The Hindi dubbing came first. The film had been shot in Hindi and most of the dialogue had been recorded on location, but atmospheric noise, wind on certain Kashmir days, background crowd sound bleeding into close-up dialogue in the college corridors, meant that significant portions needed to be re-recorded in the studio against picture. Adil's own dubbing sessions ran across two days. He watched each scene on the monitor before speaking, re-entering the emotional register of the sequence with a concentration that the dubbing engineer, who had worked on dozens of features, found quietly remarkable. There was no lag between watching and inhabiting. The shift was immediate and complete.
For Hrithik's character Rohan, they brought Hrithik into the studio on the third day. It was Hrithik's first experience of dubbing himself, and the displacement of voice from image that the process required, hearing yourself and watching yourself simultaneously as a stranger would, produced the disorientation it always produced in first-time dubbing performers. He recorded two scenes with visible difficulty, the timing slipping slightly as he tried to match his studio voice to the movement of his own lips on screen.
Adil sat beside him between sessions. "Stop watching your mouth," he said. "You're watching where the sound should go instead of where you were when you made it. Go back to the location. Welham, the corridor, the morning light. You were tired that day. Start there."
The third scene was noticeably better. By the end of the second day, Hrithik had found the continuity between his on-location performance and his studio voice.
Aishwarya arrived for her dubbing sessions on the fifth day. She was, among the three leads, the most technically precise in the dubbing booth, which Adil attributed to the particular quality of attention she brought to physical detail. The modeling career had trained her to be aware of her own body and expression in a way that translated directly into a discipline for synchronization. Her sessions ran smoothly and were completed in a single day.
The Tamil dubbing sessions began in Madras at the start of the following week. Adil travelled down himself. This was not standard practice. Directors did not typically supervise their own dubbing in regional languages. They hired dubbing directors, reputable professionals who understood the rhythms and textures of the regional cinema their audiences consumed, and trusted them to carry the transfer. Adil had nothing against this practice in principle. He simply did not intend to apply it to this film.
He arrived at the dubbing studio in Madras, which was a recording facility that had worked on some of Tamil cinema's most significant productions, and he greeted the technical staff in Tamil that stopped the room. Not the formal, careful Tamil of a north Indian attempting courtesy. The natural, slightly rapid Tamil of someone thinking in the language. The session supervisor, a man of fifty-two named Shanmugam who had worked in dubbing for three decades, looked at Adil for a moment and then said, in Tamil, "How long have you spoken Tamil?"
Adil answered, in Tamil, "Since I was a child.
Shanmugam accepted this without further comment and the session began.
Adil's Tamil dubbing of Abhimanyu ran across two days. The register he brought to it was not the register of a film translated into Tamil but of a film that had always existed in Tamil, the particular quality that comes when a voice actor is not converting between languages but inhabiting the same character across different acoustics. The supporting cast dubbing was handled by Shanmugam's team, a group of experienced regional voice actors who worked from the Hindi picture and Adil's timing notes, and the sessions moved efficiently. When the assembled Tamil version was played back on the final afternoon, Shanmugam listened for a long time.
"Normally," he said, in Tamil, "a dubbed film sounds like a dubbed film. This one sounds like it was made here."
Adil returned to Bombay that evening and flew to Hyderabad the following morning for the Telugu sessions, and then to Bangalore for Kannada, and then to Cochin for Malayalam. The pattern repeated with variation at each location. Different studios, different technical teams, different regional voice actors for the supporting characters, but always Adil's own voice for Abhimanyu, arriving in each language with the assurance of someone for whom the language was not a costume but a home.
The Malayalam sessions in Cochin produced a moment that Adil would not forget easily. They were recording the hospital scene, the closing sequence, and he was delivering Abhimanyu's lines to Principal Vashisht, the quiet speech about gratitude and the distance between where they had started and where they had arrived. In Malayalam the sentence structures shifted the emotional weight of certain lines in a way that was slightly different from Hindi, the language tended to carry its sentiment in different places within the sentence, and Adil found himself adjusting the performance slightly rather than simply translating it, letting the language tell him where the pauses needed to fall.
When the take ended, the dubbing engineer said, in Malayalam, "That was the best take."
Adil said, also in Malayalam, "That's what the language told me."
By the third week of October, all five dubbed versions were in post-production. The mixing of each regional version required its own sessions, shorter than the main feature mixing because the music was common to all versions and only the dialogue tracks varied, but careful and methodical in their own right. Subbu supervised the Hindi and Tamil mixes personally. Trusted local engineers handled Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam under detailed notes from Adil that had been written in each respective language and which the engineers found somewhat difficult to believe had come from a nineteen-year-old from Bombay.
The decision to release Student of the Year as a pan-India film was not publicly announced during the post-production period. No press releases were issued. No trade publications were briefed. The regional distributors who were approached did not initially understand what they were being asked to distribute, because films did not arrive from Bombay already dubbed into their language and ready for release. That was not how the industry worked.
Adil had always been aware that it would not be how the industry worked, until it was.