‘Delhi Belly’ Continues Bollywood’s English Advance

In 1994, when director Dev Benegal was working on his debut film, “English, August,” almost nobody in India made films in English. All the Indian distributors he approached rejected the film and it was only thanks to 20th Century Fox that it ran successfully in movie theaters.

In some ways, it was an early pioneer of the “multiplex films”—the fare offered at pricier cinemas with several screens that have cropped up in large Indian cities in the last decade. Many of these movies depict the urbane, English-speaking classes, and have come to define Bollywood today.

“‘English, August’ had to be in English,” said Mr. Benegal, whose film was an adaptation of a book about an alienated young civil servant in training in India’s boondocks. “It was a film about my generation, which was not only speaking in English but also thinking and dreaming in English.”

 Seventeen years on, as the Aamir Khan-backed movie “Delhi Belly” prepares to hit theaters this Friday, the conversation about language continues. Mr. Khan, a megastar who has turned to producing, recently screened the movie in New York. He said the comedy about three flat-mates accidentally caught up in a crime was written and shot in English. But to make it accessible to an audience beyond multiplexes, he plans to release a dubbed Hindi version. He is also considering dubbing the movie in Tamil and Telugu.

Over the last decade, a steady stream of English has trickled into Bollywood films. Reflecting the conversational style of many urban Indians, many Bollywood characters now tend to switch effortlessly between English and Hindi. And an increasing number of independent directors now appear willing to go the whole hog: make a film almost entirely in English.

Aseem Chhabra, a New York-based film critic, said that the genre of the English-language Bollywood movie is a reflection of new divisions among Indian cinema-goers.

“We’re no more in the ‘70s, where Amitabh Bachchan spoke to all of India,” said Mr. Chhabra, referring to Indian cinema’s most famous actor. “We have different Indias now. The audiences are far more fragmented.”

India’s incredible linguistic diversity has meant that English has for long been one of the threads that can connect people of a certain class from different states. English has also been a language of opportunity and aspiration, a fact that has amplified over the last two decades with an increasing number of middle-class Indians aspiring for jobs in technology and management.

Yet producers and distributors have remained conservative because Bollywood’s main earnings come from a Hindi-speaking audience.

“People haven’t turned around and said there’s a massive new market for English-language films,” said Anuvab Pal, who wrote  “Loins of Punjab Presents” (2007) and “The President is Coming,” (2009) both in English. “We have at least five English-language news channels doing well but film producers still encourage you to make movies in Hindi.”

But, he said, “I would like to think there is a pan-Indian English audience.”

Hollywood remains a formidable opponent for India’s English-language directors, though, as audiences tend to associate English language with the West, says Kunaal Roy Kapoor, one of the lead actors in “Delhi Belly” and director of “The President is Coming.”

“People seem to be saying: if I want to watch an English movie, I always have Hollywood,” said Mr. Kapoor, “But things are changing, especially with the rapidly growing market for Indian English fiction.”

Mr. Benegal also thinks that many Indian actors have a hard time pulling off English on screen.

“I don’t think we have good actors in English,” he said. “Most of them are stilted and awkward on screen. They don’t have the same authenticity like they do when they speak Hindi.”

For Indian-origin Poorna Jagannathan, the lead actress for “Delhi Belly,” the problem wasn’t English though.

“I grew up all over the world and spent time in India and Pakistan as a kid. So I’m comfortable slipping into an accent,” says Ms. Jagannathan, who has appeared in U.S. television shows, and in some ways could be the target audience for the new breed of Bollywood film, which does require some familiarity with the colloquialisms and slang of Indian English. “The toughest scene I did was the one where I speak Hindi—Aamir wanted every syllable enunciated with a homegrown accent.”

But linguists say experimenting with language isn’t necessarily a new thing for Bollywood films.

The manner in which Indians seamlessly switch tongues has fascinated sociologists, and some of them have studied Hindi cinema to observe it better. Professor Philip Lutgendorf, the co-chair of the South Asian Studies Program at the University of Iowa, talks of “code-switching,” a phenomenon in multilingual societies where people switch back and forth according to context. He says it’s been present in Hindi cinema over the decades.

“A high-degree of code-switching is part of the hero character’s all-round heroic quality,” says Professor Lutgendorf. “You’ll see heroes speaking Hindi with villagers and English in cities. And you’ll see them using Urdu in a poetic situation, when he has to sing to his beloved. The opening scene in ‘Guide’ shows Dev Anand’s character speaking in three languages.”

This piece was first published in the Wall Street Journal website