Notes from the Field | Akshaya Kumar, Petrocultured Mobility in Bhojpuri Popular Culture
Motorcycle traffic on the narrow dirt-track connecting Manikpur to the Babura-Koilwar highway. Photo courtesy Brahma Prakash.
I
In the hope of witnessing the festive Bhojpuri music concerts in northern India in full bloom, I deliberately planned to visit during Durga Puja (October), 2021. The Covid-related enforcement protocols, however, worked against the plan and it turned out to be impossible to locate any village or town in the Bhojpuri speaking region where the concerts would be held as usual. That was until we heard about Manikpur, a Thakur-caste majority village between Chhapra and Arrah, just off the four-laned highway – proposed in 2016 and completed in 2018 – which runs roughly parallel to Son River. It was in Manikpur and Babura, villages in the Bhojpur district, that we witnessed the frenzied equivalent of a pub-crawl. The oceanic turnout at the first live event we caught – a dance extravaganza by two sisters, Mahi and Manisha Jha, who always perform together – made it very obvious that young men are the largest, the most important, but also the most restless demographic cluster in attendance.
As the dancers performed to well-known Bhojpuri records in the most spectacular fashion with practiced authority, the young men in the crowd restlessly moved about, changing location and viewing angles, video-recording, and generally socializing. On the second day, with multiple shows in Manikpur and Babura (see aggregated videos here and here), the hectic program-crawling was even more intense. While women, children and old men usually sat still, young men on motorbikes rushed from one show to another, unable to settle down anywhere among the otherwise stationary audience. This demographic was hard to please and surely did not have a minute to waste. At all times during the night, the men would gauge the mood of the shows with gestures and waving hands, causing a mini exodus or an in-pouring of the crowd.
As the crowds of young men moved between shows, the narrow dirt-track connecting Manikpur to the Babura-Koilwar highway was clogged with the inexplicable aggression of motorbikers, revving up their engines while stuck in an impossible jam of their own making. What may have otherwise been a leisurely ten-minute walk of about two kilometers was now an impossible jam of crowded Tempo trucks and Jeeps overflowing with people, occasional cars hardly able to move, scores of pedestrians trying to sneak through, and a sea of noisy motorbikes revving their engines and honking mercilessly. Indeed, I do not mean to suggest an outpouring of anger and frustration; there was just as much joking, banter, waiting and phone conversations. But what made this late-night traffic jam on an otherwise desolate and dark dirt-track quizzical was the short-circuiting of the collective desire to grab a rare opportunity with both hands.
The traffic jam was caused, after all, by the perpetual conflict between an incoming and outgoing wave of automobiles. Like the physiological reaction of a cytokine storm, wherein the immune system causes an uncontrolled and excessive release of pro-inflammatory molecules called cytokines, this uncontrolled frenzy threatened to work against itself. While I had been told by numerous artists as to how they are compelled to address the pulse of the audience, it was the first time I witnessed the force of negative public feedback. This public rejection of a performative ensemble was at the heart of the cytokine storm-like frenzy of the young men going back and forth across multiple sites. Yet, the inability to move forward, even as one throttles more fuel into the engine, best represents the inflamed cultural metabolism at the heart of the Bhojpuri public sphere.
The occasion was indeed special, as the live concerts present an outstanding reversal of the routine cultural dynamic. Now, the flashy SUVs that would otherwise bypass Manikpur or Babura were taking the same dirt-track to appear before and entertain thousands of villagers. The villagers were not queueing up outside a film theatre, a political rally, or a cultural event in a nearby city or town. They were on their own turf, where the celebrity performers otherwise only seen on the big screen or YouTube had been summoned. And yet, how does one extract maximum value from such an extraordinary night, without pushing the limits of the traffic on the dirt-track that connects Manikpur to the highway networks and unleashed automobile desires? What needs to be understood, then, is that Bhojpuri live concerts fall essentially within the growing ambit of petroculture and its fundamentally inflamed and inflammatory cultural metabolism. It is when private aspirations to break free of the shackles appear to be incommensurate with the public infrastructure that the scandalous value of this metabolism is heightened.
II
One of the most definitive experiences of growing up in north Indian cities and towns till about the late 1990s was getting stuck at railway crossings, often for an inordinately long duration. Most of those transit points have been overlaid by a network of flyovers to facilitate smoother flow of traffic, since the mode of transit has increasingly shifted from public – or, more appropriately, “shared” – to private vehicles. Indeed, the trains given precedence to go uninterrupted while scores of people waited at the railway crossings meant the public acknowledgement of privileging a widely shared mode of public transport. There has however been a clear shift in priorities with the explosion of concrete and asphalt transits, where private automobiles are given precedence over any other biomechanical form. These privately-owned automobiles are routed via ring roads or elevated corridors, either passing by the messy topography of the city, or passing over it. Buried beside or under these elevated corridors of rapid connectivity are populations without the aid of petro-cultured private automobility.
