“Suresh Raina, aapka kya kehna!”
“Inke paas hai chaabi agar aapke paas hai taala. Kamaal kar dala, Junior Dala.”
You might think these are comments plucked out of a family WhatsApp group during Indian cricket matches. While that may be the case, these quotes were actually picked up from the Hindi commentary during India’s tour of South Africa.
Depending on your taste for humour, these comments may make you chuckle or cringe but if purely television viewership numbers are to go by, India just loves Hindi commentary.
The Hindi channels of India’s two biggest sports networks – Star Sports and Sony Sports – have both outstripped their respective English counterparts during the marquee series against Australia and South Africa recently. Have a look at these charts of viewership data from the two series:
According to the 2001 Census, 42.2 crore Indians speak Hindi or one of its dialects. That’s more than 40% of the country’s total population. Unfortunately, an official language survey after the 2001 census is still not available.
Hindi is spoken and understood widely in states such as Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat.
The number of Hindi-speaking people, coupled with the fact that there are 18.3 crore homes in India that have at least one television – according to a 2016 survey conducted by the Broadcast Audience Research Council – gives you a picture of the reach of Hindi commentary. Television penetration in the country jumped from 54% in 2013 to 64% in 2016, according to the same survey.
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