Arijit exits. What happens to Hindi film music now?

There isn’t anything Arijit Singh can’t sing. Give him a ghazal, and he will make it sigh. Or a Mohammed Rafi-singing-for-Shammi-Kapoor pastiche, where he will channel old-school playback. He will do western pop inflections that feel like a breeze. He will, of course, nail those weepies that he’s synonymous with. But he will also lay bare his voice, with its grains and cracks and other imperfections, in haunted Vishal Bhardwaj compositions. He will do amusing vocal stunts in a faux-Arabic tune for Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Arijit Singh is India’s No.1 singer for a reason.

It’s a historic run in Hindi film playback—supersized, unrivalled. Every era of playback has its superstars—voices that sang the most songs, for the biggest stars, and came to define the sound of their time. But every playback career also had a shelf life: a curve that rose, plateaued and eventually dipped. Singh seems to have made a mockery of that arc. He had a peak (2013-17), then what should have been a post-peak, yet there was no visible decline. If anything, his cultural dominance only intensified. In 2023, he became Spotify’s most followed artist in the world.

And then he announced his retirement from playback singing. At age 38.

It must be tiring to be everywhere all at once. In 2018, while writing a profile of the singer, I tried a small experiment: I tuned into the radio at different hours of the day, switching stations at random. There was always an Arijit song in the mix. Sometimes more than one. I don’t recall, in my lifetime, that kind of omnipresence commanded by a singer.

I first saw Singh in 2005 in the reality show Fame Gurukul, an 18-year-old from Murshidabad, who was easily a league apart from the rest. He sang everything, from Aashiq Banaya Aapne to Maa Tujhe Salaam. He had the vocal elasticity that training in Hindustani classical vocals (from Rajendra Prasad Hazari) gives you. But he didn’t win.

And now that Singh has found all the fame in the world—in 2017, he appeared in a Forbes India Celebrity List, ahead of Amitabh Bachchan and Alia Bhatt, and the only musician besides A.R. Rahman, with an estimated earning of ₹48.67 crore a year—he is going back to his gurukul. Word has it that he’s returning to his classical music roots, to finish the training he had left to pursue his playback ambitions. The relentless churn of the music industry, he said, had left him unsatisfied.

“One of the reasons was simple—I get bored pretty quickly,” he wrote in a thread on X. “That’s why I keep changing the arrangements of the same songs when I perform them.” In what was his first public appearance since the announcement, he popped up at an Anoushka Shankar concert in Kolkata on 8 February with a guitar, sang three songs and left, the kind of fleeting appearance that turns into instant folklore. It confirmed what he had clarified in the post on X: He was not quitting music, only playback.

But to step away at 38 is unprecedented. Singing in movies is supposed to be the most lucrative career you can have as a vocalist in India. Film songs are effectively our pop music—and playback singers often achieve a scale of fame comparable to the actors they’re singing for. The playback greats stuck to the profession their whole lives. Kishore Kumar and Rafi sang till the very end. Lata Mangeshkar was 76 when she sang in Rang De Basanti (2006).

Maybe the lack of competition had some bearing on Singh. Lata had Asha Bhonsle. Rafi had Mukesh and Talat Mahmood. Kishore had Rafi. Kumar Sanu had Udit Narayan and Abhijeet Bhattacharya. Playback, historically, has thrived on the friction between distinct voices pushing one another to greater heights. “I am excited to hear some singer come up and give me real motivation,” Singh wrote on his X account. It is the confession of someone who no longer finds the arena sufficiently challenging—who seems to long for a counterpart, or two.

Pavan Jha, a film music historian, reaches back to the 1930s for a parallel. The only equivalent he can think of is K.L. Saigal, India’s first superstar singer. “In those days, actors were the singers. Radio had just become a mass medium—you went to the cinema once in a while, but songs reached people’s homes daily. That’s why Saigal became a phenomenon.”

But Saigal belonged to a formative moment, before playback had evolved into a competitive, plural field. His dominance was in sound cinema’s infancy. Singh’s 14-year-long rule, by contrast, took shape within an already established playback system.

