Miss Use
A Survey of Raunchy Bhojpuri Music Album Covers
2. The Luscious Series
A series of music albums from the 1990s started a “super-hit” trend where the album titles attached the name of a luscious vegetable, sweetmeat or a hot snack to the Bhojpuri prefix. These luscious objects were obviously phallic or indicated a woman’s breasts, or equated the craving for the delectable food item with the desire for a lusty woman. The album art was a literal illustration of a luscious woman along with the luscious food. The albums had names like ‘Bhojpuri Baigan’, ‘Bhojpuri Kaddu’, ‘Bhojpuri Rasgulla’ etc.
The sexualized woman on these covers had lost her coyness. Unlike the bashful beauty of the nubile series, this woman looks directly at the viewer in a pose of sexual challenge, or longingly gazes at the giant phallic fruit depicted alongside. This woman is a crude illustration of an urban male desire for a raunchy tribal woman. She is obtainable in the urban male imagination by exercising the power equation of superior might and wealth. In a striking contrast to the woman of the ‘nubile series,’ this woman is not placed in any setting, pastoral or otherwise; against a bare background, she is without any real context.
This bawdy series was such a hit that different labels introduced different versions of the same title. The trend continued into the VCD era (starting early 2000s). This series firmly established the new genre of Bhojpuri “chat paté lokgeet” (sweet-salty folksongs). In time, the ‘Bhojpuri’ prefix was also dropped: an album with a title such as ‘Rasgulla’ was indicative enough that it was a raunchy Bhojpuri album.
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#16. BHOJPURI BAIGAN |
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#18. BHOJPURI KELA
#16-17: woman in the centre on these covers is an unknown model used only for the purpose of allure. The images on the fringe are of starlets who feature in the videos in the album. |
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# 18: The woman in the center is Katrina Kaif, a prominent sex symbol from the mainstream glamour industry, while, in comparison, the image on the right is of an unknown starlet recycled from the central image of album # 12. These models are eye-candy for the cover and do not feature in the videos in the album.
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‘Lal Timatar’ is the most popular title in this series with different labels publishing different versions of the same album title. In fact this title has been credited for sparking off the whole “luscious series” trend with its first publication in 1988. (Also see image #32)
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#23. LAL TIMATAR |
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#25. LAL TIMATAR |
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#23: This album has been published by T-series, which is a major music label. The prominently featured woman here is Rakhi Sawant, famous as an “item girl” in he mainstream film industry. She merely adorns the cover of the album and never features in the videos in the album. The other smaller images however are from actual video grabs. Rakhi Sawant here is featured attired as a village woman.
#24: This album has been published by Ganga, which is a small but popular Bhojpuri music label. The central woman here is an unknown model. She also serves the purpose of eye-candy and does not actually feature in the music videos in the album. This woman however is attired to look like a western/ urban/ showbiz woman – as are the impersonations of other women featured on the cover. The bottom left image on his cover has been recycled from album # 31.
#25: This is an image of the album cover of a Music CD; hence the women featured here, just as in music cassette covers, are merely representative. The fusion dressing and the neo-traditional attire of the women here depict this album as contemporary yet traditional.
#26: This cover is a collage of video grabs, computer graphics and photo stills. The women are attired in neo-traditional clothes and captured in poses that are a fusion of traditional dance moves and club dancing.
Also notice the appearance on men (mostly coupled with a woman) on some of these albums (# 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 26). The male figure had largely been absent from the album cover thus far. |
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