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Ratnakar Tripathy: Bhojpuri Cinema: Regional Resonances in The Hindi Heartland
Ratnakar Tripathy: Bhojpuri Cinema: Regional Resonances in The Hindi Heartland
BHOJPURI CINEMA:
Regional resonances in the Hindi heartland
The sudden and phenomenal growth of Bhojpuri cinema in India since 2001 provides a
number of opportunities for a close look at the cultural dynamics in the most
underdeveloped parts of India.1 With eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar at its core, the
dynamics in question directly involves the large Hindi speaking region of the country.
It seems possible to use the cinematic frames as windows on caste relations, the
democratization process, the rise of urbanism and changing language equations. At a
broader level, the phenomenon also allows us to develop and fine-tune our ideas on
the correlations between changes at the local-regional- national and even global levels.
The close relation between political aspirations and cinematic fantasies, which seems
to vary from region to region in India, is another valuable source of cultural as well as
political insights. While not all these tasks can be performed within the present
article, an attempt will be made to map out the several pathways such studies could
meaningfully follow. This may even help us evolve a hermeneutic stance and strategy
for making sense of similar cultural phenomena elsewhere.
The dramatically charged metaphors of change used to characterise Bihar and
parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh associated with Bhojpuri cinema include, predictably,
barbarism, decline, stagnation, decay, breakdown, backwardness, lawlessness, and
turmoil. These metaphors may seem confusingly sententious unless we look at some
of the contrasting states of India such as Mahrashtra or Karnataka where the urban
centres symbolize social and economic dynamism for the entire country. Urban
centres such as Bangalore and Hyderabad in recent years have defined the orientation
of the Indian society and economy in its forward thrust, with states like Bihar and
Uttar Pradesh symbolizing stagnation or even regression. While it remains true that
perception of change per se deserves attention, these metaphors are not arbitrary and
are often backed by statistics. At the same time, considering that as recently as the
1990s only a handful of Bhojpuri films had been made and the number had risen to a
phenomenal 76 in 2006, the uninspiring phrase ‘cultural dynamics’ acquires a sense of
urgency. Looking at the figures alone one begins to feel that there is an interesting
intellectual challenge looming over them and that the monopoly for ‘dynamism’ may
not belong solely to states such as Maharashtra and Karnataka.
What makes the rapid spurt of Bhojpuri cinema interesting, indeed fascinating is
that the concerned region is marked by a number of social and economic dead ends. It
would not seem surprising if Bhojpuri cinema continued to decline, offering no
surprises to a student of development and change. The grand judgmental metaphor of
decline in Bihar is thus often accompanied by a more prosaic and spatial one, namely
‘dead-end’ or ‘impasse’.2 It is in fact possible to enumerate the best known among the
South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 5, No. 2, October 2007, pp. 145-165
ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online ß 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14746680701619552
146 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE
ride all the way down the peninsula—the folk songs. Let us not pretend that songs
come very easily to the lips of the distressed debutante. However, they do turn up
since life is looking up and now seems more like a widening rather than a narrowing
tunnel.
Reverse the trip and you can hear the latest tunes from Bombay cinema along
with the traditional ones. Indeed the only telling precursor to Bhojpuri cinema in
hindsight could have been the cassette and CD revolution in the region in the 1990s,
which created a number of stars in the region. Music is perhaps what drew a clear
cultural map for the entrepreneurs of Bhojpuri cinema. After all Manoj Tiwari, one of
the two superstars of Bhojpuri cinema began his career as a folk singer in country fairs
and local TV stations.
There is no need to pretend that placing oneself back in the 1990s, in the midst of
the musical explosion mentioned above, one could have predicted a sympathetic
resonance in cinema. Nevertheless, it serves well to remember that before the arrival
of the talkies the gramophone companies had already harvested classical and popular
music from different corners of the country.11 In a sense, the very songs that had been
heard in a disembodied form earlier made a comeback in the guise of the ‘talking and
moving pictures’ in the 1930s. It may be interesting to note that the musical industry
in Bombay today is still largely coterminous with the movie industry and singers have
a tough time making a career entirely outside the movies. The Bhojpuri cassette and
CD revolution was, then, an exception—it had no natal connection with cinema.
Even now, it has an independent market and follows a different business model.
