For every KGF 2, there's a Jai Bhim. A balance that South has, Bollywood doesn't

After Baahubali, a handful of films from the South have dominated the Hindi belt and the global market. But for every RRR or Pushpa or KGF, there's a Jai Bhim. Here's how South cinema manages this intricate balance.

Let's go back to 2010. Enthiran (Robot in Hindi), starring Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, and directed by Shankar, managed to set the screens on fire. Enthiran is probably the first film to attain pan-India success. In 2015, SS Rajamouli's Baahubali: The Beginning made everyone sit up and take notice of regional cinema. Rajamouli followed it up with Baahubali: The Conclusion, which received greater critical acclaim and commercial success.

Today, films from the South have become super hit ventures in the Hindi belt, normally dominated by the Khans, Kumars and Kapoors. Allu Arjun's Pushpa: The Rise, Jr NTR and Ram Charan-starrer RRR and Yash's KGF: Chapter 2, despite being regional cinema, have performed exceptionally well in the North belt. In short, South films have breached northern territory.

The common talking point in all these films is its larger-than-life scale and hypermasculinity. So, is South cinema bringing the 80s back?

IS SOUTH CINEMA BRINGING THE 80s BACK?

To understand that, let us tell you what we mean when we say '80s cinema'. In the 80s, films were mostly about the hero overcoming all odds and emerging as the saviour of the masses. Are films in the 2010s and 2020s following the trend? The answer would be a big no.

Commercial films have always been about superheroic, larger-than-life heroes. Be it Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam or Kannada, our heroes are capable of anything and everything. Our heroes survive bomb blasts, bash up 100 people and yet remain unscathed. This trend will never go away as it is ingrained in our blood and minds.

Then, why do films like RRR, Pushpa and KGF work well in the Hindi belt? It is safe to say that Bollywood's recipe for a masala or mass film has been failing for over a decade. None of the commercial films has been able to make a mark beyond a certain point. This is where South films differ.

Directors down South nail the perfect recipe for a mass film. Of course, there are duds. But, commercial films, when done right, will transcend borders. And the recent examples are a testament to the theory. Take for example RRR's interval block, who would have thought that Jr NTR's Komaram Bheem would unleash a bunch of wild animals in his attack against the British. Here, we must give credit to SS Rajamouli's wild imagination. He also executed the scene with the utmost perfection. So much so that it made us jump from our seats.

Similarly, when Yash's Rocky in KGF fires bullets against the villains, you cheer, hoot and whistle for him. That is the magic of commercial cinema. And it takes a lot of imagination, conviction and perseverance to get it right.

SO, IS SOUTH CINEMA JUST THAT? MASSY?

Is South cinema all about mass and commercial films? Again, a resounding no. For every RRR, Baahubali and Pushpa, there are films like Jai Bhim, The Great Indian Kitchen, Kaala and Pariyerum Perumal. In the South, there's a market for every kind of cinema. Be it commercial or art house films, the audience embrace them with the same love.

VERSATILITY IS THE KEY

Malayalam cinema has been spearheading a change in the way films are being conceived and told. Films like Premam, Kumbalangi Nights and Jallikattu have proven the fact that content is king. One can take a simple story, but when it has solid substance, it does wonders at the box office.

Coming to Kollywood, Suriya's Jai Bhim, which skipped theatrical release, moved the audience and created a lasting impact. The film did ruffle a few feathers. But, at its core, Jai Bhim had a solid story. Similarly, filmmakers like Vetri Maaran, Pa Ranjith, Mari Selvaraj and Ram have stayed away from the 'conventional' tropes and developed their own film language.

This is probably one of the main reasons why South films get wider recognition, irrespective of the medium.

Let's go to the Telugu film industry, which was all about commercial cinema once. But, not anymore. There's a wonderful balance there. If films like Pushpa, Akhanda, and Aravinda Sametha are made, there are films like C/O Kancharapalem, Pelli Choopulu and Awe, which are also being given their rightful due.

Who would have thought that KGF: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 would put Kannada cinema on the global map? But, director Prashanth Neel and actor Yash believed in it. Films like Kirik Party, Rangitharanga and Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana, among others, have highlighted the best of Kannada cinema.

In the South, there's a space for everyone. Be it ideological films or films that highlight left-wing politics, directors can make a film on diverse topics, and with conviction, unapologetically, unabashedly. And, there lies the success.

(Source: India Today)

Behind the rise of the Hindi dub of Telugu crime drama ‘Pushpa’, a long journey of hits and misses

 The Hindi version of film, starring Allu Arjun, has been an unexpected success.

What’s behind the success of the Hindi version of the Telugu movie Pushpa: The Rise? Sukumar’s crime drama was a slow starter in Telugu but an unexpected hit in Hindi. It has so far earned an estimated Rs 84.44 crore at the box office.

The Pushpa dub has connected with Hindi audiences in a way that even Kabir Khan’s cricket-themed 83 couldn’t. The December 17 release, the first in a two-part film, is now out on Amazon Prime Video.

The hero of the film, Allu Arjun, who at 39 is already a veteran of Telugu cinema, is being hailed as the latest crossover star. Prompted by this success, his 2020 movie Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo is being dubbed and hastily prepared for a January 26 release in Hindi markets. This despite the fact that an official remake, titled Shehzada and starring Kartik Aaryan, is underway.

There are several theories about Pushpa’s commercial triumph. The most persistent explanation is that the Telugu production has the elements that Hindi cinema has been missing of late – stylishly filmed big-screen entertainment, thrilling action scenes, and an ultramacho hero who, despite jigging with a bar dancer, is faithful to his beloved.

Pushpa’s titular hero is certainly an unreconstructed male riposte to Hindi cinema’s frequently metrosexual and plasticky leading men. My name might mean flower but I am fire, Pushpa growls during his battles with various gangsters and a police officer.

In the success of Pushpa and the Hindi dub of the Kannada crime drama KGF: Chapter 1 in 2018, there appears to be a nostalgia for Hindi films as they were perceived to be: a grand 70-mm package, simplistically plotted and morally uncomplicated, with heroes, heroines, villains and vamps who stick to their moulds rather than breaking out of them.

