Religious persuasion, Bollywood style

Next in our current series of Bollywood fight scenes, here’s one from the movie Duvvada Jagannadham, commonly abbreviated as DJ.  The hero is a policeman who works undercover, disguised as a Brahmin priest, to fight crime.  He also has some rather unconventional fighting skills.  The action begins about 2 minutes into this segment.

Hmm . . . I don’t think my bishop would have approved of such methods of persuasion, back in my pastoral days!

Peter

9 comments

  1. I hate to be "that guy" again, but.. DJ is a "Tollywood" movie, not a "Bollywood" movie. 😉 Bollywood is perhaps the best known of the various "ollywoods" but they are definitely not the same.

    I've not seen this film (yet, I do intend to), but I love the "item number" from it called "Seeti Maar." Mr Arjun's virtuosity as a dancer shines through.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5X694sak5U

  2. Arg, I hate it when I hit post too soon….

    That was a fun scene. The physics were pushing in to Rohit Shetty territory (yes, he's practically a genre unto himself…), though didn't quite get there. It very much has the appearance of a typical "Tollywood Masala" film. Indian Cinema doesn't necessarily follow genre conventions like Hollywood does, and their "mashups" are called masala to indicate "a little bit of everything." This is true regardless of which "ollywood" it's a part of, but Tollywood is especially noted for it.

  3. Weird. Left (West) Pakistan in 1965 and Bangladesh in 1973; Urdu has evolved quite a bit since then, but Hindi which was perhaps identical to Urdu in 1947 is increasingly unintelligible. Anyway, they're all crazier than bat$]=[דן.

  4. @Robin Datta –this was Telugu, not Hindi or Urdu/Punjabi. Telugu is of the Dravidian language family, while Hindi is Indo-European, so yeah, it's as unintelligible to a Hindi speaker as Japanese is to an English speaker.

  5. @magson, that is Hindi actually. The video appears to be from the Hindi release of the movie. I’ve seen worse from Tollywood but this is about average.

  6. I speak English & Urdu natively and understand most of colloquial Hindi, but the fancier it gets the less I understand. In this case I understand about 40%, in some instances full sentences. My mother was a Dravidian (native language Telegu, of which I can count on one hand the words I understand). The Dravidians are a negroid race, so I am a mulatto (½ Aryan, ½ Dravidian), but disqualified from being a mulatto-in-chief, since I am not native-born.

  7. Urdu is distinct from Punjabi, and is written in the Nastaliq script. Punjabi is written in three scripts: Shahmukti (Muslims, ~Nastaliq), Gurmukhi (Sikhs) and Devanagari (Hindus, = Hindi & Sanskrit). And there isa transitional hybrid of Punjabi and Pashto called Hindko.

  8. I suppose I should have actually read the title that said it was a Hindi dub, instead of assuming that just becuz it's Allu Arjun that it was Telugu then 😉

    And thatnks for the infor about the various scriptings. I was aware the Punjabi and Urdu weren't the same, but had been told they were similar enough to be more or less mutually intelligible, so that was why i did the "Punjabi/Urdu" slash. Now I know not to do that anymore 😀

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