Bhojpuri Consolidations in the Hindi Territory: Infrastructure, Aesthetics, and Competing Masculinities in North India

Abstract

The soaring emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in 2004 took over the B/C segments of Hindi film distribution in most of north India. The success of the film industry had followed from a vibrant music industry; in a few subsequent years, however, the success of the Bhojpuri film industry turned against itself, on account of the shifting balance between production and exhibition sectors. This paper explores how the Bhojpuri industry negotiated this challenge, particularly with the reconsolidation of the Hindi film industry. I argue that the Bhojpuri stars benefitted most from the enforced reconfigurations as the film-texts became further subservient to stardom and the new aesthetic grammar was organized around the figure of the action-star. Through Jaan Tere Naam (Prasad, 2013)—one among a series of successful films featuring Khesari Lal Yadav—I assess Yadav’s popularity, earned via his performances as a launda (female impersonator). Bhojpuri cinema survives by projecting the male star as its primary text and arranging a plethora of pleasures around his figure, including the bawdy registers that proudly claim the insignia of nativity. The rebellious and native masculinity thus not only anchors the switch between bawdy irreverence and moral exactitude, it also vanquishes the “othered” urban values often resident in the female body.

The libidinal economy of vernacularisation: modernity, sexuality and Bhojpuri media

“…The male star in a Bhojpuri cinema universe is singularly awarded an exceptional mobility . The polarities between the feudal and modern worlds, the public and private fantasies of sexual desire, and the urban and rural force-fields remain trapped in the fixity of their social relations, the male star is the only entity that seamlessly navigates these boundaries – an argument I have established elsewhere (Kumar, 2016b). This exceptionality compels the star to arrest the affective charge of the said polarities and offer a curious resolution signifying the desired equilibrium.…”

“…One key shift, however, has been from ordinary rural corporeality towards superhuman acrobatics that define contemporary action cinema. Also, as I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Kumar, 2016b), these competing masculinities, partly modelled upon Hindi action blockbusters in the post- Dabangg climate, have enabled the emergence of Khesari Lal Yadav’s cross-dressing dance performances staged via launda naach . Both, the site of exhibition and the narrative contents, therefore, repurpose the modernity of new delivery technologies – cassettes, compact disks, mobile phones and a whole variety of players, storage devices and data cards, etc.– while delivering the regressive politics of rustic action-icons.…”

Market matters: interdependencies in the Indian media economy

“…Of course, we can also identify instances where media products traverse regional market territories. English print is the obvious example, but other languages seeding markets across state boundaries are Urdu and Bhojpuri, the latter particularly prolific in films, music, performers, and audiences (see Kumar, 2016; Tripathy, 2012). Across this multi-lingual market system, a common commercial infrastructure and lack of formal barriers allows content producers and broadcasters to make conscious decisions to replicate or adapt products across language markets.…”

When celluloid pornography went digital: class and race in the Bangladeshi cut-piece online

“…I would suggest that similarities in narrative context, bodily form, mise-en-scène or costume are due to the type of cinema that is the vehicle for cut-pieces. These aesthetic traits were shared by Bangladeshi popular cinema with other low investment modes of film production in the region, for example Pakistan's Pashto cinema (Hulsing 2004;Khan and Ahmad 2010;Nabi 2017) and North India Bhojpuri cinema (Hardy 2010;Kumar 2016). These all drew on shared aesthetic repertoires and production conditions of what can be broadly termed the B-circuit in South Asian cinema (Srinivas 2003;Vasudevan et al 2016), films destined for the 'segment of distribution and exhibition sectors that is characterized by low levels of investment' (Srinivas 2003, 49).…”