Language

Popular cinema in South Asia offers an audio-visually rich, musical, multilingual experience that is also intermediated, multicultural and transnational. There is a large corpus of Hindi-Urdu monographs on the subject of language in cinema, conversations with and biographies of lyricists and writers, and relatively fewer works in English. However, the aesthetic and rhetorical aspect of the simplified yet stylised diegetic language/s is yet to be explored in any analytical detail. Instead, reflections on politically charged and narrow, communitarian markers of linguistic identity, using rather thin databases (Kesavan, 1994; Trivedi, 2006) have received disproportionate traction. Nomenclature of the film industry itself is somewhat of a catachresis, partly because both the linguistic registers of cinema and the topoi of its production present a historically shifting geopolitical terrain (Dadi, 2016). Die-hard proponents and camp followers of Hindi and Urdu are found astonishingly united in claiming popular cinema as their own and even acknowledge its historic role in catapulting their languages to an incredibly wide, even global, outreach. However, given its multilingual, multiscriptal and multi-tonal materiality, the dominant language is best described in such non-exclusive terms as ‘Hindi of all kinds’, ‘hai jiski zuban Urdu ki tarah’ (whose language is like Urdu; Mir & Mir, 2006), or Hindustani – the middling, ‘Toba Tek Singh’ term appropriately favoured by generations of film scholars. Let us recall that in the eponymous story, S. H. Manto weaves a tragic metaphor for a no man’s land where a mentally challenged Sikh, who speaks a Punjabi matrix gibberish, resists his forcible expatriation from newly created Pakistan to India, until he collapses to his defiant death, transmogrifying into the eternal place-name he belonged to.

After the partition of the subcontinent, the re-organisation of states on linguistic lines, and the coming into their own of ‘regional cinemas’, ‘Bombay Cinema’ became synonymous with Hindi cinema, acquiring the reputation of an autonomous state with physically expansive and linguistically porous virtual boundaries (Akhtar, 2006; Kabir, 1999). The same film, let us say Raja Harishchandra or Devdas, could be made several times, in multiple language versions. Like its cosmopolitan crew, the content and theme flowed across classical, popular as well as factual, fictional and fantastic registers and a film would typically announce itself in three scripts. The ritual – mangalacharan – invocations of an Urdu hamd (prayer) or she’r (couplet), or a Sanskrit mantra/shlok at the film’s beginning was accepted as norm; Om Prakash Bhandari would take ‘Qamar Jalalabadi’ as his pen name, Anand Bakshi would write wonderful qawwalis, while Shakeel Badayuni composed sublime bhajans (Vijaykar, 2019). This everyday bonhomie could still be overlooked in tense moments of linguistic sectarianism. Sahir Ludhianvi was trolled by a leading Hindi film magazine, Madhuri, when he proclaimed that 97% words used in Hindi cinema were in fact Urdu. The magazine also ran a partially successful campaign for the replacement of Roman with Devanagari script in the credit rolls. This was already a practice with Marathi and some Hindi films produced by Gemini in Chennai and by Rajshri in Mumbai. In general, the film-makers had to maintain a creative balance on a high-strung tightrope laid across language fault lines – English–Hindi, Hindi–Urdu, North–South, tatsam-tadbhav (pure-impure) and so on – but they also routinely dispensed visual stereotypes and linguistic caricature in etching characters: Madrasis, Parsis, Pathans, Christians, Sardars, Bengalis, Pandits, Maulvis, Baniyas, Marwaris, Goans, Gorkhas, westernised women, outlandish tribals, Bhojpuri servants and so on.

Film scholars have observed that the term ‘Bollywood’ has only recently acquired currency after India’s globalisation in the 1990s, as a branding device of Indian products for new consumer economies at home and in international markets (Dwyer, 2014; Prasad, 2003; Rajadhyaksha, 2016; Vasudevan, 2010). Its near-ubiquitous acceptance is temporally coeval with the ‘filmi’ language moving towards a mixed register called Hinglish, and paradoxically, when Bombay came to be officially renamed as the nativist ‘Mumbai’. ‘Bhasha behta neer’, proclaims the amphibian devotional poet Kabir, no language is ever a pure, placid pool. The contemporary Hinglish explosion is neither unique to Hindi language or cinema, nor is the register itself entirely new. It is a handy old-new tool, a playful artifice to chisel characters out of the rich legacy of interlingual contact, impact, borrowing and exchange in commercial-artistic productions (Kothari & Snell, 2011; Ravikant, 2021). As such, censorship certificates or Encyclopedia entries carrying officially-ordained single language labels are poor indices of a vast range of unrecognised languages, spoken dialects and a diversity of calligraphic and typographic designs deployed by popular cinemas (Hoek, 2014). Some striking illustrations should suffice. The makers of a high Urdu film, Mughal-e-Azam (1960), strategically opted for Hindi as its official classification, while some of the key people involved in that film – Dilip Kumar as writer-producer and Wajahat Mirza as dialogue writer – created Gunga Jumna (1961) in ‘Colloquial Bhojpuri’, which proved a trailblazer for Bhojpuri films produced in Bombay. That the Partition could not have effected an overnight nationalistic transformation in the lyrical and musical habits is obvious from a Pakistani film like Mousiqar (1962; a Hindu Social?), which uses a classical Holi number in Brajbhasha, ‘phagwa Brij dekhan ko chal ri’ (friend, let’s go to Braj to watch Holi revelries), and several other songs in an eastern-sounding dialect for its rural street singer-dancer heroine, Sabiha. This is an example of cinema being an archive of receding or lost local cultures.

