9.5: Conclusion

Filmmakers’ prestige and status is critically connected to the ability to circulate within elite social spheres, such as international film festivals, and to garner praise from the English-language press in India and abroad, as seen in the divergent responses to Gangs of Wasseypur. Not all “outsiders” or primary Hindi speakers from northern India are able to leverage their linguistic skills in the same manner as the filmmakers mentioned in this essay. Linguistic skill or fluency in Hindi serves as a form of capital only for those who are also fluent in English—that is, filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap, who are internationally celebrated in prestigious film festivals, such as Cannes and Toronto, and garner a great deal of media and critical attention within India. Those film professionals who know only Hindi, with limited proficiency in English, are condemned to remain assistants (to a variety of department heads), dialogue writers for hire, or language tutors, and are frequently marginalized in the social networks that provide a chance at upward mobility in the industry. Therefore, it appears that while not knowing Hindi is not much of a setback or obstacle to participating in the Hindi film industry, not knowing English can be a problem.³⁶

The Hindi film industry has always been and had to be self-conscious and reflexive about language because of its commercial box-office orientation. In the early years of the film industry, language choice was thought about in terms of intelligibility and access to the largest market. Here I have argued that filmmakers consciously consider code choice as a way of marking a film as distinct within a crowded marketplace and of garnering symbolic capital within the film industry. Both are choices born of commercial considerations, but they speak to different moments and transformations in the political economy of the Hindi film industry. Thus, language/code choice helps make visible, or perhaps more appropriately, audible, the changing political economy of the film industry, as well as the changing social relations within it.