During my fieldwork in Mumbai in 2013 and 2014, several observers and members of the Hindi film industry lamented that the knowledge of Hindi had become so abysmal that the language appeared to be in a precarious position within the industry. Anupama Chopra, a noted film critic and television host, stated bluntly during our conversation, “Hindi is a secondary language now.” She relayed the travails of producing a Hindi version of her popular English-language weekly television show, Front Row with Anupama Chopra—a talk show that mixes film reviews, interviews with actors and directors about their upcoming releases, and group discussions about important issues or key trends within the industry. The challenge of producing the Hindi version, according to her, was that “no one thinks in Hindi here,” especially the younger generation of actors, who, though quite voluble and articulate in English, were unable to express themselves in Hindi. Chopra recounted how since it was so difficult for many actors to speak entirely in Hindi, they frequently devolved into English. She noted how in an episode on the relationship between Bollywood and fashion, eight minutes had to be cut from a thirty-minute segment because of the inability of the guests to converse about the topic in Hindi. Chopra quipped, “We would all breathe a huge sigh of relief after we finished the Hindi version, and then sit back and think [referring to the English version], ‘Now we can relax and have fun!’”
Social class, generation, and geography are the central reasons offered by industry observers for waning fluency in Hindi. The two main social groups identified as having a poor knowledge of Hindi are actors and directors who grew up within the film industry, nicknamed “star kids,” and upper-middle-class residents of Mumbai, dubbed “South Bombay types.”11 What these groups have in common is limited formal education in Hindi as a result of going to elite English-medium schools in India or boarding schools abroad, as well as the absence of a Hindi-speaking milieu by virtue of growing up in an elite social world in Mumbai where the primary language is English. Ajay Brahmatmaj, the film editor for the Hindi-language Dainik Jagran, the most widely circulated newspaper in India, discussed how in the current generation of actors, those who are from Mumbai and especially from film families speak Hindi only when they are compelled to with their domestic labor and household staff, and hence their knowledge of Hindi is limited to a very simple register. He said (in Hindi), “Many of them say they practice their Hindi, but with whom? With their cook, driver, and vegetable vendor. Now, the conversations with such individuals will be limited in terms of the vocabulary, not more than one hundred to two hundred words. At the most it will be ‘gaadi lao’ [bring the car], now ‘gaadi lao’ is hardly Hindi!”12 Screenwriter Kalpana Chadda, a native of Delhi, who started working in the film industry in the early 2000s and who had learned and spoke English only in school, described how colleagues and friends regard her as an anomaly for being comfortable in Hindi, asking her frequently, “Why do you speak in Hindi so much?”13 She reflected, “Delhi is very Hindi, friends speak to each other in Hindi, but in Bombay it seems not to be appropriate to speak in Hindi and to date that’s the joke about me.”14
Chadda spoke at length about the challenges faced by screenwriters like herself who “think in Hindi” in an industry run by people who primarily “think in English.” One particularly ironic manifestation is when she is hired to write a screenplay but not dialogue. Since a screenplay has to have dialogue, the screenwriter will put in “dummy” or placeholder dialogue, after which the dialogue writer takes over and crafts the speech in the film. Although she is instructed to write the screenplay in English, Chadda ends up writing her dummy dialogue in Hindi because of her facility with the language, but then has to translate them into English for the director, producer, and actors, even though the film will ultimately be in Hindi. Chadda said she felt like telling filmmakers, “Why don’t you just keep this dialogue and throw it away and let the writer write something else because it is double work for me to make the dialogue into English.”15 She also mentioned that she was much less precise in English, but according to her, most directors and producers from Mumbai are unable to comprehend an entire screenplay in Hindi. She asserted, “They won’t be able to listen to a script written completely in Hindi. They won’t get it. When it is in English, they’ll get the craft and say, ‘Oh this scene is tight’ because English lends itself to crispness. Hindi is very difficult for you to go crisp on it. And we can’t use difficult words because everybody is not familiar. If I use good Hindi words, I’ll write a crisp Hindi script, but I can’t do that—I have to use colloquial and general words.”16
Notice that Chadda mentions “listening” to rather than “reading” a script. The dominant convention in the film industry is to orally recount a script, and it is commonplace to hear actors assert in interviews that they decided to work in a particular film after “hearing the script.” Key members of the production team gather to hear the writer or director relay the film’s screenplay. These sessions, referred to as “narrations” in the industry, are undertaken for the purpose of pitching or having a project green-lighted as well as recruiting the cast and crew. Since a script is often judged on how well it is narrated, Chadda explained that the practice of narrating a script disadvantaged writers who had limited proficiency in English.
