Alumni in India make Bollywood film accessible in Indian Sign Language

Two alumni, Alok Kejriwal, ’89, and Aqil Chinoy, ’03, are leaders of India Signing Hands (ISH), which provides solutions to accessibility issues faced by the Deaf community in India. Earlier this year, ISH News, one of the projects of ISH, became the first media organization to interpret the Bollywood film The Kashmir Files into Indian Sign Language (ISL), thus making this film accessible to the Indian Deaf community on a streaming service.

The Kashmir Files is described in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) as “a heart-wrenching tale that captures the pain, suffering, and struggle of the Kashmiri Pandit community in 1990 and leads Krishna, a young college student, to set out on a quest to uncover the truth.” The film stars Bollywood stars Mithun Chakraborty, Anupam Kher, Darshan Kumar, and Pallavi Joshi, and was directed by Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri.

The film debuted in theaters in March, and was also shown on ZEE5, an India-based streaming and “over-the-top” (OTT) service. The ZEE5 release was made available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Indian Sign Language. This was the first time in history that a commercial Bollywood film was made available in ISL.

Launched in November 2018, ISH News produces daily news and awareness video contents in accessible formats, including Indian Sign Language, subtitles, voice-overs, and visually informative images. The dynamic team, led by Alok Kejriwal as chief executive officer, Aqil Chinoy as Head of Information Technology and Projects and Mansi Shah, a child of deaf adults, as Head of Operations, is 90 percent Deaf and includes coordinators, signers, actors, interpreters, script writers and video/graphic editors. ISH News has had nearly 202 million views on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram since its inception.