Is Pushpa’s success a passing fancy? A hunger for exotic fruit at a time when local produce isn’t as readily available? The fallout of at least three years of sustained propaganda against the Hindi film industry by Hindutva forces, which has led to what some observers describe as an “anti-Bollywood wave”? Or a significant shift in audience tastes that will further the cause of the pan-Indian movie?

The perils of film trade punditry were summarised by American humorist Will Rogers in an essay as early as 1928: “It’s the only business in the world that nobody knows anything about. Being in them don’t give any more of an inkling about them than being out of them.”

Whether or not Pushpa’s rise will have lasting effects, what is certain is that the film has benefitted from years of assiduous groundwork. For decades, filmmakers from India’s various movie industries have been mixing and matching ideas and talent in their eternal quest for the box-office hit.

Since the 1930s, movies in Telugu, Tamil and Bengali have been remade in Hindi. At the same time, Hindi hits were retooled in other languages. With a few changes in the setting and a fresh cast and music, a movie could appear as good as new.

The traffic between Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad has been the busiest and produced one of the earliest crossover stars. Vyjayanthimala’s Tamil films in the 1940s and 1950s were remade in Telugu and later in Hindi. She spoke her own lines in the Hindi versions, rather than relying on a dubbing artist. Several Tamil and Telugu actresses followed her to the Hindi film world, from Waheeda Rehman and Padmini to Sridevi and Jaya Prada.

The journey is typically easier for actresses. They play a relatively diminished role in the average Hindi film universe. Their energies are focused on looking beautiful and executing song-and-dance sequences, leading to an enduring showbiz legend that Southern actresses have Bharatanatyam in their blood.

The burden of shouldering a film’s narrative journey is nearly always borne by men who must look and sound the part. As a result, heroes from other language cinemas have found it more challenging to surmount the average Hindi filmgoer’s preference for clean-cut men with generic North Indian features and names.

The exceptions include Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth in the 1980s. Ek Duuje Ke Liye (1981), K Balachander’s moneyspinning remake of his Telugu film Maro Charitra, briefly made Haasan a star in Mumbai.

Despite a few hits in the Hindi film world, though, Haasan remained a “Madrasi” – the pejorative term for just about anybody from the southern states. In Rajinikanth’s Hindi films, he was often a comic element with an undefinable accent and wondrous mannerisms.

The preference for women over men has been challenged by recent films. SS Rajamouli’s two-part blockbuster Baahubali (2015 and 2017), which was led by the Telugu actor Prabhas, the success of the Hindi dubbed version of the Kannada crime drama KFG, starring Yash, and Pushpa: The Rise indicate that an untested hero is no obstacle when a film is seen as compelling entertainment. If anything, the foreignness of the leads is part of the overall experience.

The true test of the Hindi filmgoer’s acceptance of non-normative heroes will be seen in the coming months with such films as Rajamouli’s RRR, led by Telugu stars Jr NTR and Ram Charan, and Puri Jagannadh’s Liger, made in both Telugu and Hindi and starring Vijay Devarakonda.

RRR and Liger have hedged their bets by casting Hindi talent – Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn in RRR and Ananya Panday in Liger. Not every film can be a Baahubali, which had only two actors familiar to Hindi audiences (Ramya Krishnan and Rana Daggubati). RRR and Liger also have universal themes – patriotism in the first, sports in the second.

The exercise can be pointless even when producers play it safe. Writer Ashokamitran, who worked in the publicity department of SS Vasan’s legendary Gemini Studios in Chennai, wrote about one such experiment in his memoir Fourteen Years with Boss.

“For the first time a Gemini film sported a real film star whom people in the north would readily recognise with a sigh or a gasp,” Ashokamitran writes with characteristic drollery about the Madhubala-starrer Bahut Din Huwe in 1954. (It didn’t work – the movie flopped.)

Two of the simplest ways to make South meet the Rest of India is dubbing or remaking a Southern hit in Hindi. When they work – Kabir Singh, the 2019 monster hit remake of Arjun Reddy, for example – they have been held up as further proof of Bollywood’s declining ability to come up with winnable material.

Dubbed movies have playing the role of introducing seasoned talent to new audiences. The success of Mani Ratnam’s Roja and Bombay in Hindi in the early 1990s are instances of how dubbing can break through barriers despite unknown faces and the visible mismatch between lip movements and dialogue.

Would Roja had worked if it didn’t have a nationalistic theme, didn’t explore Kashmiri militancy and didn’t have a score by AR Rahman? Similarly, if Bombay took Ratnam out of his comfort zone of Tamil Nadu,the movie’s setting was surely one of the reasons it clicked beyond the state.

Bombay’s exploration of the city’s worst communal riots following the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya by Hindutva mobs in 1992 – a national-level event – gave the movie a wider appeal. So did the casting of Hindi actress Manisha Koirala and yet another winning score by AR Rahman.

Dubbed films have also had a fruitful afterlife on television and YouTube. In the absence of quantifiable research, we have only anecdotal evidence and fan comments on YouTube videos to remind us that audiences can be more adventurous than filmmakers and trade pundits.

None of these efforts guarantee success for the remake or, that matter, the production simultaneously filmed in more than one language. Spurred on by Roja and Bombay, Mani Ratnam ambitiously filmed Aayuthu Ezuthu (2004) in Hindi as Yuva and Raavanan (2010) as Raavan. Despite casting Hindi actors, the remakes didn’t land with the same smoothness as Ratnam’s previous dubbed productions.

The joys of the culture-specific production, which defies the standardising compulsions of the all-India movie, can be preserved only through subtitling. But subtitling across the country’s many languages is even harder to pull off than dubbing.

The cult status accorded to such dubbed films as the Chiranjeevi-starrer Indra – The Tiger notwithstanding, there is no guarantee that a film made for a specific language culture will survive the journey to Hindi. There are several obstacles – the loss of specific cultural references, the quality of the Hindi dialogue and the dubbing, the lack of awareness about directors and actors who are stars in their own right. But when intent matches content, a blockbuster seems inevitable.

