Miss Use
A Survey of Raunchy Bhojpuri Music Album Covers

TRANSITIONING SEXUALIZED IMAGERY ON RAUNCHY BHOJPURI MUSIC ALBUMS

This is a survey of raunchy Bhojpuri music cassettes and music video CDs, popularly available in the cities of Mumbai and Delhi. It presents an opportunity for observing how this tradition and media culture has transformed over the last decade and a half.

These cultural transformations can be vividly tracked through the changing titles of the albums and the changing representation of the sexualized women center-staged on these album covers. These titles and images reflect the changing gender dimensions and class associations within Bhojpuri culture. It maps the tensions between rural and urban cultures and their relative impact on each other.

The influence of media and technology can also be observed in the changing iconography of these album covers. From ‘classical’ paintings to graphic illustrations, moving on to photography and then digital compositions, each media and process brings in its own ethos and cultural linkages that add its own spin to the representations.

1. The Nubile Series

In the infancy stage of audiocassettes, the primary aim of music labels was to make it very clear through the title that this was a Bhojpuri album. This was more to inform the distributors or retailers in the city so that they could recommend these titles to their growing Bhojpuri clientele that mostly comprised of illiterate daily-wage workers. Album titles thus had names that always carried the word Bhojpuri as the prefix: ‘Bhojpuri Gujariya’, ‘Bhojpuri Rasiya’, ‘Bhojpuri Angiya’, etc. These titles immediately identified the region and the genre to which the album belonged.

The prevalent object of Bhojpuri male fantasy, then, was the nubile Bhojpuri lass from the hinterland, and therefore, most early raunchy album covers had images that signify this female stereotype.

#08. BHOJPURI GUJARIYA #09. BHOJPURI RASIYA     #10. BHOJPURI ANGIYA #11. BHOJPURI JHARELIYA

Depicted on the album cover were photo-realistic illustrations of voluptuous rural women in the ‘calendar art’ style. Here the woman is an idealized ‘classical’ sensual being. She represents innocent sexuality and sensual purity: a lusty gift of nature; an almost mythical beauty; a lovely object of divine creation; a heart’s desire to be won through grace, charm and virtue; a being only the most blessed and most fortunate could obtain. These qualities were depicted through her coy posture, her downcast eyes and her innocent smile and by placing her in a mythological pastoral setting. (The semiotic code and stylistic conventions employed in Indian ‘calendar art’ in the depiction of the ‘classical’ sensuous woman has been well expounded by the sociologist Patricia Uberoi.)

Under the garb of depicting a naive tribal beauty, these album covers were able to publish some of the most explicit sexual imagery available in mass media at that time. The barely covered breasts, see-through clothing and a frank voluptuousness depicted on these album covers are barely permissible in mainstream media even today. What probably also helped in escaping the censor’s scrutiny was that these are illustrations rather than clear photographic images and are thus a product of artistic imagination rather than exploitation of a personhood. Another fact is that these cassettes were availed by only a marginal diaspora, even though known music labels published and distributed these albums through regular channels. The Bhojpuri music industry thus continued in an almost subversive fashion.

#12. JHARELIYA Compare this VCD version of ‘Jhareliya’ with the cassette version (#11). The photographic depiction of the “fairytale beauty” on this cover lacks the mythical quality of the illustrated image on the cassette cover and comes across as a counterfeit impersonation. The real purpose of the photographic image seems to provide a titillating picture under the pretext of illustrating a classical title. The image in the center seems to be one of the most risqué photographs the publishers seem to have managed. It has thus been repeated on several subsequent covers (see: #18 and 48).