Film
Policy and the Bhojpuri Cinema
Lal Mohan Yadav
Ph.D. Research Scholar
Department of Film Studies
The English & Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
Telangana, India
Abstract: This
paper delves into the conversation around Bihar’s film policy in the Bhojpuri
film industry before the state’s government passed the Bihar Film Promotion
Policy in 2024. The clamor for policy emanated from, as well as highlighted, a
putative fault line within the Bhojpuri cinema. While Bhojpuri is spoken across
western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP hereafter) in numerous dialects,
the bulk of Bhojpuri cinema’s production has found a steady locus in UP
recently. UP’s film policy has been operational much before Bihar’s government
came up with its own, and the provision of subsidy along with other fiscal as
well as non-fiscal incentives for filmmaking in ‘regional’ languages has
transformed UP into a lucrative destination for shooting Bhojpuri films. For
many in the Bhojpuri film industry who hail from Bihar, it is regrettable that
Bhojpuri films are shot in UP despite having more to do with Bihar’s culture
than that of UP. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork I argue that the
‘outsourcing’ of production to UP had not only generated a desire to embed
Bhojpuri film production in Bihar but also brought about a contingent schism
within the Bhojpuri film industry.
Keywords: Film Policy, Subsidy, Bhojpuri Cinema, Ethnography
Note: Interviews cited in this paper
were originally conducted in Hindi and translated into English by the author.
I. Up in the air with UP
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. (Hardy 147)
In the editorial of South
Asian Popular Culture, Bindu Menon and Ratnakar Tripathy suggest a
counterintuitive entry-point to the Bhojpuri cinema, “Notably though, if you
wish to study the production chain of Bhojpuri films, you should be heading for
Mumbai and not a Siwan in Bihar or a Ballia in Uttar Pradesh” (1). While Mumbai
continues to be a vital node in the production sector of the Bhojpuri film
industry, the editors cursorily mention two nondescript small-towns to mark
that the Bhojpuri cinema’s originary base can be readily pinned on the
aggregated geography of the two north Indian states in question. The Bhojpuri
cinema, as an institution/industry, is of a peculiar character: it does not
have a center of production within the region of its cultural provenance and
purported address. Also known as Bhojpur and Purbanchal, the Bhojpuri region is
non-approximal with any state boundary, and is spread most prominently but only
partially across two distinct political units within the Indian nation: Bihar
and Uttar Pradesh (UP hereafter). It exists as an indeterminate spatio-cultural
tract that extends from western Bihar and stretches to eastern UP or
Purvanchal, further spilling over into little pockets in Madhya Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and even Nepal. This ethnolinguistic expanse is where
Bhojpuri prevails as the mother tongue of the native population although the
language is spoken in its myriad dialects throughout it. The Bhojpuri-speaking
region of Bihar and UP—neither fully contained within the respective
jurisdictional limits of Bihar and UP nor exceeding them altogether—within the
larger Bhojpuri region remains the de facto socio-spatial point of
reference for all things Bhojpuri, including music and cinema. In other words,
the Bhojpuri nation (if one can imagine it in the first place) persists as an
inchoate formation minus the claim for a new state based on linguistic
identity—contra the case in south India—following its incongruity with state
boundaries, but remains susceptible to reification in cultural discourse
without an overtly national posture. It could be argued that the Bhojpuri
nation has had the grounds for discursive imagination but not enough for a
political one—at least, not yet. Bhojpuri identity is rallied around by
claiming ‘natural’ possession of an ‘essential’ quality of ‘Bhojpuri-ness’ or Bhojpuriya,
which is an assemblage of traits and affects but one that eludes attempts to
moor it within modern geopolitical coordinates.
Highlighting how the
Bhojpuri language informs the affective economy of its cinema, Kathryn C. Hardy
argues that the knowledge of Bhojpuri—despite its thriving variations—confer a
certain Bhojpuriya to Bhojpuri films for it is the language around which
the its cultural imaginary is constructed in the cinema (237). Here, language
confers a pliable anchor of sorts to a cultural formation for which regional
correspondence is not as imperative as it is, say, for the Tamil cinema. Hardy,
in another essay, contends that Bhojpuri media (music and filmic) address and
bring together a public that is dispersed—not to entrench the idea of region
but to convey “new, diffuse cartographies of mobility and belonging” (148).
