Manoj Muntashir has said that he is not the first one to write dialogues like, "Tel tere baap ka, aag bhi tere baap ki aur jalegi bhi tere baap ki’," as he defended the dialogues of Om Raut's Adipurush.
Om Raut’s Adipurush released in theatres on Friday. The film, starring
Prabhas, Kriti Sanon, Saif Ali Khan, Sunny Singh and Devdatta Nage, has
faced quite a bit of criticism on social media for its clunky VFX and
dialogues. In the case of Hanuman‘s dialogues, there were many who felt
that the dialogues sounded way too colloquial and oversimplified and could
potentially hurt the sentiments of the audience. Now, the dialogue writer
of Adipurush, Manoj Muntashir, who is the recipient of three National Film
Awards, has defended the dialogues and said that “a very meticulous
thought process has gone into writing the dialogues for
Bajrangbali”.
In an interview with Republic World, when Muntashir was asked if it was
an error from his side that he oversimplified Hanuman’s dialogues in
Adipurush or if it was done so that there is a larger audience connect,
the dialogue writer said, “It is not an error.” He added, “A very
meticulous thought process that has gone into writing the dialogues for
Bajrangbali. We have made it simple because we have to understand one
thing (that) if there are multiple characters in a film, all of them can’t
speak the language. There has to be a kind of diversion, a
division.”
When he was prodded further about Hanuman’s dialogue during the ‘Lanka
dahan’ sequence where he’s heard saying, “Tel tere baap ka. Aag bhi
tere baap ki. Toh jalegi bhi tere baap ki,” Muntashir said, “How do we all
know the Ramayana? We have the tradition of katha vaachan (storytelling), we
read also but there is a vaachan parampara (the tradition of storytelling).
Ramayan is the kind of granth (book) which we have heard from our very
childhood, there is Akhand Ramayan, paath and many other things. I come from
a small village where our grandmothers used to tell us stories from Ramayan
in this language. One more thing, the dialogue that you just mentioned, it
has been used by the greatest saints, storytellers in our country in the
same manner as I have written it (in Adipurush). I am not the first one to
write this dialogue, it is already there.”
When asked if it should have been ‘Sanskrit-ised’, he said that they did
not intend to do that.
