If I’m making a Hindi film, I’m a Tamilian, but my DOP is a Malayali, and my editor is from Gujarat, so our common language is English.
—Sriram Raghavan, writer-director
When reflecting upon the linguistic history of the Hindi film industry, two features stand out: the relative insignificance of fluency in Hindi/Urdu as a prerequisite for acting, directing, or even writing; and the consistent presence of English as a language of trade discourse, commentary, and professional nomenclature. As mentioned previously, the industry emerged in multilingual Mumbai rather than the regions of northern or central India referred to as the Hindi “heartland” and drew personnel from all over the subcontinent and beyond. While standard histories of Indian cinema point out the diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds of actors and directors during the silent era, making special mention of how actors and actresses who could not speak Hindustani were displaced by stage actors and courtesans with the arrival of sound, the scenario is actually more complex.5
Even with the advent of sound in 1931, directors and actors came from diverse linguistic and national backgrounds. For example, Bombay Talkies, which left an important legacy in the postindependence Hindi film industry in terms of stars and directors, had many Germans in its employ. One of its directors, Franz Osten, who did not know any Hindi, directed some iconic Hindi films from this era. Throughout its history and continuing till the present, there have always been a few directors working in the industry who knew very little or no Hindi at all. This holds true for actresses as well. One of the top stars of the 1930s was the Australian-born Mary Evans, renamed “Fearless Nadia,” who gained fame in action/stunt films despite her heavily accented Hindi. Presently, women from non-Hindi-speaking parts of India as well as from as far afield as Australia, Brazil, Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States continue to try their luck in Bollywood.6
Even in the scripting process, English has played an important role starting from the early sound era. During the 1930s, in studios like Bombay Talkies, scripts and dialogues were initially conceived of in English by the writer (who was referred to as a “scenario” writer), after which the dialogue writer translated them into Hindustani.7 Since scripts were often written by individuals who were not proficient in Hindustani, the autonomous dialogue writer emerged as a staple of Hindi cinema. The credits for a script were broken down into three components: story, screenplay, and dialogue, with each element attributed to a different individual—a practice continuing into the present. As a result of the varying ethno-linguistic backgrounds of Bombay film personnel, writers who were fluent or had a facility in Urdu were in great demand as dialogue and lyric writers, since Persianized Urdu was a valorized register for song lyrics and dialogues.8 Many well-known Hindi/Urdu poets, playwrights, and novelists supported their literary endeavors by working in the Hindi film industry, and scholars have pointed out that after the partition of British India into India and Pakistan, whereby Urdu became the official language of Pakistan, the only site in India where Urdu was kept alive, and even flourished, was the Hindi film industry.9
In this multilingual context—Urdu writers, German directors, Bengali actors, Marathi singers, Parsi producers, and so on—it is not surprising that English emerged as a lingua franca for cultural producers based in a British colonial port city. While Hindi was (and remains) important as the language within the diegesis and that of consumption, English served (and continues) as the primary language of professional nomenclature and discourse about Hindi cinema and filmmaking. The English terms director, producer, writer, actor, and film are part of daily parlance within and outside the industry, rather than the Hindi equivalents nirdeshak, nirmata, lekhak, abhineta, and chalchitra. In contrast to films made in other Indian languages, the opening and closing credits for mainstream Hindi films have been in English since the 1930s. The Devanagari (Hindi) and Nasta’liq (Urdu) scripts make an appearance in a film’s title, but only after the prominent appearance of the title first in Roman script. One reason is perhaps because Hindi films are the only ones to have been consistently distributed nationally since the 1930s and internationally since the 1940s.
The most prominent forms of journalistic, critical, and trade commentary about the Hindi film industry have been in English since the 1930s. Film reviews, interviews with stars, industry news, celebrity gossip, and trade reports are carried out in English-language periodicals, whether Filmland, Filmindia, or Blitz in the 1930s–1960s; Filmfare, Trade Guide, or Screen since the 1950s; or Film Information or Stardust since the 1970s. While there are several Hindi fanzines and newspapers that cover Hindi cinema, they are quite marginal in terms of their impact or readership within the industry. The main trade journals, Trade Guide, Film Information, and Box Office India, which carry box-office figures and report about the business of the film industry, are in English.
If English has always played a prominent role in the Hindi film industry, how is the contemporary moment distinctive? The most drastic difference is English’s changed status and value relative to Hindi. While English has served as a necessary lingua franca throughout the industry’s history, it is increasingly operating as a language of production, creativity, and decision making since the mid-2000s. This change has to do with key demographic shifts in the film industry: namely, the intensification of kinship networks whereby a significant number of leading actors, directors, and producers represent the second, third, or even fourth generation within the industry; and a larger number of creative personnel drawn from urban social elites whose formal schooling has been wholly in English. Since the turn of the millennium, as Hindi filmmaking became more lucrative and rationalized, taking on an aura of professionalism and respectability that it had not traditionally enjoyed, social elites and film industry progeny gravitated toward the film industry as a viable career path.10 In the next section I discuss how these shifts are implicated in industry members’ assessments of the state of Hindi within the film industry.
