All you wanted to know about Bhojwood

“Everybody knows of Rani Mukherjee. But few have heard of Rani Chatterjee. Just as Ms Mukherjee has reigned over Bollywood, Ms Chatterjee is a star in her own right in Bhojpuri films.” So begins Cinema Bhojpuri, journalist Avijit Ghosh’s account of the history of the Bhojpuri film industry from its humble beginnings in the early 1960s.

The first Hindi talkie Alam Ara was made in 1931. The first Bhojpuri film, Ganga Maiya Tohe Piyari Chadhaibo (O Mother Ganga, I’ll offer you the yellow cloth) was made only in 1962.
The genesis of the Bhojpuri film industry is an interesting tale in itself. As Ghosh writes, “Sometime in the later half of the 1950s, character actor Nazir Hussain (whom the current generation would remember as the caring vicar who brings up Amitabh Bachchan in Amar Akbar Anthony) met the then president Dr Rajendra Prasad, at a film awards function in Mumbai. … ‘Are you a Punjabi?’ the president asked Hussain. When the actor replied that he was from Ghazipur district in eastern Uttar Pradesh, it was a moment of serendipity for Rajendra babu… Rajendra babu asked Hussain, ‘Why don’t you make a film in Bhojpuri?’ The actor gently submitted that he was a mere character artiste and making a film required a lot of money. But Rajendra babu wasn’t giving up and insisted.”

And thus began the travails of making the first Bhojpuri film. Hussain had with him a ready script, on which Bimal Roy was supposed to make a movie. Hussain took the script back and made the movie himself. And a new film industry was born. But it didn’t really take off — by 1976, only 21 Bhojpuri movies were made.

The year 1977 saw the rebirth of the Bhojpuri film industry with its first colour movie, Dangal, starring popular Hindi film villain Sujit Kumar as hero and popular Hindi film vamp Prema Narayan as heroine.

The film also had the superhit song, ‘Kashi hile, Patna hile, Kalkatta hile la, tohri lachki jo kamariya sari duniya hilela’. It was sung by Manna Dey, written by Kulwant Jani and put to tune by Nadeem Shravan, who would find success in Bollywood ten years later with the music in Aashiqui. This second phase of Bhojpuri films lasted from 1977 till 2001 and about 140 movies were produced during this period.

Since 2002, Bhojwood (as the Bhojpuri film industry is referred to) has become one of the largest film industries in India. It produces 70-80 odd movies every year, which may not be anywhere near the number of movies that Tollywood (the Telugu film industry) and Kollywood (the Tamil film industry) churn out, but is substantial nonetheless.

The reason for the recent rise of Bhojwood has nothing to do with the sudden need of people who speak the dialect to seek out their identity, as is the case with the resurgence in the Marathi film industry. But it stems from the fact that Bollywood doesn’t make movies for India’s most populous states, UP and Bihar, anymore.

The quintessential Bollywood movie used to be a mass market movie. Now it is what we could safely call an upper class market film, with most of the stories targeted at the multiplex audience. This has led to a huge percentage of the population not relating to the Hindi movie anymore. And it is Bhojpuri cinema that is now fulfilling that need.  

The third phase of Bhojpuri cinema is also marked by the rise of double-entendre lyrics. Sample this. As Ghosh writes, “In Pyaar Ka Bandhan, singer Rekha Rao croons to the lyrics of Vinay Bihari, ‘Tani lahe lahe dheere dheere dala kamsin ba dukhala raja ji’ (Put it in slowly, darling, I am very young, it hurts’), while on screen Sambhavna Seth dances to the tune and as she gyrates, a launda (a man dressed as a woman) tries to slip bangles into her arms. That is double-entendre at its best.” For anyone interested in film history, this book is a good read.