Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi

Centered on the booming world of Bollywood and the dubbing industry based in Mumbai, Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi illustrates the essential role translation plays in the political economy of media industries. Tejaswini Ganti draws on five years of extensive fieldwork to investigate the translation practices, linguistic ideologies, and regimes of value structuring mainstream media creation. By analyzing screenwriting and dubbing practices in Mumbai, she argues that translation is not merely a linguistic bridge but a constitutive and material force in media production. Foregrounding the symbiotic relationship between Hindi and English within Mumbai’s media industries, she demonstrates that translation operates beyond notions of linguistic purity or inherent hierarchy and is a dynamic and multimodal process of creating social, aesthetic, and economic value. By examining language labor in cultural production from a dominant media center in the Global South, Ganti offers new ways of thinking about global flows of culture, language politics, and ideologies of creativity and expertise in the contemporary world.