultaneously."
Burman was already somewhere else in his head. His eyes had the specific unfocused quality of a man hearing something internal.
"Electronic instruments," he said. "But not the electronic instruments we currently have — new sounds. New timbres. The synthesiser pushed into territory it hasn't been pushed into." He looked up. "I've been working with a sound engineer. We've been experimenting with the synthesiser in ways that the manufacturers didn't intend." He paused. "I can make sounds that don't come from Earth."
Everyone looked at him.
"Literally," he said. "I can make sounds that don't sound like any instrument or natural sound that exists. Is that what you need?"
"Yes," Karan said. "That is exactly what I need for certain moments. But—"
"But not only that," Burman finished. "The alien bar needs to feel like a party. Like somewhere people go to have a good time. The strangeness has to be warm, not cold."
"The specific strangeness of somewhere that has been strange so long it's become normal," Karan said.
Burman laughed. Genuinely. "That's a good problem," he said.
Pandit Raghav Rao had been quieter than the others. He had been listening with the quality of a man who was taking in a great deal and processing it internally. Now he said: "The Force."
Everyone looked at him.
"The Force needs a sound," he said. "Not a theme — themes are for characters, for emotion. The Force is not a character and it is not an emotion. It is the condition of the universe. It needs a sound that is always present, always underneath, that the audience feels without identifying. A sound that is never foregrounded but that, if it were removed, the universe would feel empty."
He looked at Karan.
"I have been working with sustained tones," he said. "With the specific frequencies that the human body registers as resonance rather than as sound. Sounds that you feel in the chest, in the bones, before you hear them with the ears. Sounds that are the boundary between heard music and felt presence."
"Yes," Karan said. "The Force is presence. It is felt."
"I will build you the presence of the Force," Pandit Raghav Rao said. "It will not be music in the conventional sense. It will be something underneath the music. Something that holds the universe together."
"The Anvil," Chandavarkar said quietly. "What Wagner called the foundation. The sound that is not heard but without which nothing else sounds right."
Pandit Raghav Rao looked at him. "Yes."
Vanraj Bhatia said: "The Empire theme. The villain's music."
"Tell me," Karan said.
"Brass," Vanraj said. "Heavy, relentless brass. But not a march — marches are for armies that are confident. The Empire is not confident. The Empire is afraid. It has been ruling for twenty years through fear and violence and it has forgotten that the reason it rules through fear is that fear is what it has instead of legitimacy." He paused. "Afraid power sounds different from confident power. Confident power is expansive. Afraid power is crushing. It pushes down."
"Yes," Karan said. "The Empire sounds like it is pushing down."
"Five notes," Vanraj said. "Descending. Each one landing harder than the last. The rhythm is the rhythm of something enormous and unstoppable. But the emotional register is not triumph. It is suppression."
He hummed it.
Five notes descending. Each one landing with the weight of something absolute.
The room was very quiet.
"Yes," Salil Chowdhury said.
"Yes," Burman said.
"Yes," said Chiranjit Singh.
"Yes," said Ilaiyaraaja.
"The Indian element," Karan said.
Vanraj was quiet for a moment. "The dhol," he said. "Underneath the brass. The dhol in a pattern that is not celebratory — the dhol used as a war drum. The dhol in the service of something that takes without giving."
"The dark use of something that is usually used for celebration," Chandavarkar said.
"Yes," Vanraj said. "The Empire has corrupted what was good."
He looked at Karan.
"This film," he said, "is about corruption."
"Yes," Karan said. "Among other things."
"The music has to carry the corruption," Vanraj said. "Not as an abstraction. As something you feel. The Empire's theme has to make you feel what corruption feels like — the specific weight of a world where wrong has been in charge for so long it has become normal."
Karan looked at him.
"Can you do that?" he said.
Vanraj Bhatia looked at the table for a moment. He was sixty years old. He had spent his life working in a country where the most sophisticated compositional work was done for audiences of hundreds rather than millions, where the serious work and the popular work were held apart by a cultural gulf that both sides maintained with exhausting vigilance.
"Yes," he said. "I can do that."