With so many remakes, dubbed films and subtitled films on streaming platforms and YouTube, it sometimes appears that the Hindi film industry is the one running low on ideas and imagination. The Bollywood obituary, which has been written over the years and is revised whenever there is a new controversy, ignores the fact that the traffic is two-way. If Hindi producers keep a close eye on Southern productions, Hindi films too are remade in southern languages.

Filmmakers yearn for a pan-Indian film to improve their earnings and increase their cultural footprint. Until that happens, they can best rely on the dubbed movie, which often provides a deceptively fresh look at dated material.

Apart from its filmmaking pizazz, little is actually new about Pushpa: The Rise and that’s possibly why it has worked. We’ve seen it before and we can’t remember where, but we go along because sometimes, familiarity breeds comfort.

(Source: Scroll)

Will Hollywood ever show us the ‘real India’?

 The White Tiger is the latest high-profile film to cast its gaze on Indian society. But how accurate is the picture of the country audiences are getting, asks Charukesi Ramadurai.

In a minor scene in the new film The White Tiger, released today on Netflix, rich-kid businessman Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) exclaims to his driver, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), "you know the real India". The two of them are at a Delhi dhaba – a local quick-stop restaurant, one of hundreds spread over north India – tucking into what looks like a simple meal. Balram possibly eats an even sparser version of this food every day. But Ashok is just back from the US, American-Indian wife in tow, and giddy at the promise of what this market of over a billion people holds for his new business ideas. To him, this meal is one more step towards understanding the puzzle that is his home country.

Like Ashok, filmmakers in the West have tried for many years now to see and show the "real India" – imagining it as a land of unknowable contrasts, teeming poverty, boundless opportunities and exotic mysticism. And of course, brown people. The White Tiger, based on the 2008 Man Booker award winning book by Aravind Adiga, may or may not show a real India, but it definitely features real Indians. For Hollywood (and British cinema), where Peter Sellers as Hrundi V Bakshi in The Party (1968) and Sir Alec Guinness as Professor Godbole in A Passage to India (1984) could paint their faces brown and try to pass as Indians, a movie with an almost entirely Indian cast and crew is a step forward.

The White Tiger's Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani laughs when he talks about this: "For the first time on the set, everyone around looked like me. Everyone was brown, and that had never happened to me before." That was a conscious decision for this film, produced from Mumbai, and with Priyanka Chopra Jonas, perhaps the most high-profile Indian actor in Hollywood right now, as one of the executive producers and stars (playing Ashok's wife Pinky). When the topic of 'brownface' comes up, Bahrani also points to a more recent film which was guilty of the practice: The Social Network (2010), where the entrepreneur character of Indian American Divya Narendra was played by Max Minghella, born to British-Chinese parents.

The casting of Indian talent

This is not to say things have not changed at all when it comes to Hollywood's relationship with India; certainly it has become more welcoming to Indian talent. In the last two decades, several good actors have made the long and rather successful journey from Mumbai to Los Angeles or London: apart from Chopra Jonas, these include Irffan Khan (The Namesake, Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire); Deepika Padukone (XXX: Return of Xander Cage); Anil Kapoor (Slumdog Millionaire, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol); Aishwarya Rai Bachchan (Pink Panther 2, Bride and Prejudice) and Amitabh Bachchan (The Great Gatsby). And the characters they play are not necessarily written as Indian.

However, while this is big news in India, these roles are often blink-and-you'll-miss-it, and could have been played by anyone. "But that is at least a start," says Baradwaj Rangan, national award winning critic and editor at leading Indian film website Film Companion. "Perhaps the only [Western] movie from earlier that used many Indian actors and technicians is Gandhi (1982), but that is more a British production than Hollywood," he adds.

Hollywood has always approached the outside world as something strange, as in Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom, which shows our savage culture with people eating snakes and monkey brains – Baradwaj Rangan

Aswin Punathambekar, Professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, and author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry, says that the UK has always been ahead of the US when it comes to casting actors of Indian origin.

"Even in a popular TV show like The Great British Bake Off, there have been Indian contestants and even winners. And actors like Archie Panjabi and Sanjeev Bhaskar – they play mainstream roles and not just Indian characters," he notes. Indeed, there is a long history of Indian stars in British productions stretching back decades, from Shashi Kapoor in Merchant Ivory's The Householder (1963) and Shakespeare Wallah (1965), to Saeed Jaffrey in multiple film and television roles. By contrast, even now, Punathambekar says, familiar Indian Americans on TV like Padma Lakshmi and Mindy Kaling bear the burden of representation – which translates to "hey, you need to speak for all of us brown people," as he puts it.

What's more, while actors from India – mainly Hindi cinema, or Bollywood – seem to be increasingly finding mainstream roles in Hollywood, the way Indians, and India itself, are depicted in mainstream Western movies and TV shows remains another story altogether. And a largely problematic one. While the Simpsons character Apu – with his grating "Indian" accent voiced by white actor Hank Azaria – has come under great criticism, leading Azaria to stand down from the role last year, the more recent sitcom The Big Bang Theory had nerd Raj Koothrappali speaking in the same heavy, whiney tone that purports to be authentic Indian. And if that wasn't  enough, there are all the show's throwaway references to arranged marriages and households with dozens of servants, in humour as subtle as a blow to the head.

"Hollywood has always approached the outside world as something strange," says Rangan, adding that when there is a story on or from India at all, then it tends to lean towards exotica. "Like Spielberg's Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom (1984) – supposed to be set in India, but actually shot in Sri Lanka – showing our savage culture with people eating snakes and monkey brains," he laughs. He also cites the examples of Eat, Pray, Love (2010), where India equals spirituality, and the very cringey The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), about a retirement home for British ex-pats in Jaipur, "which seems like Indian kitsch to us here, but perhaps to a British audience, it seems like their India dream come true…"

The Slumdog Millionaire effect

There is of course one film about India that has had a seismic worldwide impact in recent decades: the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Rangan believes that its success was due to the fact that it is a universal feel-good story about a poor man who makes it big. "All of us cheer the underdog who wins against all odds. If it had been set in the heart of Africa or the US's rust belt, as long as it is a poor milieu, it would have received the same positive response," he says. 

