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Welcome to the IVM Podcast Network.
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I had an interesting dream the other night.
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At least it started off well.
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I died and went to heaven.
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That's a good start because I could have died and found myself in a traffic jam on the Western
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Express Highway on a Friday evening, which I suppose is one idea of hell.
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Anyway, so I died and went to heaven and I didn't even need an Aadhaar card to get in.
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They took one look at me and said, come on in Mr. Verma, you've been a good man.
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You fought the good fight against the evil tentacles of the devil's pawn, also known
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I walked in and it was beautiful.
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The air smelt of jasmine, a flower particularly close to my heart.
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And the grass was green, the air was fresh.
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And all around me were picnic baskets with seafood platters in them.
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Oh the prawns, I ate six prawns from one of those platters, though I should have stopped
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And then I noticed that all the buildings around me looked the same.
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In fact, they were all cinema halls.
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I went to the nearest such amphitheater where the attendant told me that people in heaven
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did nothing but watch movies all the time and eat seafood platters.
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This really is heaven, I thought to myself.
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I walked up to the movie schedule.
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All my favorite filmmakers were listed.
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There was Kieslowski, there was Fellini, there was Scorsese, there was Shukta Jitrai.
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But then I noticed one problem.
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All these films were dubbed in Kannada.
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Maybe this was a Kannada amphitheater.
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I asked the attendant about this, who told me that every single theater in heaven showed
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All non-Kannada films had to be dubbed into Kannada before they were allowed to release.
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And at this moment, I realized that the attendant looked just like my friend Pawan Srinath.
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In fact, he was my friend Pawan Srinath.
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Pawan looked at me, grinned widely and said, this is payback.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, where I begin by trying to entertain you, but in
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the end, hope to enlighten you.
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My guest today, as you no doubt know by now, is Pawan Srinath, my colleague at the magazine
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Pragati and a fellow at the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru.
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Welcome to the show, Pawan.
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Pawan, have you seen Lord of the Rings in Kannada?
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Unfortunately, no, only in English.
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Because it cannot be seen in Kannada.
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You can see it in Tamil, perhaps, or in Hindi, but not in Kannada.
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That seems like a shocking loss for Kannada speakers.
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So, Karnataka and the Kannada film industry have this weird history of having banned dubbing
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of any movies or even TV content into the language from anywhere else.
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So this is obviously unconstitutional and illegal.
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But what happened was the state, by the way, was born out of a new political movement in
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independent India around 1956.
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And around that time, the Kannada film industry was also trying to find its feet.
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People who are thought of as stalwarts today, people like Rajkumar in Karnataka, they were
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up and coming back then and the South Indian film industry was dominated and run out of
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So the movies were coming into Bangalore and Mysore and other regions of Karnataka, but
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they were all dubbed from Tamil into Kannada.
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So this started as a little protectionist movement to say that, hey, no dubbing allowed
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We will just have our own movies for our own public.
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And what started from that sort of a protectionist move just became the norm for close to 50
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So I'm guessing the impetus behind the move would have been people in the local Kannada
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film industry who would therefore have been influential within the Kannada elites, who
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kind of just wanted to be protected from competition and therefore the rule came about.
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For what it's worth, I think many of them genuinely believed that without having some
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form of protectionism, they cannot take on higher capital and higher resources of the
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Tamil Nadu film industry.
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They were starting from scratch.
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So I don't particularly want to judge them too harshly.
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They did what they could and remember that this was also a time where the politics around
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the language was very important.
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So they drew strength saying that by defending the Kannada film industry and protecting its
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interests, they can protect the interests of Kannada as a language and Kannadiga as a
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set of language speakers.
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I mean, I'm not doubting their motives.
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We will all after all act in our own self-interest and that's for multiple reasons, the smartest
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Now the scene effect of this obviously is that for decades you did not have any other
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content dubbed into Kannada.
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What are the unseen effects?
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So the scene effect I want to elaborate the way people see it is that Kannada movies,
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Kannada entertainment was given a unique platform in its own state.
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So the idea is there is no other state government in the country which can bestow patronage
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So here is this one state government and in this one state where it's sort of protected
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and allowed to flourish.
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So that's the scene effect as they see it.
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The unseen effect is a complete lack of competition to Kannada films for over 50 years.
