The Politics of the Hindi Language

The Politics of the Hindi language must never be extended beyond paying just lip-service. And there are many reasons for this even if you are tempted by the shenanigans of "national language", "national integration" and all that jazz. Nonsense.

To begin with, you cannot impose Hindi language as if it is a god-send or it has to be spoken by all of India's population. There are as many national languages in India as Hindi which are as beautiful, lyrical and classical, infact, more classical than Hindi. It is not heaven's exclusive license to Hindi to be spoken of highly and get multiplied manifold times. Down South, Tamil is one of the world's oldest languages and beats the pulp out of many others in the sheer volume of literature. Infact, it is more than 2000 years old language with wide variety and cultural richness. Telugu is equally old, dating back to atleast a thousand years of rich lineage. In a survey of the world's most beautiful languages done in 2011, judged primarily by three reasons - lyrical beauty, elegance of letters as they are written/printed and the richness of the alphabet, Telugu came second only to Korean language beating most languages in the world including Modiji's second-favorite language, Hindi (the first one must be his mother-tongue, I am just guessing). The Telugu film industry is India's largest segment in the number of films made per annum. Malayalam is another mesmerising language that has a cult followership across and outside India, aided by a race who have been migrant yet proud of its heritage. Malayalam's movies, warts and all, continue to dominate the film industry in India on matters of story-telling essentials. Malayalam's language itself resonates with most of the words derived from Sanskrit. Kannada, considered a mirror language to Telugu has a history that is co-terminous with that of Telugu. Scratch the surface and you will find many other languages in South India which are vibrant, exciting and alive - Konkani, Tulu are few examples of tongues which are equally vibrant and celebratory of the richness of life and language albeit without formal written scripts. Then you have the languages of the west and east - from Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Bihari, Bengali and Assamese - all have their own niche.

At the height of the Mauryan empire which ruled for three generations the whole of the Indian subcontinent from the edge of eastern Iran to today's Bangladesh, portions of South would remain outside its direct control. For most of the Mughal rule and the British rule, the Southern peninsula always enjoyed a halo of respect, identity and privilege to thrive in its atypical avatars and myriad hues. When the British ruled India, they understood that South cannot be reined in by imposing HIndi, so they indoctrinated English into the veins of trade and employment, creating a class of administrative army that kept their linguistic identities yet breathed fire into English. The intercourse with English created a renaissance but Hindi's rise was slow but not uniform. Given a choice of three languages, many South Indians still prefer to learn English rather than Hindi and there are historical reasons for that which have to be understood and empathised with. Even a docile prime minister Nehru understood the language divide that exists between North and South India. He created a Deputy Prime Minister post exclusively for catering to the interests of South - a tradition that continued until Shastri's rise.

Experts who do not understand this divide jump to conclusions that South is anti-nationalistic or anti-patriotic. Nonsense. It is just that language has always given a rare indemnity from colonial invasions and tortures to the South Indians; on some occasions it provided them quasi-independence or even satellite status while allowing a socio-economic resurgence on a scale that seldom was surpassed. Traditionally, it was the South that opened to the sea routes, developed maritime trade and allowed comprehensive mapping of the Indian Oceans between the Arabs and the Portugese, and later the next European powers that came calling to India - the Dutch, the French and the British. The South also adapted easily to Western influences faster than the North. When Vasco Da Gama came to India and hit the coast of Kerala first in 1498, he thought the people of Kerala were closer to Christianity than Hinduism because he felt the buildings looked like Christian churches rather than Hindu temples. Infact, the "Hindu" itself was a word the Europeans coined to describe the race from the valley of Indus. So much on the South-Indians.

