Amanda Weidman, department of anthropology, Bryn Mawr College, will present "The Unconventional Career of L.R. Eswari: Playback Singing and Female Public Performance of South India," a talk that will examine the unconventional career of South Indian playback singer L.R. Eswari (1939-) in relation to the ways female playback singers negotiated their role and were constructed in the public imagination as public performers and women in the film field in the 1950s-70s.
Playback, a system in which a singer’s voice is first recorded in the studio and later “played back” to be lip-synched by the actors and actresses during the shooting of the film’s visual sequences, emerged as such in the late 1940s. A typology of female voices emerged in the later 1950s and 1960s as this system became established in the South Indian film industries. It was articulated in discourse about playback voices as well as in the division of labor these voices were made to perform in films, a division based on voices that were heard as clean and licit and voices that were considered “husky” or immodest. Within this context, L.R. Eswari came to be branded as a singer of sexualized “cabaret” and “western” songs in the mid 1960s primarily in Tamil and Telugu films. She subsequently retreated from playback singing and made a name for herself in the devotional music industry in the 1970s and 80s. Since 2010, defying the usual career path for older playback singers, she has re-emerged from retirement to sing several “item” songs for Tamil films, in which her voice is matched with the sexually charged performance of the actress on screen. This talk examines the complex mix of attributes and associations her voice and embodied performance have presented to the public over the course of her career.
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