New Delhi, May 24 -- About a week after Anuj Sharma turned 50, I found myself thinking not of his filmography first, but of his two names.
He carries one piece of paper on which both appear. Ramanuj, the name his mother spoke into him in Bhatapara. Anuj, the name a marketing boss at 'Godrej', preferred. Between them lie three decades of a single life. The Padma Shri certificate of 2014 is the only document on which the state agreed that both names belonged to the same man.
That detail stayed with me because Anuj's cinema too stands between names. Between dialect and language. Between local memory and public recognition. Between what a file calls regional and what an audience calls its own.
In the conversation we recorded for 'The Second Seat', Anuj described Chhattisgarh not by district but by colour. Black in the north, where the coal sits. White in the centre, where the limestone is. Red in the south, in Bastar, where iron ore runs under Bailadila's hills. The cinema halls are mostly in the white belt.
The black and red belts have very few. The old Bastar region, larger than Kerala before it was administratively broken up, once had three. What the map calls one state, the ear knows as many countries as possible. I asked him what happens when Chhattisgarhi arrives on screen. He used a word no constitutional schedule can fully hold, 'apnapan'. The feeling that something is yours.
In his films, dialect is not merely speech. It is an address. It is the rhythm of teasing, blessing, flirting, scolding and grieving. A love story stops being only a love story when it speaks in the cadence of your courtyard, your wedding song, your neighbour's joke and your mother's half-said sentence. The plot may be familiar. The emotion may be old. But the address changes everything.
That address matters because India often discusses regional cinema through market size, subtitles, release counts and industry labels. But for the first audience of such a film, the achievement is more intimate. It is not only that they understand the words. It is the words that understand them. The joke arrives without explanation. Sorrow does not need cultural footnotes. The people on screen are recognisable as kin, neighbours, rivals, elders, lovers, fools and witnesses. Regional cinema allows people to recognise themselves without translation.
But in Anuj's imagination, belonging is not a border. He believes a time will come when these boundaries will cease; when people will watch cinema from everywhere, regardless of the language belt it comes from.
A film must first belong somewhere before it can travel anywhere. 'Apnapan' is not the opposite of universality. It is where universality begins.
Darshim Saxena is a screenwriter and film analyst. She is the founder and host of 'The Second Seat', a conversation space for creators and audiences dedicated to cinema beyond box office narratives
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.