The most popular motifs either involve situating India as a place of spiritual awakenings, or indulging in what is known disparagingly as poverty porn

Punathambekar notes that Slumdog Millionaire did act as a turning point, in that it showed Hollywood studios that well-made movies about India and with Indian protagonists could click with global audiences, and need not be restricted to south Asians (within and outside the US). He also says that this movie paved the way for the rise of new south Asian faces and voices in the US, such as Kaling, Aziz Ansari and now, Hasan Minhaj.

However he also points out that India is still far from being given its due in Western TV and film – and that there is a very distinct difference between the way Hollywood views India as a box-office market and India as a source for talent and stories. "India is seen as ripe for co-production and distribution ties – it is a valuable market, only after China. But as far as storytelling is concerned, we have a long way to go here," he says.

It is also important to remember that the films about India that do get international attention, like Slumdog Millionaire and The White Tiger, are usually adaptations from books, written in English, that are also primarily geared towards an international audience. As a result, the most popular motifs they feature either involve situating India as a place of spiritual awakenings, or indulging in what is known disparagingly as poverty porn – think of the number of novels about Mumbai’s sweltering slums or New Delhi’s Great Class Divide. It hardly needs saying that the "real India" is much more than these themes.

The movie is fun and funny, but there is a simmering rage underneath that I think people around the world can feel – Ramin Bahrani

Coming back to The White Tiger itself, Bahrani says he was attracted to the character of Balram Halwai because of his cheeky, subversive humour and his utter lack of remorse about any of his actions, as he climbs his way up the social ladder, from chauffeur to entrepreneur. More broadly, meanwhile, he was taken with the tone of the novel. "The movie is fun and funny, but there is a simmering rage underneath that I think people around the world can feel, especially if they are sick and tired of being servants to other human beings, or society and economic forces that are against them."

However while the story does try to offer up a cynical view of India's complex class system, it is also a fairly simplistic rich-equals-bad and poor-equals-good spiel. (And isn't India's infamous caste system itself one of the most exotic narratives about the country on the international stage?). So, in some ways, nothing has really changed.

"I can only hope that there will be more conversation about India and south Asia now with Kamala Harris on the scene," says Punathambekar. But he believes that movies like Slumdog Millionaire and The White Tiger are rare exceptions, and the Western market is not ready to embrace everyday Indian narratives. "If say, [American audiences] watch this on Netflix, and the channel throws up more Indian content based on this history, they may explore more regular Indian content. But I don't think they are likely to pay for tickets to watch such content at the theatre."

The White Tiger is now available on Netflix around the world

(Source: BBC)

Oxford English Dictionary adds new entries: chuddies, jibbons and fantoosh

An Indian English word for underpants joins a host of Scottish insults after the dictionary crowdsourced regional terms

English speakers from around the world have flocked to help the Oxford English Dictionary expand its coverage of regional vocabulary, with a new update including suggestions such as jibbons, chuddies and sitooterie.

The dictionary launched its Words Where You Are appeal to the public last year to mark the 90th anniversary of the completion of its first edition. The regional vocabulary suggestions which have poured in from readers ever since span the globe, from the Welsh English term for spring onions, “jibbons”, to the name for the regional dialect heard in New Orleans, “Yat”, which is derived from the greeting: “Where y’at?”

The public appeal also yielded a host of Scots terms, from “bidie-in”, which the OED defines as “a person who lives with his or her partner in a non-marital relationship”, and which it says was first recorded in 1916, to “bigsie”. Meaning “having an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance”, bigsie’s first recorded use was in 1881, when the Aberdeen Weekly Journal told the story of a tailor who was known locally as a “gey bigsie kin’ o’ bodie”. The Scottish word “fantoosh” has a similar meaning – dating from the 1920s, it is used to describe anything showy or flashy, often disparagingly. The OED points to a 1936 article in Scots Magazine: “Ony sensible body wad be only too pleased if I washed their windows for naething, but jist because ye think yersel’ fantoosh, I’m no’ guid enough.”

The word “sitooterie” is another Scottish term to make the cut in the OED’s latest update, with editors Jane Johnson and Kate Wild saying that there is “something just generally pleasing about the word”. Meaning “a place in which to sit out”, it dates to at least the 1920s.

 Chuddies … the Indian English term joins the OED. Photograph: Todd Terje PR

A host of Scottish insults were also submitted by members of the public, from “bam”, defined as a foolish, annoying, or obnoxious person, as in the pronunciation from Aberdeen: “Awa ye ham, Yer mither’s a bam”, to “geggie”. Meaning mouth, geggie is frequently used in “shut your geggie”, said the OED, which found the earliest evidence of its use in William Miller’s 1985 short story Andy’s Trial: “‘Good fur you, wee Andy!’ shouted his grandmother. The judge looked over his specs. ‘Mah dear wumman,’ he said patiently, ‘will ye kindly shut yer geggie?’”

The OED’s Indian English vocabulary is updated with the phrase “kiss my chuddies”, or underpants, used as a catchphrase by Sanjeev Bhaskar in Goodness Gracious Me, while South African English in the dictionary is expanded with the inclusion of “dof”, a borrowing from Afrikaans meaning “stupid, ill-informed or clueless”, and “gramadoelas”, “an etymologically mysterious word for a remote rural region, especially one regarded as unsophisticated or uncultured”.

The OED’s Jonathan Dent also pointed to the expansion of the dictionary’s definition for the verb “get”, following the appeal, with the “humorously euphemistic way of referring to the ‘withdrawal method’ of contraception”, “to get off at Edge Hill”, now featuring in the dictionary.

“This jokey linguistic meme uses the idea of disembarking – a sexually suggestive ‘getting off’ – at the last stop before the terminus of a railway line,” said Dent. “The appropriately precipitous sounding Edge Hill is the penultimate station on the only line into Liverpool Lime Street, but there are multiple local variations in British and English – getting off at Gateshead rather than Newcastle, Haymarket rather than Edinburgh Waverley, and so on. Ultimately, though, the idea seems to be Australian in origin: in our earliest evidence, entered in Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang in 1967, the passenger steps off the train (so to speak) at Redfern, a suburb of Sydney.”

