BEHINDWOODS CELEBRITY COLUMN

When you go to watch a film that stars one of India’s biggest movie stars as Shah Rukh Khan, when you know that the heroine being a South Indian plays a South Indian too, when a much hyped release comes from a director who has three films with 100 crore collection to his credit as Rohit Shetty, when the best technicians and promotions are involved in the making and release of the movie “Chennai Express”, you expect a certain level of benchmark for the final output of the film. Given this backing and budget for such a solid production, there are also a few things that you in fact take for granted like the richness of visuals in cinematography, grandeur of art direction, super hit songs, production quality and sure shot opening weekend collections riding on the pull of the star cast. But beyond all this when a film’s script has a canvas of another state’s people, culture, costumes, location and language, the makers who spend crores of money in the making are expected to spend much more time getting the basics right. That basic requirement to me is the very dialogues in the film that the actors are trained to speak in a certain accent and tone to bring authenticity to the Tamizh characters they portray.

Looking at a few permutations of what is acceptable by and large in character sketches, when the artist is not a Tamilian as per the script and he attempts to speak the unknown language as how Shah Rukh sincerely attempts, when the artist is a Tamilian as per the script and attempts to speak Hindi with a typical south Indian accent as played by Sathyaraj or when the artist is attempting a language that is not his/her mother tongue but hardly makes the audience realize by perfecting the language as Asin in the Hindi film Ghajini or a Dhanush pulling off a ‘Raanjhnaa’ in his maiden Hindi venture, chances are the audience will wholeheartedly embrace the effort put in by the artist and a few mistakes or even the out-of-place accents here and there are brushed aside. When Malayalam star Prithviraj speaks Hindi or Tamizh, when Jayaram dubs his own voice for his Tamizh films, when Udit Narayanan lends his voice for Tamizh heroes, when SPB sings for Salman and Sanjay Dutt, when Asha Bhonsle sings September Maadham in Alaipaayuthey, when Kamal Haasan plays a South Indian in ‘Ek Duje Ke Liye’, we as an audience have always encouraged their attempt at speaking or singing an unfamiliar language.

However what was jarring in Chennai Express (among other long list of aspects of frequently listening to the lead pair signaling and exchanging messages in their abasawaram song style) as far as linguistic skills are concerned was the fact that in an attempt to make all artists dub for themselves and speak an unknown language while playing a Tamilian, the sincerity got lost in translation literally. Creative interpretations of a Tamilian having a certain accent while speaking Hindi is completely subjective and one can probably say that the way this Meenamma (played by Deepika) speaks is one way of a South Indian speaking Hindi. Even Tamizh films depict all Marwadis speaking to the tune of ‘Aadraan, Paadraan, Odraan’ and there could be many speaking good Tamizh in reality. We can safely assume that it is only the character that Deepika portrays and clearly does not generalize all South Indians speaking Hindi. The reason I’m so convinced is because I’ve been told by many Delhi-ites that my Hindi does not have a an iota of a South Indian accent and I can easily pass off as a North Indian. So I’m a living example of a Tamilian born and brought up in Chennai who picked up the language much later in life in Delhi and speaks Hindi the way it is meant to be spoken. I’m sure there are many others like me who can counter the stereotyped way of South Indians speaking Hindi but Bollywood has to realize that we’ve evolved from the days of ‘Ek Gaon mein Ek kissaan ragu Thaatha’.

Let’s be a little generous and even let go of the perception that South Indians can speak only accented Hindi and take it in our inherent sporting spirit. Now coming to the permutation of what is not acceptable is a lead heroine or the villain who is force fitted to be a Tamilian as per the script not being guided by someone with a good diction and pronunciation in Tamizh to both talk and dub their Tamizh lines. I wondered if there was any word in Tamizh called ‘Mundy’ that means ‘head’ in Tamizh before realization dawned on me that the dialogues must’ve been written in English and given to her that should’ve been ‘Mandai’ meaning ‘head’. When Deepika says ‘Poi Thola’ meaning ‘Get lost’ as ‘Poi Tholaa’, it’s inevitable to pull up the director for callously not having the dialogues or dubbing supervised by a professional with good knowledge of Tamizh. This brings me to the point of re-iterating that when a film involves a language that the director is not familiar with, it has to be supervised by an expert who’ll do justice to the final rendition of the dialogues by the artists.

When Tamizh film directors like Maniratnam, Prabhu Deva or AR Murugadoss shoot films in Hindi, much as the language is alien to them, one can hardly spot language imperfections in the finished film. All of them are very conscious of getting the words, diction and pronunciation right by the artists involved as far as delivering Hindi dialogues or region-specific accents are concerned. The director of ‘Chennai Express’ Rohit Shetty therefore cannot enjoy that immunity of shooting an unknown language. When you hear a Hindi song sung by AR Rahman himself, it’s hard to believe that Hindi is not his comfort zone to converse on a day-to-day basis. When Tabu spoke Tamizh in ‘Life of Pi’, it was nowhere grammatically or phonetically wrong and with due credit to her own dubbing, it seemed just fine. That much of care, effort and caution is put into the language with corrections being made at every stage of execution. And none of these people went about promoting the film warning the audience of certain mistakes that are bound to be there in the film and that it should be excused.

While this is not a review of ‘Chennai Express’ movie as such, this is a mere observation of basic slip-ups on the director’s part rightfully expressed by a Tamilian who was as excited as a child to catch the red carpet premiere of a much awaited movie that had a Tamizh overtone all through the film. Each language has its own beauty and it’s never a question of which is better or who is better at speaking the language. It’s always about authenticity and nailing it right with enough support through research, pre-production planning, experts’ guidance and doing your homework right all the more when you wade on unchartered waters. The whole film rides on the heavy shoulders of endearing Shah Rukh with a worthy support from his gorgeous co-star Deepika but without much bearing from Rohit Shetty who clearly seems to have scored lesser with the submission of his homework unfinished. This is a train that got derailed before its destination, chugged its way huffing and puffing to finally arrive at the station and a journey that may not make the audience board again.