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So what's happened is while 50 years ago people in say Mysore and Belgaum and various parts
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of Karnataka would go watch movies in Kannada, they slowly started shifting to watching movies
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in Malayalam, watching movies in Telugu, in Tamil and so on.
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Many of them which have very, very dynamic film industries.
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So what happened was the market for Kannada movies itself started shrinking and the quality
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of Kannada movies also started deteriorating.
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So one of the things if you see the Kannada film industry today is about 2% of the South
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Indian film industries combined.
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Population wise we are like a fourth if not more, but the film industry is that much smaller.
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There are no corporate houses which are investing into Kannada films the way they are with Telugu
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Because it's now a very bad market with this ban on dubbing just being one of the many
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protectionist moves by the film industry.
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So essentially what you're saying is that people who would have liked watching movies
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in Kannada because they simply didn't have so many movies available to watch in Kannada
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developed the habit of instead watching those movies in Telugu or Tamil or whatever and
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therefore as a reason their desire to consume Kannada content shrank and the market shrank
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and as the market shrank incentives grew smaller for people to come in and make quality films
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for that market and it became a sort of a vicious circle which is why the film industry
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is at such a pathetic curve.
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Absolutely and along with that the options and the quality of entertainment options for
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Kannada speakers have reduced because those people who can understand other languages
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a little bit are watching that but a lot of people don't understand any language other
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than Kannada and so they are completely robbed of entertainment options.
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They are robbed of television programming as well I mean so though this ban started
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with the film industry today as of a couple of years ago you couldn't have an English
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cartoon channel in Kannada, you couldn't have the history channel, National Geographic,
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Discovery Channel, none of these could be dubbed into Kannada and this is the age where
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they started getting dubbed into almost every other Indian language enabling access to quality
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science and history and you know kiddy entertainment content that would have otherwise been impossible
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for us to create locally.
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Now a lot of state interventions tend to help certain special interest groups at the expense
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of the people at large but here while the people at large have suffered in loss because
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of this who are the beneficiaries because the Kannada film industry itself is in bad
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They are in bad shape but they are happy sort of staying in that status quo.
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Big fish in a small pond.
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Yeah so what they have done is they have co-opted the machineries of the state government to
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giving you know subsidies of various sorts, little little things, little promotions, differential
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pricing for Kannada films versus other films, a differential entertainment tax so all those
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things that are well a little par for the course in the country but what's like the
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layer of cream on this horrible cake is this completely illegal, completely unconstitutional
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ban on competition to your films.
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So has it never if it's unconstitutional has it never been challenged in court what's
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the sort of history of that?
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So what happened was with this informal ban coming in place in the 60s till the 2000s
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or so even the narrative that this is a bad thing was not there you know it had complete
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narrative dominance that this is good for Kannadigas, this is good for the industry
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Around then you had a lot more Kannadigas who became more prosperous, who entered the
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tech industry in Bangalore, who entered other things, who had also seen the world a little
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and started writing about hey you know our film industry is terrible in fact there was
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a whole period and there's a whole type of films in the Kannada film industry called
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the machu long films talking about the machetes and the long machetes because that's what
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the films were about they were about people hacking and slashing each other.
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Which is all film should be about.
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But with a lot of taste and exquisite I mean you want a katana and not a machete.
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A lot of the rings in Kannada again.
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So in the 2000s the narrative started getting contested you know people then formed little
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language groups and also a consumer's forum to say that we want more entertainment content
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For the first time there was this growing public awareness that the film industry's
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interests are not the same as the language's interests.
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And it's amazing to look at the motivations of those who went on this it was not just
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that people who were you know liberal fighting for liberty, fighting for economic freedom
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but basically the argument was that if you have say Discovery Channel getting dubbed
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into Kannada then you will have more Kannada words that get created and that get used.
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I mean right now for example the internet is called Antar Jala which is a literal translation
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And you know the moment you have more dubbing happening of you know music, entertainment,
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science, history you will just have more words that are coming into Kannada more the language
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gets modernized as a result of it.
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So from a deep rooted language development and activism angle they sort of came in and
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said hey let's have more competition in the film industry.
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I find this to be an absolutely mind blowing argument because normally you know a lot of
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the protectionism is driven by sort of language chauvinism.
