Talk about speaking in tongues. An IPL-sceptic I know these days only watches snatches of games via Bhojpuri commentary, “At least I’ll learn a new language.” On listening to a Punjabi commentary audio clip, a Pakistani friend tweeted, “Swaad aagaya sun ke” (That left a sweet taste in the mouth). Novelist and cricket writer, Rahul Bhattacharya, conversant in both Gujarati and Bengali, last year switched to Bengali commentary because English and Hindi were “thaka hua” (tired/ tiring). Bengali IPL comms he says sounds “almost too elaborate” but Gujarati, “is full of PJs and jokes and punnery and wordplay… and a Gujju insiderness too.”
What language does the IPL truly speak?
Never mind the contentious on-field field Impact Player rule, the new language feeds from the IPL digital rights holders Viacom18 have become IPL16’s off-field impact players. For the record, previous global rights holders Star Sports offered IPL commentary across six languages from 2018. As of 2022, it was increased to eight – English, Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi. But Viacom’s free-to-air 12 language feed, particularly the inclusion of Bhojpuri and Punjabi, appears to have ‘broken the wall.’ (A disclaimer: while my grasp of Bhojpuri, Punjabi and Gujarati may be extremely tenuous, in Odia sadly, it is non-existent.)
For a long time, post-independence Indian cricket commentary was relayed via All India Radio in English, Hindi plus Bengali, Tamil and Marathi. The advent of live satellite television coverage from the 1990s onwards seized the fan’s focus, attention and narrative off radio, but at first only in English.
This year’s Viacom/ Jio Cinema channel 12-language burst and the selection of four new languages, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Odia and Punjabi (BGOP) was carefully calibrated. Siddharth Sharma, head of content Viacom 18, says the move up from eight to 12, “was not as much a numbers game as much as it was more language-based. How could we really expand the footprint and reach out to the top 10-12 languages in India… the extent to which they are spoken in those areas - that was a starting point.”
As per the 2011 census, BGOP feature among India’s top 12 mother tongues by population. Gujarati is No.6 with 55m speakers, Odia No.11 with 34m, Punjabi No. 12, 31m speakers. Bhojpuri, spoken mostly around eastern UP, parts of western Bihar and north Jharkhand and wherever its diaspora went had 50m speakers registered in the 2011 census. It was No. 8 on that chart, its speakers demanding official language status for decades. The 2021 census has been postponed.
Media research around the IPL indicated that a majority of BGOP speakers did not watch IPL live, even while being active consumers of other TV programming in their mother tongue. Sharma said, “a large chunk of those people did not consume IPL… why? Because it was not accessible to them, it was on pay TV and the IPL content couldn’t reach out to them, and probably was not in their language.”
Now that the IPL has given these languages their so-far free-to-air voice, the formalised structures of cricket commentary are being broken every night. In Bhojpuri, commentators calling each other bhaiya (brother), then suffix it to cricketers’ names and discuss Hetmeyerbhaiya’s innings. There’s metaphor - kharbooza kharbooze ka rang dekh keh badalta hai (a melon changes colour to match the one next to it) – in conversations about a partnership tempo.
In Punjabi, a field position is explained, “Cricket ni poker hai… bluff marya si,” (This is poker not cricket, he’s trying to pull off the bluff.) We are introduced to kuttapa (smashing/ pulverising in Punjabi) and “furniture hila diye” when stumps fly, discovering Bhojpuri’s multilingual dexterity. The sweep is now jhaadu shot and purple and orange cap are quite accurately referred to as naarangi and jaamuni topi.
“The IPL no doubt is made for this,” says Sharma, “we want it to be fun if we are reaching out to a new market. We want them to know you can watch this feed without baggage, without any legacy, that is the only way this market can open up.”
Bhojpuri’s affectionate informality has been a hit along with Punjabi’s unique cricketing core. A language of centuries-old poetry, song and literature, in cricket, it offers energy and what Sharma calls its unique “velocity.” While the commentary can be frothy, “we are never flaky”, its cricketing centre must remain solid.
To reach this party-every-night tone, Sharma and his team including Mithilesh Singh, creative director sports, began work on these building these feeds more than ten months ago in June 2022. Finding producers, editors, staffers familiar with spoken and written BGOP languages plus mandatory cricket awareness to keep the script sharp and the words on screen accurate. Each BGOP team head produced an ‘approach document’ of how to build not just the langauge’s cricketing lexicon and vocabulary, but present cricket situations using five or six alternative combinations of phrases to describe pieces of cricket action. That’s hundreds of words and metaphors, in a precise but jaunty cultural context. Analogies, trends, Sharma says, “pop cultural references germane to that region, food, their heroes, something they are proud of.”
Singh, a native Bhojpuri speaker from Azamgarh, said his first challenge, “was to break the perception of Bhojpuri… because of the ajeeb se gaane (peculiar songs). To break the larger view that this is an obscene language. It is a sweet language, we had to capture the tone and its originality.”
It meant seeking the entire range of regional Bhojpuri accents – Banaras, Ballia, Arrah and parts of north Jharkhand - plus identifying folk from each of those regions who belonged to the contemporary cricket ecosystem and were willing to champion Bhojpuri. While there was no shortage of cricketers who spoke Gujarati, Punjabi and Odiya, finding Bhojpuri cricketvolk was slightly tougher. There were a few known Bhojpuri-speaking people who distanced themselves, “Hindi kara doh, hum Bhojpuri nahin bolte.” (We’ll do Hindi comms, we don’t speak Bhojpuri). The Bhojpuri panel now features players from Railways, Bihar, Jharkhand like Mohammed Saif and Satya Prakash, and coaches, like Saurabh Verma, who works with Bihar u19.
Every BGOP candidate once chosen, underwent commentary coaching sessions on Zoom, two hours plus a day, callers and experts being mixed together to commentate on live matches online, building an all-around vibe in every team. The lexicon document, producers told them, were a framework they could build on and work with. Native Punjabi speakers, whose diaspora totals around 113m, say the IPL’s Punjabi commentary belongs to its small towns, its ‘pind’ so to speak, not the urban metropolis. This seamless flow now on TV has taken months to stitch together.
In the middle of course of our conversation, Sharma’s phone rings. Some fire somewhere in the 12-language, 17-stream IPL feed “circus” (his words) which has a crew of 700, outside of the on-field team. Of the Bhojpuri adventure, Singh says, “I never imagined that we would get this kind of response. Idea hi nahin tha.” The biggest compliment came one night when Singh ran into a Tamil producer at the end of a long work day. Who said he enjoyed Bhojpuri commentary, even though he didn’t understand many things. When he heard a Bhojpuri commentator go, ‘ay raja, ay babu’, he heard the emotional tenor of Tamil’s familiar, ‘ay machaa.’ He told Singh, “I loved these words and really loved the tone.”
Raja, babua, machaa, praa, you really have to hear it to feel it.
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