BackLounge Opinion | I can walk English, I can talk English
Finding Fanny and the business of non-Hindi Indian films
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Naseeruddin Shah can, Om Puri can’t. Rahul Bose can, Irrfan Khan can too on occasion. And going by the trailer of Homi Adajania’s Finding Fanny, it appears as though Deepika Padukone can, as well as Arjun Kapoor.
Many Bollywood actors speak and think in English, read their scripts in the Roman alphabet, and are much more comfortable giving interviews in English than in Hindi. The popular entertainment television talk show Koffee With Karan is conducted entirely in English. Yet it is with Hindi cinema that movie celebrities earn their fame and fortune, with some among them winging it with the help of language coaches and the casual banter that characterizes most movie dialogue. One of the criticisms levelled at Padukone when she first appeared in the movies in 2007 was her Hindi accent, passable to the undemanding ear but grating for the auditory senses of those who knew better.
Yet here is Padukone, an in-demand actor with hits to her name. Several of her rivals and peers aren’t doing too badly either, using their bilingualism to appear at ease with the home and the world, adopting one voice for the movies and another for private and public appearances.
Careful observers will take issue with Padukone’s dodgy Goan Catholic accent in Finding Fanny, while slang watchers, especially those with intimate knowledge of British vulgarisms, will have a field day unpacking the layers contained in the title. Yet there is already no doubt that Padukone is as comfortable in English as in Hindi. The question is whether Finding Fanny will inaugurate a wave of English films starring prominent Bollywood faces. More likely a trickle—despite the occasional use of English titles for all-Hindi films, like A Wednesday! and Gangs Of Wasseypur, it’s a no-brainer that a movie has to be in the majority language if it is to reach its intended monetary goals, which are usually too ambitious to be covered by an English-only audience. Finding Fanny will, like Delhi Belly before it, be released in English as well as a Hindi dubbed version.
Popular Hindi film-makers solved the problem of the bewildering diversity of regional variations, dialects and accents in Hindi by stripping down character names to mononyms and the language itself to a generic, catch-all version of the more nuanced and complex speech patterns in Hindi-majority regions. Urdu gave way to Hindustani, for one thing, while argot served as tempering rather than as the main ingredient in dialogue.
Mumbai generated its own patois, eloquently labelled “Hug-me" by Salman Rushdie in his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Lead character Vina Apsara, writes Rushdie, could communicate “not only in English". Rushdie writes, “Because it was only me, she could prattle on in Bombay’s garbage argot, Mumbai ki kachrapati baat-cheet, in which a sentence could begin in one language, swoop through a second and even a third and then swing back round to the first. Our acronymic name for it was Hug-me. Hindi Urdu Gujarati Marathi English. Bombayites like me were people who spoke five languages badly and no language well."
Most Indians can communicate in at least three languages, if Hindi is not their mother tongue, so the movies cannot escape slippages into the native tongue. Yet several Indian film-makers have boldly attempted to express themselves in the language of their colonizers to stay more true to their milieu. Indian English—that unique, catchy and occasionally giggle-worthy cousin of Hinglish—is especially useful in movies that explore the in-between identity crisis of deracinated Indians who feel alienated from their own country. These include the cult telefilm In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, written by Arundhati Roy, and Dev Benegal’s estimable debut English, August. “You’re going to get hazaar f****d in Madna," a dual-language and double-barrelled sentiment present in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s source novel as well as in the movie, simply cannot be translated.
Aparna Sen’s debut feature 36 Chowringhee Lane is in English, and the Kolkata director made two more in the language, Mr And Mrs Iyer and 15 Park Avenue. In all these films, the use of English is hardly incidental. Violet Stoneham, the central character of 36 Chowringhee Lane, is an Anglo-Indian teacher who offers lessons in William Shakespeare’s plays. Mrs Iyer is a Tamil woman whose Chennai drawl helps her connect emotionally and romantically with Raja, a Bengali. 15 Park Avenue is set in a middle-class family that is at ease with English and Bengali. Nagesh Kukunoor’s debut, Hyderabad Blues, makes wonderful use of idiomatic Telugu and English. Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox switches deftly between Hindi and English, and audiences around the world who are comfortable with subtitles have had no problem with the movie’s use of two languages.
Would Shyam Benegal’s Trikal, set in an aristocratic Goan family in the 1960s before the state won independence from Portuguese rule, have been more effective in English? Perhaps an English-Portuguese-Konkani dialogue sheet might have helped some of the actors better, especially Leela Naidu, who plays the matriarch.
There is no escaping the popularity and importance of English as a language of communication, creative expression and commerce. Countless Indians write and speak perfectly well in English, and won’t survive a forced shift to Hindi or any other local tongue. This can also be said about several of the younger actors in the movie business, who have been educated in English medium schools, learn their Hindi from the movies or the Mumbai streets—not always a good thing, given how bastardized it often is—and would certainly welcome the opportunity to make movies outside of Hindi every once in a while. All that needs to be done is for the film folk to figure out a way to make money out of stories in English as it’s spoken by urban Indians. The cinema coming out of Mumbai is often reduced to Hindi cinema even though it includes, at the very least, Marathi. Perhaps English needs to be added to the Mumbai film industry’s scheduled list.
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