Around the World in 74 minutes: Bollywood

With Selfridges plundering Bollywood for a themed month, with Bollywood films making it into Leicester Square, and with Baz Luhrmann and Andrew Lloyd Webber getting in on the act, India's film music has at last moved centre-stage. But as DJ Ritu points out in her liner notes to The Rough Guide to Bollywood (RGNET 1074), it has been a long haul to get it there. The tracks that she and her colleague Bhagwant Sagoo have compiled here offer a comprehensive survey of Bollywood's music from the Sixties up until today. What's striking is how frequently the same few voices crop up behind the multitudinous faces on screen.

But there was a benign purpose at work in this, for cinema helped to knit India's castes and religions together after 1947, and it's still doing the job today, with hundreds of heart-throbs miming on screen and a handful of "playback" singers doing the musical business for all of them. You could find that absurd, or you could marvel at the artistry that allows these singers to change their voices, chameleon-like, to suit the moment. The greatest of them is undoubtedly Asha Bhosle, whose sweet timbre takes on an infinite variety of colourings while the shaping of the phrases remains recognisably her own. The leading male voice was for decades that of Kishore Kumar – India's answer to Al Bowlly – whose honeyed tone recalls a bygone age of elegance and grace.

I Love Bollywood (Manteca 029) and The Kings and Queens of Bollywood (Nascente 090) offer further glimpses into this world of sugar-coated fantasy, where the nearest thing to overt sex is the ritual wet-sari song. Nascente's disc is wall-to-wall Bhosle, Mangeshkar and Kumar, allowing you to savour the way Bhosle, for example, can run the gamut from raunchy sleaze and dreamy seduction to unsullied innocence. Since all tracks date from the Sixties, it's a perfect time capsule.

I Love Bollywood ranges more widely than The Rough Guide: on some tracks, the boxy acoustics take one nostalgically back to the Forties, but the final one – an up-to-the-minute electronic setting for the ever-protean Bhosle – gives a hint of what the composer A R Rahman, who sells more records than Madonna and Britney combined, can do. When Lloyd Webber unveils Bombay Dreams in June, we'll discover a bit more about Rahman, because he has done the songs.