It took Manoj Bajpayee, a Bollywood actor from Bihar, almost 22 years to own Bhojpuri with a rap song on the plight of migrants during the lockdown, which was released on September 9.
“I waited for someone to give me a script in my mother tongue,” he said over the phone before the release of the song ‘Bambai main ka ba‘, which was about the suffering of migrants and echoed an old tradition of Birah songs in Bhojpuri that centred around the theme of migration.
During the lockdown, visuals of migrant workers walking thousands of miles to reach home went viral. Many died of exhaustion on the way.
The concept was the brainchild of Anubhav Sinha, who, according to Bajpayee, had approached him with the idea and said that it was time to take Bhojpuri to families.
The rap song can be seen as one more step, albeit a small one, towards the restoration of “dignity” to Bhojpuri music and film industry, which has in the two decades become vulgar and full of sexually explicit lyrics and choreography, etc.
Much more need to be done, though. Just recently, a bunch of Bhojpuri songs calling Bollywood actress Rhea Chakraborty a “prostitute” were released on YouTube, which prompted the National Commission for Women (NCW) chairperson Rekha Sharma to tweet on August 11 that singer Vikash Gop aka Yadav Ji, who runs the Vikas Gop Entertainment channel on YouTube, should be arrested for using profanity against Chakraborty.
A 2-minute-36-second-long song ‘Rhea toh r***i hai’ (Rhea is a prostitute) uploaded on August 9 on a YouTube channel named Bandamru was one among the few songs that were released around the same time. The Bandamru channel has 6.68k subscribers. Another one calling the actress an even more obscene expletive was uploaded on the same day by singer Ramjanam Yadav and it crossed 275,669 views. Not to be left behind, a song by ‘Pramod LIC’, uploaded on the channel SMusic2 asked Chakraborty “Where will you run, prostitute?”
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All these songs laced with expletives were designed to exploit the sentiment generated by the news coverage of actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death.
This revived attention towards the misogyny, obscenity and sexism prevalent in Bhojpuri music and cinema industry where auto-tune technology has made it possible for many to record songs that get “hits” on YouTube and other social media.
The Bhopuri film and music industry’s tryst with hyper-nationalism, sexism and misogyny is not new.
Last year, Bhojpuri singer Varun Upadhyay aka Varun Bahar was arrested for his song, ‘Jo na bole Jai Shri Ram, kabristan usko bhejo’ (‘whoever does not say Jai Shri Ram, send them to the graveyard’) which was criticised for encouraging mob lynching of minority communities. Upadhyay had also appealed to right-wing groups like Bajrang Dal and Hindu Yuva Vahini for support when he was arrested.
In 2019, Salman Siddiqui aka Sallu Khesari-2 made a song about the idea of marrying Kashmiri girls and buying land in Kashmir after the reading down of Article 370, following which, many other singers released videos along similar lines.
Bhojpuri songs like ‘Lehenga mein ghus ke‘ by Arun Acharya released in 2017, ‘Ghus gail fas gail adas gail ho‘ by Guddu Rangila launched in 2015, ‘Daal deb muh mein‘ by Antra Singh Priyanka and Manjit Marshal uploaded in 2019, etc. compete with each other to be advertised and promoted as “Bhojpuri’s dirtiest song” on social media.
The man who is credited with introducing sleaze in the industry, Guddu Rangila, has been around since 1999 when his fifth album Ja Jhar Ke (‘What a swagger’) was released by T-series.
A slew of successful albums in the past like ‘Humra hau chaheen’ (‘I want that’), ‘Tanik jeans dheela kara’ (‘loosen your jeans’), ‘Hum lem’ (‘I will take’), etc. catapulted him to “star” status.
After his success with first album ‘Jawaani ka toofan’ (‘storm of youth’), which earned good money, Rangila became the poster child of the Bhojpuri music industry and he immediately acquired a slew of imitators and followers. He soon became extremely popular in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar with his obsession with “lehenga” and “bhauji”.
By the time Rangila came, the opposition to sleaze and vulgarity in Bhojpuri songs had tapered off, which is what further led to the descent of the Bhojpuri film and music industry, the two of which are inextricably related to each other.
Most actors like Dinesh Lal Nirahua started out as singers and after the huge success of their albums, they were offered roles in the films which encouraged other singers.
The travesty of this trend is the fact that a man who wrote such vulgar lyrics, Vinay Tiwari, now with the BJP, was made the minister for Art, Culture and Sports in the Jitan Ram Manjhi government.
In this celebration of misogyny and sexism lies the tragic story of the descent of Bhojpuri music and films, which once talked about reform movements like widow remarriage, etc.
The first-ever Bhojpuri film starring Kumkum that released in 1963 called Ganga Maiyya tohe piyari chadhaibo was based on the subject of widow remarriage and was a hit. But then the industry encountered a lean period.