The formal offer came at the end of the meeting.
Karan stood and said what needed to be said.
"I want to establish a new organisation," he said. "Shergill Music and Sounds. It will be housed here — in a new facility that is being built adjacent to these offices. The facility will have recording infrastructure at a level that does not currently exist in India. The engineering will be done by specialists who are being identified now — two from London, one from Los Angeles, two Indian engineers who have been working in the cutting edge of what is technically possible."
He looked at them.
"The equipment will be whatever is needed," he said. "I am not setting a budget for the equipment because the budget for the equipment is: whatever the work requires. The work is primary. The constraint is what the work needs, not what the budget permits."
This statement landed differently in different composers.
Burman's eyes went slightly wide. He was the most commercially experienced person in the room and he understood exactly what "whatever the work requires" meant — he had spent his career navigating the specific budget constraints of the commercial film industry, the compromises between what the music needed and what the producer would fund, the specific frustration of a musical vision that exceeded the resources available. He looked at Karan with the expression of a man being told that the ceiling he had always worked under did not exist.
"The work you produce," Karan continued, "will be for the Star Wars project primarily. But the organisation will develop India's capacity for serious music production beyond any single project. The knowledge and capability you build here will be available to Indian music broadly — through training programmes, through the infrastructure that will exist when you are done using it for this project."
He looked at each of them.
"I am asking each of you to take a specific role. Not to work as a committee — committees make compromises and compromises produce work that is nobody's vision. I am asking you to work as individuals with specific domains, coordinated by a shared understanding of what the project requires."
He named the domains.
Vanraj Bhatia: the orchestral architecture. The structure within which everything else existed. The harmonic language, the orchestral force, the Empire's music, the film's formal backbone.
Salil Chowdhury: the melodic voice and the choral work. The themes that carried the emotional narrative. The human voices in a universe of machine and myth.
Burman: the innovation. The sounds that did not exist. The cantina and everything that required the universe to sound genuinely alien. The electronic frontier.
Ilaiyaraaja: the symphonic counterpoint. The relationship between the main narrative themes and the world that surrounded them. The Carnatic formal intelligence applied to a Western-scale orchestral project.
Pandit Raghav Rao: the soundscape and the Force. The presence underneath. The thing that held the universe together.
Chandavarkar: the integration. The formal mind that understood how the different musical languages related to each other and could identify when they were working together and when they were working against each other.
Chiranjit Singh: the heart of the desert world. The Punjabi folk musical language translated into the universal. The human scale within the cosmic scale.
"You will work together," Karan said, "and you will disagree with each other, and when you disagree I want you to argue until the better idea wins and not until the more powerful person in the room wins. The better idea is the only thing that matters."
He paused.
"I will be involved," he said. "Not as a composer — I am not a composer. As the person who knows what the film requires. When I tell you something isn't right, I will tell you why I think it isn't right. When one of you tells me that I'm wrong, I want you to tell me why you think I'm wrong. We will argue until we find what is right."
He looked at the table.
"One more thing," he said. "This film is going to be seen by millions of people. Not millions of people in India only — it will be made for everyone. It will have subtitles. It will be in Hindi and in English simultaneously, with the visual grammar to make it work in both. The music will be heard by people who have never heard Indian classical music, who have never heard the nagaswaram or the mridangam or the bansuri. And when they hear it—"
He paused.
"—it should feel like theirs," he said. "Not like something foreign that they are being introduced to. Like something that was always theirs and they simply hadn't heard it yet. The way the best American film music felt like America — not because it was made to feel American but because it was made to feel human, and the Americans heard themselves in humanity."
He looked at all of them.
"That is what Indian music is capable of," he said. "It is not regional music. It is human music. This film will prove it. Or it will fail trying."
He sat down.
There was a long pause.
Then Salil Chowdhury said: "When do we start?"
"You already have," Karan said.
The meeting ended at two in the afternoon.
They emerged onto Pedder Road into the specific Bombay afternoon — the heat, the traffic, the specific quality of an Indian city at two o'clock in May that had nothing to do with the space opera universe they had been inhabiting for the previous four hours.