Does the Bhojpuri cinema, then, convey a spectatorial subjectivity bereft of a
desire for regional demarcation and/or identification because the spectator
herself is either continually on the move (a nomadic subject?), or that the Bhojpuriya
retailed in the cinema has little to do with the notion of the region itself?
Is linguistic affinity sans regional affiliation enough for her to be
inducted into the cinema’s spectatorial address? Further, is state-identity in
the Hindi heartland so entrenched today that it subordinates all regional identities
insofar as they can find some manner of articulation culturally but not
politically? Is there a mediation of the state-region cleavage in north India
through cultural formations, similar, or dissimilar, to how it played out down
in the Indian peninsula on the lines of the nation-region binary?
To attend to these
questions sufficiently would require a significantly larger academic enterprise
than the one I am attempting here. However, they animate a strand of
interrogation that I will try to follow in this paper: is there a contingent
schism within the Bhojpuri film industry, best evinced by the conversation
around film policy before the state’s government passed the Bihar Film
Promotion Policy in 2024.
At the 64th National Film
Awards in 2017, UP was given the honor of being the Most Film Friendly State.
In 1999 UP’s film policy was announced by Mulayam Singh Yadav’s government, and
Film Bandhu—the nodal agency entrusted with the implementation of the
policy—turned operational around 2000–2001. It remained effectively dormant
until 2013 when the Akhilesh Yadav government amended the policy and extended
the subsidy cover to films made in Awadhi, Braj, Bundeli, and Bhojpuri, apart
from Hindi. Under the aegis of the Information and Public Relations Department,
Film Bandhu has been instrumental in turning UP into a hub for film shooting
post 2013. The policy was time and again amended by Yogi Adityanath’s
successive governments (in 2018 and 2023), and the ceiling for subsidy was
raised from 25% to 50% of the total cost for ‘regional’ films provided the film
is shot in the state for a stipulated number of days. Film Bandhu has an online
Single Window Clearance portal that facilitates the application process for
filming permissions and disbursal of subsidy. Apart from the incentivization of
filmmaking in general and development of film-related infrastructure, there are
other fiscal incentives for hiring local actors, musicians, technicians, and
for making more than one film in the state; non-fiscal ones include free
security detail and concessions for accommodation in state-empaneled
properties.
UP’s film policy has been
operational from way before Bihar’s government came up with its own, and the
provision of subsidy along with other incentives for filmmaking in ‘regional’
languages has transformed UP into a lucrative destination for shooting Bhojpuri
films. A Bhojpuri film is rendered in its final form as a finished product in
Mumbai but its formative journey may cover a host of locations before reaching
the maximum city. And in the last ten years or so, UP has stolen a march over
Bihar in hosting those locations for the shooting of Bhojpuri films. UP’s film
policy states, “Bhojpuri films produced in the state are achieving immense
commercial success and some of the best films of Indian cinema have been made
in this language” (Government of Uttar Pradesh 21). The bulk of Bhojpuri
cinema’s production has found a steady locus in UP of late, which, in turn, had
generated calls from within the industry for a film policy in Bihar as well.
For many in the Bhojpuri film industry who hail from Bihar, it is regrettable
that Bhojpuri films are shot in UP despite having more to do with Bihar’s
culture than that of UP. Such a nativist claim may have many valid provenances
but the militancy of it is vehemently informed by the perception of being at a
disadvantage vis-à-vis those in UP. Although Bhojpuri is spoken by a
fairly large population in Purvanchal, Bhojpuri is one among the three major
Bihari languages (others being Maithili and Magahi) and is widely understood as
a shorthand for Bihari culture and identity in general. However, it is UP that
has outpaced Bihar when it comes to the production of Bhojpuri films.
Film subsidy from the UP
government has turned out to be quite significant for recuperating the budget
of Bhojpuri films at a time when theatrical release is not fetching enough to
break even. Post 2018, subsidy granted by the UP government has acted as a
safety net for Bhojpuri film producers who ensure that their films are shot
somewhere in UP to fulfill the conditions for availing it. Outsourcing of
production has been a perennial condition for the Bhojpuri cinema; even Gujarat
was once a key destination for shooting Bhojpuri films in the 2000s.