While Chadda related the difficulties writers face with producers and directors, others spoke of the challenges of working with actors who had limited Hindi skills. Kamlesh Pandey, president of the Film Writers Association, who has written the dialogue or screenplay for a number of prominent films starting in the late 1980s, was vociferous in his criticism of the state of writing and Hindi in particular. Pandey blamed urban, English-educated writers and industry insiders for the poor state of Hindi, and criticized the prevalent practice of having to write Hindi dialogues in Roman rather than Devanagari script because of the inability of many younger actors to read Hindi. Pandey complained, “Hindi has come to such a state that it has to be read in Roman, and hence I’m afraid the lipi, the script will soon become extinct. In cinema, Devanagari lipi [script] has more or less disappeared.”17 For those writers who specialize in writing dialogue in Hindi, either from the outset or adapting someone else’s English dialogue, an actor’s facility with the language has significant consequences for the writer’s creative labor. For an individual who is fluent in Hindi, which is a phonetically based language and alphabet, having to write dialogues in Roman script involves more effort, especially since the screenplay of a Hindi film on average comprises about seventy-five to eighty scenes and tends to be dialogue-centric.18
Another impetus to transliterate Hindi into Roman script is connected to broader efforts to refashion the film industry into a professional, corporatized site with greater emphasis on planning, preproduction, and rationalization of the production process.19 An important artifact of such planning is the “bound script,” which has achieved a near-totemic status within the film industry. The desire for a complete typed script with dialogue available in advance, supported by a younger generation of computer-literate screenwriters and assistant directors who have had some formal film training, has led to an increase in the use of screenwriting software such as Final Draft, which is an English-only application. Hence, even if actors can read Hindi, screenwriters who utilize such software have to write their dialogues in Roman script, and then may have to transcribe the dialogue separately into Devanagari for veteran actors who find it alienating to have to read Romanized Hindi. Chadda, who uses Final Draft, remarked, “It’s so strange that we have a multibillion-dollar Hindi film industry, but we are slaves to English. We even write the Hindi word in English.”20
Writers also related that they had to think harder about vocabulary and syntax when actors were not fluent in Hindi. Pandey complained that he was unable to be subtle in his dialogue writing since actors did not understand nuance or idioms specific to Hindi. Writer-director Sriram Raghavan mentioned that he had to keep in mind an actor’s facility with Hindi when composing dialogues because good lines could ring false depending on the actor’s ability to deliver them. Sameer Sharma, a writer-director who has written dialogues for films helmed by directors who knew little to no Hindi, related his frustration: “I think the sad part is that most actors today have a diction problem, so they don’t really try, and there are directors who don’t correct them because they themselves have a problem. That’s very visible, and it’s very irritating for somebody who knows the language, but they get away with it so they don’t work hard.”21
Writers thus feel they have to work harder to make it easier for actors to read and speak Hindi, rather than actors expending the effort to improve their language skills. This appears as another manifestation of the star-centric nature of the Hindi film industry. Ever since the decline of the studio system in the aftermath of World War II, the Hindi film industry is star-oriented, star-driven—and, many would complain, star-controlled. In the next section I discuss how language becomes critical to some filmmakers’ attempts to redefine or challenge mainstream paradigms of filmmaking.