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We need to protect our language and this is speaking on behalf of the language and saying
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that instead of protecting the language quote unquote by shutting access we need to make
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it richer by opening access which is such a fantastic argument that it's not like you
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said that this is not an argument made on grounds of liberalism or individual freedom
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or what have you but you know it's a conservative argument in a sense.
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Yeah I mean if you want more people to be attracted to Kannada as a language make great
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I think that recognition has dawned slowly because I think people have seen great art
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being made in neighboring states.
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The Tamil film industry has come out with some absolute gems.
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For a while it was sort of leading the Bollywood industry as well in terms of what kind of
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I'm not familiar with the Tamil industry but I'm familiar with Bollywood and that doesn't
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So this is what has happened.
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Now as a result of this a few years ago the Consumers Association got together and filed
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a case with the Competition Commission saying that the film industry is acting as a cartel
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and it's abusing market power and doing a lot of illegal things including sort of brute
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force thuggery you know threatening people if they wanted to go against the consensus.
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And the Competition Commission took its time and then finally said look they are illegal.
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I mean the practices are illegal and even slapped some fines on to the film industry
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association and related bodies.
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So does a law still exist?
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There's never been a law which bans dubbing.
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So this is a mob rule in action.
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This is the state not enforcing the rule of law.
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So what has happened as a result is stakeholders, market players have become risk averse.
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They just don't want to take the risk to do something like this.
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No one wants to be the first one to dub a movie you know when the returns are very uncertain.
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So what the Competition Commission judgment and other things have done is they have signaled
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saying look this is all right.
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You sort of have the blessing of the state.
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And after the decision a couple of years ago you've had about three movies getting dubbed
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They are not things that you would actually want to go to watch in a theatre but they
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And now the campaign is on to get a big Indian movie or a big foreign movie dubbed into Canada
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because that would be the watershed moment because once it is done and once it somehow
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runs successfully even in Bangalore where the mob power is the most then the floodgates
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But you know even though you talk of mob power where does a mob get its sustenance from after
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all every Canada speaker would benefit from films being dubbed in Canada.
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No but this conflation of Canada interest because film stars in India are demigods.
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I mean they some have become very very successful popular politicians including in South Indian
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Karnataka by the way is the one state in which the biggest actor stayed away from politics.
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Because your industry is so small.
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No but Rajkumar was a big very very big figure within that small industry and you know he
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had played past kings from the Canada history so you know you have all that symbolism associated.
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So when the film industry is seen as a champion of the language and the history and the culture
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of that state there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in people's heads that these guys are the
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ones who are responsible for keeping our language where they are.
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And to have fought that successfully over a decade and this is a shout out to one of
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my friends Vasan Shetty very active in the consumer's forum they've done a mammoth
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job to marshal all kinds of arguments and persuade large numbers of people over a decade
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that this is a wrong thing and then they followed it up with constitutional methods went to
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the competition commission and now we have to wait for the larger public in the markets
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to decide what happens.
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I have to say this is very heartening that at least in one aspect India is moving in
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the right direction so before I end this episode I have one request for you.
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I want you to translate one line into Kannada for me.
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One ring to rule them all That's mind blowing Pawan thanks for coming
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Well that was fun so much so that I shall now go off and read the Lord of the Rings.
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Meanwhile if you want to check out some of Pawan's writing hop over to the magazine
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Pragati at thinkpragati.com and the editor of Pragati Pawan is our superstar writer.
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On the site you'll also find a new podcast called the Pragati podcast hosted by Pawan
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and a fine lady named Hamsini Hariharan.
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Once in a while I'll be dropping in goodbye for now and may every dream you dream take
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you straight to heaven.
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Next week on the scene and the unseen Amit Varma will be talking to Ramesh Naam about
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artificial intelligence.
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For more go to scene unseen dot in.
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If you enjoyed listening to the scene and the unseen check out another hit show from
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Indusworks Media Networks Cyrus Says which is hosted by my old colleague from MTV Cyrus
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You can download it on iTunes or any other podcasting network.
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking.
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Sorry to say but there's been a slight delay due to the apocalypse having suddenly begun.
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As you can see there's death, destruction and chaos taking place all around us.
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But don't you worry food and drinks will be served shortly and I would recommend checking
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out IVM Podcasts to get some of your favorite Indian podcasts.
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We'll keep you going till this whole thing blows over.
