Are you even a '90s kid if you didn't have your sexual awakening to the sound of 'choli ke peeche'?
In 1993, Subhash Ghai's 'Khal Nayak' redefined the anti-hero for '90s Bollywood. Sanjay Dutt dominated the headlines, both for his on-screen portrayal of the fugitive Balram "Ballu" Prasad and his real-life legal troubles. At the same time, Madhuri Dixit set screens on fire with her provocative dance moves to Ila Arun's sensual and sensational rendition of 'choli ke peeche'.
'Choli ke peeche' changed the sound of women in Bollywood films almost overnight.
This coincided with significant socio-political changes in the country. As India shifted from a state-led economic model to a more liberalised market approach in the '90s, the government relaxed its strict censorship codes. This shift to neoliberal policies allowed for a surge in privately owned media enterprises, leading to a paradigm shift in the types of stories filmmakers and musicians could tell and how they told them.
'Choli ke peeche' was both a product and a precursor of the new sound of Bollywood women that emerged at this time. With her husky, unapologetically sensual voice, Ila Arun smuggled female desire and sexuality into India's musical mainstream. Long before pop stars and Bollywood heroines sang openly about sex, Arun's folk-inspired hits like 'Resham Ka Rumal' and 'Nigodi Kaisi Jawani Hai' celebrated the joys of eroticism in a way that was playful, earthy, and unmistakably female.
Arun drew heavily from India's indigenous and folk music traditions to question, challenge, and tease the mainstream music culture which positioned women as 'objects of desire'. Before Arun, the sound of women in Bollywood films were defined by the thin, high-pitched, and 'girlish' soprano voice of Lata Mangeshkar which represented an idealised Indian womanhood.
Ila Arun marked a radical departure from Mangeshkar's lyrical, aesthetic, and ideological purity with her distinctive, non-normative voice and suggestive lyrics that explicitly gestured towards the female body. Although she began her career in theatre and made her Bollywood debut as an actress in Shyam Benegal's 'Mandi' (1983), it was her Rajasthani folk-inspired songs that established her as the voice of bold, pleasure-seeking women of the '90s. Her coarse vocal quality, full-throated style, uninhibited presence, and provocative dance moves earned her the title 'Rani of Raunch', or Queen of Raunch.
Ila Arun's songs and lyrics embodied a blend of sexual, ethnic, and idiomatic otherness — giving her voice a distinctive je ne sais quoi in the realm of Indian popular music and cinema. Her voice both represented rural India and asserted female sexuality, challenging the caste, class, and ethnic dominance of the urbane Hindi-speaking North Indians, who were often viewed as the quintessential national subjects. On screen, her voice was brought to life by women dressed in Rajasthani nomadic banjaran or 'gypsy' attire, singing unapologetically about desire and sexuality.
Arun normalised female desire and pleasure in Indian music at a time when women were largely confined to devotional or romantic roles. As Indian pop musicians increasingly embraces female sexuality as a subject, revisiting Ila Arun's body of work shows how that space was first opened up by a voice as raw as it was radical.
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