From 2006 on, a number of films produced by A-list production companies have utilized local registers of Hindi that set them apart from earlier films.22 With a few exceptions, these films forgo the use of major stars and are set in small towns or subaltern spaces of large cities. Screenwriter Anjum Rajabali commented that the generic Hindustani of earlier eras of filmmaking was disappearing and that in contrast to the past, when characters spoke in the same dialect and register regardless of region or social class, in contemporary films, “characters’ language is rooted in the cultural milieu in which they exist—not just region-specific, but also area-specific, city-specific, and locality-specific.”23 Rajabali explained this shift in terms of a greater concern with authenticity and realism. Devika Bhagat, a writer-director trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, asserted that it was not possible to have a uniformity of speech across an entire film when its characters represented a wide array of socioeconomic backgrounds. Discussing her directorial debut, Bhagat described the characters and their various milieus: “I have a boy who’s from the Dharavi slums, he speaks in Mumbaiya tapori language. And then there is a middle-class IT professional who speaks in Hinglish, so for each character, the language is specific to their background, their region, their attributes, so that’s why there cannot be a pure form of Hindi anymore.”24
This quasi-ethnographic attention to linguistic detail reflects the tremendous concern of a newer generation of filmmakers with gesturing toward a form of realism in mainstream cinema. One way to index the “real” is through spoken words and dialogue. Even if the rest of the production design is in the realm of fantasy and spectacle, dialogue can mark the rootedness of a film. In many recent films, the setting is actually not integral to the narrative. For example, certain films that showcase a Delhi Punjabi vernacular could have been set anywhere in India, as Delhi was not crucial to their plots; they could have easily been set in Mumbai. These films are anchored to a particular place not by the story but by the language and the register of the dialogue.
Language has become an important way to distinguish among films; it is being foregrounded not just in songs but also in dialogue and speech. Thus language, in terms of dialect, accent, slang, and proverbs, has become an important part of the mise-en-scène, akin to songs, action, locales, and sets. Dialogue has always been important in Hindi cinema, but the turn to the colloquial helps to “dress the dialogue” in a different way. Writers are less reliant on clever turns of phrase or memorable dialogue because mere showcasing of the vernacular is enough. Writers can demonstrate skill not by cleverly crafting witty or memorable dialogue but by merely sounding nonstandard and “rustic.”
Industry professionals offered two main explanations for this turn to the vernacular. One was framed in terms of a backlash of sorts by filmmakers, who were mostly from the Hindi-speaking north and outsiders to both Mumbai and the industry, against the dominant paradigm of filmmaking in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Referring to filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap, who is heavily identified with gritty, violent, dark dramas frequently set in nonmetropolitan sites, writer-director Sriram Raghavan stated, “There was that big phase of the Yashraj and Karan Johar films, which were shot largely abroad. Anurag and that group made it even more specific about certain areas [in India] because it was a reaction to some of these big films—that there were too many of them and they were seeming fake.”25
Director Tigmanshu Dhulia asserted that the artifice of films from this period was a result of Mumbai-bred filmmakers catering only to diasporic audiences: “Because films were being catered to the sensibility of the NRIs [nonresident Indians], the language became fairly easy, poetry was lost, subjects and story lines became very frivolous. Suddenly we stopped making rooted films, and because we were getting revenues from abroad, we stopped making films for Indians.” Dhulia went on to describe how filmmakers who grew up in the Hindi film industry—the second- and third-generation professionals who began their careers in the 1990s—“had not seen India; they’d only seen Bombay.”26 Due to their limited experience of India, according to Dhulia, such filmmakers only made “films about films; they were creating characters out of filmi characters, because they had no experience of India, of life; they thought Bombay is India.”27
Dhulia claimed that people coming from outside Mumbai played a significant role in transforming Hindi cinema and the film industry. In Dhulia’s words, outsiders enabled cinema to “find geography.” Referring to himself and a number of other filmmakers, Dhulia remarked, “We came with our experiences, and so we started making films about the characters we knew, about the region we knew, so that is why the change of character and of language; we became very area specific. Now films have a geography, whereas earlier films didn’t have a geography at all.”28 Sameer Sharma pointed out how even if the “bosses”—those who control finance and distribution—are from Mumbai, many of the directors, such as Anurag Kashyap, are outsiders who are becoming producers themselves and thus are able to green-light or foster films that are set in nonurban or nonmetropolitan settings. With reference to his own directorial debut, Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, a quirky comedy produced by Kashyap and set in Punjab, which employed Hindi heavily laced with Punjabi expressions, idioms, and humor, Sharma explained that although Kashyap is not from Punjab, he was able to understand a script that was rooted in a small town milieu by virtue of not being from Mumbai. Sharma stated, “It’s important that people who are actually from outside can influence the making of certain films, which may not be understood by a producer who is only from Bombay.”29
Sharma’s remarks illustrate how even filmmakers who self-identify as “outsiders” or as “indie” work very much within mainstream structures of finance, distribution, and exhibition. In fact, their use of Hindi can be seen as another way to assert and perform their “independence” from “Bollywood,” so that their linguistic ability becomes an important form of cultural capital that allows them to distinguish themselves within the industry.30 The overwhelmingly positive critical reception of such directors—including Dibakar Banerjee, Vishal Bharadwaj, Abhishek Chaubey, Tigmanshu Dhulia, and Anurag Kashyap—by the English-language media in India, mostly for their “authentic” portrayals of the “Hindi heartland,” illustrates the success some filmmakers have had with an outsider or renegade image.
