Till quite recently Bhojpuri cinema seemed unbeatable. Not just in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, it was also getting good returns from centres as far away as Mumbai. Not anymore. Utpal Kumar looks at the reasons that led to its decline
Year 2004. It was dark and dingy, with a foul smell of human sweat pervading every corner. But that was not all. For a movie buff in a small town of north Bihar, it was always a challenge to put the right foot forward if you were late in entering the hall, as there was every chance that you would step over a heap of gutkasspit by those watching the film at the theatre. The trials and tribulations wouldn’t end even after being well-seated as you had to be ever ready to lift your legs the moment someone bowed down in front of his seat. It was spitting time, after all, and you had to raise your legs!
Still nobody complained. Instead, one would often find the audience clapping and whistling at ridiculously clichéd dialogues. The best was when rustic Manoj Tiwary, the hero of the film Sasura Bada Paisewala, took on the urbane, arrogant heroine for abusing his potter friend in English. “Hey, you shut up,” he retorted in the same language, adding: “On getting a little education, do you think that other people are insectsIJ” Hearing this, most people were on their feet. The jubilation was explicable, coming as it was out of a deep-seated desire to cut the ‘Angrez’ Indians to size — something they could never do in real life!
Come 2013, constant hawking, relentless spitting, loud phone calls, and non-stop coming and going of people — all these continue in single-screen cinema halls. Still there’s a perceptible change in the air: The medium of entertainment is no longer the same. Today Bhojiwood, as we call Bhojpuri cinema, is not the sole entertainer of the masses of the Hindi heartland. Bollywood has struck back and the place of Bhojiwood stars — Tiwary, Ravi Kishen, Dinesh lal Yadav ‘Nirhua’, among others — has been taken by Salman ‘Dabangg’ Khan, Ajay ‘Singham’ Devgn and Akshay ‘Rowdy’ Kumar. And, unlike their Karan Johar-ish avatar, these Bollywood stars don’t look down upon their core audience. Rather, their films celebrate clichés that the people of qasbas and villages enjoy: The rich-poor conflict, urban-rural divide, tradition-modernity differences — all this amid a traditional family drama.
“With not-so-urban, action-oriented themes making a comeback in Bollywood, Bhojpuri films are facing a tough challenge in making their presence felt even in the strongholds of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh,” says Rahul Mishra, a distributor in the north Bihar region. “Since 2010, Bhojiwood’s business has shrunk by almost half. Even the films of big stars like Tiwary and Ravi Kishen aren’t as profitable as they used to be a couple of years ago,” adds he.
Mishra recalls how Dabangg 2, despite being penned down by critics, saw hordes of people rushing to theatres in Bihar. “The film had got an incredible opening across the State, reminding us of good, old days. And it was not an isolated incident. last few years have seen films like Son of Sardar, Rowdy Rathore,Singham, Bodyguard, etc, doing well in single-screen theatres. In the process, they have eaten into the profit share of Bhojpuri cinema, which in the last decade had a near-monopoly in this market,” he explains.
The Bollywood turnaround can be traced back to as early as 2008 when Ghajini and Wanted marked the return of action flicks. Before that, Hindi cinema had taken almost a decade-long break from what we call middle India, creating films for the urbane, suave NRIs who preferred romance over action, New York over Nalanda, and McDonalds over makke ki roti-sarson ka saag. This created a dearth of mass-oriented movies, with which the inhabitants of the Hindi heartland identified. So, in search of old, rustic-style action-cum-comedy, the audience in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh turned to Bhojpuri cinema.
The Bhojpuri boom began in 2004 with Sasura Bada Paisewala, which was made with a small budget of Rs30 lakh and went on to collect a whopping Rs9 crore. Soon many, finding it a profitable avenue, jumped in the fray to make Bhojpuri films. In the next eight years, almost 500 films were produced, transforming the “fledgling cottage industry of the 1960s” into a “bustling regional film industry”, as author Avijit Ghosh puts it in his book, Cinema Bhojpuri.
Bhojiwood began its journey quite accidentally — and in a dramatic way — with Ganga Maiya Tohe Piyari Chadhaibo. As the story goes, sometime in the late 1950s, actor Nazir Hussain met the then President Rajendra Prasad at a film awards function in Mumbai. “Are you a PunjabiIJ” the President asked Hussain. When the actor replied that he was from Ghazipur district in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Rajendra babu got excited and asked him, “Why don’t you make a film in BhojpuriIJ” When Hussain said he was just a character actor and the venture would need a lot of money, Rajendra babu insisted by saying: “But you can do it.”
This inspired Hussain to make Ganga Maiya Tohe Piyari Chadhaibo in 1962. And thus was born a new film industry. But it couldn’t really take off and by 1976, only 21 Bhojpuri movies were made. The year 1977 saw the rebirth of the Bhojpuri film industry with its first colour movie, Dangal, starring Sujit Kumar and Prema Narayan. This second phase of Bhojpuri films lasted from 1977 till 2001 and about 140 movies were produced during this period.
