Lata Mangeshkar copied some of Noor-e-Jahan's style, want to bring that back: Leslee Lewis
"I wanted people to ask, 'Did you really write this?' That was the desperation—to reach the youth," shares Leslee, adding: "There are so many independent artists these days. While I understood my audience, I knew I couldn't sing the way I always have. It was a conscious decision to sing in my own language (Hindi) so as to reach the masses. Today's youth is my target audience, and if they want me to sing in their language, so would I. Having said that, no journey is easy."
Lesle believes the current music landscape is dominated by arrangements, not strong compositions. 'There's a scarcity of good songs that truly stay with you. There is no depth in the lyrics or composition to the music which is being created. Going viral has become as easy as it can get,' shares Leslee, adding, 'A good composition is like natural beauty. Arrangement is just the styling.' While many chase trends with remixes, he moves forward with fresh material. Ask him if he plans to recreate any of his cult classics like Bombay Girl (1994), Meri Neend (2002), and Paree Hoon Main (1991); the composer says, "I've got 60, 70, 80 songs. Why recreate when I can create? I believe in working on original content and would prefer focusing on that. Even though I have been approached to recreate my cult classics, personally, I am not too keen."
The singer-composer believes in moving ahead with time, as that has been his philosophy from the start of his career. "I have believed in reforming things for me. Change is very important, and if AI will bring that change, what's the harm? It's a great tool—like a computer. But you have to be the master. If the machine starts making the creative decisions, you've already lost control. I dream music; I don't ask the machine to do it for me,' says Leslee.
Even as indie music gains traction in India, he feels song writing still needs to catch up. 'There are plenty of guitar-strumming singer-songwriters. But they lack the main core of it, as when you compare them to the likes of James Taylor or Joni Mitchell, our melodies are still catching up.'
'I want to introduce India to its own cultural DNA. Like how our grandparents had Noor Jehan—she had a sound, a style of her own. Even the great Lata Mangeshkar copied her, she adopted so much of her style. That's what I want to bring back," says Leslee, wrapping up.
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There are few people in the world who hold such a close relationship with their popular cinema as the Indian people. Popular Hindi cinema is not realistic in its depictions and portrayals of Indian life. But these films do often evocatively reflect the dominant ethos of each age. In this sense, the sub-text of Indian cinema is frequently political and ideologically driven. Look at popular Hindi cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. These were the early decades after India's freedom, times of relative idealism and hope, of celebrating India's pluralism, of combating the inequities and injustices of the colonial and feudal past, of women breaking their chains, and of nation-building. The iconic popular Hindi films of those times resonated with these aspirations, films lit up by gentle socialism and humanism, an affirmation and celebration of pluralism and shared living of Hindus and Muslims, the breaking the feudal bonds of oppression and a Gandhian belief in human goodness. Films like Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen, Mehboob's Mother India, Raj Kapoor's Awara and Shri 420, Guru Dutt's Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, BR Chopra's Naya Daur, V Shantaram's Do Ankhen Barah Haath and Yash Chopra's Dharmaputra. The songs of this era penned by famed leftist poets like Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailendra and Kaifi Azmi also were odes to secularism and Hindu-Muslim unity, with calls for social equity, the rights of farmers and workers and dreams for a pluralist, humane, progressive nation. Popular cinema from the 1990s reflected a vastly changed India, neo-liberal, acquisitive and – in the wake of the Babri Masjid movement – far more polarised. Farmers, the working class, Dalits, Adivasis and India's poor were mostly erased from popular Hindi cinema. Lifestyles and aspirations of the upwardly mobile middle became the aspirational norm. And the Muslim man transformed from the gentle Raheem Chacha or noble aristocrat of the 1950s and 60s into the mafia, religious bigots and terrorists. But Hindutva cinema of the Modi era is a new incarnation. Not because these films are political. As I emphasise, films have contained political and ideological messages in the past as well. But because, like the cinema of the Nazi era, Hindutva films not just completely unmask their bigotry, they flaunt it. They shed any residual scruples of at least making a pretence of adhering to truth. Instead, they brazenly falsify both history and contemporary events to advance their divisive ideological project. The tone of the films is shrill and unapologetically hateful. As in Nazi Germany, these films are frequently publicly commended by the supreme leader, and by other senior public officials. Modi, like Adolf Hitler, publicly attends screenings of these films, as do his ministers and chief ministers. They commend these not just to the public but also (even more perilously) to the uniformed services. These