It is a balmy November evening. At NH7 Weekender in Pune, the dancing crowd screams up at Vishal Dadlani, lead singer of Pentagram, killing it on their Mumbai-dance-rock number Mental Zero from their last album Bloodywood. The barricades shudder; even the concert photographers are starting to whip their hair back and forth. Poker-faced security personnel stand, arms crossed and motionless, beneath the stage. Across a bouncer’s massive chest, a cotton T-shirt stretches with the legend “Bollywood Sucks”.

We did start the fire: Shaa’ir + Func;

It is a familiar refrain. So is the idea that Bollywood music sucks more than Bollywood itself. Classical musicians, folk artistes, counterculture practitioners—so many kinds of musicians despise the Hindi film industry that they could be their own Cole Porter song. Hindi film music is fake. It’s made to please the lowest common denominator. It ruins every form of music it co-opts. It doesn’t allow any other kind of industry to grow.

The loudest growl, the most prolonged howl of rage against this unthinking colossus, used to come from the “scene”. Ten years ago, if you were on “the scene”, you were someone who played at Independence Rock. Today, you are part of a loose agglomeration of musicians—not quite an industry—who have slowly created a niche for themselves, in India’s new clubs and performance arenas, in the steadily increasing number of music festivals around the country, and on a small number of stages around the world. You might be on the acclaimed music show The Dewarists.

And often, these days, you might be playing on a Bollywood soundtrack.

Anushka Manchanda.

In the last year or two, an artiste like Monica Dogra has balanced a lead performance in the film Dhobi Ghat with her work as part of experimental funk-rock duo Shaa’ir + Func. Singer-songwriter Nikhil D’Souza, with a voice that invites delirious comparisons to Jeff Buckley, has sung on soundtracks for Amit Trivedi. Ram Sampath, the former frontman of indie rock band Colourblind, composed the now-cult soundtrack of Delhi Belly. The Raghu Dixit Project recently made music for Y-Films’ Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge. Dadlani, the man protected by the “Bollywood Sucks” bouncer, also writes music for movies like Dostana and Bachna Ae Haseeno with Shekhar Ravjiani.

But he is definitely a scene man. “Pentagram is who I am,” he told Rolling Stone India in an interview published last April. “Everything else is just what I do.”

What changed? When did the creativity-killing monolith of Hindi cinema and the free-minded, unabashedly weird kids who were only ever going to make music for themselves put down their gauntlets and shake hands? That may be a question for the ages. Decades ago, it was the jazz men who floated out of the clubs into recording studios, to make up the orchestras which defined the Hindi film sound in the 1950s and 1960s. Thirty years ago, even Pandits Shiv Kumar Sharma and Hariprasad Chaurasia did not resist. Maybe the juggernaut does get everyone eventually.

Sidd Coutto, Ankur Tewari (Arijit Datta) and Nikhil D’Souza (Kunal Kakodkar).

Or maybe things have changed. Bollywood certainly has. Bolder production houses and younger directors want talented musicians for their indie sound, not in spite of it. During the internal migration from the independent scene to Bollywood, these artistes have retained their sound and sensibility: Someone like Dadlani has even managed to keep his two kinds of music distinct.

Over a decade ago, Sidd Coutto was the incandescent drummer at only the second rock concert to which this reporter had ever been. Today, he makes solo albums from his iPad and can get audiences for his band, Tough on Tobacco, going from zero to 60 in the space of one song. He also created the background score for Raat Gayi Baat Gayi, appeared in the movie Soundtrack (which he says he signed because he got to smash a guitar into an amplifier), and sang, most recently, Right by Your Side on the hugely popular Ra.One soundtrack, composed by Vishal-Shekhar. “Yeah, I went through that ‘Bollywood sucks’ phase,” he says. “I was young and I was wrong. You start out all angsty and rebellious, and all of that just gets knocked down by reality.”

He sounds pragmatic, but not apologetic. “When I got into making music full-time,” he says, “I knew I was going to have to do Bollywood some day. I do my indie stuff for no one but myself: I sit down and write songs every day. But I take everything I do as an artiste seriously. When someone pays me for my talent today, I make sure my stamp is on it. I enjoy that process too.”

“Rock is huge in the country today,” he points out. “I mean not just for indie listeners but for the mainstream. When they want you to write something that will be a hit for the 16-year-old to 30-year-old crowd, something ‘youth-y’ and real and cool, they want rock.”

D’Souza is halfway through recording his solo album at Yash Raj Studios. He is one of the voices on 2010’s Sham, from Aisha, as well as Main Jiyoonga on Break Ke Baad (a Vishal-Shekhar soundtrack, on which Dadlani and Dogra sang the FM staple Dooriyan Hai Zaroori), Khwab from Kucch Luv Jaisaa (2011), and a track on Players, released this Friday. Music directors first started to pay attention to him when they heard his voice on an Airtel ad. Now, he juggles his indie career and his film jobs with seeming ease.

