Buzdil hai voh jo jeetey ji marney sey dar gaya
Mayich tha jo kaam kuch aur kar gaya.
Jab maut aako karney lagi mujhko salaam.
My valeykum salaam bola aur mar gaya.
(It is a coward, he who fears death when still alive.
It was but me who did something else.
When death came to me and did a salaam ,
I said valeykum salaam and promptly died.)
The audience roar with laughter and wah-wah as Ghouse Mohiuddin Ahmed known by his takhallus (pen name) Khamakha delivers the lines in a dead-pan manner. Then, a man dressed like a king with borrowed costumes drives his puttering Vespa scooter towards Charminar from Gulzar Houz. And we are in the midst of an engrossing fare promised by A Tongue Untied , a documentary on Dakhani by Gautam Pemmaraju.
Beginning with that archaic image, Mr. Pemmaraju fleshes out the story of a language that has been reduced to a ‘spoken vernacular’. Using interviews, poetry reading sessions called mazihiya shayri and just plain conversations across the sub-continent, including Karachi and other places in India, Mr. Pemmaraju has documented the journey of the language that has the smell and freshness of the earth.
Release this month-end
“The 90-minute documentary is nearly ready and will be released by the end of March,” says Mr. Pemmaraju.
Why does he call it a ‘spoken vernacular’ and not a full-fledged language? “Earlier, there was literature, there was poetry, but now the language survives in some pockets with variations. New literature or poetry is not being written or created and that’s why I prefer to call it a spoken vernacular,” he says.
The project began as a grant from India Foundation for the Arts, a Bengaluru-based foundation, that aids different art projects. What began as an arts research on documentation of humour and satire in Dakhani quickly became a passion for Mr. Pemmaraju who has, till now, devoted four years to his effort.
“The film looks at practitioners of the language in Hyderabad and elsewhere. Simultaneously, it looks at history of the language itself and I have brought together performances of poets and the opinions of historians and linguists. I have studied the impact of Sufism on the language. I have travelled to interiors of Karnataka, Telangana and Maharashtra wherever the language was in use,” says Mr. Pemmaraju.
Dakhani has absorbed influences from multiple languages, or as Shyam Benegal puts it: “Whether you sing it or speak it. It smells of that earth.”
“It absorbed all influences. The written form has been predominantly in Arabic-Persian script, but Dakhani is the language of the region. The language was born because of the intermixing of different people with people from the north settling down here,” says Mr. Pemmaraju.