A CRISIS IN PLAYBACK

I remember 2000s Hindi film music as a crowded room. You think of Sonu Nigam, KK and Shaan as the top male singers of the time, but Sukhwinder Singh was equally prolific. The impact of Atif Aslam’s singing style would go on to spawn imitators. From Kunal Ganjawala’s smooth, urbane croon to Rahat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwali-trained sweep, it was a rich mix of distinct voices and styles. Shreya Ghoshal’s sweetness and Sunidhi Chauhan’s sass mirrored the Lata-Asha dynamic of an earlier era. Later came Mohit Chauhan and Shilpa Rao, adding fresh textures.

It was all happening because a new wave of composers like Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Pritam and Vishal-Shekhar had arrived, ushering in a new sound, a sound that grew out of the tabla-dholak of the 1990s into something more contemporary, with creative song arrangements and better production quality. Rahman was doing some of his best work; as was Vishal Bhardwaj. In the latter half, Amit Trivedi, with Dev D (2009), was pushing boundaries with music that was genre-blurring, even anti-Bollywood in tone.

This energy spilled on to the initial years of the 2010s. And it’s unsurprising that Singh made his playback debut around the same time—he was an assistant to composers Mithoon and later, Pritam—in 2011, with the song Phir Mohabbat from Murder 2. His star-making turn came two years later, with Tum Hi Ho from Aashiqui 2 (2013), a moody romantic track that became his trademark sound.

After Singh’s arrival, the landscape increasingly revolved around him.

Sure, in female playback, Shreya Ghoshal remains a commanding presence, from the 2000s till today. Among the men, singers like Vishal Mishra and Jubin Nautiyal carved out their own pockets of popularity. But Singh loomed so large that he dwarfed everyone else.

It’s not like there was a dearth of talent. Neeti Mohan should have been a star-singer; her work in Bombay Velvet is singular and astonishing. Papon’s textured, lower-register richness is one-of-a-kind; he deserved a longer, more sustained run. Shahid Mallya (folk-tinged, expressive) and Meghna Mishra (clear, unadorned) should have been far more visible. It should’ve been a garden; instead, it’s one giant tree.

By his own estimation, Singh should have been out of fashion by 2018. “I don’t think I have a long way to go. This might be my last year,” he said in an 2016 interview with Mid Day, “Normally fresh voices replace current ones every five to seven years in Bollywood. Given that trend, I will fade away by 2018.”

In 2019, the year Spotify launched in India, Singh became its most streamed artist, a streak he has maintained every year since. He’s the only male singer in the Indian top 5. His supremacy is, of course, proof of his exceptional ability. But when an industry begins to orbit almost entirely around one singer, it is worth asking whether something in its natural ecology has shifted.

It shows in the music. Every other song is either a remix, or a copy of a copy of a copy. An unmistakable sameness runs through the songs of our time.

There’s a sub-genre Singh has helped popularise that typifies it: a certain kind of maudlin male ballad about romantic love, often Sufi-rock, and now with electronic textures. You can trace it from Saiyaara (2025) to Kabir Singh (2019), all the way back to Aashiqui 2, which, in turn, is rooted in the Vishesh Films melodies of the past, films made and produced by Mahesh and Vikram Bhatt and their associates. What intensifies the monotony is that most singers have a strong Arijit Singh hangover.

There’s a tendency to not create original music for the film, but to recreate, or procure a pre-existing song. Most of the hits on Dhurandhar (2025) are a reimagining of pre-existing folk tunes and classics. Saiyaara’s title track is not made for the film, but picked up from two independent musicians (Faheem Abdullah and Arslan Nizami) who had composed it earlier and were seeking a platform. That’s two of last year’s biggest hits in Hindi film music. Many film songs no longer seem to emerge organically from the film itself.

It isn’t just how the songs sound; the way they are commissioned, produced and distributed has changed too. Something fundamental shifted in Hindi film music in the last decade—not just in taste, but in structure.

DICTATED BY COMMERCE

The decision-makers in Hindi film music today are not directors and composers, but labels and producers. And they have pushed for industry practices that hurt the purity of process of Hindi film song-making. “People who are not creative have the power now,” Rahman said in a recent BBC interview, where he implied not being offered as many mainstream Hindi projects as before. Singh’s announcement needs to be seen in this context.

