Hearing is believing for blind fans ignored by Bollywood

Nidhi Goyal vividly recalls a particular scene during a recent screening of the upcoming film Tu Hai Mera Sunday (You Are My Sunday) for which she was helping to provide live audio description.

The character Kavi (played by Shahana Goswami) turns away from Arjun (Barun Sobti), who then walks away. This is how the audio description conveyed the scene for the blind and visually impaired: “Kavi turns away from Arjun and he slowly walks out. Actually, Kavi is so perturbed she does not notice how hot and cute Arjun is.”

This is just one of the scenes that got a huge reaction from more than 150 people – sighted and visually impaired – in the audience for a special screening of the movie at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in October.

“It is a typical case of mixing visual interpretation with narration, which not only brought out the characteristics of the hero but also the heroine’s preoccupation,” Goyal says.

Goyal, who lost her sight at 21, is a gender- and disability-rights activist, as well as being programme director with the Mumbai non-profit organisation Point of View, which pushed for the audio-described screening.

“There are a lot of crucial moments that get lost in silences, especially the ones where a person is looking into another’s eyes or that special moment when sparks fly,” Goyal says.

Varun Shah, the producer of Tu Hai Mera Sunday, which is about five friends' struggles to find a place to play football in Mumbai, says that the value of audio-description on became clear to him during the special screening.

“The way the audience connected with the film was outstanding,” he says. “Everybody laughed at the same things and, for once, the takeaways were the same for the blind and the sighted.”

Such descriptions have the potential to make movies more accessible and enjoyable for people with vision problems. Yet it is a service that Bollywood producers have been reluctant to provide.

Bollywood makes the largest number of films in the world, but not a single Indian film has been released in cinemas with an audio-description track. Shah’s film is one of a handful to get a live audio-described screening.

There are 62 million visually impaired people in India, eight million of whom are blind, according to World Health Organization estimates in 2010.

Unlike in western countries, where audio descriptions are common, Indian theatres do not have the radio transmitters needed to deliver them to the audience, despite the relatively modest cost of installing the technology. There is also no national policy on accessibility and inclusion in entertainment.

The reason is “lack of awareness”, according to Dipendra Manocha, co-founder of Delhi-based non-governmental organisation Saksham, which has been working on projects to help the visually impaired for 13 years.

Saksham is the only organisation in the country that creates audio-description tracks for films. The first was for Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black in 2005, a movie about a blind and deaf girl. A further 21 have followed. Most were self-funded.

Manocha says filmmakers are often not aware of the options available to make their films more inclusive. Saksham’s efforts are therefore as much about education as creating audio tracks.

Instead of simply selecting a film and working on an audio track – which is allowed under Indian copyright laws – Saksham asks the producers for approval.

“We want to educate the film industry so that audio description can become an integral part of the post-production process,” says Rummi Seth, Saksham’s co-founder.

Manocha says that some filmmakers, including Aamir Khan and Rajkumar Hirani, have embraced the idea. Khan funded audio-description tracks for the DVDs of his films after he found out how little it costs. But most do little other than grant permission.

"Filmmakers are too preoccupied with the box-office to think of other things," Rahul Sharma says. He is an actor who made his Bollywood debut this year in Awesome Mausam, which opened with one live audio-described show in Mumbai in March.

Shah also cites to “the inherent nature of the industry of not experimenting or looking beyond the obvious” as a reason for the apathy about visually impaired population.

“But filmmakers have also overlooked a huge business opportunity here,” he says.

Tu Hai Mera Sunday is due for release in April, and Shah is in talks with cinema owners to provide one screening a day exclusively for the visually impaired, as a test of the concept.

“Once they get an audience, they will consider equipping their theatres,” he says.

However, Goyal feels segregated shows are not the answer.

“We have to create a scenario where the visually impaired can enjoy a film with their family, friends or a date,” she says. “It is the absence of inclusion in the system that needs to be addressed.”

If filmmaking techniques can be adopted from western films, why not the idea of inclusion?

“Why should the sensitisation of every industry become the responsibility of the disabled?” Goyal asks. “Why can’t cinema’s biggies take on the onus?”

artslife@thenational.ae