The New Bazaar Language

“Mere photo ko...”  Dramatic Pause.  “Mere photo ko seene se yaar...chipka le saiyan Fevicol se.”

These hazardous lyrics are from the latest chartbuster Fevicol Se, from Dabangg 2. But you already knew that.

That’s a safe guess because it’s difficult for anyone who has a TV set, or neighbours, or uses autos, to not know of the existence of this song, or any others of its ilk. The growing genre of ‘item number’s has become the point of thrust (no pun intended) for the marketing of any big budget movie nowadays. We are literally carpet bombed. Nobody but the grumpiest seem to mind.

What is interesting though, is a strange pattern twisting through these songs. Note the following lines:

Anarkali disco chali

Character Dheela Hai

Munni Badnaam Hui, Darling Tere Liye

A significant percentage of these item songs use English words as part of their punch-line sentences. The song Jhalla in Ishakzaade uses English for every point in its long list of the character’s jhalla-ness.

The reason I found this surprising is that these songs were clearly meant to appeal to a vast section of society, many who clearly do not speak in English. It’s motives explained the pelvic thrusts. It didn’t explain the increasing use of English words interspersed in Hindi sentences – the legitimacy it seemed to give to this ‘Hinglistani’ as a way of speaking.

Then I started noticing how people were actually speaking – the woman at the local shop who says ‘yeh cream face pe laganaa hai’, the man selling ‘pottery items jisme plant rakhte hai’, the driver who asks if ‘hum scenic spot pe roke? Wahaan photo lena’.

Suddenly, it seemed like there was good reason to add English words to celebrity cleavages. But a part of me still rebelled at the idea of Hinglistani actually gaining ground. It just seemed too far-fetched. I couldn’t see it going anywhere. After all, English is spoken by so few, and spoken well by even fewer. And the Raj is gone, the English are a rare sight in India. Besides, there are currently no books written in Hinglistani, no attempts at any literature in this pidgin. Most good English speakers in India go out their way to ridicule this sort of ghati-ness.

None of these seems at all condusive to a linguistic transition – to the slow simmer forge of a new mixed language.

And yet...that’s exactly how Urdu was formed.

So perhaps, just perhaps, the lyricist of Fevicol Se, is a poet for a new language in its birth pangs.