The Hindi film soundtrack is a product of the collective imagination of the director, composer and lyricist. Traditionally, you had one composer and one lyricist working on one film. The composer and lyricist, inspired by the material provided by the director, create a parallel musical tapestry, with its array of singers, and family of melodies and motifs—something that can also be enjoyed independent of the film. Hindi film music, historically, has walked that tightrope beautifully. Even though it’s a by-product of cinema, it became an art form unto itself.

The new powers that be have made it preferable, if not compulsory, for the director to work with multiple composers (and lyricists) for a film—a decision dictated not by art but commerce. It’s cheaper, faster, and it’s proven to be successful. Aashiqui 2, whose multi-composer album became a runaway commercial success, normalised the practice.

This multi-composer format is a problem, unless it’s curated with care (which in most cases it isn’t). It results in albums—if we can at all call them albums—that lack coherence. It limits a composer’s participation in the film to a situation, rather than the whole text. When you have five composers working on five situations for one film, the result is rarely more than the sum of its parts. “It’s like making a film with multiple directors,” composer and singer Shankar Mahadevan had told me in 2019. “It doesn’t make sense”.

A number of prominent composers—such as Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Amit Trivedi, Pritam, Vishal-Shekhar and Rahman—have resisted this imposition. They only work where there’s an opportunity to do it the old-fashioned way, and that has resulted in a loss of business. Unlike in the early half of the 2010s, they’ve also been off-colour, far from their best. The composers are reliant on filmmakers—like Imtiaz Ali, Anurag Basu, Aanand L. Rai—who have a way with songs, and who have enough clout to demand a solo composer album from the producers.

A new crop of composers, meanwhile, has embraced the format. For them, it represents a loosening of what was once a tightly guarded system. They are not building albums so much as delivering singles. As a result, names like Sachet–Parampara and Vishal Mishra have become dependable fixtures for labels and producers. Multi-composer soundtracks are now the industry norm, according to MySwar, a decade-wise compendium of Hindi film music data by Param Arunachalam—60% of films in the 2010s followed this model. And yet, this shift has not quite yielded the creative flowering one might expect from a democratised field. Instead of greater openness, the system seems to have settled into a new kind of rigidity.

But there’s a deeper reason behind the change. Songs are no longer indispensable in our films, at least narratively speaking. Whereas earlier, the idea of making a mainstream film without songs was unthinkable, now it is normalised to the extent that you don’t even notice it. Songs, even if they are used in a film, often play in the background, as though it’s part of the score. Turns out, our cinema had started to get a bit embarrassed about the whole song and dance routine —ironically, that one thing that set us apart from the cinemas of the rest of the world.

As Hindi cinema chased global legitimacy and narrative realism, lip-synced song sequences began to feel excessive—even indulgent—to some filmmakers. And yet, the history of Indian cinema is filled with directors—Guru Dutt, Vijay Anand, Mani Ratnam—who transformed songs into moments of pure cinematic transcendence. The problem, then, was never the song itself, but the shrinking imagination with which it began to be used.

“The craft of a filmmaker is to use a song in such a way that a narrative is pushed forward, a character blossoms, or evokes a memory which is beyond what is there in front of you,” says Shantanu Moitra, composer of albums such as Parineeta (2005), Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006) and 3 Idiots (2009). He thinks “(most) filmmakers have forgotten the art of first identifying why you need a song in the film at all.”

This concerns playback singing directly. Since songs have quietly slipped to the background—no longer lip-synced, no longer embodied by the actor—the term playback singing itself begins to feel almost obsolete. If the actor is not singing on screen, who exactly is the singer playing it back to? “Today, the context for the singer—who is singing, where he is singing, and why he is singing—doesn’t matter. You can put the song in the background, like a piano,” says Moitra.

For many contemporary filmmakers, the cinematic grammar they aspire to is more western in influence. That shift may also reflect a broader change in audience taste: viewers today consume television and films from across the world, thanks to streaming, and their expectations of narrative form have evolved accordingly. In that sense, freeing the Hindi film from the obligation of mandatory song sequences may well be good news for cinema as a storytelling medium. But the collateral damage of that liberation has been the film song itself, which now finds its purpose increasingly uncertain.

Earlier, Hindi film songs served a dual function: they advanced the narrative while also acting as publicity, with radio and television play drawing audiences to theatres. As that narrative connection has weakened, the song has come to operate primarily as a marketing device—and therefore falls increasingly under the domain of the label and the producer. And by the mid-2010s, music labels were no longer just distributors of film songs; they had become central decision-makers in how those songs were made and monetised.