films are patronised with public funds through tax cuts and other official patronage. Chhaava means a lion cub. A lavish but historically dubious and incendiary film by this name released in the spring of 2025. The film's title referred to the second Maratha ruler Sambhaji, the son of the revered Maratha king Shivaji. Claiming to be history, it depicted the combat of Sambhaji with the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who was portrayed as a religious bigot given to unmitigated cruelty. Sambhaji on the other hand is shown to be a heroic and noble warrior defending the Hindu faith. The last 40 minutes of the 126-minute film are devoted to the graphic and gratuitous portrayal of 40 days of torture of Sambhaji. His fingernails are pulled out, his eyes pierced with iron rods, his tongue torn out, but through all of this Sambhaji remains defiant and unbroken. Historians, however, tell a vastly different story. They record Sambhaji to be a debauched and unfit ruler. Interestingly, Hindutva icons VD Savarkar and MS Golwalkar shared this assessment. The point however is not historical authenticity. The film pitches Sambhaji's battle as a religious Hindu war and Aurangzeb's cruelty and torture as a proxy of Indian Muslims in history and today. Its feverish portrayal resonated widely with audiences who packed cinema theatres. Social media was crowded with reactions of hate targeting Muslims, and videos were posted of audiences raising angry slogans during and after the screenings. A man in Nagpur rode into a cinema hall on horseback, chanting 'Har Har Mahadev' and 'Jai Bhavani'. In Gujarat, a man vandalised the screen with a knife in a bid to attack Aurangzeb. In Delhi, after watching the movie denizens of Hindutva organizations defaced road signs that bore names of Mughal emperors. One man even urinated on a road sign of a road named after Emperor Akbar. The film's doubtful history and inflammatory tenor did not constrain Prime Minister Narendra Modi from extravagantly praising the film, declaring appreciatively that it was 'making waves' and an example of 'elevated Hindi cinema'. Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis told news agency ANI that 'those who wrote history did a lot of injustice to Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, but through this movie, his valour, bravery, cleverness, intelligence, knowledge, all these aspects of his life are coming in front of the public'. A crowd of supporters of the Hindutva groups, the Vishva Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, armed with sticks and stones gathered near a statue of Shivaji in the Mahal area of Nagpur. Their demand was that Aurangzeb's 17th century tomb in Aurangabad, now renamed Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar district, should be dismantled. The tomb is built over the emperor's modest grave. The mob, incensed by the film, raised slogans, burnt a photograph of Aurangzeb and set on fire a symbolic grave in a green cloth filled with grass. Rumours then flew that his grave had been desecrated. Angry crowds gathered and stoned the police and vandalised and burned police and private vehicles. They also razed many houses and a clinic. Four people were reported injured. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, addressing the state assembly, now blamed for the violence the film that he had earlier praised. He said that after watching the film, people's emotions were ignited and so they vented their anger against Aurangzeb. He did not oppose in principle the demand for the shifting out of Aurangzeb's grave, but held that this must be done by legal methods. He reported that 33 police personnel, including three deputy commissioners of police, were injured in the conflict, and one of the senior officials was attacked with an axe. Congress MP Renuka Chowdhury in Parliament held the chief minister culpable for the violence. She derided his bid over several days prior to the violence to use the film to weaponize a 300-year-old history and 'to create divisions, distractions and unrest. It is the constitutional duty of the CM to maintain peace, and harmony and uphold law and order', she declared. 'But he has failed in his rajdharma', the duties of the ruler. This is not the only film from the Hindutva cinema stables thriving under the watch of Prime Minister Modi, that have resulted directly in communal violence, in communally motivated stabbing, killing, rape and arson. Another prominent Hindutva film that, like Chhaava, left a trail of blood and ruins was The Kashmir Files. Released in 2022, the film claims to set the historical record right about the killings and ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandit Hindus in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley in the 1990s. The movie purports to be based on true events. But as The New Yorker observes, it is true that beginning in 1989, tens of thousands of Hindus were brutally evicted from the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir. 'At least two hundred Hindus were killed, according to government data, but the movie inflates the number to four thousand. Armed insurgents were responsible, but…the film blames many others for enabling the tragedy and for lying about it afterward…: (These include) leftist university professors (and) the Congress'. The film also falsely portrays the entire Muslim populations of the valley as 'a blood-thirsty community that wholeheartedly supported militants as they raped and killed minority Pandits and forced them to leave the Valley'. 