This course examines the era of Muhammad Rafi as a way of engaging broader questions of cinema, sound, voice, media, and cultural identity in modern South Asia. While the course remains centered on Rafi’s voice and its historical significance, it also situates his work within a larger South Asian soundscape that includes figures such as Noor Jahan, Lata Mangeshkar, and Mehdi Hassan.nnMoving beyond biographical admiration, the course approaches playback singing as a modern cultural form that reshapes relations between voice, body, screen presence, memory, and artistic labor. Songs are studied as layered cultural texts, as recorded objects, cinematic performances, poetic expressions, and archival traces. Through close listening, lyric analysis, film study, and historical contextualization, students will explore the emergence of playback singing, the role of radio and recording technologies, the circulation of Urdu-Hindi film culture across India and Pakistan, and the afterlives of iconic voices in public memory and digital media.nnBringing together film studies, sound studies, cultural history, biography, and fan archives, the course introduces students to themes such as masculinity and femininity, romance, devotion, Partition, nationalism, fandom, nostalgia, and technological change in South Asian popular culture.
