“Naatu Naatu” took the stage at the 2023 Oscars and did something no Indian film song had done before: it won. Composers M.M. Keeravani and Chandrabose collected the Best Original Song trophy for a track built around nothing more exotic than a five-minute dance-off, and within weeks the “hook step” had been recreated by everyone from cricketers to foreign diplomats. It read like an overnight sensation. It wasn’t. The rhythmic pulse under that chorus is the latest note in a story of Indian music’s evolution that started roughly six thousand years ago, and it’s picked up a few strange detours along the way.
That story begins with the Samaveda, the Vedic text scholars point to as the root of Indian musical theory, where hymns from the Rigveda were set to melody using as few as three notes for ritual chanting. Those chants gave rise to the earliest ragas, and by the 6th century the treatise Brihaddeshi had turned raga into a formal system, complete with its own starting notes, resting notes, and rules for how a mood gets built one phrase at a time. This wasn’t music as decoration. It was architecture: ragas were mapped to specific times of day and seasons so precisely that a musician playing an evening raga at sunrise wasn’t taking a creative risk, they were simply doing it wrong. That framework held for close to a thousand years before anything seriously challenged it.
That unity didn’t last. Around the 14th century, as Persian influence spread through the Mughal courts of the north, Amir Khusrau helped blend Indian and Persian music, new instruments like the sitar and tabla entered the picture, and court musicians like Tansen carried the style further under royal patronage. Carnatic music, in the south, stayed closer to its roots, shaped instead by the Bhakti movement’s devotional bhajans and kirtans and its deep ties to temple tradition. One root, two branches, split by geography and empire, and both still taught essentially the same way today.
Then, in November 1902, something happened that had nothing to do with courts or temples: a British sound engineer named Fred Gaisberg set up a makeshift studio in a Kolkata hotel room and recorded a singer named Gauhar Jaan performing a khayal in Raag Jogiya. Over six weeks he cut more than 500 recordings, shipped to Germany as shellac discs and pressed for sale back in India. Gauhar Jaan went on to record over 600 songs in ten-plus languages before her career ended, and in doing so, she took classical music out of courtesan salons and rich men’s soirees and put it on turntables in ordinary living rooms for the first time in the tradition’s history.
That’s the platform Indian film music was built on. It effectively began with 1931’s “Alam Ara,” the country’s first talkie, and by the 1970s composer R.D. Burman was openly splicing jazz, funk, and rock into what had been a classical-and-folk foundation. A.R. Rahman pushed it further in the 1990s, scoring “Roja,” “Bombay,” and “Dil Se” with arrangements that treated a Carnatic phrase and a synth pad as equally valid ingredients, not a compromise between two worlds.
While Bollywood fused on-screen, the diaspora was building its own version off-screen, thousands of miles from either. Between 1996 and 1999, tabla player Talvin Singh, creative producer Sweety Kapoor, and producer Sam Zaman ran the Anokha club nights at Hoxton Square’s Blue Note in London, mixing Indian classical music with jungle and drum and bass for British Asians who’d never had a soundtrack built specifically for them. Singh’s 1998 album “OK” won the Mercury Music Prize the following year, and the night effectively named a movement: the Asian Underground. Researchers studying diaspora communities point to exactly this kind of music, made in clubs and bedrooms far from India, as one of the threads holding a scattered cultural identity together across generations, functioning less like a nostalgia act and more like proof that the tradition travels intact even when the people carrying it never set foot back home.
Which brings the story back to that Oscar stage. “Naatu Naatu” wasn’t a first draft of Indian music going global, and it won’t be the last. It’s one more remix in a lineage that has already survived a few thousand years of evolution, a Mughal empire, a British recording engineer with a suitcase full of wax, and the arrival of Spotify. The next link in that chain is probably being built right now, in a bedroom studio somewhere between Chennai and Southall, by someone who has never once thought of “fusion” as a marketing word.
Sources
- NPR — “‘Naatu Naatu’ from ‘RRR’ wins best original song at the Oscars,” March 12, 2023
- Darbar — “Brief Origins of Indian Classical Music: From Vedic chanting onwards”
- Vajiram & Ravi — “Classical Music of India, Evolution, Hindustani, Carnatic Music”
- Wikipedia — “Gauhar Jaan”
- Artium Academy — “Bollywood Film Music Journey from Timeless Classics to Modern Hits”
- NPR Code Switch — “A Look Back As The Asian Underground Turns 20,” April 6, 2017
- South Asian Diaspora (Taylor & Francis) — “Diaspora, music, and identity: Indians in the Caribbean and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora,” 2024
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- SEO title: How Indian Music Evolved Over 6,000 Years Into Global Fusion
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