Writing in Indian languages

Write in your own script

If your characters speak Hindi, write their lines in Devanagari. If they speak Malayalam or Bengali, write in that script. Most actors read their own script more easily than a Roman spelling of it.

Many writers keep the scene heading in English, since INT., EXT., DAY and NIGHT are words most crews know, and write action and dialogue in their own language. Choose one way and keep to it through the whole script.

Names without capitals

An English script marks the speaker by putting the name in capitals. Devanagari and most Indian scripts have no capital letters, so that signal is missing.

Take One handles this for you. Type @ before the name on a line of its own, and the tool reads it as a character cue and sets the name in bold, so actors can still find their lines at a glance.

Mixing languages

People change language in the middle of a sentence, and a script should let them. A student may joke with friends in Hindi, talk to her grandmother in Marathi and answer the teacher in English.

Make the change mean something. A character who moves into English to end an argument is telling us about power, not vocabulary.

If the film will carry subtitles, keep each line short enough to read in the time it takes to say.

The interval

Many Indian feature films are written to be shown with an interval, so the story is built in two halves. The scene before the break must send the audience out with a question they want answered.

A short film has no interval, but the idea still helps. Find the point near the middle where the story turns and the stakes rise, and make it strong enough to hold a pause.

Songs as story

A song can do real story work. It can pass time, bring two people closer, or let a character say what they cannot say in speech. The test is simple: something must be different when the song ends.

The Natyashastra, the classical Sanskrit text on drama attributed to Bharata, describes rasa, the feeling a performance raises in its audience. Decide which feeling your song serves, and place it where the story needs that feeling.