Hollywood reaches out to India

When Jurassic Park was dubbed in Hindi, it heralded a trend that is now a multi-billion business. Hollywood hits in Indian languages are the big success story of modern cinema, writes Nutan Sehgal

GUESS which have been the three recent highest grossing movies in Indian languages...3 Idiots, Ajab Prem Ki Gazab Kahani and My Name Is Khan. Right? No wrong. Three of the biggest blockbusters in Indian languages have been Avatar, 2012 and The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

Yes, you read that right. These three movies may be Hollywood’s highest global grossers but in India they have broken another record — by becoming the biggest money-spinners after being dubbed in various Indian languages. In fact, so big that their dubbed versions have raked in more moolah than some of the Hindi smash hits.

For more than 15 years, Hollywood had been releasing dubbed versions of its runway hits to limited cinema halls. But over the past few years, the dream factory has pressed the accelerator. Its marketing whizkids enthused by the response have started releasing dubbed versions in multiplexes as well as in normal halls in cities, towns and villages.

The sparkling success of the business can be gauged from the fact that of around 700 prints of Avatar that came to India, only 200 were in English. The rest 500 were in different Indian languages. The same goes for 2012, which released more than 750 prints of which 575 were dubbed and just 175 were in the original language. The Twilight Saga: New Moon came with around 475 prints of which 400 were in different Indian languages.

Little wonder that dubbing has become such a money-spinning business. Every Hollywood movie which gets the cash registers jingling in the West is bound to get the ‘Indian languages treatment’. Thus, The Twilight Saga: New Moon becomes Amavasya: Ek Khatarnak Kahani even as Bollywood takes a backseat and lets Hollywood invade the Indian moviegoer’s psyche.

Dubbed movies rake in more than Rs 200 crore annually and the figure is leapfrogging every year. One of the biggest hits in recent years has been Spiderman-3 that was dubbed in numerous Indian languages, including Bhojpuri, and raked far more than its English original in India.

Indeed the dubbing industry has come a long way from its hesitant beginnings. The experiment began in 1994 with Jurassic Park, which was one of the first big Hollywood hits to be dubbed in Hindi. When it was released, a two member Italian TV crew was in Mumbai (then Bombay) to ‘report the event’.

The Italian crew of Giovanni Piperno and Laura Muscardin had been assigned the task of shooting a documentary on Indian cinema.

Questioned about the relevance of the Steven Spielberg film in their scheme of things, Pepperoni’s reply was: "It is the first American movie to be dubbed in Hindi. The crowd response will decide the fate of the entire dubbing phenomenon."

No doubt, Jurassic Park heralded an entirely new concept of entertainment for the Indian audience. The hiss and grunt of dinosaurs on the silver screen, that too in the language of the Indian masses, lent a new dimension to what was till the other day merely a visual treat to the non-English speaking crowd.

In the 1990s, the process of dubbing was a cumbersome job due to a dearth of the stateoftheart equipment in India. Dubbing studios usually got two dummies — one the visual track and the unmixed sound track comprising music and voices.

However, with the advance in technology and the heartening response to dubbed Hollywood hits, everything is changing. Top-of-the-line studios are investing in sophisticated equipment and bringing in the best technology to India.

Earlier many movies were translated verbatim leading to some hilarious gaffes. But now Bollywood hires some of the best literary writers and the translation of the script is usually precise and at no point loses the ‘soul’ of the dialogue. The dubbed voice is later mixed with the music and lip synchronisation is matched. Says Vijay Sehgal, managing director of Delhi’s dubbing studio, Sehgal Photofilms, "Dubbing doesn’t mean translating the original mastercopy word for word. It means transcreating and that is how the essence of the original characters is maintained".

With the viewership booming by the day, dubbing is becoming a much bigger business. In fact, a better business than even Bollywood films. Which explains why most distributors have happily embraced this once little-known avenue. Jurassic Park may have blazed a trail in Bollywood, and set a trend that is here to stay. The era of western stars fighting and romancing in Hindi and invading the Indian screens has dawned upon us true and proper. — NF

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