PM Modi should realilse that Hindi has earned its spurs more from the proliferation of Hindi-speaking people who permeate the country and the world and the cultural exports of Hindi into Bollywood, the cuisine and the television. But it hasn't grown to become the language of the country in totality. Hence, that cannot be the reason to impose Hindi on the rest of the country. Hindi is a pulsating and lively language that is beautiful and simple but imposing it as a mandatory language has its down-syndrome. Yes we all love Hindi films and Hindi actors and Hindi writers and Hindi singers but know that no Indian language can be singled out as the lingua franca. For good or bad, the jury is out on which language is the best. Again, for good or bad, English has become the language of convenience and the language of business which cannot be replaced in many lifetimes. It is unwise to thrust your limitations of language on everybody else and re-invent the wheel. There is no long-term good now in learning a language at the cost of development and growth. Sooner or later, the French, the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians and the Chinese will realise that winning the battle against English is not the same as winning the war. It feels great to know that Spanish is the fastest growing language in the Americas, thanks to centuries of spanish invasions. But who cares for Spanish unless the world switches to Spanish. Ditto for the Mandarin. You may speak in Hindi addressing the Bhutanese and the Americans but the impact will never be the same as speaking in the language that rules the air waves.

Talk about language chauvinism, you must know this, DW - Deutsche World and RT - Russia Today, two of the state channels of German and Russian governments broadcast in English language are growing faster than the English channels of CNN and BBC - proof that language chauvinism serves little purpose in a world that almost became a global village with English. Also proof that the Germans and the Russians are eager to playing English. Play to your strengths but don't let language be a barrier to communication. The best way to build national pride is through building up levels of literacy, build up self-reliant people who are productive, skilful, employable or entrepreneurial and get global recognition not by getting chauvinistic about languages. The politics of Hindi language has always proved costly for a Union Government committed to restoring federal balance in India. I fail to understand why this time has to be different.

"Bombay Talkies" Hindi Film Review

"Bombay Talkies" is the name of the latest film co-produced by India's youthful new-age directors: Dibakar Banerjee, Anurag Kashyap, Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar. As the name suggests, it is meant to be an eulogy on Bollywood's century-old idioms. With the exception of Karan Johar, and to some extent, Zoya Akhtar, the other two are one of the two brilliant filmmakers who have sought new ground in bringing in realistic and hard-hitting story-telling with a rare irreverence to old norms while trying to achieve youthful yet compelling emotional connect with the audiences. The producers have selected the most apt title for a film which has four different tales rendered by these four directors - Karan, Dibanker, Zoya and Anurag with half-hour slots each in a total running time of 127 minutes (which includes the four-minute tobacco ad pre-and post interval and a gaudy "Om Shanti Om" style medley of Bollywood boys and girls - from Aamir to SRK to Ranbir and Kareena and Vidya Balan). Originally, Bombay Talkies was founded in 1934 by the First Lady of Indian Cinema - Devika Rani and her first husband Himanshu Rai. They went on to make many films which had an impact on the development of early Indian Cinema. Bombay Talkies became an icon for the arrival of Indian Cinema and subsequently, we all know how Mani Ratnam started his own Madras Talkies as a motif for South Indian Cinema.

Back to "Bombay Talkies" the movie. The four films are directed individually by the four talents above, with their respective name splashed on the screen when their film starts with a 15 second blackout separating one from another to indicate the end of one film and the beginning of the other. That way, the format is a little different from "Darna Mana Hai" where the stories lead upto the climactic story ending. That makes this a winning collaboration with a must-watch tag. What makes the four stories watchable is the bench-strength use of promising technicians like Amit Trivedi who scored thrilling music for all the four stories, inter-mixing the need to elevate the many moods essayed in each director's short story with impressive repertoire of folk music, playback, instrumentation from everyday rhythms and purcussions. Anyone who has long spotted Amit Trivedi from the time he debuted on MTV Unplugged till "DevD" OST got released will vouch that Amit Trivedi is the most-dazzling find amongst the current crop of Bollywood music composers. His music is rich, varied and culturally resonating with the heartbeats of Hindi heartland music, no wonder he still hasn't got the call from masala-oriented South film producers. 

How are the four stories? Are they real? Yes. Credible? Yes. Evocative? Yes, again. 