Often enough, the roads beneath the flyovers either disappear into a wall, or are impossible to tread without great difficulty due to decades of neglect for long-buried settlements. One may therefore frequently witness middle-aged or old men forced to push loaded carts across flyovers to sell fruits, vegetables or street-food; or men struggling to push their bicycles across; or a family with a child walking across the flyover. Cities and towns that scream for pedestrian bridges, convenient footpath networks, or pedestrian crossings are instead showered with flyovers that force pedestrians to mimic the luxury of automobility. The most vulnerable populations across the city still live adjacent to the railway lines, which are increasingly being buried under flyovers. Or worse, roads of direct access to essential utilities, such as hospitals and schools, may be shut off for certain villages with the coming of highly publicized highway corridors and rapid transit toll roads. It bears repeating what this effectively means: already well-connected major cities are repeatedly appeased via big-ticket asphalt corridors, which are expected to reduce travel time thereby reducing the relevance of everything in between, even as towns and villages on and around these corridors are pushed off the grid of rudimentary connectivity. In one such case, a vanity project of the Uttar Pradesh government, the Poorvanchal Expressway, closed access to the primary school in Keeri for the children of Dhondhwa village in Sultanpur district.
“The infrastructural overwriting of communities has been central to neoliberal renderings of urbanization.”
The infrastructural overwriting of communities has been central to neoliberal renderings of urbanization. These processes have led not just to suburban sprawl around concentric rings of peripheral highways, but also vertical bypassing of the messy center by outmaneuvering them in concrete. What I am trying to get at is the process by which infrastructures remake our everyday routes, landmarks, modes of access and perceptions of the spatial layout that constitute the city. After all, our public concern for shared stakes in the commons draws upon the layouts we navigate. The shifting visceral and political substance of automobility – marked by the speed and efficiency that distinguishes the old socio-technical systems from new ones – is central to the emerging cultural metabolism of Bhojpuri popular culture, which is premised upon the synergy between championing asphalt roads and digital media.
The larger processes at work here are by no means of recent provenance. The emergence of railways was crucial in reducing the trade significance of mid-Ganga basin, which earlier benefitted from river transport, particularly between Benaras and Calcutta. The bypassing of the region gradually turned it inwards after the spread of railways through the 19th century, and its weakened economy was eventually forced to send out the most valuable and essential component: human resource. The railways hastened the process of large-scale labour migration towards Calcutta for most of the twentieth century. Since about the 1980s, there was a marked shift, towards Mumbai and Delhi. The last two decades have, however, witnessed a much wider spread, to many parts of western and southern India: Punjab, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu being the most preferred destinations. Northern and eastern India, in this postcolonial industrial geography, account for much of the drain of human resources, to serve a free trading domestic economy of what Anush Kapadia calls an Empire Nation. The frustrating paucity of the avenues of wage labour in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha have forced an enormous volume of young men, in particular, towards southern and western Indian cities. The Bhojpuri speaking region, among these, has witnessed the most remarkable churning over the last three decades: large scale out-migration and a resultant comparative assessment of one’s place in the larger scheme of things.
III
Proximity to modes of transit has been central to an ongoing churning of society, on account of which the schism between the rural and the urban as relatively autonomous geographical-cultural units has dissolved. My book, Provincializing Bollywood, argues that we should instead grapple with a provincial consolidation, as opposed to the metropolitan episteme. Villagers who may have once been relatively insulated have gradually found the dirt-tracks connecting them to well-maintained national or state highways; the infrastructural relay has nearly merged them with nearby towns and cities. This is particularly true for young boys and men, like those crowding the Babura-Koilwar highway as they moved about between shows. As the late-night movements shows, these groups are often afforded exceptional socio-cultural mobility not easily available to any other demographic cluster. In this way, well-endowed caste communities from rural or semi-urban settlements invest in their young men by granting them privileged access to celebrity circuits, however briefly the successful run may last. The patronage structures on which Bhojpuri singer-performers’ careers flourish are often underpinned, and sustained, by caste networks’ reckoning of celebrity as a useful pivot to reinforce their socio-political legitimacy. Young men across caste hierarchies are therefore key to such transactions in soft power, facilitated by the nightlong extravaganzas of Bhojpuri live concerts, or rangarang karyakram [“colorful” programs], as they are called euphemistically.
