Excerpt: Sone Chandi Ke Buth: Writings on Cinema by KA Abbas

In this essay from 19 January 1941, author KA Abbas argues that Hindustani, rather than Urdu or Hindi, was evolving into the national language of India as it was the preferred language of the most popular films

It is fashionable in puritan nationalist circles to run down cinema as an immoral institution. Sometimes it has been classed with wine-drinking and satta gambling! Even the highbrow ‘moderns’ assume an attitude of superior indifference... This is not the place to discuss at length all the pros and cons of Indian cinema as a cultural force but it may be worthwhile to mention at least one aspect of it. Cinema, in my opinion, is the greatest teacher of Hindustani that

Pradeep Kumar and Madhubala in Shirin Farhad (1956). (HT Photo)

232pp, ₹599; Penguin

Purely Accidental Beginnings

…The propagation of Hindustani through the screen began with the advent of the talkies in India and was determined by purely economic factors. Long before the present Hindustani movement took shape — before, indeed, the very term Hindustani was adopted as the proper name for the national language — Indian film producers were faced with a linguistic problem. The problem interested them because it affected their pockets. In the days of the silent films it was possible to show the same pictures all over the country. Their ‘language’ of action was universally understood. With the introduction of the spoken word in the films that universality was gone and the film market was restricted to the area where the particular language used in the dialogues was understood. The early Indian talking films were of two types — romantic versified melodramas like Layla Majnun and Shirin Farhad adapted from the stage, in which the language used was high-flown Persianized Urdu, and the religious dramas based on Hindu mythology, in which the language used was equally high-flown Sanskritized Hindi. Soon, however, it was found that to make the former popular among the Tamilians of South India was as difficult as to make the Muslim population of North India rave about the latter. The commercial instinct of the producers pointed towards a compromise between the two linguistic extremes, thus making the dialogues in their pictures understood by the largest number of cine-goers all over the country. The result was the evolution of the Hindustani of the talkies — a not very elegant or literary language, a curious mixture of Hindi words like prem and Urdu words like manzil, but a language that had a chance of being understood in Calcutta and Bombay as well as in Allahabad and Lahore and even, to some extent, in Mysore and Rangoon.

Problems of Lingua Franca

It sounds presumptuous but I do believe that long before the publication of Common Language Readers and even before the term ‘Hindustani’ gained currency, the Indian talkies were helping to evolve a common national language. …

The contribution of the Indian screen to the evolution of Hindustani as the national language is two-fold. Not only has it helped… to assimilate a large number of simple, commonly understood words into a new vocabulary but, what is even more important, it has familiarized millions of people in the non-Hindustani-speaking areas with this vocabulary. Ten years ago… It was practically impossible for a visitor from Delhi to make himself understood in Bangalore, Hyderabad (Sind) or Chittagong. Today… thanks to the inroads of Hindustani films in non Hindustani-speaking provinces, it is possible for a Punjabi and a Tamilian to meet on the streets of Nagpur and to converse with each other.

Author KA Abbas (Courtesy the publisher)

Influence of Hindustani Daily Increasing

Tens of thousands of people whose mother tongue is Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Sindhi, Punjabi or Bengali, are daily thronging their local cinemas showing Hindustani films and, lured by the glamour of Kanan Bala, the melody of Saigal and the histrionic ability of Devika Rani, they are being drawn into the ranks of the votaries of Hindustani. The influence of the Hindustani films can be gauged from the fact that the films in provincial languages have totally failed to challenge their supremacy and today a Hindustani film makes far more money in South India than a Tamil or a Telugu film!

Here, then, are at least 10 million cinema fans who have acquired a rudimentary knowledge of Hindustani from the screen. While seeking only to entertain them, the films have taught them their national language. For any plan to spread and develop Hindustani, this vast number ought to be used as a nucleus and the widespread instinct to be entertained should be pressed into service of the cause of the national language.

How can this be achieved? It should be the task of Hindustani scholars to find that out, in consultation and in cooperation with literary men in the film industry. I would like leading dialogue-writers for the screen to be invited to work on any committees that may be set up to evolve a scheme for the propagation of Hindustani in all its various aspects. Not only should they be requested to lend the benefit of their experience for the purpose of preparing a Hindustani dictionary but, in their turn, they should be asked to popularize the use of correct yet simple Hindustani through the dialogues in their pictures. Prizes could be offered for the year’s best dialogues in a film, works of fiction in Hindustani could be recommended for filming and generally an increasing contact established between the film world and the literary world.

Co-editor and translator Syeda Hameed (Courtesy the publisher)

Then it could be pointed out that the life of Tulsidas, the first great Hindustani poet, should not have been produced in Marathi! Indeed, the… persons and organizations engaged in the work of evolving and spreading the national language could be used very effectively to encourage the production of films in Hindustani only, aiming at a gradual elimination of the films in the provincial languages. And, finally, why not a film or a series of films dramatizing the very theme of Hindustani — tracing its evolution since the days of Tulsidas, through the Moghul period when the impact of the two cultures produced a new common language, the era of Kabir and the early ‘Brij Bhasha’ poets, down to the present age? Here is the ready-made scenario of a really national picture — with plenty of action (It was in military camps of the Moghuls that the language originated) — fine dialogues, exquisite songs (written by the greatest poets of many centuries from Tulsidas to Kabir and Ghalib), entertaining humorous interludes (Imagine a Tamilian trying to barter his Tamil with the Pushto of a man from the frontier and both realizing the necessity of a common language!) and even romantic moments (Wasn’t Akbar’s marriage with Jodhabai a step in the direction of the evolution of Hindustani?).

Co-editor and translator Sukhpreet Kahlon (Courtesy the publisher)

Does it all sound comically fantastic? Perhaps. But if produced with imagination… it can be turned into a really fine and purposeful film... And let us produce it if only to deal with the final blow to the short-sighted snobbery that refuses to acknowledge the screen’s cultural potentialities. The films have already taught Hindustani to ten millions. Why not use them also to spread the national language to the remaining 340 millions?