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Hyderabadi tadka

Hyderabadi Hindi, much loved by filmmakers for its unique cadence, is often caricatured and held up for ridicule. Yogesh Pawar discusses representation of the dialect in Hindi cinema and why purists and 'Dakhni' speakers are not amused

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Ek amma apne potte ku 20 saal tak meeththa pedaa banati, lekin ek potti usku 20 minute mein kaisa yedaa banati, kuch aiseech hai yeh picture," Arif Ansari, an autorickshaw driver from Mumbai's Jogeshwari suburb, was telling his friend on phone soon after watching Daawat-e-Ishq. The crowd around him couldn't help laughing at not only his take on the Aditya Roy Kapur-Parineeti Chopra starrer, but the Hyderabadi Hindi it was being delivered in.
This migrant from Guntur seemed to be the only one who didn't approve of Parineeti's attempts at speaking his mother tongue in the film. "Unko koi bolne ko hona ki agli baar nakkoch baat karro tum hamari zabaan mein," said the 31-year-old.

He was at pains to explain why he wasn't amused with attempts to provide laughs at the cost of his dialect (also called Dakhni), the spoken tongue in a large swathe of southeastern India which once formed the Nizamshahi (all of Andhra Pradesh, Telengana, Raichur and Gulbarga in Karnataka and Marathwada in Maharashtra).
Filmmaker and scriptwriter Habib Faisal says his attempt to use the language was only guided by the story. "In Daawat-e-Ishq, I've set a part of the story in Hyderabad, so I needed the characters to sound Hyderabadi when the film is in that region. Apart from the food and ambience, the language was a very big part of bringing in the Hyderabadi flavour," says the man who has scripted Salam Namaste, Ta Ra Rum Pum and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom in the past.

Of course, Daawat-e-Ishq is not the first or only film to use Hyderabadi Hindi. Bobby Jasoos and The Dirty Picture are two recent films that used the dialect.

Cultural and film historian Mukul Joshi recalls the era when comedian Mehmood used the tongue to reprise some of his most memorable acts. "His mastery of the finer nuances of the language meant that whether it was his butler in Gumnaam, or the cyclerickshaw driver in Kunwara Baap, his character always hit bull's eye with the audience."
"It was so successful that even Amitabh Bachchan borrowed a leaf from Mehmood's style book for a fun song in Desh Premee. Bachchan's Hyderabadi getup right down to the striped lungi, colourful chaddi and moustache as he stalks Hema Malini's character singing 'Khaatoon ki khidmat mein salaam apun kaa/ajee potti pataanaa hai faqat kaam apun kaa' was clearly inspired from Mehmood's dance in Gumnaam for 'Hum kaale hain to kya hua dilwaale hain'."

According to Joshi, Shyam Benegal is amongst the rare filmmakers who used the language without reducing it to a caricature. "But that's because many of his earlier films like Nishant, Ankur and Mandi were set in regions where this is the language of communication," he says.

"Shyam Babu was born and raised in Trimulgherry, Secunderabad and even pursued his college at Osmania University, which must definitely help in him being able to use the language he grew up listening to, intelligently."
Naseeruddin Shah, one of India's brightest acting talents who in many ways is a Benegal find, remembers how he grappled with the language in the beginning. "Luckily, we had Shabana (Azmi) around. Her mother Shaukat aapaa is from Hyderabad and speaks the language fluently, and Shabana's picked it up quite well. So she'd become the go-to person for any issues with how to say a certain line, especially in films like Mandi." He smiles, remembering his character Tungrus who even breaks into Sufi songs when drunk.

It is this Sufi side of the language that Ratan Kumar Pandey, senior professor at the Hindi department, University of Mumbai, alludes to when discussing "Bollywood's attempts at pulling down one of the most glorious examples of syncreticism both in terms of religion and region".

"Bollywood uses everything including Hindi to make its money without doing anything for the languages. Look at the promotional interviews. Each tries to outdo the other with an American drawl as they answer even Hindi questions in English," he said. According to him, such socio-cultural xenophobes of the glamour industry do Hyderabadi Hindi a lot of damage.

Pandey refers to Amir Khusro's Urdu travelling south and encountering Telugu in the Godavari delta. "It is exciting to think of how these languages which had little to do with each other borrowed so much from one another to create Dakshini or Dakhni which became the language of both the Nizam's court and the people of the kingdom." He explains how the noun and verb often get fused to create words which defy all known parts of speech. "These further get suffixed with 'ch' giving them a distinct sound and feel."

He hopes efforts are made to honour a language which survived the Dutch, French and British, and give it its deserved place.

This would've come as music to Arif's ears who would've definitely called for a double ka meetha to celebrate.

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