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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Feature |
Death by Dialogue
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| What does it mean for the future of Hindi cinema if most films are now in fact conceived, thrashed out and largely executed not in Hindi but in English? Will filmmakers only tell the stories of a minuscule section of the population? |
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| In Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal
(2009), Jai and Meera ( Saif Ali
Khan and Deepika Padukone)
are a modern-day couple living in
London.
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| I |
T MAY SEEM UNIMAGINABLE to a generation brought up on Abhishek
Bachchan’s Bluffmaster! rap and Kareena Kapoor’s size-zero
diet, but 20 years ago, Hindi films were not cool. In large
numbers of upper-middle-class, English-speaking Indian families,
children were banned from watching “that trash”. Even if
they grew up watching Hindi films on television (and |
later, video) in the company of grandmothers and household help, they would transition, by their teenage years, into thinking of them as a sort of guilty pleasure.
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Wake Up Sid (2009) is set
in contemporary Mumbai and
tells the story of spoilt rich-kid Sid
Mehra, played by Ranbir Kapoor. |
But a decade and a half ago, something changed. The reemergence
of the teenybopper romance, now enclosed in the cloying folds of the
family, began to wean the middle-class audience away from their TV-VCR
viewing and back to the cinemas—which were themselves being
revamped into multiplexes. In a kind of reaction to the saccharinesweet,
sanitised, mostly foreign locales of these films, there emerged
the gritty urban gangster film. For 42-year-old Navdeep Singh, who
had been working as an advertising professional in the US, the moment of transformation was coming back home on holiday
in 1998 and watching Satya. He went on to direct Manorama
Six Feet Under (2007). For 27-year-old scriptwriter Ishita
Moitra (whose credits include 2009’s Kambakkht Ishq, and
this year’s Always Kabhi Kabhi), then barely in her teens, it
was Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). “Earlier, you spoke
to your friends about Batman, but not about the Hindi films
you watched. That changed after DDLJ,” says Moitra.
Over the past decade, people like Singh and Moitra—people
whose primary language is English—have come to form
a larger proportion of the Hindi film industry than ever before.
In the changing demographic of Hindi cinema, not just
of actors and art directors, but even directors and scriptwriters
are people much more comfortable in English than
in Hindi. What does it mean, one wonders, for most films to
be made in a language that no longer comes easily to their
creators? What does it mean for Hindi cinema if most films
under that rubric are now in fact conceived, thrashed out
and largely executed not in Hindi but in English?
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Kader Khan, one of the iconic dialogue
writers of the 1970s and 1980s, worked on films such as
Muqaddar ka Sikandar and Amar Akbar Anthony. |
Shyam Benegal, director of acclaimed films like Kalyug,
Mandi and Welcome to Sajjanpur, dismisses the question as
falsely conjuring up a linguistically pure golden age. The
Hindi film industry, he argues, has its origins in a hybrid, cosmopolitan mix of people and languages. “If you go back
to the 1930s and think about a studio like Bombay Talkies,
you’ll find that the producer was Himanshu Rai, a Bengali;
the main director was Franz Osten, a German; and the star
actress was Devika Rani, whose Hindi wasn’t something to
write home about!” Benegal says. “But in any case, directors,
technicians—how does it matter if they can’t speak Hindi
for peanuts? Actors, well, they can get language coaches.
The only thing that makes a difference is the writer.”
