#hello i am on back on my hindi imposition rants

[an-asuryampasya]

scream

it's been a while since I ranted about Hindi on here but Netflix having RRR in Hindi but not in Telugu has me right back on my bullshit.

I mean it's. a fucking Telugu movies ffs. It's just greattttttt (/s) to be reminded aGAIN that Hindi (slash north Indian culture in general in other contexts) is the de-facto answer to anything Indian. I mean it's annoying enough in the depiction of anything that's just "vaguely Indian", but fine whatever I can't expect every single facet of a very diverse country to be represented so whatever. but this!!! is a fucking telugu movie!!! by telugu people!!! about telugu people!!!! One of whom I've literally grown up hearing about!! now packaged for consumption by the whole world in Hindi :)))

I mean it's probably just a result of how licensing agreements and that stuff works (hopefully) more than being an intentional choice or whatever, but it still pisses me off. I mean, there's a reason I've never related to the term 'desi' - because all the connotations that word has for me have always been distinctly north Indian with minimal room for the culture that I grew up in. So as much as the popularity of Baahubali and RRR made me flinch (because if there's one thing I've learnt from my years of consuming media, it's that it never, never ends well if anything from my part of the world makes it onto international screens; that is and probably will remain my default reaction for a while tbh), it was still nice because ha, maybe NOW the rest of the world (rest of my own country included) will recognise that we're distinct from Bollywood, y'know? (Heck, it's not even North India as a whole that I take issue with, because Hindi being treated as ubiquitous also hurts other North Indian languages.)

Because yeah!!! RRR is not a Bollywood flick! Nor was Baahubali! It grates on my nerves when I see them being referred to as such. And now it's really annoying that apparently I can't even expect a film to stay in its original language when it leaves the country because of course everything Indian is automatically something Hindi when it comes to the rest of the world. the rest of us plebeians speaking other languages can go fuck ourselves I guess.