They stood on the pavement in a loose group, the seven of them, not quite ready to separate and return to their individual professional lives because the conversation they had been in had created a specific gravitational pull that made individual separation feel premature.
Burman said: "What time is it?"
Someone said: two fifteen.
"We were in there for four hours?" Burman said.
"We were in there for four hours," Salil Chowdhury confirmed.
Burman looked at the building they had just come out of. "I have a recording session at five," he said. "I'm going to spend the next three hours thinking about alien music instead."
"The cantina," Chiranjit Singh said.
"Yes," Burman said. "The cantina."
"I can't stop thinking about the Force," Pandit Raghav Rao said. He said it with the quality of a man reporting a fact. "I've been working on sustained harmonic resonance for six years. I've been doing it because it seemed important and I couldn't explain why. Now I know why."
Ilaiyaraaja, who had been quieter than the others during the exit, said in his careful Hindi: "The hero's theme. Salil ji's six notes."
"The ascending phrase," Salil Chowdhury said.
"In bhairavi morning form," Ilaiyaraaja said.
"Yes."
"But the sixth note doesn't resolve," Ilaiyaraaja said. "It has to resolve eventually — when he finds what he is looking for. In the third film. When the story ends."
Salil Chowdhury looked at him.
They had known each other for perhaps four hours.
"Yes," Salil Chowdhury said. "In the third film it resolves."
Ilaiyaraaja nodded. He had the expression of someone who had just completed a calculation and found the answer satisfying.
Vanraj Bhatia said: "The Empire theme. Five descending notes."
"Yes," said Chandavarkar.
"There should be a counterpoint," Vanraj said. "A theme that is the opposite of the Empire theme. That ascends where the Empire descends. That is human where the Empire is mechanical. That is heard against the Empire theme in the final confrontation." He paused. "The Resolution theme. What is restored when the Empire is defeated."
"That is the Force resolved," Pandit Raghav Rao said.
"Yes," Vanraj said. "The Force made audible at the moment of its triumph."
They were standing on the pavement on Pedder Road having, without quite intending to, continued the meeting that had officially ended twenty minutes earlier.
Chiranjit Singh said: "I need a train home."
"The nine o'clock from Victoria Terminus," Salil Chowdhury said. "You have time."
"He has time to eat first," Burman said. "Come. There's a good Punjabi restaurant two streets away. We should all eat."
Chandavarkar said: "I need to call my wife."
"Call her from the restaurant," Burman said.
They walked.
25 June 1974 — Shergill Music and Sounds Studio, Pedder Road, Bombay
The studio had been built in three months.
This was not normal. Three months was not the timeline for building a recording studio — not a studio of this specification, not a studio with the acoustic design that had been created by a specialist from London whose previous work included two of the most respected recording facilities in Europe, not a studio with the equipment that filled it. Three months was the timeline for building this studio because Karan had said three months was the timeline and the people he had given the task to had understood that three months was the timeline in the specific way that people working for Karan understood his timelines: as the deadline, not as the aspiration.
The studio occupied the ground floor and half the basement of a building adjacent to the Pedder Road offices. The control room had a glass wall overlooking a recording space that was large enough to accommodate a full orchestra — sixty musicians if the chairs were arranged efficiently. The acoustic panels on the walls were designed around the specific frequency characteristics of Indian classical instruments, which was different from the acoustic specifications for Western orchestral recording because the timbral range of the veena and the bansuri and the sarangi occupied different frequency bands than the violin and the French horn and required different absorption and diffusion treatment to be captured correctly.
The equipment was the most advanced available. This was not exaggeration. Karan had purchased, through the European engineering contacts Burman had pointed him toward and through Vikram Bose's knowledge of optical and audio technology, the specific equipment that existed at the frontier of what recording technology could currently do. The multitrack tape machine was a 24-track unit that had been imported from Germany. The mixing desk had been built custom by an English company that made mixing desks for the BBC. The monitoring speakers had been installed by the London acoustic specialist and calibrated to the room.
There was also a synthesiser.
