Chapter 9: “No One Thinks in Hindi Here” – Language Hierarchies in Bollywood
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“Immy, can you tone it down a bit?” I was watching a film shoot at the Marriott Renaissance in Mumbai in July 2014, and the director, Vikram Bhatt, was instructing the lead actor, Emraan Hashmi, about his body language during a tracking shot where he had to stride resolutely across the hotel’s ballroom. When Bhatt’s assistant director began to block the shot for Hashmi, Bhatt bellowed in Hindi from his position in the back of the room, “Arre beta, thode dheere se jaao! [Hey son, go a little slower!].”
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9.1: Introduction
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Overview of the chapter's goals: to examine the structural changes in the Hindi film industry since the mid-2000s that have led to film dialogue increasing in regional specificity of Hindi while privileging English over Hindi on the production side.
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9.2: English as a Lingua Franca in the Hindi Film Industry
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The historically multilingual nature of the Hindi film industry, and how this led to the adoption of English as an industry lingua franca starting in the early sound era. Highlighting the difference in the modern elevation of English over Hindi as the language of creativity and decision-making, and its historical status as a strictly necessary means of communication.
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9.3: The Precarious Status of Hindi in the Hindi Film Industry
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Some of the current factors leading to the decline of Hindi in favor of English within the Hindi film industry, including the rise of multi-generation film families whose children are educated in English-only contexts, the increased adoption of script-writing software that only supports Roman script, and actors who are unwilling to improve their Hindi skills and must be accommodated by writers under the star-centric film system.
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9.4: Hindi “Indie”
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Exploring contributing factors to the trend of post-2006 films using highly localized registers of Hindi, in contrast to the generic Hindustani of earlier films. Factors include outsider filmmakers gaining traction in the formerly metropolitan-dominated film industry and seeking to increase their perceived authenticity in depicting Indian life, and the rise of corporate production and distribution decreasing the need for any single film to be a "universal hit."
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9.5: Conclusion
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Implications of the ascendance of English over Hindi in the Hindi film industry, including the relegation of workers only fluent in Hindi to below-the-line status and the extent of English's naturalization as the unofficial language of film production such that films can gain unwarranted praise for authenticity due only to their use of localized Hindi registers.
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9.6: Notes
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