WHO KILLED THE HINDI FILM SONG?

The shift coincided with a digital revolution. In 2016, Reliance Jio’s entry into the telecom market drastically reduced data costs, triggering an explosion in online video consumption. YouTube became the primary site of music listening for millions of Indians, and T-Series—already a dominant music label—emerged as the most subscribed (310 million currently) YouTube channel in the world.

Companies like T-Series, which operate simultaneously as music label, film producer and digital distributor, came to control a substantial share of Hindi film soundtracks and their digital afterlife. As historian Pavan Jha notes, the industry has seen a steady “consolidation of power”. When the same entity finances the film, owns the music rights and controls its online distribution, songs are dictated less by the script and more by market logic.

The consequences are visible in small but telling ways. I remember the 2015 film Dilwale releasing a buoyant number called Tukur Tukur—a throwback Goan-style celebratory song, sung by Singh, with delightful nonsense rhymes by lyricist Amitabh Bhattacharya. Weeks later, closer to the film’s release, that version quietly disappeared from digital platforms, replaced by a more electronic, dance-floor-friendly remix, the soul sucked out of the song. The original was erased from circulation.

On another occasion, the display of power was more naked. On several of its 1990s soundtracks—including Aashiqui, among the most successful Hindi film albums of its time—T-Series has in recent years replaced the composers’ credit, Nadeem–Shravan, with the corporate label “Super Cassettes Industries Pvt Ltd” on streaming platforms. The change, quietly implemented (sometime in 2015), sparked a minor backlash online. “They are changing history,” says Jha.

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap has publicly criticised T-Series, alleging that the company “doesn’t pay for the quality of music”, a remark that points to the growing friction between corporate control and creative ownership. In such a centralised ecosystem, the label does not merely release the music, it shapes how it is presented, credited and circulated.

Then there is the tyranny of numbers: hits on YouTube, streams on Spotify. The measure of a song’s success is no longer whether it deepens a film’s narrative logic, boosts album sales, or becomes part of cultural memory, but whether it trends instantly, whether it passes the skip-rate test (a measure of how often listeners abandon a song before it finishes).

In a data-cheap India, scale is everything. This has encouraged a song-making culture that emphasises fast beats, immediate hooks and familiar melodic shapes. Film songs used to grow on you; now they need to explode. “Once numbers become the main conversation, creativity gets compromised,” says playback singer Benny Dayal. “Streaming numbers have become currency. You are a currency, and your value is worth so many million followers or billion streams. I’ve been a victim of it too—dumbing down creativity just to feed the numbers.”

Dayal, a contemporary of Singh with hits like Badtameez Dil (2013) under his belt, has in recent years found more consistent work in the Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam industries. He argues that despite the same streaming pressures, those industries have retained a commitment to original music. “The sound there is rich and constantly evolving,” he says. “They’re thinking big, reaching the world—RRR went all the way to the Oscars. People are willing to create new music instead of refurbishing what audiences already know.” In contrast, he feels Bollywood hasn’t innovated much. “It hasn’t picked up the pace in terms of originality. My biggest complaint is that this decade doesn’t have a sound of its own.”

If the music sounds cautious, it is because the industry is cautious. “There is too much interference,” says Moitra. “There is a constant fear—‘Will this song work?’”

Most of the times it would if Arijit Singh sang it. And so he sang most of them. He became the default setting. His versatility—from pop croon to Sufi ache—made him even more ubiquitous. And even if you are the greatest singer in the world, if your voice is subjected to the kind of overuse Bollywood subjected Singh’s voice to, there’s bound to be fatigue.

“It became a model that was very safe for everybody,” says Dayal. “It became so predictable at a point, that we would be like, ‘Release Arijit’s voice on the first song.’”

THE SINGER AND THE SYSTEM

Singh has earned his place among the all-time greats of playback with his versatility and originality. But his legacy is complicated by the fact that his reign not only coincided with a long period of homogeneity in Hindi film music, but in fact even symbolised it.