Parthasarathi vividly narrates accounts of extensive surveys and recordings carried out
by enterprising executives of newly found gramophone companies from the US and
Europe, who keenly competed for the market. Music as an unwitting harbinger of
cinema seems an interesting idea to explore.
It is useful to pose the following assertions for debate before moving deeper into
the world of Bhojpuri films:
N First, the expanding Bhojpuri music industry played the harbinger to its cinema and
on a more generalized level; music perhaps lies at the very core of Indian cinema.
Music arguably forms the selfhood of Indian cinema around which stories,
characters and visuality accrete.
N Second, the mainstay of Bhojpuri cinema is provided by the following segments:
migrants in bigger cities from the lowest rungs of the middle castes, and semi-
literate and illiterates from middle and lower castes from the smaller towns in the
native region. Add to it a sprinkling of the Dalits (untouchables) and the relatively
uneducated and economically under-privileged upper caste inhabitants and your
profile for the Bhojpuri film audience is near complete. If this seems confusing,
eliminate the educated and the upper castes (whether resident or non-resident)
from the Bihar society and you zero in over the same sociological profile.
N Third, if one excludes the non-affluent upper caste members from the above
profile, you begin to approximate closely the base of voters supporting parties and
regional governments that have lead to the empowerment of the middle castes and
to some extent the Dalits in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the past two decades. It
would seem that vertical social mobility and migratory mobility are closely related,
often blending in the cinema halls and on the cinema screen.
BHOJPURI CINEMA 149
The national media in India has taken due notice of the tremendous vitality of
Bhojpuri cinema and columnists have had to offer an explanation for this. The
explanations come in mainly two types. The first typically focus on the recent changes
within Bombay cinema and they can be summarised as follows: Bombay cinema in the
last decade or so has shown an increasing tendency to appeal to the big town audience
and the Indians settled in Europe and the US. Even its stories have shifted from the
Indian soil to locales such as New Zealand and the US and that are populated with
Indian characters based in Bombay, London and New York. Such outward movement
has created a vacuum that is now understandably filled by Bhojpuri films. The second
explanation turns to the other half of the phenomenon—the regional against the
global, pointing out the growth of a new regional audience, almost presuming that an
audience had been waiting for Bhojpuri cinema to come into existence.
The two stock explanations are not off the mark and manage to catch the basic
flavour of the phenomenon. Once one admits, however, that the two explanations
(instances of verstehen) are complementary, the complexity of the sociological issues
becomes apparent. It would seem that we are dealing with a gigantic change that can
be best expressed through the dynamic continuum: Hollywood cinema—Bombay
cinema—Bhojpuri cinema. It is possible to talk about this continuum not simply as a
theoretical construct with heightened relevance in the age of globalism, but a ‘real’
experience from the audience’s viewpoint. On any given day in Patna, for example,
the audience has a choice not simply between a Hindi and a Bhojpuri film, but also
dubbed version of Hollywood films. Who knows, there will be a day when
Hollywood films would be dubbed in Bhojpuri. Moreover, if the audience is found
lapping up James Bond in Bhojpuri, who are we to complain of cultural dissonance.
Images that are even more incredible have popped up in the past just as the media
commentators wondered over their unlikeliness.19
It is very tempting to aver that the relation between Hollywood and Bombay films
is analogous to the relation between Bombay and Bhojpuri films. As a ludic heuristic,
the symmetry would seem harmless, but when applied mechanically it may lead to
hermeneutic failure. Bhojpuri films as folk versions of Bombay cinema, and Bombay
cinema as Indianised version of Hollywood, are good but limited models incapable of
dealing with cultural fault lines and discontinuities. In the field of cultural studies the
discontinuities are often more interesting than the continuities. For example, Bhojpuri
cinema in its most interesting moments is likely to dwell on themes that Bombay
would habitually ignore.
the rise of Bhojpuri films that it has found a certain cultural commonality and
resonance in the regions of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.20
The process of temporary and permanent migration from this region over time
has compounded the rural and the urban experience into a single whole despite the
polarities, incorporating Sultanpur or Chhapra and Bombay within the same
continuum. This finds a parallel in Hindi cinema where increasingly Bombay and
New York simply provide two different acts of a smooth-flowing story or a diptych.
The strength of both these continuums is that they do not focus on a given site with
total attention, nor to they draw opaque walls around the local experience. There is a
situation as if of a seesaw or a constant arrival—transit—departure that lends a
particular poignancy to the stories and the emotions. Thus, the most striking basis for
this consolidation lies in the everyday experience of the audience as citizens in this
part of the country.
