India is a multilingual country. In fact, the federal structure of the country comprises of states that have been arranged on the basis of separate languages. The government of India recognises 22 languages as official languages and sanctions funds to uphold the literary legacy of each of them. The most remarkable thing is despite speaking different languages, Indians have adapted themselves to live with this diversity. Most Indians are multilingual and understand various languages. It is not uncommon to find a group of Indians having a conversation in multiple languages.
However, this perfect balance gets skewed when it comes to entertainment media. India boasts of media comprising radio, television and cinema. Although entertainment media runs in a number of languages, it is Hindi entertainment which is unanimously considered to be national entertainment. Hindi satellite channels, Hindi movies and Hindi music are regarded as the face of Indian entertainment and play the greatest role in shaping Indian pop culture. This special treatment of Hindi in the world of Indian entertainment is because of the fact that Hindi is spoken and understood by a majority of the population. However, the languages that have relatively fewer native speakers suffer due to this.
Let us take the example of Odia. Since the number of native speakers of Odia is fewer than that of Bengali, Telugu or Marathi, media corporations hesitate to invest in the development of Odia content. As a result, Odia speakers get deprived of quality multimedia content in their own language and are forced to consume Hindi entertainment. This has resulted in the negligence of a large section of the Odia speaking population that is not fluent in Hindi.
This huge gap was first identified by Viacom 18 and it did not take much time to launch a sister channel of Colors. The channel is known as Colors Odia. Since there had been a serious absence of general entertainment programmes in the language, the channel has bridged this gap with its drama, situational comedies and reality shows in the Odia language. Colors Odia has not only focused on the standard formula of entertainment that is comprised of fiction and reality shows, but it has also added some masala to the formula by incorporating talk shows and music based programmes. As a result, the people of Odisha are able to enjoy world class entertainment in their own language.