'The film is not about Kashmiri pundits in the end,' Arundhati Roy, novelist and public intellectual declares, 'it's about Kashmiri pandits standing in for Hindus in India, and all the Muslims are evil butchers who slaughter and kill. Whereas, in truth, there are Kashmiri pandits who continue to live in Kashmir, who continue to maintain relationships with their Muslim friends and neighbours. And their figures are that in 30 years, 619 people were killed. But in the film, it's like the whole population was either slaughtered or driven out.' Once again, the film stokes hatred and rage in its targeted Hindu audience with fake history. But once more, Prime Minister Modi took an entirely different view of the film. He dubbed it 'the truth', recommending that 'everyone must see it'. Not just him, the entire Bharatiya Janata Party leadership vociferously endorsed the film. The Madhya Pradesh chief minister granted half-day leave to policemen to watch the film. BJP leaders distributed free tickets. It became one of the year's highest grossers. In theatres, anti-Muslim sloganeering during and after the screening was not uncommon. Social media exploded with hate and rage. The New Yorker quotes one BJP leader who is 'given to casual calls to shoot 'anti-nationals' urging his Twitter followers to watch the film 'so that there is no Bengal Files, Kerala Files, Delhi Files tomorrow'. There is a sequence in The Kashmir Files of a Hindu woman being stripped and sawed alive by militants as her Muslim neighbours watch and do nothing to help her. In Madhya Pradesh's Khargone district, for the Ram Navami procession that followed the release of the film, the local Shiv Sena used a mannequin and a bicycle wheel to recreate the horrific scene for a tableau. A sound track introduced graphic sounds of a woman sobbing. The tableau also carried a blow-up of the face of a distressed Anupam Kher, the actor who played the woman's father-in-law in the film. Emblazoned on the tableau in banner letters was the warning, 'Wake up Hindus, lest other states in India become Kashmir'. The procession with this tableau stood outside the central mosque of the town, blaring hate songs and slogans with young men dancing feverishly. Stones were thrown, and soon many neighbourhoods of the town were inflamed with communal violence. Properties were torched and vandalised, and the district hospital soon filled up with men and women injured by knife and baton strikes. The next morning, entirely unlawfully, the state administration demolished a number of Muslim homes as punishment. The minister charged with overseeing the administration of the district, Kamal Patel, said in an interview, 'What was shown in The Kashmir Files has happened in Khargone.' He claimed that the violence was a conspiracy by the town's Muslims. They decided to loot, injure and rape their Hindu neighbours. He would not admit that the spark that lit the violence was the provocations of the Ram Navami procession, nor that the Muslims had suffered substantial losses. Likewise, unmindful of the harms suffered by Muslims, Mahesh Muchhal, a Bajrang Dal worker, whose home was torched in Sanjay Nagar, told reporters that Hindus in Khargone are still seething with anger. 'Just like The Kashmir Files, they [Muslims] are out to make Khargone Files,' he alleged. The dominant themes and tropes of the BJP-Rashtiya Swayamsevak Sangh recur in Hindutva cinema of the Modi era. One central preoccupation of this genre of films is of falsifying history, to represent Muslim rulers in medieval India as uniformly cruel and bigoted, invaders spurred by one central mission of persecuting Hindus, defeating and eliminating Hindu kings, breaking Hindu temples, raping Hindu women and forcing them to convert to Islam. Hindu rulers, on the other hand, are portrayed as unvaryingly heroic and noble, Hindu women as chaste and submissive and the savagely persecuted Hindu people fiercely dedicated to defend their Hindu faith against the brutal, chauvinist invader. This malign communal mythologising of history for hateful ends was accomplished with particular impact in Chhaava. But a worrying sign of how much this view has got normalised is a film made by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Bhansali is renowned for his opulent over-the-top historical melodramas but he certainly is not ideologically one from the Hindutva stables. He chose in Padmaavat to recreate the legend of a Rajpur princess of such beauty that the Sultan of Delhi, Allaudin Khilji, attacked and defeated her kingdom, but the princess immolated herself with many other women in the palace rather than fall into his hands. Khilji is portrayed by Bhansali as an uncouth, debauched, beastly king. This contradicts his depiction by leading historians like Satish Chandra and Irfan Habib as an enlightened ruler with land policies and the treatment of Hindu subjects that were well ahead of his times. This same trope, of portraying Muslim rulers in India as violent invaders resisted by heroic Hindu kings and generals is repeated in many other films, like Tannaji. Rani Lakshmi Bai, queen of Jhansi, heroically fought the British colonial army in 1857 in the First War of Indian Independence in 1857. The fact that the 1857 battle against British colonialism was fought jointly by many Hindu and Muslim rulers of small principalities led by