Having drawn a parallel between the mainstream cinema and Bhojpuri it is
important to explain what is meant by consolidation of an audience and a linguistic
grouping. The explanation lies in the very nature of this extremely flexible dialect
with a huge embrace. Bhojpuri in actual experience ranges from being seen as a style
of Hindi (‘Bhaiya’ or Bihari’) to a large cluster of dialects spoken natively in Bihar,
eastern Uttar Pradesh, and parts of Madhya Pradesh. Thus, Bhojpuri cinema
constantly has to seek a balance that would ensure viewership in the entire region,
albeit at a much smaller scale than Bombay films. Bhojpuri cinema is seen not just by
Bhojpuri speaking populations, but also by ones that speak similar tongues. In some
cases, the allegiance comes from speakers of tongues that are far from similar—for
example, Maithili, a language spoken in the non-Bhojpuri Mithila region and endowed
with a classical literature. Bhojpuri, on the other hand, is rarely found in the written
form and is largely dependent on oral literature. Bhojpuri is not a simple ‘given’ as
defined by a grammatical ukase but a consolidated result of a process that has taken
several decades. This has a close parallel in Bombay cinema, which has to strike a
balance over a much broader canvas covering a wider cultural and linguistic territory.
There is another vital socio-cultural process unfolding in the region that relates to
the caste dynamics. In the past three decades, the entire region has seen a dramatic
upward mobility among the middle castes such as Yadavs and Kurmis, and to a lesser
extent among the lowest rungs, the Dalits in the society. State politics in Bihar and
Uttar Pradesh is now largely in the hands of coalitions dominated by not just middle
segments, but also certain Dalit castes and Muslims. These processes can be best
understood perhaps through a close look at the upward mobility of certain lower
castes and their highly reflexive and adaptive ways of making the most of the electoral
and democratic processes. There is a clear need to admit the centrality of the above
issues for any study on the region. Thus, in brief, migratory movement and upward
mobility are twin factors that directly influence both the content of Bhojpuri cinema
and the rise of the Bhojpuri language.
The above two processes are not inherently linked in that one does not follow the
other. Nevertheless, they happen to be yoked together experientially, defining the life
of the migrant and the non-migrant in different ways. The emboldening of the weak
thus acquires several layers—migration often ensures that the world outside seems
less scary, and the dominant castes in the world within seem less fearsome due to
social mobility. Of course, the upper castes look at the expressions of this confidence
152 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE
as newfound arrogance and vulgarity. No wonder then that Bhojpuri films are often
condemned for their vulgarity and lack of aesthetic appeal, perhaps as ‘aesthetic’
retaliation to political hurt.21
It is not difficult to see that in a region marked by bitter caste wars, deepening
social conflicts, and lack of politically inclusive ideologies, a cultural form such as
Bhojpuri cinema has the potential to create a new resonance not found elsewhere.
Opportunistic political coalitions and eclectic ideologies can often create a sense of
incoherence and ‘anomic’ vacuum that needs to be filled up. With the aspirations of
different castes and sub-castes aligned in uneasy coalitions, politics would almost seem
to make way for an inclusive cultural arena such as a cinema where people can
commingle to create a broader identity. The hope that politics alone can resolve social
conflicts has proved vain in the past, choking spaces that culture should rightfully
occupy. There is a clear need thus to look closely at some of the continuities between
the realms of culture and politics in the region in the coming years, given that several
processes are still in the state of unfolding.
In the event, if this paper gives the impression that Bhojpuri cinema is inclusive in
the sense of being all-inclusive, we need to admit that the process of consolidation has
thus far excluded both sections—the upper crust that opts out of Bhojpuri films, but
significantly also a lower crust that has no access to movies. Although it is difficult to
quantify, a large rural or small town segment does not connect with Bhojpuri films,
just as it is unable to join the migrating hordes for a better life. There are castes such
as Musahars and Doms and other illiterate groups with no previous exposure to
cinema and for a variety of reasons no evident interest in it.22
that constantly recreates the collision and the collusion between the myriad values
from the village and the city. Although what we get to see as the end product is a song
or a film or a story, the cultural auteur/protagonist/audience of the story lives it out
and rehearses it endlessly before positing the end product in front of us. Despite all
our attempts to recreate something of this emotional and intellectual struggle, we can
only uncover a few layers of it at a time.
