Why Heroine and not Abhinetri? Tracking Bollywoods film titles

Not just for the sequels and the remakes Hindi films are known to have a plethora of titles shared by more than one film over the decades.And the current trend of using a lot of English titles is as much an option to bypass this shortfall in inspiration as it is to be €˜"contemporary"€™ and global.

Not just for the sequels and the remakes Hindi films are known to have a plethora of titles shared by more than one film over the decades. And the current trend of using a lot of English titles is as much an option to bypass this shortfall in inspiration as it is to be €˜"contemporary"€™ and global. After all,

sounds so much trendier and universally-accepted than

Nevertheless, Bollywood will always continue to repeat titles for films in the years to come.

The purpose of this piece is not to enumerate all the cases, which would take space enough for a booklet, but to delve into some of the interesting and lighter side of this

business of repeating titles, which in many ways is unique to Hindi cinema, mainly because of the quantum of films dished out and the limitations of commonly understood Hindi and Urdu, for Hindi films have to appeal from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and likewise the breadth of the country. Hollywood and regional films are barely known to do so, except with remakes.

would have worked as well for Salman Khan’s first turnaround film in 2009 had the maker of the 1987 Mithun Chakraborty-Tina Munim flop not parted with it! Let’s also think of the all-time cult film

(the title suggested by Kirron Kher from the chartbuster of the 1974 blockbuster

). Hardly anyone is aware that this was

the title of a C-grade film censored in 1980, but never released! Of course, the spelling was different – a common point in such cases, as a Roman interpretation of Hindi and Urdu words.

Speaking of cult blockbusters,

itself, which put Shashi Kapoor and composer Ravindra Jain in the big league, was used for a 2002 David Dhawan non-starter. Dhawan has been a master at repeating many titles, including that of another cult film

with the last word’s spelling changed to

. He has smartly bypassed Subhash Ghai and Manmohan Desai by using their B.O. smashers

and

with a suffix –

! To give the Dhawan his due, both his movies

and

too were huge hits, but piquantly, they had taken the central plots not from these originals but from two Hrishikesh Mukherjee films,

and

respectively. And the

saga is too well-known as the beginning of Rohit Shetty’s completely different comic franchise, while Shetty officially remade Mukherjee’s comedy as

!

So we have the same titles for different stories and different ones for the same plot! And this happens only in Bollywood! Like Dhawan reprising

as

and mixing the original

(The 1969 Prakash Mehra hit debut) with

to create his career-biggest hit, the 1993

!

(also spelt in two of the four versions as

) has quite a history. The first film (1950), a social, introduced Madan Mohan, the second (1968) was a spy saga, the third (Dhawan’s 1993 film) was a screwball caper, while the last (in 2002 with Amitabh Bachchan and Akshay Kumar) a thriller. But each film had an interesting common point – at least one comic situational song! Eerily also, each of the three

(1949, 1971, 1994) and

(1959, 1975, 1994) have starred a Kapoor in the cast. Coming once again to

, Govinda was such a fan of Dharmendra that he loved having the senior actor’s film titles even in other films - check

and

. He considered this lucky and of these four films, only

did not work!

Speaking of suffixes like No.1, such technical ‘escape routes’ really lead to a misuse of cult titles. Two C-grade skin flicks in the millennium were named

and

and no one apologized to Raj Kapoor or N.Chandra for degrading their immortal titles! And the success of

led to a barrage of dubbed films beginning with

like

or

The prosecution rests!

Of course, there were the always lucky names – the ‘50s Daag revived Dilip Kumar’s hit-streak after many flops, ditto the 1973

for Rajesh Khanna. The 1999

(we suspect another bypass with the suffix!) was lucky for Chandrachur Singh and Mahima Chaudhary who had had flops after hit debuts! Similarly

(1965) was a pioneer in multi-star films as well as the lost-and-found genre in contemporary cinema, while the 2005 film of that name saw NRI business go to the next level after the Aditya Chopra-Karan Johar beginning.

was yet another blockbuster title each time.

There were also the always-jinxed titles –

for one,

for another,

for a third. And so we could not understand how - in superstitious Bollywood - some filmmakers actually re-used their flop titles, like Pramod Chakravorty repeating

(1976, 1998) and Aamir Khan’s father Tahir Husain using

(1974, 1994). Of course, Rajkumar Kohli could not repeat the magic of his career-biggest hit,

(1979) in 2002, and Ram Gopal Varma, convinced that his director had messed up

(2005), remade it instantly with the title of his debut success,

, only to give another disaster!

Finally, in the great gamble that is filmmaking, it is amusing to realize that no film having a title connected to cards or gambling (

in Hindi) has ever had the box-office dice fall in its favour – check

twice, two

or