Ironically, Bihar could not come up as a viable production hub for Bhojpuri
films in spite of its socio-cultural correspondence with the Bhojpuri cinema.
II. For a policy in Bihar
There are many filmmakers
who want to shoot in Bihar, away from Mumbai, to bring authenticity to their
work but end up settling for adjoining Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh or other
states for want of adequate facilities here. Hopefully, the new policy will
plug the gaps. (PTI)
In a way, Pankaj Tripathi,
a well-known actor in Hindi films, echoed what many from Bihar had been voicing
after Bihar’s government introduced its Bihar Industrial Investment Promotion
Policy 2016, which reached a fever pitch post the Covid-19 pandemic. Within the
tourism segment of the policy, there is a clear indication of promoting tourist
destinations by encouraging shooting of films “through single-window clearances
along with necessary incentives, as provided for under the relevant government
notifications” (17). ‘Cinematic’ is one of the priority sectors of tourism; for
attracting investment in the sector’s value chain there is a reference to a
Film City in the making (18). The very mention of the words ‘film’ and
‘cinematic’ in the policy had caught the attention of the Bhojpuri film
industry’s Bihari stakeholders. This citation of something related with the
business of image-making generated an anticipation that a film policy was just
around the corner. By that time, both Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand already had
their respective film policies in place, proposing incentivization of
filmmaking via institutional assistance for promoting tourism, attracting
investment in development of film infrastructure, and generation of employment
in the film industrial segment. However, it were only the government of Bihar
that had not extended any form of institutional support to filmmaking in the
state.
Commenting on why Bihar had
no film policy for so long, Uday Kumar, an active member of the theater scene
in Patna, rued the fact that many prominent Bihari actors and film
professionals have made their name in the Hindi film industry, but are not keen
on showing support for filmmaking in Bihar. He went on to claim that the Bihar
government at the time did not even seem interested in the formulation of a
cultural policy, let alone a policy promoting filmmaking. No popular film star
from Bihar threw their weight behind the cause of Bhojpuri cinema. Further, the
Bhojpuri film fraternity from Bihar never came together to solicit any
government in Bihar to consider the formulation of a film policy as a future
possibility. In the absence of an association or a committee that could
represent the Bhojpuri cinema and/or act as a pressure group, the government
could not be persuaded to officially recognize cinema as a legitimate industry
and have a policy regarding the same (Kumar, 04 Jan. 2024).
The clamor for film policy
in Bihar emanated from, as well as highlighted, a putative fault line within
the Bhojpuri cinema which may not be visible in, or abstracted from, its
textual mode(s) of address: the Bhojpuri industry betrays its incontrovertible
clustering into two constellations aligning with the states of Bihar and UP
respectively. While any industry is heterogeneous, highly cosmopolitan and
abounds in hierarchies of capital, labor, and value generation, there prevails
a mutual sense of association among its personnel and stakeholders. The
Bhojpuri film industry may have had its internal differences over an array of
functional roles and operational logics but what the conversation around film
policy in Bihar had animated is how the political-economic logic of state
policy can help splinter a regional production culture.
At the Indian International
Film Festival in Goa in 2022, the then Minister for Art and Culture of Bihar,
Jitendra Kumar Rai, stated that the government of Bihar was finalizing a film
policy that was soon to be sanctioned. It was only in July 2024 that the
government of Bihar finally passed its Bihar Film Promotion Policy 2024.
However, this delay in its sanction had been a significant source of
frustration for filmmakers, producers, exhibitors, and industry professionals
in Bihar. Since UP’s film policy makes a clear acknowledgement of cinema as an
industry, filmmaking in regional languages along with Hindi has been rendered
eligible for institutional support. Veteran Bhojpuri filmmaker Akash Yogi
remarked, “In UP many [Bhojpuri] films are shot because Yogi ji (Yogi
Adityanath, the Chief Minister of UP) provides subsidy. This makes it easier
for the producer. If we have a film policy in Bihar, we would not go there [to
shoot]” (06 Jan. 2024). The delay in Bihar’s policy had not only necessitated
the outsourcing of production to Uttar Pradesh, but had also deferred the
recognition of the Bhojpuri cinema as an industry in Bihar, which, in turn,
disqualified film producers from applying for loans from banks to fund their
productions. But if one were to just cross the Bihar-UP border to make a film
there, they would be eligible for institutional support unavailable in Bihar.
