We were talking today at work about how nobody in this city speaks Hindi as it should ideally be spoken. Except perhaps Amitabh Bachchan, someone said with a bit of a sly grin showing. His sonorous voice and his nicely rounded vowels make listening to him a pleasure, though I did hear some time ago that some of his voice-overs were actually done by someone else and you could tell the difference only if you knew whether the Big B had done the assignment or not. Be that – as I giggle saying – as it may, there is admittedly hardly anyone I know who is a good average Mumbaikar and who can do the Hindi thing like it should be done. Our Bollywood movie stars least of all.
Most of them speak in tongues that are not discernibly anything. In the ‘old days’, as my irascible boss loves to put it, the actors came from parts beyond, usually north-ish, and spoke Hindi like the natives of the heartland that they were. Dharmendra had his good looks and his drawl to endear him to the masses who clamoured to watch his films. And he spoke decent Hindi, though he stumbled through English with pitiable results – every speech he made at every awards function was fraught with stress and effort for both the actor and his viewers. Then there was Dilip Kumar, who had moments of chaste Urdu in his public appearances. And there was Sanjiv Kumar, Rajesh Khanna and so many more. The women, too, were articulate, from Madhubala to Geeta Bali to Sadhana, even Hema Malini, who spoke good Hindi in a wonderfully Tamilian accent and never managed to do much with her English, even years after being the well-travelled public persona that she is.
Today the younger stars, be it Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan, Aamir Khan or any of the others of that generation, are far more comfortable in English, albeit oddly accented at times and definitely ‘Indian’. When SRK speaks to the public through a media interview or some kind of special show, he tends to say whatever he wants to say in ‘Hinglish’, mixing his own special brand of cocktail that works wonders for his articulate and expressive image as well as for his appeal to even those who are not Khan fans. Salman Khan speaks his strangely American-accented English without very much hesitation, though where he acquired his twang is still a mystery. Aamir Khan talks a lot when he does say anything, and he goes far deeper and is a lot more diplomatic than his peers. Akshay Kumar’s English is not as good as his Hindi and the action-emotion star very wisely sticks to the language he is more comfortable in, which makes a lot more sense than to babble on in a strange tongue that no one really understands but is too polite to question.
The women, too, are off-and-on types when it comes to speaking. Kajol talks a lot, in loud and very ‘Bombay’ English, though her Hindi is not bad either. Rani tends to trip over her pronunciation, and her accent is never very far from her Bengali roots. Tabu is unabashedly a non-English speaker, never mind her experience, and Manisha Koirala’s speech varies with her escort of the moment. Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta, Sushmita Sen and Dia Mirza are very articulate and can hold their own in an international forum, but Aishwarya Rai’s accent tends to slip into Tulu when she is self-conscious, which is most of the time. But all these women have the unfair advantage of being well-finished products of their time, polished from toenails to phonetics. And they have been communicating internationally for so long now that it all comes naturally.
Which makes me wonder – if the men were shoved into international beauty pageants, would they speak better?
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