What dialect do they speak?
MM: They speak Bhojpuri, which is a dialect of Hindi. So my field producer, who’s from Delhi didn’t even speak it, so we had to work through these layers. She would talk to the social worker–there are very few people who speak both English and Bhojpuri; there are a lot of people who speak Hindi and Bhojpuri, or Hindi and English, but not the whole chain, so you had to go through this. Actually Dr. Subodh, the surgeon, is one of the few; he grew up in Banaras, but was sort of busy. Yet, often, he’d be translating for us at the same time he was doing the surgery and everything. Q: It’s a good thing that the surgery is relatively basic. MM: And he does it all the time. So the communication with her family–to try and get that level of trust and explain to them what my mission as a filmmaker was, what my motivation in telling their story was–they had no concept even of what a movie was. Her mother could not wrap her head around the idea that I was a foreigner. She can sort of understand