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A resurgence of sorts came at turn of the century with Manoj Tiwari’s Sasura bada paisewala in 2004, which made more than Rs 4.5 crore at the box-office. The film, made on a budget of Rs 30 lakhs was Tiwari’s debut film and was inspired by films that Bollywood star Govinda had made popular and had a song titled ‘Ladki high voltage wali‘. The movie broke all records and ran in theatres across Bihar for four months at a stretch.
Bollywood films had become too urban-centric or were aimed at NRIs and the hinterland audience wanted their own reality reflected in films which was recognised by filmmakers from outside, who saw the potential of investment in Bhojpuri film and music industry with this film.
Now, according to Ranjan Sinha, whose agency promotes Bhojpuri superstars like Khesari Lal Yadav and Pawan Singh, the Bhojpuri cinema’s audience is over 26 crore in the Purvanchal area including parts of Eastern UP and Bihar. About 300-400 films are produced in a year with a turnover of Rs 2,000 crores; the music business generates more than Rs 500 crores annually.
“Our audience are rickshawwallahs and migrant labourers in other parts of India who used to be the audience for B grade Hindi films,” said Sinha. “The issue is that our own people don’t love their mother tongue.”
In her fifth-floor apartment in Patna, Bhojpuri actress Akshara Singh, 27, is candid about vulgarity in the Bhojpuri entertainment industry “Which industry isn’t?” she asked.
While she doesn’t condone the decline into vulgarity, she says it is not all that bad. People invoke Guddu Rangila who sings vulgar songs but he alone isn’t the benchmark for judging all of us, she said.
“If Nitish Kumar gave us respect as artists, it would be different,” Singh said.
The apathy she refers to comes from the state that has failed to accord any recognition to its Bhojpuri actors or to the language itself. She criticised director Anubhav Sinha for his derogatory remarks on the Bhojpuri film industry, where he had allegedly used the phrase nanga naach (vulgar dance). “People know you as an intellectual, but how can he used such a phrase?” she said.
Filmmaker Nitin Neera Chandra, who hails from Bihar, said the abandonment of the mother tongue by the elite and the powerful and the upper caste had led to the corruption of Bhojpuri. This can be traced to the migration of the elite and powerful to other cities, which then led to Bhojpuri no longer having patrons that could oppose its descent into obscenity.
Chandra said the destruction of Bhojpuri was led by imposed languages in education, trade and official work.
“Hindi is a ‘coloniser’ which displaced Bhojpuri,” he said. “Upper caste elite are responsible for the mutilation of Bhojpuri. The society is being run by upper caste and political power belongs to them and they abandoned their mother tongue here in Bihar.”
But now resistance to sleaze and vulgarity is building up with young singers like Chandan Tiwari, who along with Sharda Sinha is trying to offer content that is different and rooted. “I picked up Bhojpuri because I wanted to tell the world there is another side, a rich side to it,” Tiwari said.
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A Delhi-based lawyer Abhishek Nath Tripathi, who is from Eastern UP, has been digitising Bhojpuri folk songs that his mother wrote in her diaries to counteract the mushrooming of salacious music videos in films and other mediums.
“My mother sang throughout the day. She was married when she was 13 years old and she maintained a diary of these songs,” he said. These were traditional folk songs that were popular and are still sung at weddings and other occasions in Bihar and Eastern UP.
“Folk literature is passed down through oral tradition and about 400 songs were passed down in our family. Someone needs to put it out there that Bhojpuri is not bad,” he said. His project, Lok Taan intends to put these Bhojpuri folk songs into the public domain.
“People like me who have Bhojpuri legacy and background and who have moved to cities have to own up to our Bhojpuri identity to create a sense of pride. This is a counter-narrative,” Tripathi said.
Tripathi’s mother Annapurna Devi and grandmother Sushila Devi recorded 90 hours of Bhojpuri songs for various rituals.
Annapurna Devi. Photo: Author Provided
Still, it will take a long time to make all the sleaze disappear. Despite laws like Sections 292, 293 and 294 of the Indian Penal Code that address obscenity, it has continued unabated. Kumar Saurav Sinha, who is the head of content for Yashi Films Pvt. Ltd., said it didn’t take much to understand that sexual content sells.
The content also gets spread by the “dance troupes” that have become part of local culture and weddings and these orchestra bands where girls dance to these numbers. While many police complaints against these orchestra dances have been filed, and despite the monitoring by several collectives in Bihar of social media for sleazy content in Bhojpuri, not much has changed at the macro level.
With regards to songs with sexually explicit lyrics, the ubiquity of the internet which brings the videos to every smartphone has contributed to its spread. Ultimately, the debate comes down to censorship and freedom of expression and if a morality test can be applied. In the meanwhile, the superstars of Bhojpuri film and music industry continue to be that – superstars.
Chinki Sinha is a reporter and writer.