One feasible way of approaching and approximating the migrant’s struggle to
make sense of his composite and kaleidoscopic universe is to look at his life situations
in terms of two extreme predicaments. First, a situation when a migrant finds his
village and city values rather similar or comparable. Though fraught with considerable
debate and oscillations, this may understandably be a simpler situation. A more
complex situation may be that of incommensurability, when village values (or
situations) and city values (or situations) pose conflicts that prove impossible to
resolve. Yet for practical reasons, they need to be resolved at least for the time being.
The issue of incommensurability is thus to be placed in a pragmatic context and not in
an abstract logical space, where a person can very well wring his hands and declare
that the dilemma has no answer, and walk away unimpeded.
It is not difficult to see that the migrant has to live out an endless series of
ambivalences, which he must resolve for the time being quite simply in order to carry
on living as a morally sensate human being. It would also seem that the ambivalent
predicament is rarely resolved forever. The mental journeys between the village and
the metropolis never end, and the migrant spends a lifetime travelling back and forth.
In a sense, then, leaving the frontiers of the village is like being doomed to a lifetime
of ethical nomadism that nevertheless has to be ‘translated’ constantly into a rooted
existence. The fear of the unknown needs to be tamed by grasping part of it, any part
of it, for the time being. Unthinking or opportunistic mimicry, strong resistance to it,
slow absorption of alien values, promotion of such values in the village or town
setting—all these would seem to provide the migrant with his bag of tricks or his
arsenal of social strategies.
The tremendous reflexivity required of the immigrant is thus often reflected in
Bhojpuri cinema. This reflexivity emerges from the frequently unseen ‘interstices’ of
cultural systems and features.24 What one probably needs to remember is that while
the migrant faces tremendous pressures, he is also driven by a powerful existential
force that combines his helplessness and despair with a great sense of opportunity and
hope. It also needs to be admitted that the rough edges of existence hide many of
these daily struggles in their interstices—the intensities as well as the mechanical
insouciance of daily living.
The above points require to be illustrated with scenes from Bhojpuri cinema. This
is important for getting a clear idea of hermeneutic openings that everyday experience
may provide a person. To put it differently and perhaps more effectively, illustrations
from a Bhojpuri film story may give us a clear idea of how a person imposes his own
interpretive take on a real life situation, since interpretive opportunities are anyway
rarely available to a passive agent.
In Pyaar Ke Bandhan (The Bonds of Love) a lively but snooty daughter of a
landowner insults a cobbler (a chamar.) in English, throwing his fee at him like he was
dirt. The cobbler grabs this opportunity to give her an elaborate lecture in Bhojpuri-
accented English on the value of education in refining one’s character. He tells her
154 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE
that sadly, education has instead only degraded hers.25 The heroine stands corrected
and promptly falls in love with the character, of course.
The above lecture explicitly talks about the dignity of labour and the value of
(English) education. Both these values are fixtures from the most boring of school
assembly homilies, and the entertainment-hungry audience would normally refuse to
tolerate such a cliché, far from cheering it. The message cheered by the audience is—
learn to respect a chamar for both his work and his education, if not for his
‘chamarhood’ alone. The tame lecture thus carries a subversive sting in its tail, making
the sequence exhilarating for the audience. Members of the potter and the carpenter
castes can freely apply the morale to their own predicaments. Moreover, so can a
plumber (not a caste, but a modern occupation).
The heroine was depicted above as an intrepid lover ready to fling her heart at the
slightest opportunity. We probably need to modify her portrait, as she is likely to
brood endlessly on the brief homily, and sort out her ambivalent reactions only after a
great deal of interpretive agony. Of course, the film does not dwell on these
broodings. Instead, it makes something very unlikely happen—a landlord’s daughter
falls in love with a cobbler. The ‘sweet’ euphemism of Bhojpuri films leaves it open
whether the hero is chamar by caste or occupation alone, making matters more
palatable for an upper caste audience than they would have been.26 In a sense then,
the interstices are not provided by experience but sought out actively and intently by a
person. At times, these interstices turn into roomy windows, but at other times, the
interpreter has to ram away at the frontiers to create a narrow crack for an opening.