The young men seen at the Bhojpuri live concerts bristle with an inexplicable energy, not just as performing stars, but as self-appointed cultural and political vanguards, as protectors of the womenfolk, as a restless bunch unwilling to settle down in a spot. The belligerence, aggression, and surplus emotion one witnesses among them marks a new cultural metabolism germinating across provincial north India. I suggest that their restlessness is the equivalent of chronic inflammation inside the human body, debilitating its capacity to absorb nutrients and extract nourishment from the digestive process. Inflammation, however, is also an immune response: a symptom of the body fighting infections, injury or disease. The assertively libidinal cultural metabolism of Bhojpuri popular culture is, therefore, simultaneously an immune response as well as a chronic disease condition. Here, the inflammatory response that began as a defense mechanism has taken root in such a way as to be deeply injurious to its host body.
However, if the lack of automobility, as a signifier of wider deprivations, marks one part of the cultural metabolism in question, the other part is marked by the inflammation that can hardly be understood without an excess of automobility. These conditions are best witnessed in cities, towns and villages where infrastructural overlays have not yet complicated the horizontality of the spatial layout, leaving the restlessness in full public view. The Bhojpuri live concert has become one of those key conduits around which this energy can be witnessed.
But of course, the live concert is only one part of Bhojpuri popular culture, which matters not just to the Bhojpuri speakers in provincial Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but also to those in large cities across India, including Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. It shows that the Bhojpuri speaking working class is flowing into urban enclaves and asserting cultural relevance, in the midst of declining hegemony of placeholder coalitions. One of these placeholder coalitions was Hindi melodrama, which was tethered to Urdu-inflected Hindi and the city of “Bombay” till about the late 1990s. The gradual fragmentation of this placeholder form into genre cinema was preceded by the spread of audio cassettes, which were pivotal to vernacular music distribution, mostly via Delhi-based cassette companies. Yet, it was not until the Bhojpuri film posters emerged on the pillars of flyover bridges and the walls next to rundown theatres – usually within the inner ring of cities, close to the railway stations – that the scandal of Bhojpuri popular culture drew significant public attention.
Bhojpuri popular culture navigates a vast terrain between the studios on the fringes of Mumbai and those mushrooming all-over small-town Bihar, servicing the savings of migrant laborers as well as a dubious network of financiers who served the Hindi film industry before its corporatization. While the music industry taps into the reserves of labor migrants or familial wealth, films need a much larger and more stable catchment of capital investment. Yet, they forge together a garish, noisy and audacious market of films and music videos which are relished for their scandalous and disruptive force. The dwelling in question, then, is a makeshift shelter for a variety of transitory interests, eccentricities, and vocations. Bhojpuri popular culture is upheld by the unpredictability of popular uptake, which could occasionally catapult minor artists to stardom. As a fascinating avenue of irrational social mobility, its promise remains to alleviate the everyday drudgery of those chained by oppressive and stagnant social systems with little to no social mobility.
Aspirations to celebrity status and sudden wealth, therefore, throttle more fuel into the culture machine; but alas, for most of them stuck in an endless traffic jam of aspiration, the breakthrough rarely materializes. In terms of social mobility, the only comparable alternative to this culture machine is the middle-class desperation with marquee entrance exams (IIT-Joint Entrance Exam and the Civil Services Exam), which unfailingly extract enormous resources. However, with the quality of education available to most of the students in the region, even that aspiration seems rather distant to their provincial counterparts, who gather in the arena of coaching centers for lower-ranking government posts in Group C & D, in the urban neighbourhoods such as Musallahpur Haat and Bhikhana Pahari in Patna. Aarefa Johari’s comprehensive report captures the agony of lakhs of mostly young men, who breathlessly await vacancy notifications, while neoliberal policies are rapidly privatizing public services.
IV
Automobility has come to address, or deflect, the developmental impasse in the Bhojpuri speaking region. The relatively recent emergence of highway infrastructure has helped Bhojpuri concerts cultivate an occasional reversal of the extractive mechanics of the empire nation. The occasion, however, does not stop the drain of human resources; it perhaps further encourages that process by inviting the youth to fully participate in the spectacle. But the live concert ensemble itself, addressing an eruption of restlessness as it does, inhabits the heart of the inflamed cultural metabolism.
Bhojpuri popular culture has been marked by the “virtue” of scandalizing the audience. These scandals generally range from asserting the honor of caste, region and masculinity. What makes these scandals most fascinating for a cultural analyst, however, is that they emerge from an incommensuration, even though they strictly abide by the conservative barricading of everyday etiquette. In other words, they scandalize not by challenging the socio-cultural dynamics, but by seeking validation from the reigning social order; the scandal is primarily about making the implicit, explicit.
Akshaya Kumar teaches Film, Media and Cultural Studies at IIT Indore. His book, Provincializing Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema in the Comparative Media Crucible, has been published by Oxford University Press (2021). Parts of the field insights in the above article have been drawn from an ICSSR-IMPRESS funded project work, undertaken along with Dr. Brahma Prakash (JNU, New Delhi).
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Akshaya Kumar, “Petrocultured Mobility in Bhojpuri Popular Culture,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, March 23, 2022; https://doi.org/10.52698/FVYK9951.