I distinctly remember the mahurat day of my boss Pankuj Parashar’s new film in Filmalaya Studios, Andheri, in 1991. Before that day, I had seen pictures of celebrities giving claps for the mahurat shots. All those clapboards had the word mahurat written on them. Being from Benaras, I have pure Hindi in my DNA and I did score a distinction in Sanskrit too. So every time I saw those pictures, I wondered why ‘mahurat’when the word is ‘muhurt’. I came to know later that the film industry was dominated by Punjabis in the beginning and in Punjabi, the word would be pronounced mahurat and that spelling must have stuck.
That day in 1991, when I was writing the clap, I decided as an assistant director to spell the word right and I did. But soon I had to change it back to mahurat because the majority thought I had misspelt it and I was too junior to argue. But did that make the event or the clapboard any less auspicious? No.
I have spent a long time in the business and have seen the industry evolve in the way it functions. We have foreign crew working with us now. State barriers are blurring too. Technicians and actors from the South work in Mumbai and vice versa, and in the process, the use of Hindi as a tool of communication has gone down. It has also changed largely.
The other day, Vishal Bhardwaj and I were sitting with Gulzar sahib and I said something about how people in movies don’t call a flower a phool but pronounce it as fool most of the time these days. A big faux pas. Gulzar sahib smiled and said, “Languages change, don’t take these things to heart. Hindi is changing and it will change more.”
It’s all OK
He was right. Even English is changing. ‘Okay’ became ‘Ok’ and then it has become ‘k’ and that is okay. Look at our songs now — such an eclectic mix of Hindi, Urdu, English, Punjabi, Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, and it is wonderful. ‘Ladki beautiful kar gayi chull’ — how many knew the meaning of chull before it made it to Hindi movies? This is no pure Indian language, this is India.
I used to obsess about the purity of Hindi and Urdu in movies but not anymore. The scripts are now written in a software called Final Draft. Final Draft, for some strange reasons, doesn’t import Hindi fonts, so you end up writing in Roman. There goes my beloved Devanagari. As far as I know, in most Mumbai schools, Hindi is not even compulsory and Final Draft knew this in advance. Very few actors expect a Devanagari script, most want a Roman script.
This would annoy me no end a few years back but then I thought, why not. If people who can’t even read Hindi are making Hindi movies, Hindi is doing well. Devanagari is being used less in movie-making but Devanagari is being used less across the board anyway.
I keep hearing complaints about movie posters not being in Hindi or even a recent advisory from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting asking for the use of Devanagari for movie credits. I think it is a non-issue. When I look at the Twitter handles of the people cribbing about Devanagari, they seem to be happy using English.
A few hundred years ago, who would have thought the language of the Ramayana would become almost extinct. Sanskrit gave birth to Prakrit and then Khari Boli and then Hindi and who knows, a few hundred years later, there will be another language that our children or their children will speak. I am more interested in what we speak, and that should continue to remain more important than any language or its script.
The writer is a professional filmmaker and aspiring chef based in Mumbai.