“The film song recording process was a different experience from what I was used to,” he remembers. “You’re singing someone else’s composition and you’re trying to get the ‘feel’ right, (to) get used to a different style, lyrics” (D’Souza writes his own songs in English). “I never listened to much Bollywood music before. Now I have a lot more respect for it; there are some music directors who are really talented and who are constantly trying to push the envelope.”

“The truth is, there are directors now who are making different kinds of films, which need different kinds of music,” says Bobin James, executive editor of Rolling Stone India. “The music directors are younger, so they want to record with younger musicians. Look at the way producers like Excel Entertainment got Midival Punditz to make the background score for Karthik Calling Karthik.” Midival Punditz also worked with Karsh Kale on the music of Soundtrack, an album which, among other things, demonstrated the range of vocal talent on the indie scene: It contained everything from the rock-god voices of Anushka Manchanda and Suraj Jagan to the pop-qawwal Kailash Kher and young Assamese star Papon.

Vishal Dadlani and Imogen Heap on The Dewarists.

Perhaps even more unusual was the eclectic soundtrack of Shaitan (2011), which featured work by several different composers. Director Bejoy Nambiar even included a reworking of Mumbai death metal band Bhayanak Maut’s Habemus Papam (called Unleashed on the album), because he knew it fit well with the film’s soundscape. “We wanted a variety of sounds to suit the film,” Nambiar says. “The clarity about that started at script level. Each composer had a different sensibility—it was great to work with the manic energy of Bhayanak Maut as well as with Ranjit Barot, who has the kind of experience I’m in awe of.” For a small film, he says, record company T-Series paid them “a decent amount”, and the royalties on downloads and ringtones made the album a resounding success.

“(Actor-producer) Aamir Khan protects the entire team from commercial pressure,” Sampath says of his own experience of working for Delhi Belly. “He creates an environment where the best idea wins. I was one of the chief recipients of that luxury.” Sampath’s work has spanned several forms, from advertising to indie to non-film pop. His view of the compromise points to a gap which still exists. “The scene has really matured today, and it’s a crying shame that we don’t have the infrastructure for non-film artistes.”

One of mainstream cinema’s big releases this season, Karan Johar’s upcoming production Ek Main aur Ekk Tu, has an Amit Trivedi soundtrack which features singers such as Manchanda, singer-songwriter Shefali Alvares and Ash King, the British Asian performer first heard in Bollywood in 2009’s Delhi-6, singing the lovely Dil Gira Dafatan. Dadlani, who as part of Vishal-Shekhar works firmly in Hindi cinema’s mainstream, says that in recent years, film-makers like Johar, with whom he is working on the forthcoming Student of the Year, have themselves been open to trying out new voices and sounds on their music.

“For what it’s worth, no one has ever told us what to do,” Dadlani says. “People in the industry are supportive of anything that works.”

“For a long time they were two different worlds,” he says of the scene and the industry. “Even though people like R.D. Burman were always experimenting; someone like Bappi Lahiri brought in a lot of voices from popular music; you had Kalyanji-Anandji, Laxmikant-Pyarelal. But the big songs were sung by big singers. There’s less of an emphasis now on the name, and more recognition of what something fresh and new brings to your film. There is such outstanding talent, so much that is unique, on the indie circuit.”

Lalitha Suhasini, deputy editor of Time OutMumbai, adds some balance to this notion. “It’s not going to be the same if you’re recording with someone like Annu Malik,” she says. But the experimenters aren’t all on the margins: As James points out, people like Ehsaan (Noorani, guitarist and a part of composer group Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy) may not spend too much time playing live these days, but they know how to work with other artistes like themselves.

Movietone: Smaller films like Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge and Shaitan (below) and forged innovative sounds.

“The last film album that moved more than two million units came out seven years ago,” says Ashish Patil, head of Y-Films, the youth division of Yash Raj Films. “That was Veer-Zaara. The parameters to measure success now are things like airplays, licensing, digital downloads to an extent.” Raghu Dixit’s soundtrack for this year’s MujhseFraaandshipKaroge shot into the top five downloads on the Nokia Ovi store right alongside Bodyguard, Patil points out, and in four weeks of pre-release publicity, got about 6,000 spins on national music channels, turning a profit of Rs 25-30 lakh.

“Music, is a form of branding too,” Patil says. “People quoting Dheaon Dheaon, or Har Saans Mein becoming a Most Shared song (on video sites)—that’s a way to sell tickets, if not CDs. That’s your ultimate goal.”

