What Bollywood Owes Folk India

In 1999, a song played in cinemas across India to considerable acclaim. Nimbuda Nimbuda, from Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, became one of the most recognised film songs of its decade — Aishwarya Rai dancing in a red lehenga, the melody infectious and immediate, the choreography celebrated in film schools and on wedding floors for years afterward. What most audiences did not know, and what the film's credits did not especially emphasise, was that the song had long circulated among the Manganiyar and Langa communities of Rajasthan. Ethnomusicologists attributed it to Ghazi Khan, a master Manganiyar musician, though within the community the song was understood to belong to everyone — the shared property of a hereditary tradition stretching back generations.

The Manganiyars did not receive royalties. They received something else: the experience of watching a song they considered their own become a copyright-protected film recording, controlled by a music label, generating revenue for everyone in that chain except the community from which the melody had been taken.

This is not an isolated incident. It is a structural condition of the Indian music economy, one that has persisted across decades, accelerated by digital platforms, and largely unaddressed by a legal system that was built for a different kind of creator entirely.

A Law Built for Individual Authors

The foundational problem is one of legal design. India's Copyright Act, 1957 — amended most significantly in 2012 — is structured around individual authorship. To have copyright, a work must have an identifiable author or group of named authors. The rights vest in that person, persist for their lifetime plus sixty years, and can be assigned or inherited. This framework has worked reasonably well for named lyricists and composers. The 2012 amendments were a genuine improvement, ensuring that lyricists and music composers could claim royalties for the commercial use of their work even after assigning rights to producers or labels.

Folk music, however, does not have an identifiable author in the legally meaningful sense. Traditional music is a basket of songs that come from a group or community, the authorship of which is not known or linked to a particular person. The song belongs to the community through the fact of collective inheritance and ongoing practice, not through any act of formal creation or registration. This communal ownership — which is a perfectly coherent form of ownership — has no standing in a copyright law designed to protect individual authors.

The legal consequence is severe: because traditional music has no registered owner, it is effectively treated as public domain. Anyone can use it without permission. Anyone can adapt it, record it, and register the adaptation as their own copyright. The moment a named music director adds a new arrangement or a film vocalist's interpretation, a legally protectable new work is created. The folk community whose melody forms the core of that new work gets nothing.

Folklorist Komal Kothari, who spent decades documenting Rajasthani music and was intimately familiar with the Manganiyar communities, raised pointed questions about Nimbuda that the law could not answer: would live performances by hereditary performers in Rajasthan now require a licence from the film's music label? The question exposed the absurdity at the heart of the legal situation. The communities who created and maintained the song now had no rights in it. The company that adapted and registered it did.

The Kacha Badam Parable

The Nimbuda case is from 1999. One might hope that over twenty-five years, digital platforms and shifting public consciousness would have changed the terms. The 2022 story of Bhuban Badyakar suggests otherwise.

Badyakar was a peanut vendor from Birbhum, West Bengal, who had composed a short hawking song — a melody for calling out his wares — that he sang through the streets. The song, Kacha Badam, was recorded informally, went viral on social media, was remixed by a label called Godhulibela Music, and spread globally. Badyakar had not signed any agreements. He had not registered any copyright. He was not contacted before the remix was made and distributed. By the time social media attention turned to his situation and began asking uncomfortable questions, Godhulibela settled with him for ₹3 lakh — a one-time payment, not a royalty structure.

The number is instructive. The song, at its peak, was generating millions of streams. The settlement was ₹3 lakh. It came not from any legal obligation but from public embarrassment after social media outrage. Without that outrage, Badyakar would have received nothing.

The Indian Performing Right Society reported performance royalty collections of ₹700 crore in 2024–25, a 42% increase year-on-year driven largely by streaming revenue on international platforms. Badyakar, the originator of one of that year's most-streamed songs, received ₹3 lakh as a discretionary one-time payment. He received no royalties.

Scholars who have studied this case note that the 2012 Copyright Act amendments — intended specifically to provide fairer treatment to performers versus record labels — proved largely ineffective for Badyakar. Copyright laws, structured around individualistic norms, disregard the "privilege gap" that Badyakar represents — a result of years of inequality and identity politics associated with cultural production. A law that treats all individual authors as equally positioned to assert rights does not work for a peanut vendor with no legal counsel and no knowledge of the copyright system.

The Bollywood Supply Chain

It is worth being precise about what the film industry is actually doing when it adapts folk music, because the vocabulary of cultural exchange can obscure economic reality.

