Constituting a Diffuse Region: Cartographies of Mass-mediated Bhojpuri Belonging

Abstract

Contemporary Bhojpuri cinema has been celebrated as demonstrating a renaissance of regional culture, but also derided as commercially opportunistic, producing inauthentic regional cultural products. Instead of judging the authenticity of Bhojpuri media, this article addresses the ways that regional cinema produces durable ideas of geographic regionality by addressing a region that is constantly on the move. The referent of the "regional" in "regional cinema" is often taken to be an isomorphic dyad of language and geography. But in the case of Bhojpuri cinema, "the region" is not a straightforward place: the linguistic limits of Bhojpuri are always in question and the geographic limits of Bhojpuri have not been coterminous with any state; the Bhojpuri audience is taken to be highly migratory; and Bhojpuri cinema is produced far from its geographic center. Without a stable geo-linguistic referent, and without an unbroken history of filmmaking by linguistic insiders, contemporary Bhojpuri filmmakers shift Bhojpuri cartographies to address Bhojpuri migrants across the country. This article traces the shifting maps sketched out by recorded cassettes and cinema in Bhojpuri. I argue that through these modes of shifting geographic mapping, Bhojpuri media calls a diffuse public into being-one that does not consolidate pre-existing geo-linguistic borders, but suggests new, diffuse cartographies of mobility and belonging.

Localization, diversification and heterogeneity: Understanding the linguistic and cultural logics of Indian new media

“…More so in India’s case, where, historically, Indian regions and states were identified on the basis of their culture and language. Academics such as Kumar (2013) and Hardy (2015), through their seminal research on Indian Bhojpuri language content, have already argued against this narrow territorial imagination.…”

When celluloid pornography went digital: class and race in the Bangladeshi cut-piece online

“…Studying cinematic pornography in South Asia is a way to study cinema there without letting 'political geographical boundaries generate and limit research problems, creating hermetically sealed cultures and populations' (Srinivas 2015, vii). Instead, as Hardy (2015) has argued for Bhojpuri cinema, it is the cinematic discourse itself that produces a cohesive regional field of pornography, that crosses geographic as well as social boundaries, and is delimited by its aesthetic particularities; in this case the contingencies of the erotic pleasures located in the particular bodies, costumes, sex acts and mise-en-scène that are presented in clips of South Asian cinematic pornography. It is the transition of the cut-piece onto the VCD, enumerated in viewing lists that explicitly equate them with their regional counterparts and allow their reproduction in a single medium, and distributed locally, that makes the region tangibly present.…”

Localizing YouTube: Language, cultural regions, and digital platforms

“…Moreover, forces of economic globalization and cultural globalization that led to the emergence of numerous translocal television networks like Sun TV, or the development of new and diffuse regional formations around Bhojpuri-language cinema have also challenged this narrow mapping of region onto language (Kumar, 2013). As Hardy points out, given that the ‘linguistic limits of Bhojpuri are always in question and the geographic limits of Bhojpuri have not been coterminous with any state’, we cannot presume a neat mapping of language onto a geographic region (Hardy, 2015: 145). Scholars have also pointed out that media and cultural regions, far from being fixed and pre-given, have to be continually produced and performed.…”