Language, region and cinema: Translation as politics in Ek Duuje Ke Liye

Language articulates cultural distinction and difference in a variety of ways in India’s diverse cinematic traditions. In mainstream Bombay cinema, language has been deployed to assert the hegemony of Hindi and to cast Hindi-speaking North Indian subjects as quintessential national subjects. This assertion of linguistic and cultural privilege runs counter to the fact that film-making in India has always entailed a host of multilingual and cross-regional exchanges, from producing remakes and double versions to dubbing film dialogues. This article uses G. N. Devy’s concept of ‘translation consciousness’ to demonstrate how Ek Duuje Ke Liye/For Each Other, a Hindi film produced by South Indian film-makers, challenges the hegemony of both Hindi and Bombay cinema as an industry. In moving deftly across multiple tongues and cultural forms – from various iterations of Hindi to Bharatanatyam to classic film titles – EDKL urges us to embrace a more playful attitude towards linguistic and regional identity. Attending to the politics of language and sound in this particular film, and in Indian film history more broadly, also allows us to rethink the relationship between the ‘national’ and the ‘regional’ in film studies as a discipline.