9. “No One Thinks in Hindi Here”: Language Hierarchies in Bollywood

Abstract

Immy, can you tone it down a bit?"I was watching a film shoot at the Marriott Renaissance in Mumbai in July 2014, and the director, Vikram Bhatt, was instructing the lead actor, Emraan Hashmi, about his body language during a tracking shot where he had to stride resolutely across the hotel's ballroom.When Bhatt's assistant director began to block the shot for Hashmi, Bhatt bellowed in Hindi from his position in the back of the room, "Arre beta, thode dheere se jaao! [Hey son, go a little slower!]." He then spoke on the phone in Gujarati with a marketing representative from the music company that had released the soundtrack of his soon-to-be-released film.I noticed that the sheets of Hindi dialogue used by another assistant director to monitor actors' accuracy were written in Roman rather than Devanagari script.A Hindi film set is a highly multilingual environment, and it is common to hear several languages spoken, but the linguistic bifurcation illustrated in this example, where Bhatt spoke in Hindi with his assistants and in English with his lead actor and screenwriter, is a manifestation of the increasing presence of English in the everyday life of the Hindi film industry.In 1996, when I started fieldwork on the production culture of the film industry, I was surprised by how prevalent English was as a lingua franca, especially among the actors, directors, writers, art directors, designers, and others responsible for the creative labor that goes into a film.For below-the-line workers, Hindi was merely one language in a complex linguistic universe that included Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and Punjabi.This is a testament to the tremendous linguistic diversity of India-18 official languages but 122 languages with at least 10,000 native speakers-and the cosmopolitan nature of the Hindi film industry, where people hail from every 9 "No One Thinks in Hindi Here" Language Hierarchies in Bollywood

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