In 1991, when Kamal Hassan-starrer Tamil psychological romantic drama ‘Gunaa’ hit the box office, it had an average run. However, over the next few years, the film achieved a ‘cult status’, with its song ‘Kanmani Anbodu’ — composed by the legendary Ilaiyaraaja — becoming a rage. The film’s most lasting contribution, surprisingly, was something else. Parts of the film were shot in the hill station Kodaikanal, including a cave known back then as the Devil’s Kitchen. The notoriously dangerous cave became so popular as a tourist spot as a result that it began to be known as ‘Guna Caves’.

Over three decades later, Kamal Hassan, ‘Kanmani Anbodu’ and Guna Caves have gripped the imagination of cinephiles again, this time through a Malayalam film. ‘Manjummel Boys’ is a dramatic re-telling of the real story of a bunch of friends whose trip to the caves in 2006 turned into a disaster after one of them got trapped in it. The film — stripped of any ‘star’, songs, or even a female lead — has sprung a surprise and emerged as the first Malayalam film to enter the Rs 200 crore club.

A fourth of that has come from Tamil Nadu. Ruban Mathiavan, managing director of Chennai-based G K Cinemas, says even after five weeks, some shows are running housefull. “It has already earned equal to what films with Tamil superstars earn. Kamal Hassan and the Ilaiyaraaja song have been a huge factor in it,” he says.

Not just in this particular film, but in multiple movies and web shows today, linguistic and state boundaries are blurring. From dialogues to pop culture references, filmmakers cater to an audience that’s increasingly multi-lingual, mobile, and more comfortable with subtitles than ever before.

Big star-led blockbusters such as ‘KGF’, ‘RRR’ and ‘Baahubali’ led the way, but have now opened the floodgates for more experimental forms of content, says Harshit Bansal, founder of Humans of Cinema, an online community of cinephiles that has nearly four lakh followers on Instagram. “Audiences are now more comfortable with the cinematic languages of different regions. From action sequences, songs and background music, to how women are portrayed... Everything differs. A Marathi film looks very different from a Tamil film. Audiences are realizing that they don’t need to turn to Hollywood or Korean cinema in order to get something different,” Bansal says.

What this means is that ‘pan-India’ content today has dived deeper, moving away from lazy remakes, television re-runs with oft-hilarious and unsynced dubbing, or merely putting together stars from different regions in order to broaden the appeal.

For instance, two different versions of Sriram Raghavan’s ‘Merry Christmas’ were simultaneously shot in Hindi and Tamil. In an earlier media interview, Raghavan said he didn’t want any of the versions to ‘sound dubbed’. While the story of the slow-burn romantic thriller was almost identical, the references were carefully tweaked: the Hindi version had references to Rajesh Khanna, the Tamil one had Kamal Hassan. Two different teams of writers were hired for the languages, and original songs were composed for each! Bollywood’s Katrina Kaif and Tamil actor Vijay Sethupathi were leads in both versions, but the secondary cast differed.

However, some things remained the same. Both the versions were dedicated to director Shakti Samanta, and Sethupathi’s credits referred to him via his popular Tamil title ‘Makkal Selvan’ (people’s treasure).

In last year’s biggest hit ‘Jawan’ too, references to an old song being played at a pivotal point in the film differed in each version. The Hindi one had ‘Bekaraar Karke Yun Na Jaiye’ (Bees Saal Baad, 1962), the Tamil one had ‘Paattu Padava’ (Thennilavu, 1961), and the Telugu one had ‘Ee Mounam’ (Doctor Chakravarthi, 1964).

In ‘Manjummel Boys’, director Chidambaram didn’t shy away from letting the audiences know his inspirations. Illustrations from ‘Kanmani Anbodu’ play in the background as the title credits come on screen. The boys buy a CD of the film and play the song on the trip. They refer to the caves as the ‘place where the Kamal Hassan song was shot’. And, perhaps most fittingly, the love song plays in the climax itself, with the lyrics now spotlighting the power of friendship instead.

“The idea to put the song in the climax was in my head even before I started writing the film. I asked my team to get the rights to it before the production started. I told them if we can’t get them, then I won’t make the film. Everything else was written around it,” the director says.

Interestingly, the second half of the film has more Tamil dialogue than Malayalam, which Chidambaram says is ‘organic’ because of the setting. “Lingual boundaries are blurring. Even if one has to make a movie in Bengaluru, the characters can’t just speak Kannada. There will be a mixture of Kannada, Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu. Similarly, Malayalam content also has to change. That’s how our country is today,” he adds.

In the world of OTTs too, different settings are being explored in order to offer something fresh to the audiences. From characters speaking a mish-mash of different languages to stories being set in far-away locations, creators are opting for it all. Netflix India’s dark comedy ‘Killer Soup’, for instance, is set in a fictional hill station in South India, and has dialogues in Hindi, Tamil, and Dakhni. Starring Manoj Bajpayee and Konkana Sen Sharma as the leads, it is based on a 2007 murder case in Telangana, and has emerged as a sleeper hit.

Harshad Nalawade, one of the writers of the show, says the fictional setting allowed them to also create more eccentric characters that spoke in peculiar accents and mannerisms. “We didn’t want to make yet another show that is set in a small town in north India. I think a section of the audience is tired of content coming from the north, and there’s no fresh world that they are seeing. So this was the opportunity to actually explore that,” he says.

Raj and DK’s hugely popular shows ‘The Family Man’ (season two) and ‘Farzi’, which featured a few Tamil dialogues alongside Hindi, made it easier for the audience to consume more of it in subsequent shows, the writer adds.

One thing is clear. For more and more viewers in India today, language is no bar. As South Korean director Bong Joon-ho said in his 2020 Oscars acceptance speech: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

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Others are creating a whole new language themselves. At the global boxoffice, the sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s scidrama ‘Dune’ has earned accolades for offering viewers a glimpse into the fictitious Chakobsa language, created by a group of linguistic experts who borrowed from real-world languages. 

In India, grim survival drama ‘Kaala Paani’ has managed to do the same. Set in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, it traces the journey of tourists and officials who try to tackle the outbreak of a mysterious disease.

The fact that it featured tourists from multiple parts of the ‘mainland’ made the use of a multilingual setup necessary, says creator Sameer Saxena. However, the main challenge was to create a fictional language spoken by the ‘Oraka’ tribe featured in the show.

“We got language scholars from across the world, and made a guidebook from scratch, with all the alphabets and pronunciations. We didn’t want it to sound similar to any of the existing tribal languages,” Saxena points out.

The end product was rather finessed, as opposed to the often-derogatory representations of tribal languages that have existed previously. (Think : the jhinga la la hoo hoo songs in the past.)