Hindi cinema and television are neither conceived nor executed in Hindi.

She was pregnant with a child.” This sentence was the bone of contention. As the Hindi writer on the show, I had been given a detailed brief, in English, to write the voiceovers. My job was to write, rewrite and rewrite again till they were satisfied. “They” were a bunch of highly-paid professionals with a fancy office in Bandra. Many of them had foreign degrees that got them jobs at the production house which specialised in bringing the best directors from abroad to shoot commercials in India. For a change, they were doing a show in Hindi.

My creative producer was an experienced editor and a delightful writer. But the problem was that she couldn’t read or write Hindi. And she wasn’t alone. Neither could the presenter of the show.

Now the tricky part was that my creative producer had to vet my script before it was sent to the channel. Since it was a television show, it required two more clearances—from the producer at the channel and their legal team—before it could be shot. All of them were doing their best to make sure that my Hindi was flawless.

A pregnant pause

“Which of these words means pregnant,” I was asked. “None,” I said. I had written “Woh maa banne wali thhee.” (She was expecting). The next question was whether there was no word for pregnant in Hindi. I told them that there was. However, the idea was not just to translate but to make it feel conversational.

Silence. I asked, “Have you heard anyone in real life saying, ‘main garbhavati hoon’?” They seemed convinced but then came the masterstroke. “And what about... with a child?” There is infinite scope to misinterpret a literally translated sentence like, “Woh ek bachche se garbhavati thee.”

Anybody who has worked as a Hindi dialogue writer can recount hundreds of such stories. The unfortunate reality of Hindi cinema and television is that they are neither conceived nor executed in Hindi. Scripts are written in English and many actors need their Hindi dialogues transliterated into Roman to be able to read them.

Language has always been the bone of contention in Hindi cinema. In fact, many would argue, rightly, that it has never been Hindi but Urdu cinema, because dialogues in the early days had always been in chaste Lakhnawi Urdu.

And if you ever look at the names hung on the walls of Film Writers’ Association (FWA) in Mumbai, you would realise that many of them were acclaimed writers and poets of the language. The bridge that traditionally existed between Hindi/ Urdu literature and Hindi cinema collapsed over the years.

Whether 3 Idiots or Bombay Velvet, Hindi cinema is increasingly turning to books for inspiration. However, it’s hard to think of a Hindi novel or a story that got adapted recently. This wasn’t always the case. When lyricist Shailendra decided to produce a movie—Teesri Kasam (1966)—he chose an adaptation of Phanishwar Nath Renu’s short story ‘Maare Gaye Gulfam’.

In regional cinema, National Award winning Punjabi film Chauthi Koot was adapted from Waryam Singh Sandhu’s short stories, while India’s official entry to the Oscars, Visaranai, was based on M. Chandrakumar’s novel Lock Up. So why is Hindi literature not being adapted into movies? Are Hindi writers not producing good material any more or are the decision makers simply ignorant of their existence?

Market constraints

There is another challenge: the biggest market for a Hindi film is Western India where Hindi isn’t the primary language.

In fact, what is considered the Hindi heartland isn’t significant to the business of most Hindi films anymore.

However, as Hindi cinema is intended for a pan-Indian audience, it has a burden to bear. The burden of being simple to the point of being simplistic. One operates with a limited vocabulary of a few hundred words, using “explanatory” expressions and a language meant mostly for effect.

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I heard Bengali writer-director Rituparno Ghosh speak on screenwriting. He showed us the screenplay of Asukh, the film he was working on at the time. It was a beautifully handwritten draft in Bengali.

Recently, my Sri Lankan filmmaker friend Prasanna Vithanage showed me his Sinhalese screenplay. I can’t think of any filmmaker of my generation who wrote a script in Hindi and got it made. But I am not even proposing that Hindi films be written in Hindi because that is an impractical idea. Most decision makers wouldn’t be able to read it, be it studio heads, actors or their managers.

But the beauty of Hindi cinema is that it is made by people from all over the country. I made my Hindi film Chauranga with a Bengali cinematographer, a Malayali sound designer, an Odia location sound recordist and a Goan music director.

It’s a situation unique to Hindi films where its primary audience and the people who make them don’t use the language in their lives. But I’m not complaining. It offers poor writers like me new avenues.

The author is award-winning writer-director known for his film Chauranga. @bikas