Miss Use
A Survey of Raunchy Bhojpuri Music Album Covers

The Bhojpuri Music Album in India: From a fringe regional category to popular urban subculture

It all began with the “cassette culture” (a term attributed to ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel) in the 1980s: cheap and portable audio cassettes and players made recorded music a mass culture. This gave rise to number of small recording companies publishing local content. By the 1990s, music labels were publishing a flood of regional titles catering not only to the vast hinterland audience, but also, increasingly, to the growing market of migrant populations in the cities. Coinciding with the process of mass urbanisation that began in the latter part of the decade, the market for regional media in cities became so dominant that it started dictating the trends in the regional music industry.

Fashioned according to marketing perceptions of music company executives and fuelled by its commercial success, the folk genres have now transformed into a form of pop music – an urban sub-cultural phenomenon.

Bhojpuri media has been spearheading this surge of regional media in the metro towns and cities of India. The recent rush of Bhojpuri films (from early 2000s), featuring the biggest stars from the mainstream industry and playing to packed houses in Delhi, Mumbai and Ludhiana, has been a startling phenomenon. However, Bhojpuri films - mostly social dramas accultured to a middle class audience - do not display any of the ribald raunchiness that the music albums have become synonymous with.

The Bhojpuri music album has had a long and consistent trajectory. Over the last two decades it has continued to grow on the fringes in an almost subversive manner. In it is thus encoded the transforming cultural ethos of this regional media. Although Bhojpuri media in the form of films, stage performances, television channels, magazines and newspapers and lately online content, continue to grow, the music album is still the dominant form in which this regional culture is available for mass consumption. In fact many of the big names in Bhojpuri cinema such as Manoj Tiwari and Dinesh Lal Yadav began their careers as singer-performers and had several successful albums to their credit before going on to cinema stardom.

In an interesting transformation (starting in the early 2000s), the music album is now widely published as a video CD with accompanying music videos. This change was necessitated by the increasing popularity of easily available VCD players (at the fraction of the cost of audio tape players) that connected to the television sets that had become a ubiquitous commodity in urban dwellings and also in many rural areas. With this an audio category was transformed into an audio-visual category. These music videos, with no real precedent in the traditional culture to take its cue from, have taken on a rather hybrid and haphazard form. These accompanying visuals have added their own twist to this emerging media category, further divorcing it from its traditional form and firmly ensconcing it as an urban sub-cultural category.

From Risqué Folksongs to Raunchy Music Albums

#02. ODHANIYA-WALI #03. TWO-PIECE-WALI These two albums represent the extreme poles that bracket the sexual representation of women in Bhojpuri media.   #02: Odhaniya is a traditional piece of clothing used by women to shield themselves from the male gaze. The tagline reads: ‘Parivarik (family) Bhojpuri Album,’ implying that even though the songs have titillating themes, the album on the whole is still suitable for family viewing/ listening. This is a unique album, as normally it is the raunchiness of Bhojpuri albums that is promoted as their U[nique]S[elling]P[oint]. #03: A two-piece dress, on the other hand, reveals more than it covers. A ‘two-piece-wali’ is thus a woman who readily offers herself to the male gaze. The tagline reads: ‘Tani Daide De Ge Hamar’ which roughly translates to ‘Please give it to me’. (This album is in the Mathili dialect that is very close to Bhojpuri.)

Songs of sexual expression are a big part of Bhojpuri folk culture, but they do not exist as a separate category. Traditionally these songs are performed by family members and friends in private gatherings and are not a form of public entertainment. They are expressed in various musical traditions, such as ‘shaadi’ (marriage) songs sung at nuptial ceremonies, seasonal songs such as ‘kajris’ (monsoon songs), the ‘holi’ (spring festival) songs, ‘bidesia’ (literally: foreigner; implying the emigrated lover) songs, Braj songs about the flirtations of the mythical figure of Krishna, etc.

By picking these songs from different traditional genres and publishing them as compilations albums, stripped of its original context, the recording industry has created a new category of ‘Raunchy Bhojpuri Music,’ often referred to as “chat-paté lokgeet” (sweet-salty folksongs).

The traditional raunchy songs employ clever phrasing, double entendres, subtle innuendos and suggestive imagery to euphemistically convey taboo sexual acts and desires. Often bordering on the bawdy, they are nevertheless playful in spirit. When these sons were sung and performed, words and phrases in these songs were often interchanged or passages skipped or added to attune them to the level of permissiveness in the social gathering.

Exploiting this malleable quality of the folk tradition, recording companies have given this genre their own spin. By coarsely emphasizing the subtle and by turning a phrase or two, these songs have been converted into vulgar commodities.

Traditionally sexual expression forms a part of everyday life in Bhojpuri culture. Especially amongst women’s gatherings in family settings, these songs are a way of teasing and coaxing to diffuse sexual tensions; causing merry embarrassments to warm up relations; an explicit expression of yearning for the migrant beloved to lighten the heart; or a satirical rendering of incestuous tendencies to clear out hidden intensions.

However, once recorded, and published for public consumption, these song texts get falsely rearticulated as sexual objectification of the characters and situations portrayed in them. A social medium for sexual expression thus becomes a consumable commodity for ribald bemusement. This very quality became a unique selling point for the commercially inclined music labels.