Almost 80 percent of the Indian music industry's revenue comes from Bollywood music. The film music economy involves a clear chain: a melody is identified, adapted by a named music director, recorded by a label, assigned to the film producer, and released. The music label retains the sound recording copyright; the producer holds the sync rights; the named lyricist and composer have enforceable royalty rights for non-film uses. This is a sophisticated, legally protected supply chain.

At the upstream end of this chain — where the raw melodic material originates — there are folk communities who receive nothing and have no legal standing to demand anything. The industry has built a downstream economy of significant scale on an upstream that it treats as a free resource.

The Indian music industry was valued at around 24 billion Indian rupees at the end of 2023 and was estimated to reach 37 billion rupees by the end of 2026. Meanwhile, the average income earned in the informal music industry in India in 2022 was, in general, lower than the median salary of an unskilled worker in the country. The communities who originated the melodies that power the formal industry live on those margins.

What the Law Does and Does Not Say

To be precise: India's Copyright Act does not expressly permit the appropriation of folk music. It also does not expressly prohibit it, because it does not recognise traditional cultural expressions as a legal category at all.

The legal framework offers little direct protection for folklore unless it has been transformed into a copyrighted work by an identifiable author or body. Folkloric expressions like tribal drumming or oral renditions face commercial exploitation without any credit or benefit flowing back to their source communities.

The 1997 amendment to the Copyright Act gave performers moral rights over recordings of live performances. In 2012, there was a substantial amendment in the Indian Copyright Act (Sections 38A and 38B) that took into consideration primarily global copyright practices as well as the specificities of the Hindi film music industry. But these rights are individual, not collective. They apply to documented, named performers — not to a tradition itself.

The influence of legal frameworks in the circulation of oral traditional music in India has been minimal. While intellectual property laws in India align to a large extent with WIPO international treaties, they do not expressly recognize traditional cultural expressions as a legal category. The gap between international framework and domestic implementation is large and consequential.

What Change Would Actually Look Like

Several models exist. None is simple, but collectively they point toward what a workable framework might require.

The first requirement is documentation. Rights cannot be asserted for traditions that are unrecorded and unattributed. Institutions like the Rupayan Sansthan — the body Komal Kothari built in Rajasthan — have done this work for specific communities. But archiving is not itself legal protection; it is the precondition for it. A national registry for traditional musical expressions, maintained by communities themselves or by trusted institutions, is a minimum requirement.

The second is legal recognition. The Copyright Act needs an amendment creating a category for traditional cultural expressions owned collectively by defined communities — a sui generis right, not grafted onto the individual-author framework. The protection of traditional knowledge demands more than retrofitting old laws. It calls for a legal philosophy that respects collective authorship and intergenerational custodianship.

The third is a benefit-sharing mechanism. Even without full legal ownership, a compulsory arrangement — similar in principle to the Access and Benefit Sharing framework in the Nagoya Protocol for biological resources — could require commercial users of identifiable folk music to contribute a percentage of revenues to the source community. This would not require definitively resolving the ownership question. It would simply require that exploitation not be free.

The fourth, and least addressed, requirement is enforcement capacity. Laws that communities cannot access or afford to use are not functional protections. The Manganiyars are a celebrated community with significant international exposure. Badyakar was a peanut vendor. Both were equally unable to assert any legal claim to their music.

A Reckoning That Has Not Yet Come

India's film industry is in the middle of a broader conversation about what it borrows and how it borrows it — from regional storytelling traditions, from caste histories, from tribal aesthetics deployed in big-budget production design. Music has been conspicuously absent from this conversation, perhaps because music appropriation is so normalised as to be invisible.

But the extraction is not invisible to the communities on the receiving end of it. The Manganiyars know which of their melodies are in Bollywood films. The folk singers of Chhattisgarh track which of their traditions appear in item numbers. This knowledge circulates. What is absent is not awareness but leverage.

The argument for change is not primarily sentimental. It is economic and institutional. A music industry that treats its most fundamental raw material — the melodic traditions of a civilisation — as a free resource is extracting value from communities that cannot afford to give it away. It is also behaving contrary to the spirit of international agreements India has signed. And it is building a cultural economy on foundations that are neither acknowledged nor stable.

The real numbers and size of the informal music industry remain largely unaccounted for, with fragmented components and activities that are challenging to estimate. These large numbers of stakeholders remain invisible in most assessments of the industry.

A formal industry worth ₹24 billion that rests on an informal sector earning below minimum wage is not a sustainable structure. It is a ledger with one side missing.