Guest article by Arunkumar Deshmukh ( The Living Encyclopaedia, Arunji, needs no introduction to the readers of SoY or other music related blogs. His first guest article in the series on was on Hindi-Marathi, naturally. When I was struggling to look for someone to write on Hindi-Kannada, Arunji surprised me by doing the. Telugu is one of the many languages he is proficient in. So it was only a matter of time that he would write on it.

United Evangelical Christian Fellowship(UECF) is a Popular Indian Christian Website and a gateway to Bible resources like telugu, hindi, tamil & malayalam audio.

With this, all the four South Indian languages are covered – Venkataramanji and Anuradha Warrier having already done guest articles on Tamil and Malayalam respectively. The series conceptualised by Mr Ashok M Vaishnav has grown way beyond what he may have thought initially. Arunji is known for the depth of his research and capacity for great detail. I thank him, as also Priya Laxmiji, Ambrish Sundaramji and Sudhirji, who have helped him in his endeavour. – AK) I had the advantage of being born in a multi-language state like Hyderabad.

It was a composite state of 8 Telugu speaking districts (which have now become Telangana state), 5 districts of Marathi speakers and 3 districts of Kannadigas. Hyderabad being the Capital city, people from all sectors had settled here. I had many Telugu and Kannada friends. I picked up these two languages easily as a child. Urdu was the medium of instruction till the 5th standard and Marathi was my mother tongue, while Hindi was the language of communication. No wonder I became a multi-language person, with English (and now Gujarati) to boot! Obsessed with films, I had no qualms of seeing any language film, be it Hindi, Telugu or Kannada or even English or Marathi.

I remember in those days, especially in the 50s, we used to find out which films are remakes of other languages. To our surprise we found many such films and similar songs too in Hindi, Telugu and Kannada. Amongst the South Indian languages, Tamil and Telugu are the elder sisters, next comes Kannada and then Malayalam.

The first Talkie film in South was Bhakta Prahlad – a Telugu film which was released on 15-9-1931 (within 6 months of India’s First talkie – Alam Ara, released on 14-3-1931) and then came the Tamil film, Kalidasa, released on. In both these films, Shri Hanumanth Munjappa Reddy (H. Sam Houston. M.Reddy) had a major role to play. He was an associate of Ardeshir Irani, Producer of Alam Ara, in his Imperial Film co. When Alam Ara was completed, H M Reddy decided to make a Talkie film in Telugu on the same sets.

He discussed it with Irani and left for Andhra – his native land. He gathered the entire star cast of a popular drama “ Bhakta Prahlad” and brought them to Bombay. The main actors were M.

Subbiah as Hiranyakashyapu and S.Kamalabai as Leelavathy. The direction was by H.M.Reddy. He completed shooting, editing etc and the First Talkie film in Telugu was released in Crown theatre in Kakinada, Maruthi in Vijayawada, Gaiety in Madras city and Minerva in Machlipatnam (Bandar). ( Note: The thumbnail in this post is the handbill of ‘Bhakta Prahlad’.) Interestingly, Reddy was also the director of the First Tamil Talkie, Kalidasa (producer was Ardeshir Irani), made at Bombay. Both films had Telugu,Tamil and Hindi actors. The Tamil Talkie was released in Madras city on. Thus, both Tamil and Telugu Talkie films had their beginnings at Bombay!