On February of this year (2017)  had attended Bangalore International Film Festival, I watched a ton good movies there and got to meet a lot of interesting people. On one of the day there was a QnA session with one of the India's best directors, His name is Vetrimaran. Vertrimaran's movie Visaranai (The Interrogation) was the official selection for Oscar from India last year (2016). He was probably the most celebrated director in the year 2016. Vetrimaran was a very down to earth person and answered all our questions.  One of the questions asked by an attendee was "Do you think songs are important in Indian films?". After hearing this question Vetrimaran looked like as if he was hurt. The following is my recollection of the answer given by Vetrimaran  and things I learnt along the way.

 In India everything is a song: 

One of the first thing he said was, movies are a medium of telling stories. Stories can also be told in other forms. A story could be told like a play or a novel or a song. Film making is an art which is still very young, film making is just 100 years old. But, other forms of story telling is thousands of years old.  In India the medium of storytelling was always through songs and poems. Indian epics like Mahabharata and Ramayana were also written as poems. Mahabharata is the worlds largest poem. And all the stories from Veda and Upanishads (Indian texts) were all written as hymns and poems. 

You may think, why there were only poems? Because, it was an overly accepted format which can be easily memorized. You can easily memories every word of a song after listening to it a few times. But, can you every memorize a book or novel? And making copies of the texts would take years, so memorizing it was the easy way. When stories are sung like songs it will be understood by others and they will also remember it.  

In India the medium of story telling was writing songs. And this tradition followed into more books and plays. When the first India talkie film (films with sound) was made most of the stories were all in the song form. Alam Ara was India's first talkie film, in which there were more number of songs than dialogues. Because, the earlier movies India had to fall back on the Indian stories to make films, but most of the stories were in the form of songs.

So, once the tradition of songs started in films it never went away. 

Songs are a distinct feature of an Indian film:

Almost all the Indian films have songs in them, giving all Indian films an distinct feature to it. Though, nowadays  songs are used as a marketing tool. It is also puts an Indian tag to it.

Thanks for reading, If you have your own version of the answer do reply, so I can also learn from you.

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