Not the standard synthesisers that were beginning to appear in commercial recording. A custom instrument — a combination of existing synthesiser components with modifications that Burman and the Gorakhpur ISMC electronics team had been developing since March. The modifications produced sounds that no existing synthesiser could produce. Burman had been working with it every day since it arrived in early June and had told Karan at the beginning of June: I can make the universe.
The preliminary work had been developing for three months.
Each composer had been working in their own way — Vanraj with orchestral sketches on paper, Salil with melodic fragments at his piano in Calcutta, Burman with the synthesiser and a recording rig in his Bombay studio, Ilaiyaraaja with harmonium and paper in Madras, Pandit Raghav Rao with his flute and a tape machine and the specific sustained tones he had been exploring for years, Chandavarkar at his desk with analysis and notation, Chiranjit Singh with the harmonium in a room in Chandigarh that looked out onto the Shivalik hills.
The preliminary work had not been composed in isolation. There had been five group calls — telephone calls on the conference line that the Pedder Road office had established specifically for this project, calls that sometimes lasted two hours and sometimes ended in five minutes when the thing that needed to be discussed had been discussed. There had been written exchanges — Chandavarkar sending analytic notes on what he was hearing in the other composers' sketches, Vanraj sending harmonic frameworks, Salil sending melodic fragments with annotations.
There had been arguments.
Burman and Ilaiyaraaja had argued for three weeks about the musical language of the Rebel Alliance — the human side of the conflict, the people fighting the Empire. Burman wanted electronics. Ilaiyaraaja wanted classical structure. The argument had been conducted across telephone calls and letters and had produced, eventually, the synthesis that Chandavarkar identified as the correct solution: the Rebel theme would use classical Indian melodic structure as its spine with electronic colours woven through it — the human tradition made contemporary, the way a living tradition always was.
Vanraj and Salil had argued about the choral element. Salil wanted vocal — human voices in the music. Vanraj wanted instrumental purity. The argument had been resolved, after three calls and a letter each from Chandavarkar on both sides of the debate, in Salil's favour: the human voices would be present, but they would be used as instruments rather than as singers. No lyrics. The voices as texture, as tonal colour, as the specific warmth that human voices brought to a universe that otherwise risked being cold.
Chiranjit Singh and Ilaiyaraaja had not argued. They had, in two phone calls, arrived at a musical understanding that existed without conflict: the desert world and the hero were connected by a specific musical language that was both Punjabi and Carnatic, that belonged to neither exclusively, that was the musical expression of a young man whose heritage was ancient and who was entering a universe that was larger than that heritage without the heritage being any less real.
Pandit Raghav Rao had not argued with anyone. He had been working alone, in the specific silence of a man engaged with a problem that no one else could solve because it was his specific problem to solve. The Foundation — the sound of the Force — was his contribution, and it was not discussable in the way that melodic themes were discussable because it operated below the level of explicit musical content.
He had sent Karan a recording three weeks earlier.
It was seven minutes long. It was not music in any conventional sense. It was a sustained harmonic texture — layers of sound that built from frequencies so low they were at the boundary of hearing, through middle frequencies, into an upper register that was almost at the edge of perception. It was built from flute tones and synthesiser tones and electronic manipulation and a specific technique Pandit Raghav Rao had developed over six years that allowed him to produce sounds that had no identifiable source.
Karan had listened to it alone.
He had listened to it in his office late at night with the lights off.
When the seven minutes ended he had sat in the silence and had felt something that he recognised from his previous life: the feeling of the moment in the cinema when the Star Wars logo appeared against that specific musical fanfare and the universe opened.
He had called Pandit Raghav Rao the next morning.
"You found it," he had said.
Pandit Raghav Rao had said: "How do you know?"
"Because when I listened to it," Karan had said, "I felt the universe."
The June 25th session began at nine in the morning.
All seven composers were in the studio. They had not all been in the same room since March. The three months of separate development and the specific quality of the work they had done in those months had changed the texture of the group — they were less seven individuals who had met at a meeting and more a group of people who had been working on the same problem from different angles and who had, through that working, developed specific knowledge of each other's musical thinking that was different from the knowledge that came from meeting.
