Hindi ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SONG, DANCE AND MASALA

Salim Ahmed Khan’s admiring observation of Sahibjaan’s lovely feet and his quiet worry that they might get soiled is subtle and delicate, yet beautifully conveys the strength of his love for the ill-fated courtesan. The lady, tragic heroine of the 1972 Hindi film, Pakeezah, can only reciprocate. By the end of the film, Sahibjaan dances at Salim’s wedding, while he marries another.

Star-crossed lovers and their enraged parents, scandalous webs of illicit love, the wastrel son-turned-saint, the corrupt inside job, villains who could pass off as the Devil incarnate and moments of glorious serendipity for the downtrodden... For the past century, Bollywood has certainly served up a masala, a term referring to a mixture of spices. In Indian film, the potpourri of intoxicating dance tunes, various cinematic genres and the ubiquitous exotic locale characterises its best work. Selling 2.7 billion tickets for the thousand-odd films it produces per year, Bollywood is the Hindi film industry, and it is the most prolific film industry in the world today.

Hindi is the official language of the Republic of India, and an official second language in Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname. Estimates of the number of speakers vary considerably, depending on what speech varieties are subsumed by the term ‘Hindi’. Ethnologue gives a figure of 260 million speakers of the language in India alone, giving it the fourth largest number of native speakers among languages of the world. The language is directly descended from the classical language of Sanskrit and belongs to the IndoAryan language group, a sub-set of the Indo-european family. It has been influenced by various languages, among which are Persian, Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Portuguese and English.

Hindi and Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, are considered distinct languages. However, their differences are partially political and social, rather than just linguistic. The two are quite similar at the conversational level but diverge from one another at the formal and literary levels. They have a core grammar in common, which is based upon that of a vernacular dialect spoken

Do Teen Char Paanch SIMPLE PHRASES Hello (Na-mas-te) What is your name? (Ap ka nām kya hai?) How are you? (Ap kaise/kaisī hai?)