In both these films, Shri Hanumanth Munjappa Reddy (H.M.Reddy) had a major role to play. The first Talkie film in South was Bhakta Prahlad – a Telugu film which was released on 15-9-1931 (within 6 months of India’s First talkie – Alam Ara, released on 14-3-1931) and then came the Tamil film, Kalidasa, released on 31-10-1931.

To our surprise we found many such films and similar songs too in Hindi, Telugu and Kannada.Īmongst the South Indian languages, Tamil and Telugu are the elder sisters, next comes Kannada and then Malayalam. I remember in those days, especially in the 50s, we used to find out which films are remakes of other languages. Obsessed with films, I had no qualms of seeing any language film, be it Hindi, Telugu or Kannada or even English or Marathi. No wonder I became a multi-language person, with English (and now Gujarati) to boot! Urdu was the medium of instruction till the 5th standard and Marathi was my mother tongue, while Hindi was the language of communication. I picked up these two languages easily as a child. Hyderabad being the Capital city, people from all sectors had settled here. It was a composite state of 8 Telugu speaking districts (which have now become Telangana state), 5 districts of Marathi speakers and 3 districts of Kannadigas. I had the advantage of being born in a multi-language state like Hyderabad. I thank him, as also Priya Laxmiji, Ambrish Sundaramji and Sudhirji, who have helped him in his endeavour. Arunji is known for the depth of his research and capacity for great detail. The series conceptualised by Mr Ashok M Vaishnav has grown way beyond what he may have thought initially. With this, all the four South Indian languages are covered – Venkataramanji and Anuradha Warrier having already done guest articles on Tamil and Malayalam respectively. So it was only a matter of time that he would write on it.

Telugu is one of the many languages he is proficient in. When I was struggling to look for someone to write on Hindi-Kannada, Arunji surprised me by doing the favour. His first guest article in the series on Multiple Version Songs was on Hindi-Marathi, naturally. ( The Living Encyclopaedia, Arunji, needs no introduction to the readers of SoY or other music related blogs.

Oho basti dorasani song in hindi