Few questions about India, watching Sacred Games

[lljkk]

Been watching & enjoying this show. Few things struck me that I didn't expect. Wondered if it's just film sensationalising or a subgroup thing, or anglicised or ... actually representative.
Hindi speakers although I'm sure most the subtle ethnic differences are lost on me, I just about track who has which religion. Set in Mumbai.

1. The casual petty & worse violence. People hit each other a lot. Even the professionals, the cops, slap & punch each other when pissed off with each other. I assume horrible violence among the criminals is supposed to show how immoral they are, but didn't expect cops to thump each other ad hoc for every strong disagreement. Is Indian culture much more tolerant of casual slaps & punches or is this just sensationalised story ? Don't think our 'good guy cop' has impulsively thumped anyone, yet.

2. We're watching in Hindi. The borrowing from English is rampant. Like... one in 5 Hindi sentences has a borrowed word. "Damage" was one I noticed last night. "Madam", "drugs", "ad film" (=commercial, advert) and others. They slip English sentences and part-phrases in very often too, then straight back to Hindi. Is that genuinely how a lot of people talk in Hindi?

3. the characters seem to all call the city Bombay not Mumbai. Why did the name officially change?

My husband is Indian and I lived in Delhi for a few years, living with his parents. I wouldn't necessarily say my experience is typical of India, but going from my own experience (this was also a couple of decades ago. Things may have changed):

1. Yes, there can be more physical violence. E.g. police were armed with lathis - a type of wooden nightstick- and were not really shy about using them, particularly on people who were workers or poor. Another example, advice to a woman being sexually harassed was to slip off your sandal and try to hit the harasser with it as it was the only thing that would make them back off.

1. In an urban population Hindi is used with a huge admixture of English, as you describe. This can be either individual words, or switching languages at a natural break point in a sentence. So for example: "So I told her that (in Hindi) the food at that place is really delicious (in English). What you are probably not seeing is that Hindi also uses a huge number of loan words from Persian and Arabic also (not exclusively from those languages, there are also loan words from Portuguese for example). And your choice of word suggests/reflects your background and/or religion. For example, do you use, for the word 'wife', bivi or istri or the English word wife, which is more neutral?

At the time we were living there, there was only one state-run TV channel where policy for the news was to use a type of hyper-Sanskritised Hindi, where all those loan words were replaced with words taken from Sanskrit instead of those of foreign origin. Official forms were written in it too. It was very different from everyday usage and hard to understand. (For many people, not just me.) I suspect it was easier for people from the Hindi speaking heartland to understand, though (from somewhere like Lucknow, for example). When more TV channels came in the language used became more everyday.

1. I always had the impression that changing the name was more of a political move than reflecting the desire of the people, so people don't really feel the need to change.

As a non sequitur to all of that, people actually speak Marathi rather than Hindi in Bombay, so there will be a certain lack of realism built into the show from the get-go.

ah... the word Marathi comes up a few times but I didn't know what it meant.