the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar makes, for historians, powerful evidence of Hindu-Muslim unity. But this is entirely obscured in the shrill and communally toned 2019 biopic of Rani Lakshmi Bai Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi. Another frequent theme of Hindutva cinema is allegations against contemporary Muslim citizens of being disloyal to their motherland, of their participation in sinister conspiracies like love jihad and of their sympathies with terror. Apart from The Kashmir Files, the most successful of this set of Hindutva-themed films is The Kerala Story. This film tells the story of a burqa-wearing young Kerala woman, initially with the name Shalini Unnikrishnan, brainwashed by her Muslim lover to convert to Islam. Now, as Fathima Bi, she is sent to join the Islamic State. The film's trailer claimed the film to be the true story of more than 32,000 women who had met the same dire fate. But when the filmmakers could not offer any evidence for this claim to the Supreme Court, it directed the film-makers to withdraw this claim and add a disclaimer that this was a fictional story. But this disclaimer did little to pre-empt or repair the damage the film did to Hindu perceptions of their Muslim neighbours across the country. Audiences were led to believe that first Muslim young men trap Hindu and Christian girls in marriage and to convert them to Islam. After this, radical Muslim clerics send them to countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria to fight as terrorists in the battle for Islam. These prejudices based on false narratives and fake news strung together in the film were further systematically fanned by BJP leaders. The prime minister again commended the film. The Bhopal MP, terror-accused Pragya Thakur, praised the film, claiming 'The despicable conspiracy shown in the film The Kerala Story portrays reality.' She took a young teenaged woman to watch the film, to persuade her not to marry her Muslim lover. (Incidentally, her effort failed as the teenager eventually eloped with her lover). The Madhya Pradesh chief minister explained his decision to exempt the film from entertainment tax: 'We have already made a law against religious conversion in Madhya Pradesh. Since this film creates awareness, everyone should watch this film. Parents, children and daughters should watch it. That's why the Madhya Pradesh government is giving tax-free status to the movie The Kerala Story.' Other films that rewrite recent history to endorse versions of the Hindutva establishment include Accident or Conspiracy: Godhra, and The Sabarmati Report. Both endorse the claim strenuously pressed by Modi since his time as chief minister to justify the communal massacre that followed. This was that the burning of the train in Godhra on February 27, 2002, which killed 58 Hindus, was a sinister conspiracy by Muslim terrorist organisations, aided by organisations and the government across the border. Article 370, and Razakar: The Silent Genocide of Hyderabad were other Hindutva revisionist histories. Some films like Hamare Barah promote other prejudices and conspiracy theories against Muslims. The Muslim protagonist in the film has two wives and forces them to produce more children, even at risk to their lives. Underlying this film is the conspiracy theory of 'population jihad' frequently touted by Hindutva supporters, claiming that Muslims deliberately breed large numbers of children with the political objective of one day Muslims outnumbering their Hindu compatriots. They are unperturbed that this claim contravenes evidence that the reproductive behaviour of Hindus and Muslims when matched for income and education levels are similar, and that the Muslim community has shown in recent years a sharper decline in their fertility levels than that of any other community in India. Hindutva films also create hagiographies of their heroes, such as Swatantra Veer Savarkar. Savarkar was a founder of the Hindu Mahasabha, the first leader who proposed that Hindus and Muslims constitute different nations; he supported Hitler's genocidal actions against Jews; was arrested after Gandhiji's death alleging his hand in the conspiracy; and opposed the Indian Constitution, contrasting it unfavourably with ancient Hindu legal treatise Manusmriti or the Laws of Manu which advocates caste and gender discrimination. PM Narendra Modi is a gushingly celebratory biopic of the prime minister, of his modest origins, his selfless service to the RSS, his successful control of the 2002 communal carnage and the sterling development he brought to the state of Gujarat as its leader for a dozen years. In parallel, many Hindutva films demean the political opposition, most of all the Indian National Congress. Prominent among these is The Accidental Prime Minister lampooning the globally admired Congress prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh as weak and bumbling. Left academics and activists are shown as shifty and unscrupulous in Bastar: The Naxal Story, and JNU: Jahangir National University, but also in films like The Kashmir Files. What explains the deluge of Hindutva themed films (incidentally of generally minimal aesthetic standards) under Modi? After the box-office success of The Kashmir Files, Nikkhil Advani told The New Yorker, filmmakers naturally wondered if this was the kind of thing people want to watch. 