The OED is continuing its search for regional vocabulary, Dent continued, and will include “many more words” in future updates.

(Source: The Guardian)

Language is no zero-sum game

For India, learning English does not come with costs — it only brings benefits.

Hindi Diwas is observed on September 14. On this day in 1949, India’s Constituent Assembly adopted Hindi as an official language. It also adopted English as another official language. There is no doubt we should celebrate the richness of all our Indian languages. Hindi, by virtue of being the language spoken by the largest number of Indians — albeit not by the majority — has a special place among Indian languages. But, promotion and celebration of a language does not require attacking another language. Unfortunately, however, at a Hindi Diwas event this year, Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu called English a “disease left behind by the British”. He went on to say that progress can only happen through learning Hindi.

I argue that the net economic benefit of having English as an official language is huge. Here are my arguments for respectfully disagreeing with the Vice President. Researchers Jaques Melitz (Heriot Watt University) and Farid Toubal (Paris School of Economics) have shown that trade between any pair of countries is 50 per cent higher when that pair has a common official language. Also, Jan Fidrmuc (Brunel University) and Jarko Fidrmuc (Charles University) find that if the probability of two randomly chosen people from a pair of countries (one from each country) being able to communicate with each other in English increases by 10 percentage points, trade between those two countries is 11 per cent higher. Thus, India, where 12 per cent of the population speaks English, gets a 13 to 50 per cent boost in its trade with English-speaking countries such as the US, UK and Australia.

This additional trade is substantial and important. The increase in trade since the reforms of 1991 has, in several years, delivered growth rates of around 8 per cent — occasionally, even up to 10 per cent. During this period, India’s poverty rate has fallen from slightly under 50 per cent before the reforms to around 20 per cent now. There is strong empirical evidence that trade leads to higher incomes and, in turn, to poverty reduction.

At a Hindi Diwas event this year, Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu called English a “disease left behind by the British”.

While most of the research discussed above was for goods trade, a common language like English is arguably even more important for trade in services, including information and communications technology (ICT) services, where India is a major player. According to recent World Bank data, while India’s exports of goods and services are about $488 billion, services exports are roughly 38 per cent of that, at $184 billion. Furthermore, India’s ICT service exports, at $113 billion, are roughly 61 per cent of its service exports and 23 per cent of its total exports. In contrast, China’s total exports are a mammoth $2.4 trillion, as it houses the world’s manufacturing factories and is a big player in input processing. Its services exports are much smaller at $206 billion, not even 9 per cent of its total exports. Its ICT service exports are $85 billion, roughly 40 per cent of its services exports and merely 3.5 per cent of total exports.

India’s recent tariff hikes on imports of extremely labour-intensive manufactures demonstrates that, despite being a labour-abundant country, it does not perform well in labour-intensive manufacturing, especially relative to its services sector. This is not surprising, given India’s restrictive regulatory frameworks in labour and land, with its rigid labour regulations applicable to manufacturing but not services. Therefore, unlike in manufacturing, India is not handicapped relative to China in services, where it actually has an advantage because of its large English-speaking population. This was seen during the Y2K crisis at the turn of the millennium, when overburdened American firms turned to Indian IT companies like Wipro and Infosys for help, leading to a jump in India’s exports of computer and business services. A simultaneous surge for Ireland underscores the importance of an English-speaking workforce in taking advantage of such an opportunity. Y2K provided India’s IT companies a great opportunity. Over time, they were able to expand from providing IT maintenance and servicing to rolling out innovative software for American multinationals.

Even though the highly-skilled and educated individuals employed by the IT sector constitute a small fraction of the country’s population, the fast-expanding sector is a major contributor to India’s economic growth — my research with Reshad Ahsan of the University of Melbourne illustrates this. Additionally, it has multiplier effects through linkages with the rest of the economy.

Furthermore, as seen from the proliferation of call centres, India has benefited a great deal from the outsourcing of back-office and customer-service jobs that do not require a high level of specialised skills, but are well-paying nevertheless. Consequently, people are responding to economic incentives by learning English, the demand for which has led to the emergence of many new English language institutes.

Finally, education that emphasises learning English has played an important role in the success Indians have had in the American job market. Having Indians at the helm of Microsoft and Google helps greatly with networking and recognising talent within the ICT field in India. Add to this the presence of Indians in American and British academia pushing the frontiers of knowledge in the basic, social and applied sciences, such as medicine and engineering.

Learning English does not have to come at the cost of knowing or even having one’s native language as the first language or medium of education, something championed by Noam Chomsky for a child’s intellectual growth. However, there is also scientific evidence that learning multiple languages is good for the human brain’s development. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

(Source: The Indian Express)

6 Indian films that tackle mainstream cinema’s casteism

As the recent social media commentary on the trailer of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s magnum opus film Padmavati shows, like our lives, our films are seeped in structures of caste. Caste informs the composition of the film industry; the themes of the films; the names, mannerisms and treatment of characters in the film.

So while Bhansali’s film trailer seems to find nothing problematic about its leads mouthing supremely casteist dialogues that cement upper-caste pride, it is part of a structure. An industry structure dominated by those who have never seen or experienced marginalization owing to their caste, and hence are oblivious to how perpetuating existing caste-dynamics can make life difficult for real and everyday people who do not enjoy such caste privilege.

And yet some films stand out for doing things differently: for acknowledging caste, for portraying its twisted ordering-logic, for giving voice to the experience of those caste groups who have been silenced and looked through, and for challenging the trappings of the trope of Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasis as victims.

The following is a list of films which have done exactly that:

1. Fandry (Marathi)

Nagraj Manjule’s 2014 film stands out for giving us a non-dominant caste protagonist who is interested in carving out his own identity and space. Far from being a mute object of study, Jabya is a character who thought, felt and resisted. Come as he did from a family of pig-catchers, he recognised the forced work which was handed down to him generation after generation, by the village economy (and villagers) as oppressive. Jabya wanted to study and do well in school.

