So I’m watching this movie.
It’s called Zakhm. It’s from India. Bollywood to be precise. It’s… well, it’s pretty horrible. I have seen one other bollywood movie, called Mohabbatein, and it was actually not bad. I mean, a lot of the artistic choices are nearly diametrically opposed to what a western director would do, and in many places it’s amateurish even to the point of being childish, but it had great songs (it’s a musical), good energy, some funny stuff, etc. I enjoyed it. I bought the soundtrack. I thought I’d try some other indian films.
But Zakhm sucks. It looks like it’s pretending to have songs and dance sequences, but so far in the first hour, it’s only had 2 songs, and only one of them had dancing — the other one had sullen glares followed by a hug. The story is very somber, and is trying to be very serious and political, but the apparent amateurishness of the product and the complete lack of acting skill or production values really does not go well with the serious tone of the film. Add in the occasional schoolboy dancing on the top of a piano, and you get a pretty amazingly unpleasant viewing experience.
I actually wanted to talk about Zakhm because of the language in it. Of course, it’s mostly in Hindi — or some variant thereof, I suppose. But, about 10 or 15 percent of the spoken language is English. People will be rattling along in Hindi and suddenly there will be one phrase or sentence in English. Usually they’re short, idiomatic things — like answering the phone “Hello”, telling somebody “Please be careful”, “Goodbye”, “I love you” or “Happy birthday”. But in the scene I just watched, a doctor is talking our protagonist about his mother, who is sick. He’s speaking incredibly quickly in Hindi about how they’ve had to take in breathing apparatus, but she’ll be alright, etc etc. And in the middle of it, he says one sentence in English. They don’t have subtitles for the English, and since I was not really listening for comprehension, I missed it the first time around. I had to rewind, to hear him say “I think her lungs have collapsed.” Excuse me? Is there not a word in Hindi for “lungs” or something?
Can anybody explain to me why they sometimes speak in English and sometimes in Hindi?
Relics of a colonial past, doncherknow. The British spread English language and bureaucracy like a plague germ, everywhere they went. English is, IIRC, the second language in India. For a country with as many languages as India has, this is quite something.
it’s because they have so many languages that English is so universal – secondary (high) school and university is all taught in English because teachers have to go to one of the big cities to train, and it would be impossible to run courses in all the different regional languages.
Sorry, it seems there was confusion — I know why English is spoken in India. What I meant to ask is how it is decided to use Hindi for some phrases and English for others — the ones I mentioned previously are common and idiomatic, so it’s very understandable how they got into the vernacular; “hello”, “goodbye”, “I love you”. But, “I think her lungs have collapsed”? That’s the one I don’t get.