Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial derivative form that defies its place in the given scheme of things. Situating it at the intersection of vernacular media production and the infrastructural-political reordering of provincial north India, the book shows that Bhojpuri media's characteristic 'disobedience' is marked by a libidinal excess- simultaneously scandalizing and moralizing-to address the inexact calculi of Bhojpuri speaking region's 'under-development'. Bhojpuri media therefore demands that it is assessed not merely for its internal content but within the comparative media crucible, marked by interpenetrating forms and histories as diverse as those of ecological distress, musical traditions, gendered segregation, real estate, urban resettlements, and highway modernities. Foregrounding the libidinal excess, language politics, and curatorial informalities, Provincializing Bollywood synthesizes Bhojpuri media's spectacular public insubordination and its invocation of a shared debt, which is by no means regional in its provenance.
The research for this book was started during my doctoral work at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, on a fellowship by Screen, the academic journal of film and television studies, and the University of Glasgow, during 2012-15. It was only later that I began to sincerely think about the role of environmental distress at one end, and algorithmic recapture of the overflowing tendencies manifest in Bhojpuri popular culture on the other. I therefore began reframing the questions in a much broader theoretical framework since early 2018 and finished writing in the middle of 2019. The production stage at Oxford University Press, however, overlapped with a most unprecedented moment in recent history-the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other tragedies, the one of Himalayan proportions was that of millions of migrant workers walking back home for thousands of kilometres. Evicted by landlords since they could no longer pay rent, or because they could not buy any essential supplies, the migrants were given a rude reminder of their temporary' dwellings. Caught between essential work and non-essential workers, this historic moment of reverse labour migration was, apparently, a spectacular undoing of the work of neoliberalism over the past three decades. Charitable efforts and lamentations by the citizens could hardly compensate them for the indignity and injustice, let alone for yet another dispossession. Indeed, a vast majority of these workers were from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; one may presume with some caution that a large proportion of them would be either native Bhojpuri speakers or among the regular audience of Bhojpuri popular culture-the subject of this book.
The starving people walked with their families, some belongings, and little to no savings, since they had lost wage employment to a brutal national lockdown, indifferent to their destinies. Instead, the police humiliated them in public, beat them with sticks, and barricaded district and state borders. They forced the migrants to frog jump, and on one obscene occasion, drenched scores of them with toxic disinfectants. Yet, they continued to walk back, since the cities where they worked had locked them out of every possible entitlement. Some sat on top of packed buses and trucks, some rode on bicycles, some also repurposed pushcarts-they walked along the highways and railway tracks, while waiting occasionally for governments to help them out. Many committed suicide on account of all sorts of police brutality. Hundreds of them were killed by marauding automobiles. Every day the newspapers were painted red with the blood of a few who were knocked out the day before. Women gave birth by the roadside, the hungry and heatstruck occasionally fainted, and their children were stupified by the misery. Indeed, the novel coronavirus had struck down upon much of the world like lightening, but very little of the specific agony of the poor working class migrants in India could be attributed to the reasons operational elsewhere. They were abandoned by one and all the mammoth informal economy fell apart, formal contractual employers mostly looked the other way, and the state was far too busy with public relations stunts. Indeed, hundreds of families and communities also generously fed those walking back home hungry, but they could have never compensated for the scale of the betrayal.
The reportage in the media, however, was a lesson in systematic invisiblizing. Regardless of several extraordinary reports, which this author learned from, a vast majority of the discussion silenced, or cruelly mocked at, the provincial migrants. Why could they not stay put like the rest of us?, many of them occasionally barked. The most pathetic moment of reckoning was perhaps captured by a Supreme Court hearing. The Chief Justice of India, heading the bench, remarked in response to the hearing of a Public Interest Litigation, why the migrants walking back home would need money, if they were being provided meals. Some of these remarks, whether in jest or soaked in cruelty, sum up the apathy of urban citizenry towards the provincial lifeworlds. Poverty alone, it must be added, does not capture the substance of the divide, since it only means the deprivation of certain means. Much harder to understand is the trauma of being hung out to dry by the city to which one may have provided essential services, at a great cost to oneself, for a number of years, perhaps even staying away from one's family.
The artefacts of popular culture are often framed as if they were anchored within either relatively autonomous cultural horizons, or as the resultant effect of a historical force-field rendered in economic, political, and technological dimensions. In most of the work in film, media and cultural studies, the entity under critical investigation is not only rendered an internally differentiated descriptive body, but is also isolated for analytical convenience at the same time. An allied pursuit to cover up such simplistic analysis is more common: To map the socioeconomic conditions of production contemporary to the cultural domain, and read them as if they were engaged in a direct conversation. As this book will establish, however, the unshapely objects of popular culture often share their edges with a whole variety of outsides, which may have a powerful but delayed. latent, or indirect bearing upon the trajectories in focus. The margins could thus constitute the aesthetic-political kernel of cultural fields of enquiry-which can hardly be conveniently isolated-and anchor their respective historical trajectories, without being directly identifiable as such. It is desirable, therefore, to broaden the comparative frameworks within which cultural objects are situated, and to sharply investigate their boundary conditions which shape and consolidate the systems under investigation.
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