“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!].” He then spoke on the phone in Gujarati with a marketing representative from the music company that had released the soundtrack of his soon-to-be-released film. I noticed that the sheets of Hindi dialogue used by another assistant director to monitor actors’ accuracy were written in Roman rather than Devanagari script.
A Hindi film set is a highly multilingual environment, and it is common to hear several languages spoken, but the linguistic bifurcation illustrated in this example, where Bhatt spoke in Hindi with his assistants and in English with his lead actor and screenwriter, is a manifestation of the increasing presence of English in the everyday life of the Hindi film industry. In 1996, when I started fieldwork on the production culture of the film industry, I was surprised by how prevalent English was as a lingua franca, especially among the actors, directors, writers, art directors, designers, and others responsible for the creative labor that goes into a film. For below-the-line workers, Hindi was merely one language in a complex linguistic universe that included Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and Punjabi. This is a testament to the tremendous linguistic diversity of India—18 official languages but 122 languages with at least 10,000 native speakers—and the cosmopolitan nature of the Hindi film industry, where people hail from every linguistic region of India as well as other parts of South Asia (or beyond) and are not necessarily native Hindi speakers. According to the 2001 census, while Hindi is spoken by 53.6 percent of the population, there are fifty different types of Hindi.1
India is perhaps unique among film-producing nations for having at least eight major film industries, all distinguished by language, and for producing films in about twenty languages every year. The polyglot nature of the contemporary Hindi film industry fits into the broader history of filmmaking in Mumbai. Mumbai, as a colonial center of commerce, has always been marked by tremendous linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity, and this diversity has been apparent in the world of filmmaking from its origins: early Indian cinema featured Parsi and Gujarati capital, Marathi directors, and Anglo-Indian performers.
With the advent of sound in 1931, Mumbai filmmakers had to choose which language to make films in; Hindi offered the largest market, but which type of Hindi? Filmmakers finally settled on a version, referred to as Hindustani by the British, that had operated as a sort of lingua franca throughout northern India.2 Thus Mumbai became the only city in India where the language of the film industry’s output was not congruent with the dominant languages of the region, Gujarati and Marathi. This was in direct contrast to other major centers of film production in India, such as Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Trivandrum. Thus the Hindi film industry, unlike other Indian language film industries, has not had recourse to a regional state apparatus to promote its interests. Other states in India promote filmmaking in their official languages by offering incentives and subsidies, whereas Hindi films are not identified with any one particular state.
Whether it is the earmarking of subsidies for filmmaking in specific languages, the promotion of a particular dialect as a normative standard in advertising, the daily translations undertaken by news agencies, or Hollywood studios’ local language production strategies, language—as a category of socio-political identity, a form of labor, a set of commodified skills, and an object of market exchange— plays a critical role in the political economy of media industries.3 Referring to the increasing opportunities and attractions afforded by the Hindi film industry and the growing international profile of Bollywood, this chapter discusses how changes in language or code choice within Hindi cinema and the increasing significance of English in the production culture of the film industry concretely animate the transformations that have taken place in the political economy and social world of the Hindi film industry since the advent of neoliberal reforms in India mandated by the International Monetary Fund in 1991.
The changes I have characterized elsewhere as gentrification have resulted in a situation in which two apparently contradictory phenomena are taking place within the contemporary industry:4 the spoken language in many contemporary Hindi films is much more diverse and regionally specific than in films from earlier decades, at the same time that fluency in Hindi appears to be waning among certain elite categories of creative workers (writers, directors, actors, producers), resulting in a situation where English has attained a certain primacy and status and putting those whose primary language is Hindi in a far more socially and economically precarious position within the industry. This chapter discusses the reasons for and consequences of this paradox and illustrates how language and linguistic competence become sites for the elaboration of distinction, the performance of cultural capital, and the enactment of new hierarchies within the Hindi film industry. I argue that the turn toward localized registers of Hindi in film dialogue is integrally connected to the increased prevalence of English within the film industry, as both phenomena emerge from structural transformations that have beset the industry since the mid-2000s.
These transformations have reduced the economic precarity that typified Hindi filmmaking for much of the industry’s history. Flexibility, fragmentation, decentralization, and their associated occupational/employment insecurities, which are cited as characteristics of a global late-capitalist order, have actually been defining features of the Hindi film industry since the end of World War II. Dramatic changes in the structure of the Hindi film industry were initiated after the Indian state recognized filmmaking as a legitimate industrial activity in 2000. Official designation as an industry paved the way for a greater variety of financing for filmmaking, including loans from banks and other financial institutions, and initiated a number of structural changes commonly characterized as “corporatization,” where high-profile Indian conglomerates established new production-distribution companies or existing production, distribution, or exhibition concerns became public limited companies listed and traded on the Indian stock market. These new regimes of finance and organization in the film industry transformed it from a very undercapitalized enterprise (with accompanying high rates of attrition and stalled films) to one where raising capital was no longer an obstacle. However, these very conditions have produced a scenario where Hindi has become marginalized within the Hindi film industry.
This chapter is divided into three main sections, based on fieldwork conducted with screenwriters, writer-directors, directors, and journalists in Mumbai in August 2013, January 2014, and August 2014. First, I provide historical background on the multilingual nature of the Hindi film industry, including the long-standing presence of English. Then, I discuss how contemporary members of the film industry assess the relationship between English and Hindi within the industry and outline the impact, especially on screenwriting labor, of the growing reliance on English within the creative process. Finally, I examine how certain filmmakers deploy their linguistic skill in Hindi as a form of cultural capital and a mode of elaborating distinction within the film industry.
