“It isn’t just the wreckage of Hindustani that ‘Brahmastra Part One: Shiva’ partakes in but the generous and awkward secretions of Hinglish, too,” writes Prathyush Parasuraman (@yush_azure). The first instalment of Ayan Mukerji’s fantasy trilogy released to overwhelmingly negative reviews directed at the Hindi version’s dialogue writing. Though more insistent on being commercial rather than political, the film deploys language in a way that creates a “tension between English and Hindi, Hindi and Urdu, one that is located in the film’s acquiescent politics of language,” he notes. As Parasuraman considers the reasons for the inauthentic Hinglish that generated discomfort rather than the intended new urban cultural lexicon, he argues that Dharma Productions’ move away from their usual metropolitan, multiplex audience required them to devise a a pan-Indian film that didn’t dip its toes into controversy and yet managed to travel across the lines of states and the audiences’ class backgrounds. However, with the ‘brahmastra’ being described as a pizza, the Urdu word “taaqat” losing its uvular pronunciation and being flattened into “taakat” or comically simplistic lines such as “Light uss roshni ka naam hai. Jo hum sabke andheron se badi hai” (Light is the name of the brightness that is bigger than any of our darknesses), the resulting product emits a distorted and confused energy. The characters all speak in a style that neither Mukerji, producer Karan Johar nor dialogue writer Hussain Dalal have a firm grasp of. “'Light' and 'button' pop up like unsuspecting weeds, out of place in the linguistic texture of a sentence, producing the same rush of agitation as when ‘love storiyan’ was inserted smack in the middle of ‘Kesariya’, a typical, swooning love song with ornate and sentimental Hindi lyrics.” Full story at the link in bio. — #Brahmastra #Hinglish #MovieDialogues