From a lingo for crass villains to the hero's lips, Telangana dialect has broken the class barrier

Whenever a rough draft of a movie script landed on his desk, Harikrishna Choudary, a screenwriting curator with a leading studio house in Hyderabad, was sure about one thing — the story will have lines for the hero and the villain written in two different Telugu dialects.

It is usually Telangana slang for the antagonist and the ‘chaste, standardised Telugu’ for the hero. And, the comedy track usually involved a mocking Telangana slang.

This was a standard template for decades, particularly proving successful in the 1990s when a string of hit movies had the antagonists blurting out choicest epithets in Telangana slang and the slapstick comedy scenes too were loaded with the regional dialect.

“It was as if the characters had acquired this natural trait. The Telangana dialect was stereotyped as inferior and spoken by characters of questionable virtues,” Choudary says.

Statehood campaign theme

One of the key narratives at the height of the Telangana statehood movement was that the region’s dialect was historically subjected to derision, mockery and linguistic subjugation at the hands of the rulers from Andhra region.

A sense of perceived injustice for Telangana slang in popular culture formed one of the underlying themes of the prolonged agitation, apart from the main slogan of “Neellu, nidhulu, niyamakalu” (water, funds and jobs).

The reasons for such public perception were not far to seek: in movies, television serials and other popular cultural forms, Telangana dialect was routinely mocked at and insulted.

The K Chandrasekhar Rao-led Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), which spearheaded the agitation since 2001, made it a point to highlight, during its campaign, the alleged linguistic and cultural hegemony of the coastal Andhra people.

In Telugu movies, the Telangana slang was typically used by villains and comedians while heroes invariably stuck to ‘standardised’ Telugu spoken in coastal Andhra Pradesh. For decades, the Telangana dialect had no place in mainstream media. Historically, an overwhelming majority of litterateurs were from the coastal belt, a more prosperous region.

The Telugu film industry, largely controlled by businessmen from the coastal region, was under a cloud for its alleged cultural insensitivity towards Telangana and its linguistic culture.

Changing trend

Six years after the formation of a separate Telangana state, things are, however, changing. Telangana slang appears to be the flavour of the season in popular culture now.

The Telugu films, though still being produced and financed by people from coastal Andhra, are embracing Telangana dialect with gusto. A series of films are being made now where the lead characters speak in Telangana slang and the storylines are set in Telangana.

Many of them have become blockbuster hits in the two Telugu states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Earlier, virtually all popular heroes were from the coastal belt. Now, the reigning star of Tollywood, Vijay Devarakonda, is from Telangana. And, he wears his Telangana identity on his sleeves.

Television shows weaved around the regional dialect have been gaining popularity. Fresh talent from the region is getting noticed in the mainstream cinema.

Post-bifurcation, a new crop of directors and actors have gained prominence, wearing their Telangana linguistic identity prominently on their sleeves. Even the Telangana cuss words are the new cool thing.

“The trend can be attributed to the realisation of the statehood dream. This has evoked a sense of linguistic pride among the people. Moreover, the forces controlling Tollywood have realised that the Telangana slang cannot be used as an object of ridicule anymore,” film critic Babu Nagabhairava says.

“I would say that the Telangana dialect started acquiring the flavour of the mainstream with the 2016 blockbuster Pelli Choopulu. Its debut director Tharun Bhascker deserves the credit for starting the trend which continued with Sekhar Kammula’s Fida, Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Arjun Reddy and Puri Jagannadh’s iSmart Shankar,” says analyst and researcher Ramakrishna Sangem.

The cult hit Arjun Reddy (2017), which was later remade in Hindi as Kabir Singh, normalised the Hyderabadi-Telugu accent.

The industry, which once routinely dubbed the Telangana dialect as the “other”, has now embraced movies that bring home the ethos of the Telangana dialect and its culture. And with it has grown innumerable talents, be it in cinema or on social media platforms, adding to the coolness quotient of the dialect, he says.

