The Eloquent Language: Hindustani in 1940s Indian Cinema

Film journals had become part and parcel of the complex of cinema consumption and a vital source of information in the 1930s. These film journals successfully expanded the reach of cinema and created a space for thinking and engaging with cinema and cinema-related content. The film magazine not only fulfilled the needs of average cinema-goers but was also aimed at distributors, exhibitors, advertisers and potential film financiers. This article throws light on the issue of cinema’s relationship to language through the Urdu film journal. It explores how literary public spheres impinged on the cinematic and reflected the tensions and anxieties that had arisen over the question of the Hindi-Urdu language divide during the 1930s. The intersection between – and transformations of – literary and cinematic cultures effected by commercial printing produced a series of complex negotiations. Through the specific cases of the Urdu film journals Film, Shama, Star, Film Stage and Nigarkhana, I show how these journals were responding to – or how they expressed continued engagement with – notions of akhlaq (moral conduct) and islah (correction) which were central to contemporary articulations on reform and morality.

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Where Adab Meets Film: Mapping Discourses on Akhlaq and Islah in the Urdu Film Journals from India (1930–1950)

Niazi¹

2023

“…14.Radio Ceylon’s broadcasters also challenged neighbouring Pakistan’s linguistic policies, which sought to promote a marked version of Urdu (distinct from Hindi) as the country’s national language (see Huacuja Alonso, in press). For works on language and the Hindi film industry see Lunn, 2015 and Lahiri 2015.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Songs by Ballot: Binaca Geetmala and the Making of a Hindi Film-Song Radio Audience, 1952–1994

Alonso¹

2022

Binaca Geetmala was a weekly countdown or hit parade radio programme that ranked Hindi film songs by order of popularity, first based on listeners’ requests and later on record sales. The programme aired from 1952 until 1994 and is arguably one of the longest lasting and most influential radio programmes in the world. Drawing on a variety of sources, including listeners’ diaries, correspondence from listener radio clubs and interviews with broadcasters and devoted listeners, I trace Geetmala’s four-decade ‘melodious journey’, charting the programme’s central role in making Hindi film songs – the leading popular music in the Indian subcontinent. I make two interrelated arguments. First, I argue that through its popularity charts, Geetmala cultivated an understanding of Hindi film songs as ‘the music of the common people’ and made partaking in film song’s so-called ‘commonness’ the very attraction of the programme. Here, I consider how this fascination with ‘commonness’, with measuring popularity, and with individuals’ participation in the process, relates to the larger political culture of independent India’s first decades, including the experience of universal suffrage. Second, I argue that by encouraging alertness to ever-changing popularity lists and by developing specific terminology, Geetmala effectively transformed ordinary radio listeners into discerning Hindi film-song experts.

“…The article further adds, ‘With the Indian talked out of the European cinemas there is a fillip given to the production of Indian films in the vernacular and to the building of cinemas for Indians’ ( TOI 1930, p. 14). David Lunn (2015) has written that the introduction of sound presented Indian studios with an unprecedented problem of choosing a language of film production. ‘In the Hindi–Urdu–Hindustani context, this became a question of register, of which range of the oral continuum would be appropriate for a given character, film, or situation’ (p. 2).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing from the Margins of Media: Screenwriting Practice and Discourse During the First Indian Talkies

Sengupta¹

2018

This article is an attempt to rethink the intermedial practice and discourse of screenwriting during the first Indian talkies through a study of the margins of print, theatre and film history. I engage with the unfortunate archival absence of film scripts from the early years as a heuristic rather than a handicap, employing intermediality both as an archaeological and a conceptual tool in reconstituting screenwriting as a converged media practice. I argue that the widespread circulation of screenwriting manuals for amateurs constituted a pedagogical infrastructure separate from, but parallel to, the other infrastructural flow of ideas and professionals from the Parsi theatre into the film industry. The autobiographical accounts of some of the first playwright-turned-screenwriters bear testimony to the spaces they negotiated for themselves in the talkies after a successful stint with the Parsi stage. These memoirs form an interesting counterpoint to the testimonies of another group of screenwriters from the Indian Cinematograph Committee evidences (1927–1928) in which these writers express great apathy towards the practice in the Indian studios and declare their freelancing associations with Hollywood studios which solicited story ideas from viewers worldwide.