Beyond Song and Screen: Roi Roi Binale and the Craft of the Regional Musical

The story of Indian musical films goes back to the years around Independence. One of the earliest examples was Vijay Bhatt’s Baiju Bawra (1952), a film that wove Hindustani classical music into its very soul. Since then, India has produced several remarkable musicals, but their number remains surprisingly small especially within regional cinema. The Telugu industry found its landmark in Sankarabharanam (1980), a masterwork of sound and spirituality. For Assam, though, the journey took almost a century before its first true musical film finally arrived.

 For a cinema culture that has always carried music as background blood; folk songs at weddings, radio hits on repeat, theatre songs living between village verandahs; Roi Roi Binale arrives as an explicit claim: Assamese cinema can be a musical in the technical, narrative sense.

A musical film, as a genre, does more than feature songs. Songs in a musical are diegetic or narratively operative; they reveal character, push plot, create montage logic, or stage conflict through choreography and motif, rather than just pausing the action for a chart-topping tune. That distinction matters because Indian films have always used songs, but a musical demands that those songs are structural, not decorative. The risk is higher; so are the rewards. 

Roi Roi Binale places songs at scene junctions. Melodic leitmotifs recur as emotional anchors. A single refrain shifts register from lullaby to protest as the camera pulls back, turning an intimate moment into social commentary. Those formal moves; leitmotif, thematic recurrence, contrapuntal scoring against image are classical tools of the musical and they’re used here deliberately. The result is a film that asks the viewer to follow ideas by ear and by rhythm. 

Look across regional cinemas and you’ll see multiple experiments where music becomes central rather than incidental. Malayalam cinema has offered defined musicals in which narrative arcs ride on song cycles; films in the language have staged stories around singers and communities, using local musical forms as structural material. Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada and Telugu industries have sporadically produced films that wear the musical label in the technical sense. None of these industries have treated the musical as a steady mainstream ecosystem; instead, they produce occasional, high-ambition works that interrogate what film-song can do when it’s asked to carry plot logic.  

Regional musicals use local folk scales, ornamentation, and rhythm cycles to make music feel native to the story world. That means composers must work like ethnomusicologists and dramaturgs simultaneously arranging music so it obeys both traditional musical grammar and cinematic timing.

Regional musicals often lean on star-singers or on actors who can sell a song’s emotional truth. Playback practice is still central, but where the song is plot-bearing, the sync between voice and body becomes a technical problem: editing must honor phrasing; camera movement must resolve with a song’s natural breaths.

Not every musical needs Busby Berkeley spectacle. In a regional idiom, choreography can be internal: a folk-step, a ritual gesture, or a camera that listens by moving into a choir. That reduced vocabulary makes the musical feel authentic rather than borrowed.

A musical needs a scoring strategy that keeps vocals, diegetic instruments, and ambient sound in conversation. The mix must allow lyrics to serve narrative clarity without flattening the natural acoustics of the region being portrayed.

Assamese music has long been central to the state’s public life. From Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s early theatre-film hybrids to Bhupen Hazarika’s songs that bridged folk and modernity, Assam’s cultural memory is musical. Yet cinematic practice kept music mostly as accompaniment. Roi Roi Binale changes that alignment. It leverages the region’s tonalities; Modern rock inflections, humane balladry and re-tunes them for cinematic form. The choice feels less like a novelty and more like the missing grammar finally being written.

Regional musicals face structural limits. Budgets are tighter, distribution networks are narrower, and audiences are trained to expect a certain grammar of regional film; commercial, star-driven, or realist. A musical requires rehearsal time, larger sound-stage thinking for recording and mixing, choreographers attuned to local forms, and risk-tolerant producers. That’s why musicals in regional languages have often been episodic rather than institutional.

Roi Roi Binale is not an answer for every director in Assam. It is a model. What this really means is that regional cinemas can choose to make musicals on their own terms; grounded in local music, disciplined in technique, and daring in form. If the film succeeds, it will do more than mourn or memorialize. It will tell younger filmmakers that songs can be more than interruption: they can be architecture.

Also read : Tears, Applause & Immortality: Zubeen’s Final Film ‘Roi Roi Binale’ Leaves Assam in Emotion