Karan was also there. He had been in meetings with the building contractor until eight-thirty and had walked from the Pedder Road offices to the studio building and arrived slightly breathless and had sat in the control room with the studio glass in front of him showing the recording space where the composers were setting up.
Vikram Bose was there, because the visual and sound design of the film were being developed in relationship and because what the music sounded like affected what the visuals did.
Ramesh Iyer was there, because the sound design and the music needed to be developed in the same room to be developed in relationship.
The agreement had been: each composer would present their preliminary work for the domain they had been assigned. The presentation would be played in the studio. The group would listen together. Then they would discuss.
Vanraj Bhatia went first.
He had a full orchestral sketch on paper — sixty-four pages of notation, handwritten, with annotations in his precise technical handwriting. He had brought his notation because he was the kind of composer who composed in notation first and sound second, who heard the complete architecture in his head and wrote it down before playing it. He sat at the grand piano that was in the recording space and played a reduction — a two-handed piano version of the orchestral sketch.
He played the Empire theme first.
Five notes descending.
They fell into the room like something being struck. Each note landed with the weight Vanraj had described in March — the weight of something enormous and unstoppable, the weight of suppression. The rhythm was relentless and slightly off-even, a pattern that never quite settled, that kept moving in a way that gave no rest to anyone listening.
The room was silent when he finished the Empire theme.
Then he played what he had been calling the Resolution — the ascending counterpart. The theme of what was possible, of the world before the Empire and the world after, of the Force triumphant.
The two themes played against each other were — the room felt it. The counterpoint between suppression and liberation, composed in harmonic terms that were simultaneously classical Indian and European symphonic, was not describable in words. It was audible. It did what Karan had asked: it told you what you were feeling before you knew you were feeling it.
When Vanraj finished, Karan said: "The dhol underneath the Empire theme. I need to hear it with the dhol."
Pandit Raghav Rao picked up a small tabla that was in the room — not a dhol but a functional substitute — and played against the repeat of the Empire theme.
The combination was specific. Specific in the way that the right combination was always specific: it didn't feel like an addition, it felt like the thing that had been missing all along had arrived.
"Yes," Karan said.
Salil Chowdhury went second.
He went to the piano and played Luke's theme.
The six-note ascending phrase that had arrived in March in the meeting room, that had been described then as something reaching for resolution it hadn't found. He had developed it in three months into a complete theme — a full melodic arc that contained the ascending phrase at its core and built around it a structure that was simultaneously simple and rich.
He played it once.
Then he played it in bhairavi morning form — the raga structure woven into the European melodic line, the Indian morning quality of anticipation and longing and the sense of a day that is about to begin.
The two forms of the theme played against each other produced something that Ilaiyaraaja, listening, said: "It is both."
"Yes," Salil said.
"Western and Indian simultaneously."
"Yes."
"Without being neither."
"That was the work," Salil said simply.
Then he played the choral sketch. Not a full choir — he sang it himself, layering multiple vocal lines on the tape machine, his own voice in four different registers creating the texture. Human voices as instruments, as Vanraj had required, but with the specific warmth that made the universe feel inhabited.
When Salil finished, the room was quiet in the way that rooms were quiet when something true had been demonstrated.
Chiranjit Singh said: "The desert world."
He had brought a harmonium.
He sat on the floor with the harmonium in his lap — not at a chair, on the floor, the way that Punjabi folk musicians sat — and he played.
What he played was not a theme in the conventional sense. It was a musical statement — a short composition that was simultaneously a Punjabi folk melody and something else, something that had absorbed the folk melody and translated it into a language that was wider than Punjab.
The specific ache of it. The specific longing of the harmonium — the instrument that was ancient and human simultaneously, as Karan had said in March. The quality of someone standing in an open landscape looking at a horizon that was too far away.
When he finished, he looked at Karan.
"The boy on the desert planet," he said. "Looking at the two suns."
"Yes," Karan said.
"This is what he feels."
"Yes," Karan said.
Chiranjit Singh played it again.