So, even though a rather hackneyed Hindi–Urdu–Hindustani debate is a nineteenth century legacy relating to the print public sphere in undivided north India, the film world did not remain apathetic to it, and in fact posed new theoretical and practical dimensions through writings and films (Abbas, 1969; Srivastava, 1932). In important transitions – from Parsi theatre to cinema and from silent films to the talkies and beyond, writers and lyricists, from Agha Hashar Kashmiri, Narayan Prasad ‘Betab’ and Sudarshan down to G. S. Nepali, Narendra Sharma and Majrooh Sultanpuri were expected to prove their non-sectarian versatility. Together with the film-makers, they proudly showcased their cross-over talents (Hansen, 2011; Lunn, 2015; Maheshwari, 1978; Vasvani, 1998), and made repeated appeals to understand both the new medium and its message:

Pyar hai do nainon ki bhasha na Urdu na Hindi

Na koi zer zabar ka jhagra na syahi na bindi

(A lingo of the eyes, love is neither Urdu nor Hindi

It’s a paperless tongue: no quarrel over symbols and dots inky)

This evocative couplet is from an ensemble song from Chacha Zindabad (1959), a rare allegory satirising the ‘partition’ between two old Hindu friends and patriarchs, engineered by their off-spring unwilling to enter into an arranged marriage with each other. It has no Muslim character. The film’s opening credits provide comic cartographic visualisation of the partition of India. Cloud clumps of various regions fly into the frame to assemble a map of undivided India. At its completion, two dark lines emerge to divide the map into three parts. The director’s name, ‘Om Parkash’, too gets tri-furcated: the Hindu-auspicious ‘Om’ stays in India, ‘Par’ (other side) lands in the West and ‘Kash’ (I wish!) in East Pakistan! It is clear that the Roman transcription has followed the Urdu-Punjabi pronunciation of the Sanskrit ‘Prakash’ as ‘Parkash’, in which ‘par’ is also read as ‘paar’. Zer, zabar, syahi and bindi are markers of print culture and in declaring them irrelevant the song may be read as a tribute to the audio-visual or cinematic use of language.

While maintaining its Hindustani core, the language of Bombay cinema has remained playfully open to various local and global styles and modes of dialogue-delivery. A recent film PK (2014) deployed Hinglish, quite casually, as its main language, as it is the everyday speech of its television-journalist heroine, her boss and several other characters. Equally remarkable is how its eponymous ‘humanoid alien’ lead, played by Aamir Khan, adopts ‘Bhojpurish’ (Bhojpuri-like/mix of Bhojpuri and English), whose knowledge he miraculously absorbs a la Matrix into his own body, by simply touching the hand of a Bhojpuri-speaking tawaif (courtesan)! Director Raju Hirani had earlier used the tapori, street-smart lingo quite successfully for his Mumbai-based characters in the Munnabhai films and Hinglish again in a campus film, 3 Idiots. Yet he found Bhojpuri both familiar and exotic enough, for the blue-eyed, long-eared and ‘naked’ PK, and it seemed to work with the audience. The fraudulent Hindu guru in the film, Tapasviji, speaks tatsampradhan, Sanskritised Hindi, quite appropriately, making the film truly multilingual and transnational.

South Asian cinema traverses other media in its travels beyond the screen. As the most vital repertoire of entertainment, film music and dialogues have been listened to on gramophone players, radio, tapes, re-performed in dramatic adaptations and re-purposed as curated packages, and as malas or garlands of songs relayed by TV stations, YouTube channels and other social media platforms. Ever since cinema began talking, its songs and dialogues have been printed as collectible memory-and performance-aids in the form of lyrics and swarlipis or musical notations, and screenplays have been memorably and meticulously recreated frame-by-frame, with complete sound and visual effects, in a variety of print media formats (Duggal, 2018; Morcom, 2016; Mukherjee, 2013). The internet has emerged as a growing archive of films once considered lost, traces old and new, of nostalgic, amateur and professional cultures living off and reliving cinematic content. Here is where we find digitised material from the analogue era together with endless ‘live’ renditions, karaoke and remixed versions performed by generations, together with multilingual and multinational comments spread across years.

In the Hindi version of Disney-Pixar’s much-dubbed top-grosser, Finding Nemo (2003), Gill, the ringleader of the gang, rechristens Nemo as Shehen-Shark (Shark Bait in the original) after the latter passes ‘the ring of fire’ test of initiation and is thus warmly welcomed into the tank brotherhood. It is interesting that while the accents of Nemo, Gill and Marlin are unmarked, the voices of some other characters carry Bengali and Tamil inflections. This invites reflection upon enduring character-typologies modelled on recognisable voice icons. Another under-researched area is the practice of script writing in south Asia.