The “third wave”, as Ghosh calls the emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in the 2000s, was different from anything that had happened in the past. The gold rush this time brought all kinds of people willing to invest their money. Sadly, most of them neither knew anything about the industry, nor had they any knowledge of Bhojpuri culture. They were just eager to make a quick buck. In the process, the very character of Bhojiwood changed. Its earlier films were culturally rooted in the Bhojpuri-speaking area and filmmakers would go the extra mile to rightly paint the region’s customs and traditions. Ghosh tells us how scenes of weddings or even a tadikhana (drinking place), as in Ganga Maiya Tohe Piyari Chadhaibo, carried a degree of authenticity. The films in the current phase, in contrast, have no or very little stamp of Bhojpuri flavour.
It’s this development that has brought in crass vulgarity in Bhojiwood — incidentally, the roots of its decline can be found here. The newly-arrived filmmakers, in their obsession to mint money, would bring in glamour to make up for their ignorance of the region and its culture. Thus, one finds former Miss World Yukta Mukhi as an item girl in a Bhojpuri film. For the producers she was a big catch, but for most people in the qasbas of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, she was a non-entity!
Then, these producers wanted to cash in on the presence of a large number of ‘bhaiyyas’ (workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh) in different parts of the country. These were uprooted people. With nothing coming from Bollywood, and with their families living in far away villages, they preferred spicier Bhojpuri stuff. Back in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, the core Bhojpuri audience still wanted clean family socials. The new wave of Bhojpuri cinema, thus, alienated most families, particularly women, who had traditionally been its main audience. Such was their support that during a show of Ganga Kinare Mora Goan, the biggest blockbuster of the 1980s, on April 10, 1984, in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh, women formed 90 per cent of the audience. Thus, with the traditional family support gone, Bhojpuri cinema fell like a pack of cards when Bollywood reinvented itself in 2008.
By the mid-2000s, Bollywood filmmakers realised that their NRI obsession had reached a point of diminishing returns. There were no big hits like Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge or Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. They, thus, had no option but to return to their middle India roots, which they did with a bang with Ghajini in 2008. By 2010, the transformation was so acute that the hero had to be Chulbul Pandey, and not Raj or Rahul. In Dabangg 2, he generously uses rustic humour and introduces the villain as someone who uses lifebuoy soap, brushes with Dabur laal Dant Manjan, and puts chameli (jasmine) oil on his head! And if this were not Bhojpuri enough, one finds Bhojiwood-like songs in Munni Badnam Hui and Fevicol Se. So, for all practical purposes, Dabangg, Rowdy Rathore,Singham, Son of Sardar, among others, point towards the Bhojiwood-isation of Bollywood. Hindi movies have now become the new Bhojpuri.
While Bollywood’s rediscovery of the Hindi heartland has helped Hindi films hit the Rs100-crore mark way too often, it has surely dealt a body blow to Bhojpuri cinema. Today, Bhojiwood has not only squandered its share in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, it has lost its hold over a large section of territories in Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. “Till a couple of years ago, big films featuring actors like Ravi Kishen and Manoj Tiwary would fetch around Rs 50 lakh in Mumbai. Today, they just manage Rs15 to Rs20 lakh,” says Ratnesh Naik, a Pune-based distributor.
Incidentally, the decline of Bhojpuri cinema has also seen the closing down of a large number of single-screen theatres like Moti, one of the oldest single-screen halls in Chandni Chowk, Delhi. Known for screening only Bhojpuri films, Moti — the third oldest single-screen cinema hall in the Capital after Regal and Plaza — was quite popular among Poorvanchalis.
Hans Cinema, in Delhi’s Azadpur area with a large population of labourers from outside, is still holding the fort, playing Nirhua’s latest Vardi Wala Gunda. But a visit there would be enough to indicate that even this theatre is on its last legs. And with this we would lose another single-screen theatre in Delhi which has shown us the wonders of cinema at Rs20-Rs30. You won’t even get a soft drink with this amount of money at a multiplex, but here it buys you the pleasure of watching Mahesh Bhatt’s Jism 2, Sanjay Dutt’s Policegiri and, of course, a Bhojpuri film. But for how long remains a big question.
Ganga Maiya Tohe Piyari Chadhaibo (1962)
Revolving around a widow's predicament, the film, being the first film in Bhojpuri language, was made for Rs5 lakh. It grossed Rs75 lakh. It was dedicated to Rajendra Prasad, the first President, for being the inspiration behind its making.
Dangal (1977)
The film marks the revival of Bhojpuri cinema in the late 1970s after a brief success in the 1960s. Sujit Kumar and Prema Narayan were the lead pair for the film which also saw Nadeem-Shravan, the top music director pair of the 1990s, making their debut.
Ganga Kinare Mora Gaon (1983)
Directed by Dilip Bose, a well-known Bhojpuri filmmaker, the film ran for 30 weeks in Patna's Apsara theatre. Biggest hit of its time, it’s an emotional tearjerker.
Sasura Bada Paisewala (2004)
This movie revived the Bhojpuri film industry after the dull 1990s. It was such a big success that it did better business than Bunty Aur Babli in Bihar. Made with a shoestring budget of Rs30 lakh, it went on to collect over Rs9 crore.
Panditji Batai Na Byah Kab Hoi (2005)
Directed by Mohanji Prasad, who has given several hits in Bhojiwood, the film turned Ravi Kishen into the star he is today. This movie, along with Sasura Bada Paisewala, saw more than 275 films being made in the next five years.