'Now that it has worked,' he said sarcastically, 'let's all make this kind of nationalistic, jingoistic cinema.' But the reality is that despite unvarnished and extravagant state patronage including generous tax exemptions and unstinted promotions by the senior leadership of both the government and the party, few of these films have made profits in the box office. Chhaava, The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Files and Article 370 are the few financial successes. We need to recognise that these films are not made primarily for financial profit. They are made instead because they are powerful elements of the ideological project of Hindutva, because they enable the spread of its world-view, political claims, prejudices and ethics, to millions of hearts, minds and homes. In this, Hindutva leaders have learned closely from the playbook of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Although cinema was still a new technology and communication medium, Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels saw its immense potential as a vehicle for popularising the Nazi worldview, prejudices and its social and political project. The medium also carried personal fascination for both. Goebbels was rumoured to try to watch a film every day. Hitler's preferred companion in official dinners were popular German actresses. One-sixth of the films produced in the Nazi period were propaganda films. An early policy decision of the Nazi Party soon after gaining power was to establish a film department. They saw the power of film in influencing the emotions and beliefs of the German people. International cinema was censored for any democratic content and criticism of the Nazi government and ideology. Goebbels also blocked films with Jewish or anti-Nazi. Goebbels even banned critics from writing negative reviews. The Nazi leadership believed that the masses are mentally inert, and books are less effective in influencing their beliefs. One of their ideologues wrote of the better prospects of the motion picture. 'In a much shorter time, at one stroke I might say, people will understand a pictorial presentation of something which it would take them a long and laborious effort of reading to understand'. Nazi propagandist Hans Traub wrote of film as a 'formidable means of propaganda'. Achieving propagandistic influence, he observed, always demands 'a 'language' which forms a memorable and passionate plot with a simple narrative.'. The most effective medium of propaganda is the moving picture. 'It demands permanent alertness; it's full of surprises concerning the change of time, space, and action; it has an unimaginable richness of rhythm for intensifying or dispelling emotions. Goebbels believed that to be effective propagandist cinema should be entertaining and glamorous. Nazi films were not just rabidly anti-Semitic. They promoted other aspects of the ideology. For instance, Hitler himself promoted films that promoted the idea of disabled people being a burden on the public exchequer and supporting their forced sterilisation. The impact of propaganda through popular cinema was enhanced by state support to large theatres. Nazi ideologues felt that watching films with large audiences would overwhelm individual critical capacities. They also carried the films to rural areas, and even organised shows in village inns. Cinemas were so important for the government that even when in 1944 under the impact of the World War schools and playhouses stopped working, it was only cinemas that continued to run until the very end of the war, sometimes protected even by anti-aircraft units. In the many decades that have passed since Nazi Germany was defeated, the technology, the reach and the power of cinema to impact hearts and minds have all expanded manifold. It is not surprising, then, that even while wearing a democratic veneer, the Modi-led BJP government has plugged into using cinema to spread its ideological worldview, including importantly its demonisation of Indian Muslims and left-liberal dissenters. The BJP is driven by the ideology of Hindutva and veteran Hindutva ideologues were admirers of Hitler and his policies against Jews. In nurturing Hindutva cinema, the BJP-RSS has adopted a playlist similar in many ways to Hitler's Germany, although adapted for modern times and the façade of democracy. Like Nazi cinema did for the Jews, we have seen how these ideologically driven Hindutva films falsify history and contemporary events to encourage prejudice and sometimes violent hatred against Muslims. They also belittle, even demonise the political opposition and left political and civil activists and academics. Not all of these films directly and manifestly result in religious violence targeting Muslims. But every one of them fuel distrust of centrist and left politics, media, academia and civic action and further cement in millions of hearts and minds prejudice and hate against Muslims who are 'othered' as the violent and disloyal enemy within. In these ways, Hindutva cinema is central to the Hindutva project to dismantle the civilisational and constitutional soul of the free India nation. I am grateful for research support from Omair Khan. Harsh Mander is a peace and justice worker, writer, teacher who leads the Karwan e Mohabbat, a people's campaign to fight hate with radical love and solidarity. He teaches part-time at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, and has authored many books, including Partitions of the Heart, Fatal Accidents of Birth and Looking Away.
