Rise of the true blue Indian cinema
"Nenu rakshinchalsindiokkadi ne,” says the 6,000-year-old man cursed into immortality. While the voice and the face of the actor were unmistakable, Amitabh Bachchan was speaking a different language. That’s because the ‘kalki yuga’ of pan-India cast is here and now. Kalki 2898 is a Telugu film in which all lead actors from Bachchan to Deepika Padukone to Saswata Chatterjee learnt Telugu and dubbed the dialogues themselves. Let us take a look back at how we traversed the various avatars to get to Kalki.
More than 60 years ago, Gemini Ganesan had acted in Nazrana (1961), as had Jayalalithaa in Izzat (1968). But the former was really a Raj Kapoor film with Ganesan in an extended cameo while Jayalalithaa playing the second female lead. Ek Duje Ke Liye (1981) was the big shift because southern actor Kamal Haasan played the lead.
Rajinikanth followed with Andhaa Kanoon (1983) while Sridevi and Jaya Prada occupied pole positions around that time. But still these were Hindi language films with the actors from the South having to learn Hindi. And they did. All these actors had built their fan bases in the Hindi film world and were ‘domiciled’ in then-Bombay. Nobody saw them as outsiders.
Box office success Minsara Kanavu (1997) marked the reversal of traffic with Bollywood’s Kajol playing the female lead in a Tamil film (albeit with Revathi dubbing for her). While Minsara Kanavu was dubbed in Hindi as Sapnay, the converse happened a year later with the Hindi original Dil Se… (1998) being dubbed into Tamil as Uyire (Shah Rukh Khan’s voice dubbed by Arvind Swamy) and in Telugu as Prematho. But yes, Bollywood stars were now ‘speaking’ in South Indian languages.
A few notions in the film world had shifted too. Hitherto, a character speaking in a different language or with a non-native accent made for stock comedy tropes. But in the new millennium, with the big cities turning more cosmopolitan, accents no longer sounded as out-of-place as they used to. Secondly, the humongous box office successes of South Indian films like the Baahubali series and RRR created a clamour for tickets to ride the southern Noah’s Ark.
Thirdly, the OTT web series has flattened geographical boundaries. Samantha Ruth Prabhu (as did a few other actors) spoke entirely in Sinhalese Tamil in Season 2 of The Family Man. Farzi featured Vijay Sethupathi’s character speaking in Telugu with his estranged wife’s parents and in Tamil with his son. True, sometimes scripts get tweaked for consistency with the actor’s brand.
Says Sriram Raghavan about casting Sethupathi in Merry Christmas (2024), “Vijay was so out-of-the-box that it defied all conventional casting rules. And the dosa and molagapodi went well with Vijay. All that was included after Vijay came on board.” But this acceptance of actors from different regions by the audience lifted the final bolt on the door to the new era of an integrated Indian cinema as opposed to Bollywood, Tollywood, Mollywood etc. Aggregation is strength.
Director Goutam Ghose has always believed that there is no ‘regional language cinema’. All films are Indian films.
No better substantiation of this than Kalki.
Balaji Vittal
Film commentator and author
Posts on X: @vittalbalaji