MultipleVersions   

Indian directors who have roots in different languages have been known to make the same film in two different languages simultaneously. The Tamil director Mani Ratnam is an example. His recent film Ravan had a Hindi version and a Tamil version. Both had the same story, screenplay and dialogue but had different actors in the two versions. His film Yuva in Hindi was Ayudha Ezhuthu in Tamil and had a completely different set of actors. The Hindi film cannot be called the dubbed version of the Tamil and neither is it a completely original film. Since it is made by the same filmmaker and based on the same story and screenplay, it is difficult to pinpoint the original and the remake. One can only conjecture that the original is Tamil since Mani Ratnam’s first language is Tamil.

Directors like Priyadarshan recreate Malayalam films in Hindi. Some of them are creations of other directors, while some are his own. Since India has overlapping linguistic territories, the same film can have one or more languages. It is common to have liberal usage of Punjabi in Hindi films. This is not translated as it is assumed that people who are fluent in Hindi would know a bit of Punjabi as well. This is also true of closely related linguistic communities like Tamil and Malayalam. However, when a character has to resort to a language that might not be popularly known, the film resorts to subtitles. The terrorist’s speech in the Tamil film Roja had Tamil subtitles, because the speech was crucial to the understanding of the film and the director had to make sure that it was understood by the majority of viewers.