But as the forces of caste start straining these hopes and aspirations Jabya has for himself, they also drive home the near-fixity of his caste identity as even the upper-caste girl he is ardently in love with sees him as nothing but a source of entertainment.

2. Sairat (Marathi)

This Marathi blockbuster was also directed by Manjule. Many read this film as a continuation of the journey of Fandry’s male, lower-caste protagonist i.e. as a story which traces what happens to a Jabya once he crosses the threshold from adolescence into adulthood.

While the fact that the film barely mentions caste and also brings in the element of class—as protagonist Parshya falls in love and elopes with the upper-caste Maratha daughter of a wealthy, local politician—was seen by some as a dilution of Majule’s anti-caste stance in his film narrative, others commented on how the film showed the workings of caste without ever having to use the word ‘caste’.

3. Madras (Tamil)

Similar to Majule’s work, Pa Ranjith’s films succeed in showing the every-day working of caste even while it throws light on the superstructure of the caste system. The narrative of this particular film has at its centre a power struggle between two political factions. As this piece says:

“Two warring factions of a political party are desperately trying to establish their supremacy by taking control of an insignificant building wall at a housing board apartment complex. The wall previously displayed the picture of the two powerful leaders together, but with their split, there is a huge tussle as to who owns the wall.”

Most mainstream reviews of the film in fact missed the film’s engagement with questions of caste, but through little details and snippets about the lives of its Dalit protagonists, the film succeeded in telling a story from a point-of-view that is close to non-existent in cinema.

4. Kabali (Tamil)

As one of our older pieces outlines, “Kabali is an action-packed movie with Malaysian gang wars as its backdrop. Malaysia has a sizeable Tamil population. Kabali, played by Rajinikanth, is a common tree plantation worker who rises to the top fighting for workers’ rights. But Kabali’s leadership is challenged for his working class background and low-caste status.”

As Rajesh Rajamani observes in this piece, the film undoes the trope of the oppressed community as a prop, and it humanizes them.

5. Court (Marathi)

This Marathi film by Chaitanya Tamhane chronicles the court battle a Dalit protest singer has to endure, as he is accused of driving a sewage-cleaner to suicide. While many applauded the film for being a clever satire on the crippling helplessness the legal and state machinery imposes on the disadvantaged citizen, the film has also been criticised for showing elements of a Brahmin-saviour complex as it merely shows the legal machinery populated by upper castes without critiquing such disproportionate representation.

6. Masaan (Hindi)

Like Manjule’s film, this Hindi film also has as one of its central plot devices an inter-caste romance. The female, upper-caste lead Shaalu falls in love with Deepak, who is from the Dom community: a community which “tends funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganga”. When Shaalu finds out about Deepak’s lower-caste location, it comes as a shock and yet she comes around and promises Deepak that she will stay with him. The film has been criticized however, for it resolves this plot complication a little too neatly and this seems to be in deference to accepted caste notions and related notions of love.

(Source: FII)

Surging Hindi, shrinking South Indian languages

Nine charts that explain the 2011 language census. So ascendent is Hindi that the data suggests even some Urdu speakers are now identifying themselves as Hindiwalahs.

All countries like to think of themselves as special. But when it comes to language, a fairly good argument could be made that India is objectively so. Most states in the world are monolingual or have a clearly dominant language. This trend is so common that in the Old World, the names of many countries are simply a variant of a language – France, Mongolia, Turkey. But India has as many as 22 official languages. Moreover, there are at least 41 more languages demanding inclusion in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India, which accords a tongue official status.

In the midst of this linguistic cornucopia, the census conducted by the Union government every decade provides a way for policy makers, political watchers and language nerds to make sense of it all. The Centre released data on language from the 2011 census last Tuesday (after an inordinate, unexplained seven-year delay).

Here some findings.

Hindi is exploding
Hindi is India’s most spoken language. It is one of two languages used by the Union government (the other being English). As a mother tongue, Hindi is found mainly in North India and Central India, although there are significant urban pockets of Hindi speakers in most states of the Union.

Currently, nearly 44% of India speaks Hindi (this figure, however, includes languages such as Bhojpuri that are fighting to be accorded separate status). Between 2001 and 2011, Hindi grew at a rate of 25% to add close to 100 million new speakers. Among the 10 largest languages in India, Hindi is the only one that saw the proportion of its speakers rise.

But the growth of Hindi is not just confined to this decade. It has been growing at a good clip since 1971, driven mostly by high population growth in the Hindi-speaking states.

Proportion of South Indian language speakers falling
While high population growth in North India has helped Hindi surge, lower population growth in the five Dravidian language-speaking states – Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana – has resulted in the proportion of Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam falling.

While Hindi grew by 161% between 1971 and 2011, for example, the four largest Dravidian languages grew at half that rate – 81% – over the same period.

Note: The 1981 census data for Tamil was lost in a flood and is unavailable. The 1981 data for Tamil has, therefore been extrapolated by assuming a linear rate of change between 1971 and 1991.

Hindi is growing even in South India
In addition, growing migration from north to south has meant a greater presence of Hindi in the five southern states. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the proportion of Hindi speakers nearly doubled from 2001 to 2011. In some cases, like in Karnataka’s capital Bengaluru, this north to south migration has caused political ripples and resulted in an agitation to remove Hindi signages from the city metro. That said, absolute numbers are still small and it remains to be seen if the trend continues in the 2021 census.

Note: Andhra Pradesh here refers to current-day Andhra Pradesh and Telangana since the Census was carried out before the state's bifurcation in 2014.

Urdu numbers falling
Only two scheduled languages have seen a fall in absolute numbers, Urdu and Konkani. There are 5,07,72,631 Urdu speakers in India, a fall of about 1.5% since 2001.

Urdu speakers are spread across India but the language’s strongest presence is in the modern-day Hindi belt: the two largest Urdu-speaking states are Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. However, it is precisely here that the fall in Urdu numbers has been significant.

Since Urdu in modern India is associated only with Muslims, this fall is unusual given that the Muslim population in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar has grown between 2001 and 2011. What this might, therefore, mean is that a new generation of Muslims is turning to Hindi since Urdu education has nearly ceased to exist in much of North India.

