I saw one of the most memorable Hindi films Yaadon Ki Baarat the day it was released in Bombay, now Mumbai, in the early Seventies. As my Hindi was pathetically poor, I did not know what the title meant. I sought the help of two young Malayalees who spoke fluent Hindi and Marathi and were my neighbours at Bassein Road in West Bombay.
Both of them tried to explain to me that baarat meant the procession in which the north Indian bridegroom arrived at the wedding venue. Since I had never seen a baarat, they went to great lengths to explain the Hindu marriage customs. Though I understood what baarat was, my primary question about the meaning of Yaadon Ki Baarat remained unanswered.
Today I would translate it as ‘Procession of Memories’. If this was the predicament of a non-Hindi speaking viewer of Hindi cinema in the early Seventies of the 20th century, I was struck by the predicament of a Hindi-speaking viewer of Bollywood cinema in the 21st century.
I purposely asked a rickshaw-puller from the heartland of Hindi whether he could read the title of a Hindi movie from a poster I showed him. “It’s an English movie and I cannot read English” said the poor man, who seemed to have been embarrassed by my question. No, the poster was that of an Imran Khan-starrer Hindi movie, I Hate Luv Storys. Two of the four words in the title are certainly not in the English lexicon.
The title is incomprehensible to a vast majority of the Indian people, who cannot read, let alone understand, such a complicated and supposedly ‘English’ title. If one of them is rich and brave enough to buy a ticket and see the movie, what will he understand when in a duet, the hero sings, “I know you like me, you know I like you/Let’s get together girl, you know you want to/I know you like me, you know I like you/Let’s get together girl, you know you want to”?
This is not the translation of the opening lines of a song. I have quoted verbatim from the song, which has, I counted, more English words than Hindi ones. You may think that this is an exception but the fact is, it is not. Here is another example. One of the popular songs in the film Housefull begins with “Oh girl you’re mine, oh girl you’re mine”. This line is repeated 15 times with minor variations in the same song.
In another, perhaps more popular, song from the film 3 Idiots, I found this gem: “Give me some sunshine/give me some rain/Give me another chance/wanna grow up once again”. Here the song-writer even uses a slang word like ‘wanna”. The song has greater shocks for the average Hindi viewer than the slang: “Alpha beta gamma ka chaala/Concentrated H2SO4/Ne poora poora bachpan jala daala”. The lyricist even expects the viewer to know that H2SO4 is sulphuric acid.
To assume that the ‘courage’ shown by the film-makers to give English titles like My Name is Khan to their movies is an aberration, rather than a trend, is not to understand the Hindi cinema industry, which has undergone a metamorphosis in the recent past.
A study done a decade ago showed that for the same number of tickets sold for a Hindi movie and a Hollywood film, the latter earned 10 times more revenue than the producer of the Hindi movie. It was a pointer to the low rates of admission in Indian theatres compared to cinemas in Western countries.
An aside, when Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot while walking home from a cinema with his wife Lisbet Palme in Stockholm, it caused quite a surprise in India, not because a Swedish gun manufacturer was in the news those days, but because a prime minister went to a movie hall like hoi polloi! Those were the days when it took several months, if not years, for a successful Hindi movie to make profit.
To earn a profit, a film had, first, to be released in metros, then in large towns and finally in small towns. Till the collections were aggregated and calculations made, the producer and the distributor could never be sure that a particular film had made a profit unless it was a blockbuster like Sholay, which, too, registered a net profit only after a few months of release.
The ticket rates in cinema theatres, including 70 mm air-conditioned ones, were low even by the standards prevalent then. Besides, every theatre had several classes to accommodate different classes of people. While the rich could see a movie from the comforts of a balcony in the rear of the hall, the poor could see the same film at one-fifth of the cost by sitting in the front, sometimes on the sand-filled floor.
Over the years, most of the theatres of that period have been closed. In cities like Delhi they have been replaced by multiplexes which have several theatres under one roof showing different movies at the same time. These halls with excellent acoustic and plush backsliding seats are small and have not more than two classes.
In most such multiplexes in Delhi, the ticket sellers even prefer to be paid through credit card, for they do not have time to count money or give balance. The ticket rates vary from weekdays to weekends and, in any case, they are hefty enough to warrant use of a credit card.
The poor are automatically excluded from viewing movies. At one time, cinema was the cheapest form of entertainment for the poor. Today the rickshaw-puller I had earlier mentioned will have to take a loan from a microfinance organisation if he wants to take his family of wife and two children to see a movie! Incidentally, most of the loan amounts in one such organisation this writer knows about are around `1,000 in a country where billionaires multiply by the dozen.
The lyricists and film-makers know better than anyone else that their clientèle has changed. They are no longer the ones who greet one another with a simple ‘Ram-Ram’. Instead, they are the ones who will tell their beloved, “Hush hush papa sleeping, hush hush papa sleeping”, as in Housefull. They also know that their viewers are not in Lalitpur in Uttar Pradesh or Sarguja in Chhattisgarh but in Sydney in Australia and Port Louis in Mauritius.
Unlike in the past when a Hindi movie had at best 100 prints when it was released, the recent Mani Ratnam multi-lingual Raavan had 2,000 prints, which were released simultaneously in not just all the states in India but in countries as far apart as South Africa and South America. Small wonder that the latest Bollywood offering is titled Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai
ajphilip@gmail.com
About the author:
A J Philip is a New Delhi-based senior journalist