Put another way, the scene is now seeing the results of having put a foot in the door a decade ago. Before Sampath and Trivedi, popular music in the 2000s was transformed by the East-West fusion, high standards of production and strong singing voices on the soundtracks of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and Vishal-Shekhar. In their turn, these composers followed in the footsteps of another rocker. Change came to two different film industries because of the former keyboardist of the Chennai collective Roots, A.R. Rahman. With thumping bass lines, coolly digital sounds that we have only been able to fully appreciate with the coming of the iPod, and unusual singing voices, Rahman and the directors with whom he worked didn’t just advance film music technologically. They fundamentally changed our expectations of what that music could be. Twenty years later, it seems appropriate that Rahman’s biggest project in 2011 was called Rockstar.

“If not for A.R., change would have come to Bollywood,” James says. “The world is connected today in a way that it never used to be: You can just log on to listen to a little Serbian band recording somewhere, and collaborate with people with such ease. That fluidity becomes a part of everything in the industry. Everything he brought—the samples, the sound—I think there might have been others who did it if Rahman hadn’t come along. It might have taken another 10 years.”

“I think the scene has changed too,” Suhasini says. “It’s not just the people who listen to alternative indie who’ve dropped the ‘Bollywood sucks’ attitude. A lot of the metalheads have too. They recognize that there are genuinely good film composers working now. Indie musicians who go to Bollywood get free rein, because people want them.”

A still from Shaitan

While Dadlani is someone who can raise hell with Pentagram as well as go on tour with Ravjiani on transatlantic Bollywood galas like The Unforgettable Tour of North America, one thing artistes like D’Souza won’t do is “the Bollywood tour”. “If you’re trying to establish yourself as an independent musician, then you can’t,” he points out. “That makes you a ‘Bollywood musician’.”

Some aspects of live rock have chilled out, but the accusation that a musician is a “sell-out” still has the power to hurt. While mosh-pit aggression is half ironic, half genuinely angry, audiences might be recognizing that the lines are blurring too. When Delhi band Menwhopause close their show with the hilarious, guitars-and-rap Katil Sardar, it could just as easily be a smart set piece out of a film like DelhiBelly.

“Pentagram has mellowed, Vishal’s mellowed, the crowd’s mellowed,” agrees Dharmesh Gandhi, a veteran Pentagram fan. “But you know, there’ll always be one guy in the crowd who wants to stir things up.” Last year, he remembers, a drunk fan started chanting “Why don’t you play Sheila ki Jawani?”—Vishal-Shekhar’s big hit from Tees Maar Khan—during a Penta gig. Dadlani called him up, then kicked his butt—“literally”, Gandhi emphasizes—and sent him back down.

Then there are musicians like Ankur Tewari. The Roorkee-born musician, writer and film-maker came to Mumbai about eight years ago. In an editorial for CNNgo.com in 2010, Tewari wrote: “Ten years ago, (I) dreamt impossible dreams. One was to compile a record of my songs…The nation was grooving to Gulshan Kumar’s Jhankar Beats and sequencer software had given birth to a whole generation of ‘convenient musicians’. Around that time I chose a path that would turn out to be the longer, more inconvenient route.”

Over 10 years, Tewari made his album Jannat, fronted The Ghalat Family band, and directed films like 2004’s Let’s Enjoy, for which he also composed and sang the hit Sabse Peeche Hum Khade. His composer credits include 2009’s offbeat Raat Gayi Baat Gayi, for which Coutto did music production.

“I don’t think about whether I’m writing for a film or a gig or a possible album,” Tewari says, of his “Hindi-Indie” music. “When I create a song, I can’t think about its audience. That is not my job.”

Tewari’s journey is reminiscent of what Lesle Lewis said to Lounge in a conversation about this year’s music show, CokeStudio@MTV, which brought artistes from a variety of scenes together to recreate their hit songs. “People keep asking what’s next, what’s after Indipop,” he said. “Here you go, here’s something after Indipop.”

Perhaps one of the reasons the conversation between Bollywood and the indie scene today is so refreshing is because few people remember 1990s’ Indipop fondly. “It wasn’t real,” said Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy, the lead singer of Scribe (an experimental metal band who cheekily describe themselves as ‘Bollywoodcore’) and one of the directors of The Dewarists, when speaking to Lounge last year. “Everything about Indipop was produced and packaged. Now, for the first time, you have people who are really creating something on their own terms.”

In a situation like this, it can be hard to let the old grudges rule. “Indie musicians always feel that their music is sidelined for Bollywood,” D’Souza says. “But the truth is 99% of our audience perceives Bollywood as ‘the’ source for music. That’s not going to change anytime soon. Perhaps the best way for bands is to use the incredible reach of Bollywood to get their music to the masses.”

It’s pop. It’s rock. But it’s your own, say the musicians, whether you’re making it on the scene, in the scene, or in a recording studio where a new breed of composers is standing between you and the “10 people behind the glass who are paying for the film”, in D’Souza’s words.

Tewari’s instinctive approach is the fittest explanation for the Bollywoodcore vibe. “If it sounds good to your ear, it sounds good to your ear,” he says. “How are you going to deny it?