According to the 2011 census, the decline in Konkani speakers is 9.5%.

Bengali spreading to south, west
As Hindi spreads to other states with migration, so does Bengali. While states bordering West Bengal and Bangladesh have always had a significant Bengali population, the 2011 census counted 4.4 lakh Bengalis in far-off Maharashtra and 2.2 lakh in Delhi. While numbers are small in the south, they are growing. In Kerala, the proportion of Bengali speakers has grown nine times, driven by the movement of a large number of blue collar workers from rural Bengal to the coastal state.

Assam’s language divide
The sharpest linguistic divide in India possibly exists in Assam, where the National Register of Citizens – a project that aims to create a definitive list of citizens of the state and identify illegal immigrants – and a proposed citizenship law has divided the state’s Assamese and Bengali speakers.

Assam is no stranger to linguistic conflict, a pattern that might be driven by the state’s highly fragmented language demographics. Assam is the only major state in the Union (population more than 1 crore) that does not have any language group in a majority. Assamese speakers, the largest group, make up 48% of the state – a number that is, in fact, decreasing even as the proportion of Bengali speakers went up in 2001-2011.

On Friday, Assamese nationalist organisations expressed concern over these trends.

More Indians are speaking English
A carry over from the British Raj, English is the link-language between India’s various states and the language of its upper crust elite. However, in absolute numbers, there is a tiny number of people who speak the language as a mother tongue, with only the Anglo-Indian community historically identifying with it.

In spite of that, English seems to have registered a 15% jump since 2001, making it one of the fastest growing languages in the decade.

Since this rise cannot be explained by a rise in the population of traditional English-speaking communities, it might point to more Indian elites not only speaking English but identifying with it as a mother tongue – data that backs up this piece on Scroll.in from February.

Wild cards: Sanskrit, Arabic and Pashto
Sanskrit is India’s smallest official language with 24,821 speakers. However, Arabic – with no official status – is double its size with 54,947 speakers. Since neither language has any active speakers in India, these numbers probably represent people who misreported their mother tongue given the high status Sanskrit and Arabic enjoy as liturgical tongues in Hinduism and Islam.

Speakers of Pashto – spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan – have, meanwhile, doubled in size in India from 2001. The absolute number, however, is tiny: as of 2011, India has 21,677 Pashto speakers. Jammu and Kashmir accounts for 83% of the Pashto-speaking population while Delhi has 8%.

(Source: Scroll)

Committed to the screen: Women, marriage and cinema

One of the first questions the press asked actor Anushka Sharma after her marriage to Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli was whether she will continue to act. It remains the standard query to every female actor if she chooses to walk down the aisle when she is still working in cinema. When it comes to heroines, this decidedly sexist theory has worked in almost all the film industries even as a male actor’s marital status never stands as a deterrent to his being the leading man. Bollywood, however, has been successful in breaking this glass ceiling to a large extent.

In fact, it began much earlier with Sharmila Tagore, Tanuja, Saira Banu, Dimple Kapadia - all of whom worked more after marriage and essayed some of the most memorable roles of their career. Probably because the media wasn’t that high-pitched, and no one really made a fuss about it, it wasn’t discussed. But it’s also true that the ratio is not in their favour with just too many actresses, across time, calling it a day post marriage—from Poonam Dhillon to Genelia Dsouza. But then slowly actresses also chose to make their respective comebacks post marriage and motherhood. Like with Sridevi, Kajol, Madhuri Dixit, Rani Mukherjee, Vidya Balan, Kareena Kapoor and Aishwarya Rai. "I think the definition of success with this film, for me, is the fact that it has broken the perception that married actresses, or actresses who are making their comeback after motherhood do not work and are a dead commodity. After this, I hope more women come out and work in movies," Rani Mukherjee was quoted after the success of Hichki.

Though it is not always hunky dory and there have been instances which made it plain that the marital status quo marred many a filmmaker’s casting choices. Sanjay Leela Bhansali reportedly dropped Kareena Kapoor from Goliyon Ki Raasleela-Ram Leela, as he felt “his Juliet cannot be a married woman.” There have been instances when actresses were forced to hide their marital status fearing exit from films. Juhi Chawla kept her marriage to Jay Mehta under wraps for a long time as was the case with Rani Mukherjee (who married Aditya Chopra).

In Tamil cinema, Jyothika waltzed back into screen in her late 30s after marriage and two children and got to pick her roles (her first comeback film coincidentally was the remake of Manju Warrier’s How old are you? and was produced by Suriya’s film production) while Simran struggled to find a place in Tamil cinema, making that odd appearance now and then. There was also the late Soundarya who stayed relevant even after marriage.

In Malayalam cinema, though Kavya Madhavan was able to make a comeback post marriage, it was really Manju Warrier who successfully broke the stereotype.  One reason could also be her overwhelmingly strong fan base who always missed her when she away. Her comeback films were all solid author-backed roles (save for a Villain) which required no starry heroes. “As a viewer I am not concerned about the heroines off screen marital status when I watch a film, nor do I personally think it affects her desirability quotient. But yes, for most part it also depends on the general desirability factor for the particular actress,” says journalist Krishna Kumar.

Thankfully, filmmakers seem to have taken a hint from Warrier’s success. Rima Kallingal, after her marriage to filmmaker Aashiq Abu, continued her acting career and was part of interesting films like Rani Padmini (directed by Aashiq Abu), Chirakodinja Kinavukal, Kaadu Pookkunna Neram to her latest release Aabhasam.

Drishyam had two married actors getting equal billing with Mohanlal—Meena and Asha Sarath (who later played lead roles opposite both the superstars). Mamta Mohandas also starred in several films where she was on equal footing with the hero and her last release was Carbon.