Singh himself has been critical of it. The little you get to know about the singer’s views about art, music and industry— expressed in the few interviews he had given, before he stopped giving them altogether—suggest a conscientious musician in search of something pure, and a discerning listener. In a 2016 interview with Mumbai Mirror in the middle of his peak years, Singh commented that “the Hindi music industry isn’t really evolving”. “I can’t hear good stuff these days, and I don’t mean just good compositions. There is so much focus on melody-making that no one is trying to sound different with each album,” he said. In the same article, he picked Bombay Velvet (2015) , an Amit Trivedi album that doesn’t feature a single song by Singh, as having “set a new benchmark for Indian composers”.

In a rare interview given to a podcast, hosted by his longtime collaborator Tarsame Mittal, a talent manager and entrepreneur, in 2023, he said something that suggests the persona being at odds with the person. “You know, that name is not actually me. It’s a perception… For me that name has become a joke, in my personal life. And also irritating sometimes.”

You can see why an artist of Singh’s temperament would feel tired out by the mechanics of a music industry chasing numbers, and why he would have felt boxed in. He had started cutting down his playback assignments; from 51 in 2017—nearly thrice as many songs as the next most popular voice (Yasser Desai)—the number of songs he sang in 2018 dropped almost by half to 27. That number remained more or less steady, till he had a spike, again in 2022, a year in which he sang 35 songs. But it illustrates that his decision to call it quits in playback didn’t happen overnight.

The first big move that perhaps anticipates the retirement is his leaving Mumbai and moving back to his hometown Jiaganj, in Murshidabad, West Bengal, in 2020. Singh lives there with his family, and has set up a studio, where he records most of his music. In the same year, he launched his indie label, Oriyon Music, following in the footsteps of Hindi film composers like Trivedi, Bhardwaj and Shekhar Rajviani. The first track to release under the banner? A song about breaking free; it’s called Rihaa (2020). The lyrics talk about a creative mind that’s restless, wandering. It’s soft electronic pop, with a Bangla rap verse thrown in, also sung by Singh. But perhaps the most remarkable feature of the song is its video, a story told through stop-motion animation done with handmade dolls—Singh is credited for the concept, screenplay and storyboard.

In 2021, he made his debut as a Hindi film composer with Pagglait, a film about a young widow on a soul-searching journey. The soundtrack, released under his label, shows what a composer can do with freedom. Singh put out a whopping 24-track album that clocks 1 hour, 34 minutes. It makes the most minimal use of Singh, the vocalist. Instead, it’s a showcase of female voices, some established names, others untried in Bollywood. But it’s also a soundtrack that gives equal importance to the instrumentation and production: the comforting strains of a tar here, an inspired little guitar lead there. The second half of the album is the film’s score, which has callbacks to the songs. It’s unmistakably a soundtrack, where the work seems born out of the screenplay. And the little that he sings in it, as in the beautiful duet Lamha, Singh brings out the richness of his bass voice. By the blunt metrics of streaming numbers, Pagglait did not register as a “hit”. It only underlines the fact that in the last decade or so, artistically ambitious music has often gone unrewarded.

The same goes for the other non-film work he’s been putting out under Oriyon, where Singh often gives himself the kind of challenging singing assignments he might be missing in Bollywood. These songs haven’t quite cut through the noise either; but post his retirement from playback, a new Oriyon track is bound to benefit from the exclusivity it brings to them.

It also means, unlike his Bollywood songs, he will now own what he creates. “Playback singers were never owners of what they sang. Even the greats didn’t have real rights—they had to get permission to sing their own songs,” says Jha. “Cinema remains a producer-dominated system where the singer has little legal or creative ownership. Arijit is in a unique position because he has built a global following and independent avenues—he can own what he performs, and that changes the terms of engagement.”

Singh’s departure from playback is occurring in an ecosystem where film music no longer monopolises popular listening. The Punjabi pop scene, for example, has always had a place of its own (often co-opted by Bollywood). But in recent years, more and more indie acts are gaining popularity, with the likes of Anuv Jain and Aditya Rikhari—or Divine and Hanumankind—finding substantial audiences.

“Pop and hip-hop music have grown in popularity to a great deal,” says music journalist Amit Gurbaxani, co-host of The Indian Music Charts Podcast. “A major reason is the popularisation of streaming services and the access to all kinds of music. During the pandemic, a lot of people discovered music that is not from soundtracks.” Gurbaxani points out that while Bollywood music accounted for as much as 80-90% of listenership on most streaming services operating in India in 2019, this has fallen significantly in recent years. On Spotify, for example, the share of Hindi film songs among the top 50 tracks of the year was about 50% in 2025.

