My dissertation titled “Sitaron Ka Tarana: Acts of Expression in the Bombay Film Song” is on the convergence of film and poetry in the song sequences of Bombay cinema of the 1950s, and I explore the philosophical issues these sequences raise around language, experience, and expression. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s writings on skepticism in literature and film, I put film-philosophy’s concerns about film’s medium-specific properties (such as its representations of reality, its displacements of character and performance) in conversation with the central topics of the philosophy of language (the nature of meaning, the relation of language and reality) to open out a fresh perspective on the meetings of word and image in the Bombay film song. In my chapters, I conduct comprehensive analyses of individual films and their songs, uncovering the complex patterns of verbal imagery that are essential to understand the workings and structure of the films, while also exploring the Bombay cinema’s unique industrial and aesthetic practices, such as the “playback” convention and the poetic traditions behind the song lyrics. These specificities and details of the appearances of the songs are often neglected and buried in scholarship on the Indian film song, and my work shows that close, precise, and narratively situated analyses of individual songs is essential in understanding the larger puzzle of Indian cinema’s dependence on this lyrical convention. In my first chapter, I take up the under-studied field of Bombay comedies, focusing on the interactions of male and female voices across duets and solo songs, in the 1958 screwball comedy, Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi (That Which Moves is Called a Car), and explore how the sexual politics and ideas of conversation and of marriage in classic Hollywood comedy is mediated and transformed by the convention of the sung duets between the couple. In my second chapter, I show how the sung poetry in Guru Dutt’s 1957 film Pyaasa (Thirst), which follows the disillusionment of a socialist poet with his art, explores a philosophical crisis of voice and language. The third chapter is on a genre of iconic songs in the films of actor-director Raj Kapoor, especially the 1951 Awara (Vagabond) and the 1955 Shree 420 (Gentleman Thief), which I see as evoking the question of the individual political voice that is central in the historical context of the new democratic nation. Traditionally scholarship in the field of film-philosophy has predominantly focused only on a set Western canon of films, while the scholarship on India’s popular cinema has primarily studied its films through the lens of political nationalism with an almost exclusive focus on the mode of melodrama. My dissertation works to put these two fields in a more productive and fruitful dialogue with each other. I also examine key figures involved in this period of cinematic history, providing new perspectives on major actor-directors like Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor, highlighting the unique case of singer-actor Kishore Kumar, and bringing out the oeuvre of lesser-studied figures, like the singer Geeta Dutt and the lyricist Shailendra.