Deswa, the film and the movement: taste, industry and representation in Bhojpuri cinema

Abstract

In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north India, but also in many large cities of peninsular India. However, this emergence has also brought to the fore various questions around taste, class, region and representation. Nitin Chandra’s ‘unreleased’ Bhojpuri film Deswa sought to alter the ‘vulgar’ orientation of this industry, but had to wait for nearly four years to finally release as a Hindi film. Arguing that the vibrant debate that took place on the fundamental distinctions of Deswa is animated by Chandra’s persistent desire to narrate Bihar’s lost glory and utmost disrepair, I assess in this paper the industrial constraints that shaped the journey of Deswa. Drawing contrasts and parallels with the Hindi film industry, and drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical modeling of the field of cultural production, I locate the Deswa debate as a key moment in the contestations over subject positions, industry infrastructure, and linguistic affinities.

Keywords:

• Bhojpuri cinema
• Deswa
• Bihar
• Pierre Bourdieu
• field of cultural production

Notes

1 All the quotes from personal communications, as well as weblogs, have been translated from Hindi by the author.

2 ‘Item girls’ is a popular reference towards women who feature in seductive dances but play no character within the film. The term has increasingly been evacuated of its disparaging significance within Bollywood but the same cannot be said about Bhojpuri cinema (see Kumar 2017).

3 The weeklong festival screened the rough cut of Patel’s documentary 50 years of Bhojpuri Cinema.

4 Patel (2015, 115) writes, ‘most of the films announced never reach the theatres and even those that do, one never knows when they emerge and disappear. It is a common practice to add up one or two weeks’ screenings in various theatres scattered around the region, to celebrate the fiftieth or hundredth day’.

5 Shool (1998) and Prakash Jha’s Hindi films [Mrityudand (1997), Gangaajal (2003), Apaharan (2005), Rajneeti (2010), Aarakshan (2011) and Satyagraha (2013)] establish rampant corruption and extreme violence within the oppressive political systems of patronage in Bihar. Most of these films propagate vigilante justice for resolution. In Chandra’s film, the vigilante act is marked by helplessness and clumsy execution. The resolution is provided by a popular awakening instead.

6 Indeed, these terms of representation are specific to the cycle of production that began in 2004. The earlier cycles of Bhojpuri cinema – between the mid-1960s and the late-1980s were mainly constituted by rural melodramas (Kumar 2015, 45–47, 2016b; see Ghosh 2010).

7 The protagonists’ escape only takes them to Allahabad in eastern UP, which is not so much a signifier of development as it is a punctuation, depicting incremental social mobility, which may eventually lead to further mobility.