Will Scarlet writes in.

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I have been having a number of fascinating discussions on accents, especially in the context of Bollywood, over the last few days. The issue came up once again that Bollywood actors usually have people dub in for them. In other words, that voice you hear may not be that of the actor herself. Saheli had a great comment on Sepia Mutiny some months back on dubbing and accents that popped into my mind as I was thinking about this post.

Just to bring in a different perspective: Michelle Yeoh can't speak proper Mandarin to save her life. But one of her most famous movies was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is in Mandarin. Born in Malaysia, her first languages are Malay and English, and her Chinese is Cantonese. Someone--sometimes even Ang Lee himself-- would have to write out the day's shooting script in pinyin (phonetic Chinese) and help her pronounce it. She would spend hours memorizing lines phonetically, and when Ang Lee would change the script during shooting she would have minor nervous breakdowns. This in a physically demanding role and after a broken knee. I'm told that her accent was audible and distracting even to American-raised Chinese who are non-Mandarin dialect speakers themselves. Knowing all this, Ang Lee--who had plenty of fx tech available to him--still used her voice, with sync sound. And I've never heard someone complain about her accent vehemently enough to suggest he should have dubbed her; they still wanted Michelle Yeoh to do the acting. I think this speaks to the extent to which most directors take sound and voice incredibly seriously. There's a great making-of on the Harold and Kumar DVD mocking this seriousness, but it can be mocked to good effect precisely b/c it's real and important. Now, Ang Lee might not have taken so much trouble with a lesser actress, or for a lesser film, but all things being equal, it was obviously important to him. And she worked really hard to fit in with that priority. Ever watch the making-of portions of the latest Chinese exports? The sense of artistic discipline and drive you get from the actors is amazing. Takeshi Kaneshiro works in three languages (Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin), and read up on archaic Tang Era expression. so he could inflect his Mandarin properly.

Now that's a very different market structure from Bollywood, and a very different class of films. It requires a lot of time and effort, a real market for that kind of quality, and a good script that is solidified long before shooting to base your preparations around. It's absolutely unfair to compare Sarkar to House of Flying Daggers, for instance. But even the highest production value, lovingly scripted films like Devdas and Lagaan often seem to lack that final buff of perfectionist polish. A good counterexample: it's really inspiring to watch Monsoon Wedding and hear the director's commentary; which lines were spoken in Hindi, English, or Punjabi was all carefully thought about.

To build on Saheli's comments a bit: part of the reason for this is the way the Bollywood industry is structured. Organizationally, Bollywood is not organized into studios but is rather a network-organized set of independent producers.

As is often the case, the organization determines the process. In Bollywood, the process is not nescessarily executed in the usual fashion - starting with a script, and then moving on to casting, and then production. Actors are often doing several movies at the same time. Dubbing is often used since the leader actors often don't have the time to deploy their own voice. Directors pay another person for the dubbing since it is rather cheap to get a decent dubber. The end result is that the actor's accent is not faithfully reproduced.

I am not arguing that this is a good thing, but rather that it is an artifact of the organizational structure. Things are getting more organized, but given the way Bollywood is structured today, how would things change? How would you get "Bollywood" to recognize a problem such as this and act upon it? A key problem here is that you don't have command and control flows like in a typical hierarchical structure. Would mass media help? What would blogging about it or writing about it in newspapers cause to happen? Bollywood is probably going to continue doing what they have been doing all along. That is, zilch. Zero. Nada. (Unless, of course, there is a consumer-side push.) There have been complaints about Bollywood being kitschy for years, but little has changed. Personally, I expect these aspects of Bollywood to persist. Dubbing, songs in the rain and many many other aspects of Bollywood are going to be around for a bit longer. I think it is best to make peace with that!