So let’s talk about the writers, then. From the 1930s right
up to the 1970s, Bombay cinema was famously a vehicle for
accomplished writers in Urdu and Hindi. “Whether it was
Pandit Mukhram Sharma, who wrote so many socially conscious
films for BR Chopra, or men like Kamal Amrohi, KA
Abbas or Wajahat Mirza, the writers of the ’50s and ’60s had
a connection to the language,” says 51-year-old Anjum Rajabali,
himself a well-known scriptwriter (Drohkaal, Ghulam,
Rajneeti) and someone who has helped institute scriptwriting
courses at the Film and Television Institute of India
(FTII) in Pune and the Whistling Woods International film academy in Mumbai. Rajabali points out that even as late
as the 1970s, most of Hindi cinema’s scripts were written
in Urdu. Javed Akhtar—one-half of what is probably Hindi
cinema’s most successful scriptwriting team, Salim-Javed—wrote in Urdu, which was then transliterated into Devanagari
for the benefit of those who couldn’t read the Urdu
script. But Rajabali is also quick to point out that the bound
screenplay didn’t really figure that much in the Hindi film
industry until very recently. “When Mahesh Bhatt first met
me in the 1980s, he said to me, ‘I believe you write?’ You see,
very few scripts were actually written at that time (with the
exception of Salim-Javed). There would be a 10-or 20-page
story, on the basis of which a director, producer, technicians
and actors all came together, and the screenplay actually
emerged in the process of making the film. Which meant
that scenes were written, if at all, on scraps of paper, and
there was no complete screenplay written out.”
Rajabali seems to suggest that the emergence of a culture
of screenplay writing in Hindi cinema was itself coterminous
with the linguistic transition to English. Part of the
reason for this, as Rensil D’Silva (screenplay writer, Rang
de Basanti and director, Kurbaan) matter-of-factly points out, is technological: it’s about people typing screenplays
on computers with English keyboards and screenwriting
software that would enable writers to time their scenes
only being available in English. In any case, the major directors
who started working in the 1990s, from a Sooraj
Barjatya to an Aditya Chopra, wrote their screenplays in
English—though they may have written their dialogues in
Hindi. Today, Rajabali estimates, more than 50 percent of
screenplays written for Hindi films are originally written
in English, including the first draft of the dialogue. It is only
at a later stage that a Hindi dialogue writer is brought in,
and the English translated to Hindi.
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Anjum Rajabali is a well-known scriptwriter in the
Hindi film industry. Among his significant films are Drohkaal,
Ghulam and Rajneeti. |
Now, one can argue that filmmaking is—and always has
been—a collaborative exercise, and the screenplay (that is,
the film script), in particular, is often the product of several
stages of writing and rewriting by different people. By that
logic, a division of labour between the screenplay writer and
the dialogue writer is just a function of different skill sets.
But what is interesting is that the dialogue writer as a
named separate entity is unique to India. In Hollywood, or
in European cinema, for example, there is no such thing.
There may be several people credited for the story—the
original germ of the plot, with the bare bones of characters
and events in place—or for the screenplay, the fleshed-out
script of a film, containing a scene-by-scene description of
the action: what characters will do and say, how and where
they will do so, and instructions for shot transitions. But
there is no separate credit for dialogue.
So why did Hindi cinema need the specialised ‘dialogue
writer’? Was it because, as Rajabali argues, the film went directly from the story stage to the shooting stage—steered
by a forceful director—and then all that was needed was
dialogue for each scene as it came along? Or was it because,
as Javed Akhtar points out, Hindi cinema—unlike Tamil
or Malayalam or Bengali cinema—did not emerge in a region
where Hindi, or rather Hindustani, was the spoken
language? The roots of Hindi cinema lie in Pune, Calcutta,
Lahore and Bombay. “Bengalis, Marathis and Parsis, who
were great screenplay writers, were not necessarily conversant
with spoken Hindi/Hindustani. So they needed dialogue
writers who were,” says Akhtar.
If the epic cinema of the 1960s—a Mughal-e-Azam or a
Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam—demanded a dialogue writer with
a poetic sensibility, the gritty urban cinema of the 1970s
and 1980s—especially after the success of Salim-Javed—demanded memorable punchlines. Also, mainstream Hindi
cinema’s tendency to repeat the same plots (families separated
by fate reuniting at the end of the movie, poverty-stricken
mothers with illegitimate sons, starcrossed lovers
trying to bridge the class divide) made it more and more
important to have dialogue that distinguished one film’s
mother-son scene from another’s, one star’s screen persona
from another’s. For scriptwriter Jaideep Sahni (Chak De!