“We now have films that celebrate Bonalu and Bathukamma, the Telangana festivals. Moving away from the age-old traditions being done to death on screen, it is refreshing to see how directors are giving prominence to traditions that were once considered inferior,” says popular YouTube star Sumanth Prabhas.

Rahul Ramakrishna, a hugely talented artiste who shot to fame with his role in Arjun Reddy, says that there is more scope now to explore the subcultures. “The language, clothing and culture changes every few kilometres, and the cinema has to reflect this,” he says.

‘Othering’ of Telangana culture

When the Telugu film industry shifted from Chennai to Hyderabad in the early 1990s, with active backing of the then chief minister NT Rama Rao, himself a matinee idol, it looked at Telangana as a different cultural space. Telugu cinema engaged with Telangana cinematically as a distinct geographical, cultural and linguistic space.

”In this encounter, we do find a secret fascination of otherness which subsequently resulted in stereotyping of the region, its culture and its dialect. The constructed “othering” of Telangana manifested itself culturally and linguistically on the screen at various levels,” say authors and researchers Sathya Prakash Elavarthi and Vamshi Vemireddy.

Traditionally, Telugu films used coastal Andhra dialects as de facto standard and ignored other dialects. However, the representation of culture and language was not politicised until Telugu films started denigrating the Telangana dialect in the 90s, after which it snowballed into a huge issue of self-assertion and identity.

At this stage Telangana dialect ceased to be a question of mere language but became an issue of identity and representation.

As the Telangana agitation picked up steam, Telangana activists started projecting their dialect as a defiant statement of identity in the face of standardisation and false homogeneity of the universal Telugu identity promoted by all media industries, including cinema.

In an article, titled Noorella Therapai Telangana Atma (The soul of Telangana on hundred years of Screen), author and director of the Department of Language and Culture Mamidi Harikrishna argues that mainstream Telugu cinema had failed to capture the soul, struggles, and diversities of Telangana, despite speaking the same language.

He argues that the special ways of life and conditions in Telangana have influenced and contributed to parallel and crossover cinema in India. Despite being made in non-Telugu languages, movies like Ankur (1974), Nishant (1975), Baazaar (1982), Mandi (1983), Susman (1987), Hyderabad Blues (1998), Angrez (2005) and Hyderabad Nawabs (2006) reflected the ethos of the region, its uniqueness and its flavour.

On the other hand, Tollywood made consistent attempts to stereotype and construct Telangana dialect and culture as the “other”. Two movies, made in the 1990s, stand out in this.

In Jayammu Nischayammu Raa, actor Kota Srinivasa Rao speaks Telangana dialect to generate slapstick comedy. Interestingly, except Kota’s character no one speaks in Telangana slang in the movie, not even his son. Everybody else speaks the dominant coastal Andhra dialect. In addition, whenever this character appears on the screen, a donkey’s bray in the background adds to the comic element.

In another movie Mondi Mogudu Penki Pellam, Vijayashanti plays the wife of a police officer. She is portrayed as a bubbly but ‘ignorant housewife’, who speaks Telangana dialect and does not know basic social etiquette. Except her character, no major character speaks her dialect in the film.

Her behaviour and language are ridiculed and used to generate comedy. Even though he loves her, her police officer husband is always ashamed of her language and makes sure that she does not speak in front of his colleagues and friends.

“The film was suggestive of the strange relationship between the two regions, where one region is ashamed of being with the other and wants to reform it to meet its standards,” Satya Prakash, professor of film studies at the University of Hyderabad, says.

The leaders of Telangana movement also highlighted the issue of the alleged linguistic discrimination in school text books and the state-sanctioned cultural festivals.

With the formation of a separate state in 2014, the TRS government has been reviving local art and dance forms and rewriting history textbooks to correct the “historical injustices”.

“I strongly believe that a cultural renaissance is on now. There was suppression before as the dialect of the region was a butt of jokes. Now, it has become part of the mainstream media, be it films, radio or news. The government is also focusing on the local culture and festivities like Bathukamma,” state information technology minister KT Rama Rao says.