The relative degrees of gentleness and violence may be commensurate with the
toughness of the task.
A second example from Kanyadan focuses on the issue of female infanticide.
Having given birth to a series of girls, a not so young wife makes the discovery that
her husband has been consigning the newborns to the sacred river Ganga. Rather
uncharacteristically, she confronts him and calls him a rakshasa (a demon). Even more
uncharacteristically for a Bombay film, the husband actually cares to defend his actions
by recounting a trauma that made him completely averse to daughters. When young,
he witnessed his father being humiliated by his sister’s husband. When the son-in-law
found that he did not receive support from his father-in-law in the local elections, he
dragged his wife and deposited her at her father’s feet. ‘You can take your daughter
back’, he told his father-in-law. The arrogant son-in-law did not relent even when the
father-in-law removed his headgear, the very symbol of his caste pride and put it at his
son-in-law’s feet. The growing boy interpreted this incident to mean that the very
presence of a girl in the family was enough to make you vulnerable—anyone could
decide to trample on your honour. All you could do is swallow your pride and beg for
mercy.
The above dialogue between the wife and the husband is very revealing, in fact
too revealing for a Bombay film. However, the Bhojpuri film brings out the psyche of
the ‘hurt’ male with great patience, not justifying it, but simply making it explicit.
Later on, in the King Lear fashion the story goes on to depict the surviving daughter as
her father’s saviour as against a disloyal and feckless son, thereby demonstrating that
the father interpreted his trauma wrongly. The story thus places the trauma where it
belongs—with the original sufferer, namely the sister who was used as a pawn in a
political quarrel. The husband had just dispossessed his married sister of her trauma,
BHOJPURI CINEMA 155
claiming it to be his own. In a sense then the film takes us to the rock bottom of the
man’s misogyny.27
What is striking here is not the situation itself, but the depth to which it is
uncovered. In a sense, what the Bhojpuri film is doing is to borrow a stock situation
from Bombay cinema to magnify it with far greater patience than Bombay cinema is
likely to show. Even if we see Bombay and Bhojpuri films as part of a continuum, the
moments of discontinuity and thematic magnification reveal unexplored terrains such
as the details of a youth’s trauma mentioned above. Here again the intention is not to
lay down rules of interpretation as such but to simply trace a certain strategy of
storytelling, where a Bhojpuri film may be able to focus much more closely on the
social fabric than Bombay cinema. Bombay cinema faces a somewhat different
challenge in dealing with a wider social context, and perhaps has less space for
nuances such as above. The apparent commonalities thus between Bombay and
Bhojpuri quite simply bring out the common cultural ‘thresholds’. It is likely that
regional cinemas will find themselves focusing together on two types of
assignments—first, to pick on common cultural thresholds and to seek their own
individual trajectories beyond them, and second, to find altogether new themes. They
will succeed in defining their own ‘vernacular’ styles with sufficient distinctiveness
without having to choose exclusively between one or the other.
Yet the very growth of Bhojpuri cinema would indicate that Hindi is unable to
cope with large territories of experience, except perhaps through translation from
these languages. Interestingly, it is in recent times too that Bombay cinema has made
place for the Bombay Hindi dialect in the Munnabhai series (2005–2007), proving a
great success with near cult following.29 The urdu tehjeeb (style, manners, polish) of
Bombay cinema has had to give way to the crudely expressive tongues spoken by the
common man. Thus while Hindi continues its heroic balancing act between influences
from Sanskrit, Urdu, English and the dialects and may begin to grope southwards
towards the Tamil family, languages like Bhojpuri cannot spend a lifetime behind the
wings, forever repressing themselves voluntarily.30
The rise of the middle castes and Dalits and their continued empowerment, their
cultural self-assertion through literature and cinema, and their continuing political and
ideological assertion are likely to change the shape and status of Hindi in the coming
years. While it remains true that the relation between Sanskrit and the vernaculars,
and Persian or English and the vernaculars has not been the same as between Hindi
and its dialects, the unquestionably domineering position of ‘classical’ (shudhdha/
pure) Hindi is likely to be questioned more frequently than before. If the proponents
of Hindi decide to see a threat in the growth of the dialects, it may even lead to a new
turn in the politics of languages in the country. At this stage, however, there is a
greater feeling of complementarity than conflict. It is quite likely that in the coming
years the dialects will assert themselves not simply through independent platforms but
by legitimizing forms of Hindi used by a greatly varied population ranging from slums
in metropolises to smaller towns and villages across the nation.