In any case, most playback singers earn the bulk of their income from live concerts; the fee for recording a film song is relatively modest. The real objective is to land a hit — something that can travel to the stage. Each addition to the repertoire strengthens their draw, and with it, their market value. And Singh has a repertoire that can last him a lifetime.

Today, stepping away from playback is not the existential risk it might once have been. A singer of Singh’s stature does not need the film song in the way earlier generations might have.

Streaming has blurred older hierarchies; he now competes on the same global playlists as Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, the latter having travelled to Jiaganj to collaborate with him on Sapphire. The audience is no longer confined to cinema halls. But the paradox remains: it was Bollywood’s machinery—its marketing muscle, its theatrical reach—that first amplified his voice to that scale. Outside that system, Singh will have complete creative control. Whether he will have the same promotional force is another question altogether.

Perhaps that trade-off is precisely the point. Singh has long signalled that playback was only one part of a larger artistic life. He is serious about filmmaking—he is currently developing a feature film with his wife, Koel Roy. In Jiaganj, he is deeply involved in community initiatives, serving as chairman of a local school committee and investing time in grassroots work. His withdrawal, then, does not feel like retreat so much as recalibration. Still, in a culture where our idols rarely know when to step aside, his decision to walk away at the peak of his powers remains striking—and entirely in keeping with an artist who has consistently resisted the expected script of stardom.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Will Bollywood miss Arijit Singh? Terribly. He had different equations with different composers, and we’ll be poorer without those collaborations. Rahman would use Singh judiciously, and effectively, like in Agar Tum Saath Ho, from Tamasha (2015), where he recorded Singh in two vocal layers to achieve a self-harmonising effect. Bhardwaj would encourage Singh to show the unvarnished side of his voice. Singh did some of his cleanest singing for Trivedi.

I can imagine composers rummaging through their library of voices and looking at names that may have been waiting in the wings. There is more promise in the ecosystem than the last few years would have you believe. Raghav Chaitanya, for instance, brings a raw, KK-like urgency to Dil Ka Kya (2025) in Metro… In Dino, while Vishal Mishra reshapes it in the reprise with a different emotional texture altogether. Faheem Abdullah, the independent singer-songwriter from Kashmir, carries the Saiyaara title track with a weight and style that feels distinctly his own; in Rahman’s Aawaara Angaara from Tere Ishq Mein (2025), he sounds nothing like an understudy, only like himself.

“I’m excited to discover new voices,” says filmmaker Anurag Basu, one of the few Hindi directors who still treats songs as an integral part of storytelling. Basu knows Singh personally and believes the decision was less impulsive than it seemed. “He wants to do so many things in life. I think he was tired of not being able to say ‘no’. This was his way of sending a message,” he says. He admits he will miss working with Singh, but also sees an opportunity. “It’s a good thing. We used to get stuck with Arijit. We didn’t look beyond him.”

When your safety crutch is taken away, an element of risk is introduced. And when the name of that crutch is Arijit Singh, it has a domino effect across the ecosystem. Labels, producers, directors, composers, actors. Everybody needed that mandatory Arijit love song for their film. Will they be forced to innovate now?

Playback has reinvented itself before. When Saigal faded, a new grammar of singing emerged. When the Sanu–Udit era ebbed, a different generation took over. Each transition felt like decline in the moment, like something irreplaceable had been lost. But Hindi film music has always renewed itself through disruption. The difference this time is that the disruption has not come from the outside—from a new voice overthrowing the old—but from the old voice stepping aside. Singh did not lose his crown; he set it down.

For nearly a decade, the industry organised itself around inevitability. If doubt hovered over a soundtrack, Singh dispelled it. If numbers mattered, he delivered them. That reflex is now gone. Composers will have to imagine differently. Labels will have to take chances. Directors may have to think harder about why a song exists at all. Perhaps nothing changes. Perhaps the system doubles down on caution. Or perhaps, freed from the comfort of a single voice, Hindi film music rediscovers plurality—the crowded room it once was. Singh has liberated himself from playback. The harder question is whether playback can now liberate itself.

Zico Ghosh is a journalist based in Kolkata.