However, rather than indexing the “real” or “geography,” the Hindi in such films circulates as an exotic parlance or a simulacrum of the Indian hinterlands within English-speaking cultural spheres. The widely divergent responses between English-language and Hindi-language media regarding Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur provide a case in point. Screened at Cannes in the Directors Fortnight in 2012, this tale about a long-running blood feud between the families of an outlaw and a corrupt politician in Bihar was widely celebrated in the international and Indian press for “redefining” Indian cinema and identified as a potential crossover success. Interestingly, some media analysts noticed that the Hindi press was quite underwhelmed with the film and pointed out that reviewers for Hindi newspapers dismissed the film’s claims to authenticity and argued that it simply pandered to metropolitan stereotypes under the guise of realism.31 With respect to the dialogue, one analyst pointed out, “The English-language media were fawning about precisely the sort of things the Hindi reviewers noticed as false, including the language with its extravagant crudity.”32 I contend that it is only as a result of English becoming the unmarked, naturalized language of production and discourse within the film industry that filmmakers are able to deploy Hindi as a self-consciously marked commodity.
The second reason for the turn to the colloquial has to do with changes in the political economy of the film industry. The fact that some filmmakers are able to utilize language in a way that would have been regarded in an earlier era of filmmaking as limiting or alienating one’s audience has to do with changing structures of finance, production, distribution, and exhibition that have reshaped the Hindi film industry’s audience imaginaries—issues I have explored in detail elsewhere.33 For example, Tigmanshu Dhulia, referring to his 2012 film Paan Singh Tomar, a biopic about a celebrated and medaled Indian steeplechase runner who is forced by circumstances to become a bandit, stated, “The language was Bundelhi; it was not even Hindi and I was scared that . . . I thought the audience would not even understand the language, but they did! So now cinema has changed, and I think it has changed for the better.”34
One of the biggest changes in the political economy of the Hindi film industry since the advent of multiplexes and corporate production and distribution companies is the diminished significance of the “universal hit”—films that do well all over India and across all demographics. This is due to the structural transformations in filmmaking caused by the entry of corporate production companies and multiplexes, which have altered ideas of commercial success in the industry. Multiplexes, with their high ticket rates, revenue-sharing arrangements, and financial transparency, have managed to transform even low to moderate audience attendance or ticket sales into a sign of success. The entry of the Indian organized industrial sector into film production and the ability of established producers to raise money from the Indian stock market have diminished the role of traditional territorial distributors, who were always perceived by filmmakers as averse to cinematic experimentation. Many corporate producers have ventured into both all-India and overseas distribution and possess a much higher threshold for financial risk. These corporate distributors can either rely on profits from some territories to offset losses from others or profit from their investment by reselling distribution rights to individual territorial distributors. A universal hit is simply not as necessary within this new financing and distribution scenario. Thus there is less anxiety on the part of the financing side of the industry if a film appears limited in its appeal.
Sameer Sharma asserted that filmmakers now have a greater opportunity to express their individual style: “Previously you had to cut across to a whole section of the audience, and your way of making was dictated by the fact that a film should work both in New York and in Patna. But today, it’s become more flexible. I think people have gotten more confident that you don’t have reach out to everybody.”35 Sharma’s statements illustrate how the reduced value of the universal hit within the industry has expanded the criteria of success to the benefit of filmmakers. While the previous structure of the industry rewarded—in terms of both economic and symbolic capital—only filmmakers who strived for universal hits, the contemporary structure enables those filmmakers who are unable to achieve or are unconcerned with broad appeal to also raise money and earn prestige and status within the industry.
