The Bhojpuri Boom (Video)
Posted on June 20, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Culture, India, International.
MUMBAI, India – Twenty-year-old Darbanga Lalit Yadav left his village in the north Indian state Bihar two years ago and moved to Mumbai in search of a job. He works as a cook in a family’s home and earns 4,000 rupees ($87) a month. When he gets a day off about once a month, he said he spends it by wandering around the city and then going to the movies.
But Yadav does not waste his time watching Bollywood films that typically show wealthy, jet-setting Indians in modern outfits living around the world. He can’t relate to those movies. Instead, he goes to the latest Bhojpuri film. In these movies, the characters speak the Hindi dialect Bhojpuri, which is spoken in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and among many of Mumbai’s migrants.
“They’re from my Bihar,” Yadav said of Bhojpuri films as he stood in line to buy a 30-rupee ticket at a single-screen theater in Andheri, a northern suburb of Mumbai. Men repairing the cinema stood above Yadav on bamboo scaffolding. “Bhojpuri films are more interesting,” he said, “because they belong to my own village and language.”
Regional cinemas like Bhojpuri have seen a surge in growth in India over the past decade as a result of Bollywood films increasingly catering to more modern, wealthy and cosmopolitan Indians, according to Kathryn Hardy, a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate in South Asia studies who is working on a dissertation on Bhojpuri cinema.
Continue reading and watch the video at GlobalPost.
