A few weeks ago, when a section of Pakistan’s film industry had raised concerns over Hindi films eroding their market share, director-producer Mahesh Bhatt was among those who’d empathized with them.
But now we hear that something similar may be brewing closer home – buzz is that certain industry bigwigs are lobbying to convince the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to ban the dubbing of English films into local languages.
Speaking to DT, Bhatt said, “There are similar apprehensions in Bollywood and everyone is planning to come together and fight this practice of Hollywood films being dubbed in Hindi or Tamil. We cannot allow them to have a right over our mother tongue and use it to their advantage just because they have the budget. Hollywood studios have big budgets for promotions and we can never match that. Hindi film producers are now planning to come together against this. Letters have been written to the I&B ministry secretary in the past also, and I can say with full certainty that something similar is on the cards now. We face similar issues in other states at times. For instance, I cannot get my movie dubbed in Bengali.”