Hindi has shown signs of adequate flexibility and ability to deal with rural and
urban contexts of every day life and the rich variety in between. With the rise of
globalism, Hindi’s adversarial stance towards English is quite likely to be
complemented with a relatively pacific acceptance of co-existence.
Correspondingly, Hindi may feel enriched and not threatened by the consolidation
of its dialects as its foot soldiers pitted against the onslaught of global English. The
dialects themselves may range from the quasi-classical ones such as Braj and Maithili to
Hyderabadi (Dakhni) and to the recently spawned ones like Bomabaiya (Bombay
Hindi). Hindi’s bitter envy of English is now increasingly based on its inability to
make inroads in the South, where again the lifting of prescriptive grammatical and
phonetic sanctions may allow different Hindi styles to find fertile soil in the coming
decades. In fact, such alchemy may have already begun on the streets of Bangalore
with some help ironically from linguistic islands such as Gulbarga Urdu. Hindi’s real
issue with English is likely to be in the realm of ideas and intellectual discourse, where
the vernacular has to wrestle with the might of the cosmopolitan in an ‘unfair’ battle.
Along the way, Hindi quite sensibly gave up its claims to provide scientific
terminology except until the high school level.
In the midst of all the linguistic churning, Bhojpuri and other dialects clearly do
not have aspirations that threaten the status of Hindi. However, they equally clearly
have the potential to create and, even more importantly, legitimize many Hindis in all
their richness, expanding the lexicon and the stock of regional idioms and sounds.
On the whole then, the dialects would seem to support the case of Hindi in its
envious jostling with English. With the whole world fondly gazing at the vast Indian
and Chinese markets, who knows if Hindi along with Chinese may make hasty inroads
BHOJPURI CINEMA 157
into the western curricula, causing another twist in the tale within our own lifetimes.
Given that China’s preparations for the next Olympic Games include quick and
aggressive mastery over basic English by a large population, language learning may at
times even acquire epidemic if not pandemic proportions. Linguistic communities
thus have so many ways of consolidating.
all its insinuating cunning and violence. This is not surprising—burqa clad software
engineers, women with postgraduate degrees from US universities hunting for grooms
in India through helpful but often bewildered parents are some other exotic but
basically male dominated solutions to problems created by globalism.
Strangely enough, the one occasion when the Indian male-hood seems willing to
make a compromise in media is during the beauty contests at local, national and
international levels. The motives behind beauty contests are however difficult to read.
They seem highly ambivalent—on the one hand, they represent the boast of the male
as the master, showing off ‘his’ women and the charisma of his bloodline. On the
other hand, they seem to indicate a sense of exposure, even surrender of his women
to the world outside. To the smaller world of likely grooms? Or the wider world of
superior white men who need to be impressed. In the Hindi film ‘Banti aur Bablee’
(2006), the female protagonist who sets out to win a beauty contest in the distant
metropolis finds a lover and fellow traveller from her own hometown, again turning a
potentially disruptive tale into a tame fantasy.
The above discussion is by no means complete, but the purpose here was to
demonstrate that a popular form like Bombay or Bhojpuri cinema is marked by both
thresholds and openings, as well as closures and silences. In the everyday life of the
industry, they are known as the practical dos and the ‘don’ts’ of cinema, in reality
providing vital clues to deeply embedded cultural norms. Although at any given
moment they seem to have a fairly rigid and static appearance, the fact is they are
always in a state of debate and modification.32 For a student of cinema it is important
to look closely at this process of internal legislation, clauses of which are detectable in
narratives defining the thresholds of articulation as well as the barriers, beyond which
lie the acres of silence. Thus, in a metaphorical sense, Bhojpuri cinema moves over a
territory that spreads across the world within and the world without, reflecting over
its own constituencies as well as the wider world.
The two sub-sections above aim to bring out in relief the uneven terrain of
Bhojpuri cinema. Altogether, it would seem that Bhojpuri films are endowed with a
large territory to navigate in. But one needs to understand that a popular form must
move very carefully, choosing to say what must and can be said, leaving aside wide
swathes of the unstated for future exploration. This uneven terrain is thus marked by
deep chasms that cannot be filled up easily. Film scenes analysed in the earlier sections
make it clear that thematic shifts over this terrain often do not allow smooth or
continuous movement. Thematic leaps, evasions, euphemisms, stark lies, cover up,
and silences thus become means of keeping an audience intact. Overall, however, it
seems a good idea to leave the portals of cinema open to castes and classes that are still
mulling over the hoardings outside, wondering if they should walk in to take a seat.