India, 2007; Bunty Aur Babli, 2005; Khosla ka Ghosla, 2006),
this is what makes the dialogue writer the unsung hero of
popular Hindi cinema. “Especially by the 1980s, this Ramlila
mode, where you knew exactly what was going to happen,
had come to dominate Hindi films. Now, if there’s an
evil smuggler villain in every single film, how will one villain
be differentiated from another? How else but through
dialogue?” says Sahni.
| PAL PILLAI / AFP / GETTY IMAGES |
 |
Shyam Benegal is the director of acclaimed films
like Kalyug, Mandi and Welcome to Sajjanpur. |
If, for Jaideep Sahni, the dialogue writer is the invisible
soul of the popular Hindi film, there are others like Rekha
Nigam for whom it is the screenplay that ought to get more
credit than it does. The nuts-and-bolts business of narrative
structure, in this view, is seen as something quite distinct
from the embroidered overlay of cinematic dialogue.
Nigam, who has written dialogue (Parineeta, 2005) as well
as screenplays (Laaga Chunari Mein Daag, 2007), describes
the difference between the two functions as akin to the difference
between interior decoration and architecture: “The
screenplay is the skeleton that nobody actually sees. The
dialogue is what gets the claps.”
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Anand Ramakrishnan
21 December 2011
02:37 AM
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The writer warns "we should stay clear of falling into the authenticity trap", but the sense I got was that a desire - though confused - for authenticity was the point of this whole article. Also, should we forget the irony of the fact that the article is written in English, "consumed" by upper middle class babalog and babyjis? And, in the last paragraph, who is the "one" hoping those hopes? Why?
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Amitava Kumar
30 June 2011
09:17 AM
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I enjoyed reading this very much, not least because I feel I'm trapped, along with billions others, in a metropolitan simper that is a Karan Johar sentence. The whole issue of Indian fiction in English is something I was thinking about while reading the piece--no, come to think of it, I've been thinking about it for the last twenty years--and was struck by the observation here that the whole problem exists exactly in reverse in the Hindi film world. I had always thought the two problems were identical: the baba log and babyjis having no clue of vernacular lives.
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Rohan
17 May 2011
07:20 PM
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But at the end of the day how can you expect authenticity in representation from a film industry that is largely driven by commercial interests? Surely this is at the crux of it?
Superb piece. Much food for thought.
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Factchecker
5 May 2011
11:06 AM
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Alyque Padamsee is not a Parsi, he is a Muslim.
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James Goldberg
29 April 2011
10:28 PM
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Lage Raho Munna Bhai was written primarily by my former teacher, Abhijat Joshi, who writes in English for film and is also fluent in Gujarati but relies on others for Hindi.
My sense is that part of Munna Bhai's success though was its ability to capture the spirit of the film by creating the term "Gandhigiri" which worked for colloquial Hindi speakers.
On the other hand, the main slogan of 3 idiots was "Aal izz well," which is more obviously English but marked clearly as a Hindi loan phrase by the adapted pronunciation. It seems to have caught on with a large segment of the population, too.
I do know that Rajkumar Hirani feels some of Rancho's speeches on education suffered in the translation from English to Hindi...
It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on those two films in terms of language construction and use.
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Contrite Goose
29 April 2011
12:51 PM
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The problem is that they sound unconvincing when they speak in transliterated Hindi and even in English. The attempt is to speak like the characters in English movies, whether the dialog is in Hindi or English. That is what makes it all so jarring. Even if you compare advertisements over the years, you can notice this. We are all acting out situations which are so unfamiliar to anyone. The filmmakers from the North and the Hindi belt, including Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Bharadwaj and all understand this. Even if you make a movie about English speaking Indians in the metros, it looks very affected.
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