This disadvantage for camp Bihar within the Bhojpuri film industry, in a way,
mobilized a strong bid for film policy in the state.
The narrative of being at a
disadvantage vis-à-vis the UP cohort was propped up in such a way as if
the Bihar government’s tardiness to come up with a film policy were to blame
for the industry being in dire straits in the state. This was further
accentuated by reports of several Bhojpuri films making in the subsidy list of
UP’s Film Bandhu. According to Sanjay Kumar, the editor of a Patna-based film
trade magazine called Pollywood, “nearly 40% of Bhojpuri film producers
are Bihari” (09 Jan. 2024). And yet successive Bihar governments did nothing to
roll out the policy that could have facilitated Bhojpuri film production in the
state while its industrious neighbor was building a strong production culture.
“Bhojpuri industry is going through a difficult time”, remarked Kumar, “due to
lack of infrastructure. In Bihar there is no film [production] culture. They
shoot films in UP and finish in Bombay. Producers in UP have no [such] problem”
(09 Jan. 2024). While it is true that Bhojpuri cinema is undergoing an
uncertain period owing to the closure of single-screen theatres, the calls for
a film policy in Bihar pointed to the industry seeking statist intervention of
the kind UP has witnessed recently. Although subsidy, as Akash Yogi had said,
reduces the financial burden on the producer, UP’s film policy intervenes in
the exhibition sector as well. With provisions for incentivizing re-opening of
theatres that are no longer operational, upgradation of functional ones, and
even construction of new, UP’s film policy promises an overhaul of the leisure
economy of the cinema in the state. And, this sets forth the precedent for many
in Bihar as to what the state’s film policy should be—after all, the lack of
one enabled the consolidation of Bhojpuri film production in UP. In this
context, it is rather ironic for Bhojpuri films to have more takers in Bihar,
as per the editor mentioned above, than in UP. Nonetheless, the desire for a
film policy in Bihar stemmed less from a nativist impulse of regional or
ethnolinguistic exceptionalism; it were borne out of contextual
political-economic conditions.
III. Film City in Bihar
Producers from Bihar too
dipped their toes in the subsidy waters of UP and enjoyed its concomitant
benefits. But the lobbying for a policy in Bihar was not only for receiving subsidies
from the Bihar government. While the conversation around the delay in
implementation of Bihar's film policy was getting louder, some from the
industry underscored the necessity of a Film City in Bihar. UP’s latest film
policy (2023) states that the government is building a Film City in Sector 16-A
of Noida, which was envisaged back in 2012 by the Akhilesh Yadav administration
but supposed to be in Lucknow. In the same year, Nitish Kumar, the then Chief
Minister of Bihar, had proposed to build a Film City in the state. In spite of
these announcements, none is nowhere near to completion.
Shanti Kumar argues that
Bollywood informs the creative impulse driving the fusion of urban and
film-related infrastructure ‘most evident in Indian cities and towns that have,
or are planning to have, a “film city” in their master plans for urban
development’ (49). From a neoliberal governmental perspective, building
infrastructure connotes a developmental step towards enabling economic growth
and generating opportunities for employment. The same narrative is deployed by
those who seek statist intervention or support for developing infrastructure
where there is none. For the Bhojpuri film industry in Bihar, the
long-gestating Rajgir Film City in Nalanda is projected as a veritable solution
to the situation the cinema finds itself in.