Bhojpuri cinema is thus divided between its indebtedness to the tales of conflicts
within, and the need to amplify tales of resonances to the outside world. This is an
ambivalence capable of providing a genre with sufficient moral, emotional and
aesthetic energy to continue for decades in search of a kaleidoscopic array of
temporary narrative resolutions. A wonderful thing about cinema is it may continue
to ‘rehearse’ social reality as long as the audiences are willing to purchase the tickets.
The daily life of cinema thus contrasts with the five-year timescale of electoral
politics, even if the two processes are seen as parallel. Another wonderful thing about
cinema is it succeeds in tilting down utopian consummations from the horizon to the
160 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE
cinema screen—a line from a dialogue and caste system may instantly evaporate, a
close up of brimming eyes may demolish aeons of social inequality at a glance on
immediate basis.
The above terrain almost simultaneously gives us an idea of the typology of
Bhojpuri films, its future course, and the thematic limitations (barriers) and
possibilities (thresholds) that the Bhojpuri industry has to work with—issues which
deserve continued analysis in the coming years. At one extreme lies a world
untouched by Bombay cinema—aspects of regions, religions, mythology, legends,
castes and sub-castes, communities, ceremonies and many other unexposed crevices
ready to dehisce untold tales. At the other extreme, Bhojpuri cinema faces the
temptation to woo the upper castes and classes by retelling the Bombay (or even
Hollywood) tales in Bhojpuri. Given the heavy backlog of telling and retelling,
Bhojpuri cinema is unlikely to find itself unemployed any time soon.
friend.34 Indeed, the taming of cinematic villains perhaps makes for more fulfilling
narrative than their slaying. To put it bluntly, a culture cannot project itself
meaningfully to the outside world when positing its internal conflicts or fault lines as
its distinctive core or the basis of its identity. For this reason, a culture has often to
depict its evils as non-unique secondary traits, or at least as universal evils to be fought
and vanquished by all. To conclude the thematic discussion, it is indeed the goodness
of the hero and the goodness of the culture for which uniqueness must be claimed.
To conclude methodologically—a student of cinema must try to read both the
said as well as the unsaid, admittedly a cliché. While insights obtained through
interpretation of the ‘said’ are ‘falsifiable’ to various extents, uncovering the unsaid
may often turn out to be rather a wild hermeneutic adventure. This inherent risk is,
however, unavoidable. It is crucial to use both the above prongs to catch social reality
in its most interesting moments. Refusing to comment on the silences or the ‘unsaid’
aspect of cinema may reduce the researcher to duplicating the same old results and
insights of empirical sociology under a different but redundant rubric of cinema. One
would expect that a study of cinema should frequently, if not regularly tell us things
about society that often slip out of the grasp of the more direct approach of empirical
sociology. Using cinema only to confirm findings from other empirical sources, in
brief, seems such a waste.
To conclude on a more mundane and specific note, at the end of these discussions
it would seem that relation between (a) Hollywood-Bombay-Bhojpuri as genres is
somewhat similar to the relation between (b) English-Hindi (or Tamil, etc. in a
different context), Bhojpuri with a structural sociological parallel in (c) upper
castes—middle castes—lower castes/untouchables. While we may continue to use
independent models and metaphors for the three different realms of experience, it
would be interesting to use them as models for each other in order to give due focus
to the hierarchies and their dynamics.35 The shifting relation between the elements of
the three continuums/lacunae may lead to insights relevant exclusively to each
domain as well as those that may be applicable to wider public life. There is a strong
basis to suspect that through a series of comparisons and contrasts between these
inter-relationships, one would be able to delineate not simply a set of fruitful
hermeneutic stances, but also an inchoate functional model with some causal content,
in however, limited or ‘weak’ sense.
Notes
1 ‘For the Indian film industry, 2006 was a watershed year. It produced the largest
number of films ever—a staggering 1,091… With 76 films produced in 2006,
Bhojpuri films have recorded the fastest growth rate—a 100 per cent increase over
2005. They also account for 7 per cent of the total number of films produced, only
marginally behind Malayalam and Kannada films, according to figures released by
the Central Board of Film Certification’ (Singh 22 February.).