“I don’t think it has to do with the viewer’s intolerance. It can be attributed to the heroes who in their prime chose to act with fresh faces to retain their youth and refuse to oversell their pairing with any particular heroine, however talented they are. Since heroes remained the biggest selling point in cinema, they exercised that power to full use. And if some of the heroines decided to opt out of films after marriage it is more a personal choice I think. Just like in households where some women decide to stay back to look after family and children instead of going to work,” says journalist A Ranganath. The other big elephant in the room remain their spouses/families. The double standards which make Dileep admit that he cannot sit through his wife romancing another man on screen and he can very well do it and his wife wouldn’t mind. Aishwarya Rai’s intimate scenes in Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hain Mushkil and lip lock with Hrithik Roshan in Dhoom 2 didn’t go down well with her seemingly progressive in-laws, the Bachchan’s.

 In the recent past, more and more married actresses are getting author-backed roles in Malayalam cinema. Anu Sithara was chosen to play Malini in Ramante Edenthottam, a complex human drama that touched on extramarital relationships and it also kickstarted the much-married actress’ journey in Malayalam cinema, which is on a roll now. “It never even crossed my mind that I am about to sign a married actress or that people might view her differently because of that or it might affect the film’s success. Anu was perfect as Malini and that’s been the only criteria. Then and now. Honestly, I don’t think such tags matter anymore,” says director Ranjith Sankar.

Others who have broken the status quo include Nyla Usha, who debuted with Mammootty in Kunjananthante Kada to the recent Diwanji Moola Grand Prix where she played a stunning character; Sshivada, who played the central character in Shikari Shambu; and Vinitha Koshy, who came up with a stellar performance in Ottamuri Velicham.

“In Manju Warrier’s case, it was as if she just took a break and Malayalam cinema was always waiting for her comeback and the years hadn’t taken a toll on her appearance or talent. No other actress could achieve what she did through her comeback. With Anu Sithara apart from her undeniable talent, there is also the matter of age by her side. As is with other said married actresses. Another pertinent point is that it also coincides with the decline of superstardom and the new wave fresh cinema where a lot of experimentation is going on. They would rather invest in talents than pretty young things,” says media analyst Preethi.

 True, this is a welcome change in Malayalam cinema, but it will remain consistent only if there will be writers and makers who recognise the importance of celluloid women rising above the male gaze, pitch in real and fleshed out characters where they get to share a space as relevant as the male and not just end up as superficial feminist icons. Only when that change happens will a lot of stereotypes and myths go for a toss.

(Source: Full Picture)

Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term—té in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi.

Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before “globalization” was a term anybody used. The words that sound like “cha” spread across land, along the Silk Road. The “tea”-like phrasings spread over water, by Dutch traders bringing the novel leaves back to Europe.

The term cha (茶) is “Sinitic,” meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. It began in China and made its way through central Asia, eventually becoming “chay” (چای) in Persian. That is no doubt due to the trade routes of the Silk Road, along which, according to a recent discovery, tea was traded over 2,000 years ago. This form spread beyond Persia, becoming chay in Urdu, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian, among others. It even made its way to sub-Saharan Africa, where it became chai in Swahili. The Japanese and Korean terms for tea are also based on the Chinese cha, though those languages likely adopted the word even before its westward spread into Persian.

But that doesn’t account for “tea.” The Chinese character for tea, 茶, is pronounced differently by different varieties of Chinese, though it is written the same in them all. In today’s Mandarin, it is chá. But in the Min Nan variety of Chinese, spoken in the coastal province of Fujian, the character is pronounced te. The key word here is “coastal.”

The te form used in coastal-Chinese languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century, as explained in the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main Dutch ports in east Asia were in Fujian and Taiwan, both places where people used the te pronunciation. The Dutch East India Company’s expansive tea importation into Europe gave us the French thé, the German Tee, and the English tea.

Yet the Dutch were not the first to Asia. That honor belongs to the Portuguese, who are responsible for the island of Taiwan’s colonial European name, Formosa. And the Portuguese traded not through Fujian but Macao, where chá is used. That’s why, on the map above, Portugal is a pink dot in a sea of blue.

A few languages have their own way of talking about tea. These languages are generally in places where tea grows naturally, which led locals to develop their own way to refer to it. In Burmese, for example, tea leaves are lakphak.

The map demonstrates two different eras of globalization in action: the millenia-old overland spread of goods and ideas westward from ancient China, and the 400-year-old influence of Asian culture on the seafaring Europeans of the age of exploration. Also, you just learned a new word in nearly every language on the planet.

(Source: Quartz)

What is Tourette syndrome, the neurological disorder Rani Mukerji has in Hichki?

Tourette syndrome is a common neurological disorder that often starts during childhood.

If you've been charmed and moved by Rani Mukerji's character from her upcoming movie, Hichki, you're probably wondering what Tourette syndrome is. The trailer of the movie shows Mukerji's character portraying the symptoms of, as well as admitting that she has Tourette syndrome.

Here's everything you need to know about this neurological disorder:

What is Tourette syndrome?
Tourette syndrome is a common neurological disorder that causes patients to have sudden, uncontrolled movements or sounds, repetitively. These sudden movements and sounds are called nervous tics, or just tics.

The condition was named after Georges Albert Edouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette by Jean-Martin Charcot in 1885, a French physician and neurologist who made a study of a number of patients who suffered from the disorder. Tourette was one of Charcot's most remarkable patients, and so, the disease was named after him.

What causes Tourette syndrome?
According to WebMD, Tourette syndrome is linked to the part of the brain that controls movements, called the basal ganglia. Trouble or disruptions in the brain's network of nerves affects the proper function of this part of the brain, leading to the tics.

But the human brain still largely remains a mystery for researchers. So, the exact causes of Tourette's is unknown. It is, however, suspected that genes play a role in passing down this disorder. If there are Tourette's patients in your family, it is likely that it will be passed down to the following generations, but the tics would differ.

Symptoms and treatment
The biggest symptom of Tourette are the tics, probably because they are noticeable over time. Stress, excitement, sickness and exhaustion can make this chief symptom worse. What's more, as Mukerji's character exhibits in the trailer, the symptoms can be quite embarrassing, because they cannot be controlled and can happen in public.

The tics of Tourette can, thankfully, be controlled with treatment. It is not completely curable or preventable yet, but early detection can help one avoid the risk of the disorder turning severe.

(Source: India Today)