The second time through, Salil Chowdhury began to hum. The ascending phrase. Luke's theme. Against Chiranjit's harmonium melody. The two things found each other — the melodic theme and the harmonic folk statement — in the specific way that things found each other when they were made for the same emotional truth.
"There," Ilaiyaraaja said.
Everyone heard it.
"Binary sunset," Karan said quietly.
"What?" Salil said.
"The sequence where the boy watches the two suns set," Karan said. "That is the music for it. Those two things together. The folk melody and the ascending theme. Both resolving toward a resolution that doesn't arrive. Both reaching."
Salil and Chiranjit looked at each other.
"Yes," they said simultaneously.
Burman presented next.
He had brought a tape.
He played it from the tape machine in the control room into the studio monitors.
The sounds that came out were — the room had no reference for them. They were sounds that existed in no category of previously heard sound. Not synthetic in the cold electronic way, not natural in any recognisable way, but something that was both and neither — sounds that had the organic quality of natural sounds and the architectural quality of composed sounds and the alien quality of sounds that had no precedent.
"The cantina," he said over the playback.
The alien bar. The alien music. It was recognisable as music — it had rhythm, it had harmonic structure, it was clearly something that creatures sat in a bar listening to while they drank. But it was music that sounded like it came from a planet that was not Earth, from a tradition that had developed without any of the Earth traditions as predecessors.
It was funny. This was the thing that surprised the room most — it was funny. It had the quality that Karan had described in March: the strangeness of somewhere that had been strange so long it had become normal.
When the playback ended, Chandavarkar said: "How did you do that?"
Burman said: "The synthesiser modification. The ISMC team and I built a new oscillator architecture. It produces timbres that are outside the normal synthesiser frequency bands." He paused. "And I recorded twelve different instruments, processed them through multiple stages of electronic treatment until the source instrument was unrecognisable, and then layered the processed sounds against the synthesised sounds." He paused again. "And I hired a Rajasthani folk musician to play a specific pattern on a specific instrument for six hours until I had recorded every variation he could produce, and I used those recordings as the rhythmic backbone."
"Which instrument?" Vanraj asked.
"I don't know the name," Burman said. "It's a small clay drum. He brought it from Jaisalmer. I've never seen it outside of Rajasthan."
Vanraj stared at him. "You used a Jaisalmer clay drum as the rhythmic backbone for alien bar music."
"It was the right sound," Burman said simply.
Then he played the Vader motif.
The breathing.
He had created it from a combination of recorded breathing — processed, extended, given a specific mechanical quality through electronic treatment — and low synthesised tones that pulsed in rhythm with the breath. The result was not merely the sound of someone breathing through a machine. It was the sound of something that had chosen the machine. The specific quality of mechanical existence as the consequence of a deliberate choice.
The room was very still when it played.
Ramesh Iyer, who had been listening from the control room with the specific attention of a sound designer evaluating something that would live alongside what he was building, said through the intercom: "That is the character."
"Yes," Karan said.
"You don't need to see him when you hear that," Ramesh said. "You know exactly what he is."
"Yes," Karan said.
Ilaiyaraaja presented in the afternoon.
He had prepared something that nobody in the room had expected. He had taken the hero's theme — Salil's six-note ascending phrase — and had built a full symphonic development around it, a development that used the Carnatic formal tradition of alapana — the slow, raga-based development of a melodic idea through all its variations and implications — as the structural principle for a Western orchestral piece.
The result was something that had never been heard before.
It was a Western orchestral composition. It had Western harmonic language. It had a Western orchestral instrument palette. But the compositional logic — the way the theme was developed, the way it was interrogated, the way each variation related to the theme as a raag was interrogated in classical performance — was purely Carnatic.
The European form and the Indian logic produced, together, something that was neither.
When Ilaiyaraaja finished playing the tape, the room was completely silent for approximately thirty seconds.
Then Vanraj Bhatia said: "I want to understand what you just did."
"The raga development method," Ilaiyaraaja said. "Applied to the Western theme."
"You used alapana as the formal principle for orchestral development."
"Yes."