The Indian government
granted ‘industry status’ to domestic film trade in 1998, throwing the doors
wide open for the entry of corporate capital in the film industry. While
Bollywood’s corporatization in the 2000s signposts the formalization of
economic-cultural practices associated with the Mumbai-based Hindi cinema
(Ganti), the same could not be said for fringe cinemas such as Bhojpuri
(Kumar). As an institution, the Bhojpuri cinema is an aggregate of diffuse
practices ranging from the folk-cultural to media-industrial. As this industry
is largely informal, it is beset by economic uncertainty and precarity of
labor. In this regard the idea of a film city is espoused as a feasible
solution to not only embeds a highly itinerant mode of production in the state
of Bihar but also to formalize the industry itself. Rajkumar Singh, a former
film distributor in Bihar claimed that a film city could be a game-changer for
the Bhojpuri cinema and could save producers from outsourcing production and
post-production to UP and Mumbai respectively. He further stated producers,
directors, actors, technicians, and other film personnel would not have to go
out of Bihar had the Rajgir Film City been up and running. An operational film
city would help reduce the budget of films and also set the ball rolling for a
tentative formalization of film production in the state—the lack of which hurts
many producers in Bihar. He also claimed that a strong film fraternity could
also be imagined working together at the film city. A proper film body
comprising various stakeholders could then negotiate with the government for
its demands and institutional support. Such a body could also serve as a
censoring mechanism by formulating guidelines to curb the production of
‘vulgar’ music and films. Opining that Bhojpuri cinema suffers an image-crisis
because of Bhojpuri music videos, he went on to contend that because of the
prevalence of ‘vulgar’ content, the government had not acknowledged the industry
nor devised measures for supporting it (Singh, 08 Jan. 2024).
Awadesh Kumar had directed
two Bhojpuri films, but none of them could see the light of day. He claimed
that the absence of an association of film personnel and technicians that would
regulate wages and the cost of renting equipment has made film production an
unstable business. Many a film could not be finished because after a certain
portion of the film is shot, either the actors, technicians, or equipment
renting agencies would suddenly increase their rates, which ballooned the
film’s budget, and in extreme cases, the production would be shelved because
the producer would simply develop cold feet. In such a situation, Kumar
explained why the government should formulate a policy for regulating various
processes in film production. A committee should be formed to devise guidelines
ensuring that the rates of actors and technicians are fixed and that those who
do not abide by them will not be allowed to work in the industry. He even
stated that even film actors and personnel needed to unionize to protect them
from exploitation and to ensure regular employment. The solutions to such
issues are the development of the film city and the formulation of a film
policy to generate a stable system of production in Bihar (Kumar, 24 Mar.
2024).
Bunty ‘Azad’ Roy, a rangkarmi
or theatre worker, has featured in many music videos and played minor roles in
a handful of Bhojpuri films. He spoke on the difficulties faced by actors in
eking out a steady income from the industry. Since there is no union of actors,
most of them are unable to continue acting due to a scarcity of opportunities
and poor pay (Roy). R.K. Vidyarthi, another small-time actor, voiced his
disappointment at having to travel to UP for his acting gigs, which diminished
his earnings (Vidyarthi). For both of them, a film city in Bihar could open the
doors for better opportunities and mitigate the attendant precarity in the
industry.
In the colonial era, Madras was the center of production
for films made in the languages spoken in south India. Rising ethnonationalism
coupled with the ascendant notion of regional self-determination based on
linguistic identity had rendered the composite and multilingual film production
culture in Madras unsustainable even before the republic of India came into
being. The linguistic reorganization of south India in 1956 further helped
embedding film cultures locally in the newly carved states of Andhra Pradesh,
Karnataka, and Kerala (Raghavendra 2011). To foster the growth of film
industries at home, governments of these ‘linguistic’ states promulgated film
policies favoring filmmaking in their official language at the expense of
others (Srinivas vii). The conversation around a film policy in Bihar did not
germinate from a militant linguistic nationalism as in the case of south India,
nor did it articulate any latent desire for a distinct Bhojpuri nation. While
it did hint at the Bhojpuri film industry showing signs of factionalism
informed by the idea of state-identity, the rationale behind it was governed
more by the uneven nature of statist intervention in cultural production than
by the surfacing of an irrevocable breach within the Bhojpuri region, or, for
that matter, within the Bhojpuri film industry itself. Since the policy has
been implemented in Bihar, the conversation has shifted to the continual delay
in the completion of proposed Film City. Criticism on the policy
notwithstanding, Akash Yogi has shot back-to-back Bhojpuri films in Bihar. He
now hopes that the Film City in Nalanda turns operational as soon as possible
(19 Feb. 2025). As of November 2025, apart from the fencing of the land
acquired in Rajgir for the Film City’s sake, the project is yet to see any
material development.
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