2 For a clear idea of the regressive metaphors and tendencies, specifically
deindustrialization, see ‘Bihar Development Report, 2006’, Institute of Human
Development, New Delhi, 2007.
3 Kishore provides a keen diagnosis of the ailment.
162 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE
an afterthought. Culturally, eastern Uttar Pradesh, the very heart of the state seems
to have more in common with Bihar than western Uttar Pradesh does.
21 ‘The city media tries to brush aside such cinema as loud and obscene, but Ravi
argues, ‘‘These films are propagating values that are long lost in Hindi cinema like
the respect for bhabhi, the relevance of ghoonghat. Even how rivers like Ganga have
been part of our lifeline.’’’ See Kumar 7 October.
22 A parallel observation—there are times when even a desperate social niche and
‘known’ status in a village may seem more secure than the possibility of moving out
into the ‘unknown’ chaos of an urban job market.
23 ‘It follows, then, that a logical technology choice for India is ‘‘electronic cinema’’.
Electronic presentation systems can be installed for considerably less money
than high quality ‘‘digital cinema’’ systems. Such systems will not be as stellar in
presentation as digital cinema, but will could offer enough improvement over
the worn film prints and low quality film projection systems of the B and
C-grade centres to attract patrons back to these cinemas.’ See Karagosian and
Shah.
24 Homi Bhabha’s notion of the interstices, the hybrid in culture, and some of the
spatial metaphors form the basis for some of the concepts used here. However, the
idea of ambivalence was elaborated and interpreted in this specific sense in my
doctoral thesis ‘Freud and the Theory of Culture’ (unpublished) submitted to the
University of Poona, India in 1987.
25 ‘The audience erupted deafeningly at this scene, with applause and whistles lasting
several minutes. It later turned out that this same sequence was to be found in many
of Tiwari’s films, beginning with his first, the 2005 blockbuster Sasura Bada
Paisawala. Explains Aslam Sheikh: ‘‘The point is to show an image of what can
happen when the cobbler learns English. Many Scheduled Castes are now
educated.’’ ’In Nelkantan.
26 Of late Bhojpuri films have shown a tendency to name castes. Over time if the
audience is able to stomach the candour without breaking into riots, this may be a
seminal contribution to the process of democratization in the society.
27 This confession occurs not on the analyst’s couch but in a face-to-face conversation
between a husband and his dying wife.
28 See Orsini.
29 Bombay Hindi combines Bhojpuri, Marathi, and some south Indian languages.
30 The author is indebted to two works noted for their sweep as well as numerous
insights— The Otherness of English, India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome by Probal
Dasgupta, and the more recent The Language of Gods in the World of Men by Sheldon
Pollock. The original purpose of the two volumes, however, is not directly
related to the discussion here despite their highly relevant ramifications and
implications.
31 This is not just a general moral issue. Prolonged absence of migrant men from the
village creates a wide variety of family crises, some of which seem routine. Clearly,
there are situations that can turn the sweetness of nostalgia quite bitter. For
example, what if a story line tries to make place for a young wife who having run
out of tears, decides to have some fun with other men. While it is easy to decry the
silences of a popular form, one needs to appreciate the difficulties faced by the
storyteller.
32 In the Bombay film trade, the word ‘masala’ (combination of spices or recipe) refers
to the strange alchemy of narrative strategies that moves between the horizons of
164 SOUTH ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE
the ‘do’s and don’ts’ to the higher plane of commercial success, rather than just
acceptance. In a sense, with every success, the masala/s get redefined all over again,
in turn modifying the ‘dos and don’ts’ to some extent.
33 Majumdar 28 May.
34 It would be interesting to conduct an in depth inquiry to explain the gap of two
decades between the rise of the middle castes/Dalits in the region and the rise of
Bhojpuri cinema in the new millennium. Perhaps Bhojpuri cinema had to wait
before the ‘political’ noise associated with caste strife settled into a more positive
‘cultural’ resonance.
35 One would suspect that the discrepancies between the three would prove more
interesting than similarities. While similarities and simple analogies tend to blunt
hermeneutic and causal analysis, differences pose unavoidable but worthwhile
challenges difficult to subdue.
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