Vanraj was quiet. He was a man who had spent twenty years trying to understand how Indian and European musical logic could coexist in the same compositional space without one swallowing the other. He was looking at a twenty-nine-year-old from Madras who had solved the problem.
"I need to study this," Vanraj said.
"I'll send you the notation," Ilaiyaraaja said.
Pandit Raghav Rao went last.
He said nothing before playing. He simply stood in the recording space with his bansuri and a small portable playback unit, and he played the Foundation track — the seven-minute sustained harmonic texture that Karan had heard three weeks earlier — through the studio monitors while he improvised over it on the flute.
The combination of what he had recorded and what he was playing live was — it was not describable. It was not music in the conventional sense. It was a presence. The sustained tones beneath and the flute above created a space, a three-dimensional acoustic space in which the studio ceased to be a room in Bombay and became — something else. Something that had depth and height and the specific quality of being inside something much larger than the room.
When it ended, the silence lasted a long time.
Chiranjit Singh said, very quietly: "I believe in that."
"Yes," Pandit Raghav Rao said. "That is the intention."
"You made the universe feel real," Chiranjit said.
"I made the Force feel real," Pandit Raghav Rao said. "The universe is in the rest of the music. The Force is underneath everything."
Karan stood.
He looked at the seven composers. The seven composers who had spent three months working in separate rooms on the same problem from different directions and who had arrived, on June 25th, at something that none of them had started with.
He stood and looked at them and said nothing for a moment.
Then he said: "I'm going to tell you something."
They waited.
"What is in this room today," he said, "is the most important thing I have been involved in building since I started building things." He paused. "Not the most technically significant. The most important. Because what you have made here is not a product. It is not a technology. It is not a capability. It is something much more difficult to make than any of those things."
He looked at them.
"You have made something that will make people feel," he said. "Not feel a specific feeling — feel. The capacity to feel what the universe is trying to show you. The capacity to receive the story the film is trying to tell, at the level below thought, at the level where music operates before you know it's operating." He paused. "That is what the best music does. That is what you have made."
Salil Chowdhury said: "We haven't made it yet. We've made the beginning of it."
"Yes," Karan said. "The beginning. The beginning is the thing that determines whether the rest is possible."
He looked at the room.
"The Star Wars theme," he said. "The main title. The piece that plays over the opening. The piece that the audience hears first and that tells them in thirty seconds what kind of experience they are about to have. That piece doesn't exist yet."
He looked at Vanraj Bhatia.
Vanraj looked at him.
"The Empire theme is the foundation of the film's darkness," Karan said. "The main title is the foundation of the film's light. It has to contain both — the hero's longing and the adventure's promise. It has to sound like the beginning of something the audience didn't know they had been waiting for."
Vanraj was quiet.
He was thinking.
Everyone in the room waited.
He sat at the piano and played.
He played something new — not from the sketches he had brought, not from anything he had prepared. Something that arrived in the room as he sat at the piano, which was the specific way that certain things arrived for people who had been preparing for them for long enough that the preparation itself became the generative condition.
He played a fanfare. Not a conventional fanfare — not the ceremonial brass announcement of something official. A fanfare that was also a question. That was also a promise. That was also a beginning. Six bars of ascending orchestral energy that built from the opening statement through a development that went higher and higher and then — not descending, not resolving, turning. Turning outward. Into the universe.
He played it once.
The room was completely still.
He played it again.
On the second playing, Salil Chowdhury's ascending six-note phrase arrived inside it — not from Salil, from the structure itself, from the way Vanraj had composed the fanfare so that Luke's theme was already inside the main title, already present, already the specific promise of what the film was about.
"Yes," Salil said.
"Yes," said Burman.
"Yes," said Ilaiyaraaja.
"Yes," said Pandit Raghav Rao.
"Yes," said Chandavarkar.
"Yes," said Chiranjit Singh.
Vanraj stopped playing and looked at Karan.
Karan said nothing for a moment.
He said: "Play it one more time."
Vanraj played it.
And this time as he played, the others added.