First story is an explicit take on Indian Male homosexuality directed by Karan Johar (what else where you expecting?). Randeep Hooda and Rani Mukherjee live their own lives in different cubicle nations within the media industry. They are almost sex-less and live a boring civil life until their frustrations surface with the entry of an intern at Rani's office. This young lad is a self-confessed Gay and he gets cosy with Rani in a platonic way only to get cosier with her husband in a plutonic way. Karan seems deft in handling the emerging theme of homosexuality and its repurcussions in conservative Indian families. The gay abandon with which Karan revels in re-creating the sexual preferences of an emerging male order makes it a subtle watch with some hummable music remixed of the old sixties by Amit Trivedi. That room, that music room of old LP records and audios owned by Randeep Hooda in the film must be any music lover's delight - it must belong to one of them - Anurag Kashyap, Producer Viacom's Raghav Behl or Farhan Akhtar, Zoya's sibling.

The second story is the most brilliant of the short films, directed by Dibaker Banerjee. It shows an in-form Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a go-nowhere dweller of a certain chawl in Mumbai, with a bed-ridden daughter who is tired of dad's old stories and a wife who juggles many jobs in three shifts. As if to make a statement on Ponzi schemes, Dibaker introduces EMU farming which has caught on with India's aspiring middle-class. One day, our Mumbai householder goes for the job of a Security Guard, misses it by a whisker and lands himself in a crowd watching Ranbir Kapoor's latest shoot. He gets a rare call from the film's Assistant Directors to enact a two-second scene - to bump into Ranbir from the other end, engrossed holding a newspaper. He exults at the opportunity and gets ten minutes to rehearse in a solitary set away from the din where he works himself up to do the role. In that interlude, he imagines having  an intense conversation with his theatre-obsessed father - brilliantly played by Sadashiv Amrapurkar - who was always pushing him to get to the basics of life. Then the shot readied, improvisations done, Nawaz goes home in a trance forgetting the small change, and the bottle of water earned as a perk for the brief role. He goes home, re-enacts the day's exciting proceedings to his daughter and wife, in a majestic  narrative without words and only flute music in background. This is the best story and my research tells that this is based on one of Satyajit Ray's famous short stories. 

The last two stories are more effusive of the magic spell of Bollywood on India's youth and children. Zoya's story is about a young boy whose father drives him to football but the boy loves the dances of Bollywood. He eulogies Katrina Kaif and becomes her in dreams and in daylight as he pursues dancing to the point of raising money for his sister. The end is filmy with sibling love and dream coming true but this is the only story which has an item song, if you can call that of Katrina's onscreen and off-screen presence in the film. The last story by the nonchalant Anurag Kashyapa is about a father (Sudheer Pandey) and son (Vineet Singh). The father's wish is to send the son with an heirloom bottle of "Murabba" (a kind of a ladoo made of sweet pumpkin) to Bollywood's Badshah's house - Prateeksha - the home of Amitabh Bachchan for a bite by the legendary actor so he can die in peace, something his father did with Yousuf Khan a.k.a Dilip Kumar. The saga is all about the days of wait and exasperation by the youth from Allahabad as he encounters many others who live on a pail of water in order to shake hands with Bollywood's glitterati. It is a pithy take by Anurag to capture the timeless appeal of Bollywood's icons. There's a sweet ending with a twist in the tale but Anurag handles it well with  raunchy wit.

On the whole, all the four stories have their signature styles of their creators who are in between their swinging and cutting-edge form. Undoubtedly, my take is that the honors go the four in this pecking order: Dibaker, Anurag, Zoya and Karan. What spoils the party in the end as we are about to applaud a rare ensemble of a talented foursome is a loud reprise to the ruling Divas of Bollywood in their audacious dream costumes - as I said from Kapoors to Khans. This must have been some producer's silly idea to endear an otherwise charming junction of upmarket, mofussil and fairy tales to the front-benchers who whistle at sighting each of the two generations of glitterati including Sridevi, Juhi and Madhuri. A great, watchable experiment and hopefully, Viacom should make it viable for more coming in this direction of sterotype-smashing cinema. 4 out of 5 for "Bombay Talkies". But I wonder why, U/A for a film that starts off the first story with hair-raising homosexuality. Maybe India will be the 15th nation in the world to endorse same-sex marriage now that the Censors have no objection to it.