Ilaiyaraaja at the harmonium, under the main statement. Chiranjit Singh with his harmonium, adding the folk warmth. Burman on the synthesiser, the alien texture of the universe appearing around the edges of the theme. Salil Chowdhury at a second piano, the ascending phrase woven through. Pandit Raghav Rao with his flute, above everything, the Force made audible.
Chandavarkar sat with his notebook and wrote.
He wrote what he heard as it happened — the specific notation of a man who understood formal music deeply enough to document what was occurring as it occurred, to catch the thing as it was being created rather than reconstructing it after.
The seven themes had found each other.
The Star Wars main title, in this room, in Bombay, on June 25th 1974, existed for the first time.
Later, when the session had ended and the light in the studio had gone from afternoon to evening without anyone quite noticing the transition, Karan sat alone in the control room.
The mixing desk was in front of him. The multitrack recordings from the day's session were on the tape machines. The studio glass showed the empty recording space — seven chairs pushed back from where the composers had sat, seven music stands at various stages of openness, a scattered collection of instruments and papers and notebooks.
He had been listening to the day's recordings for an hour.
Not the finished thing. The beginning of the finished thing.
He was thinking about something that Salil Chowdhury had said at lunch, when the group had broken for an hour and had eaten together in the Pedder Road offices, the seven composers and Karan and Vikram Bose and Ramesh Iyer, a table of people who had spent the morning building something serious and who were, at lunch, behaving with the specific warmth of people who had worked together in an intense space and who found, in the release of the lunch break, that they liked each other.
Salil Chowdhury had looked at the chai in his hands.
"I sometimes feel," he had said, carefully, "that certain things exist before they are made. That the making is the act of finding what was always there. Not creating — discovering." He paused. "This film feels like that. Like it existed somewhere before you described it to us. Like you described something you had found, not something you invented."
The table had been quiet.
Karan had said: "Yes. That is the right way to describe it."
Salil Chowdhury had looked at him.
"Where did you find it?" he had said.
The question had hung between them.
Karan had said: "Somewhere a long way from here."
Salil laughed in annoyance.
He had not said more.
Now, in the control room at the end of the day, he played back what they had made.
The fanfare. The Empire theme. The Force foundation underneath. Luke's ascending phrase reaching upward through the harmonium desert texture. The alien sounds at the edges. The voices as instruments underneath the orchestral architecture.
He listened to the beginning of a film that did not yet exist.
He listened to the music of a story that was going to be told, that would be told, that he was in the process of ensuring would be told correctly, with the specific care that the story required.
He had heard this music before, in another life, from another source. It had sounded different. It had been magnificent — he would never claim otherwise. The music from that other world had been magnificent and had done what he was asking this music to do: it had made millions of people feel the universe.
What he had been trying to do, what the seven composers in this room had spent three months achieving, was something parallel and different: music that made millions of people feel the universe in a way that was Indian. Not music that required Indian cultural knowledge. Music that was Indian the way water was Indian — not because it was labelled, but because it came from the specific springs that Indian music came from, carried the specific minerals of Indian musical tradition, tasted of India's specific approach to the emotional truth that music was built to convey.
The American music had made Americans feel at home in the galaxy far, far away.
This music was going to make Indians feel at home in the galaxy far, far away.
And then — because the best Indian music had always been universal, had always carried the specific Indian route to human truth — the rest of the world was going to feel something it had not known it was missing.
He sat in the control room as the recording played.
The fanfare ascending into the Bombay evening.
The Force beneath everything, holding the universe together.
The desert planet's longing in the harmonium's breath.
The darkness of the Empire descending.
The hero reaching upward, six notes, toward a resolution he had not yet found.
He sat with all of it.
Then he picked up his pen.
He opened the notebook.
He wrote: June 25, 1974. Star Wars has music. It is Indian. It will be heard by the world.
He closed the notebook.
He turned off the playback.
He walked out of the studio into the Bombay evening, where the city was doing what cities did — continuing, indifferent, magnificent — and the music he had just heard was going to change what the city's children grew up understanding about the size of the world they inhabited.
That was enough.
That was exactly enough.
End of Chapter 160