It is an early monsoon day at Sheetal, a single-screen theatre in Kurla, in central Bombay. An animated audience, part of Bombay's growing population of migrant workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, overflows the theatre's seats at a weekend screening of the Bhojpuri film Ravi Kissen. Dancing to catchy songs, clapping at snappy dialogue, whistling and joking, the crowd shows its appreciation for the nice and naughty versions of star Ravi Kishan in the first ever double-role in a Bhojpuri film.
In Bombay's territorial local politics, the bhaiyya, unschooled in the ways of modernity, is seen as either a rustic bumpkin or a hired thug, unwelcome but unavoidable. In theatre after run-down theatre showing Bhojpuri films in cities with sizeable migrant populations, one can witness the delirious reclamation of space by people who do not feel entirely at home outside of the theatre's walls. A guard at such an establishment smiles in amusement, saying, "This is nothing. Most of the bhaiyyas have gone home to harvest the crops now. You should have seen what it was like last month."
Going by such-scenes – and the profusion of Bhojpuri films playing not just in Bihar and UP, but also in Delhi, Bombay, Punjab, Rajasthan, Hyderabad and even across the border in Nepal – it is easy to understand the current buzz about Bhojpuri cinema. The phenomenon is not easy to quantify, given years of elitist neglect by the trade journals and film magazines, but unofficial estimates put the number of Bhojpuri films currently under production at about 250, up from absolutely nothing during the preceding decade. Film trade analysts are declaring it a symptom of Hindi cinema's historic turn away from the 'masses', while Hindi- and English-language newsmagazines note with surprise the sudden flowering of this new North Indian cinema.
In fact, Bhojpuri cinema is not new – it has been around since 1962, when Kundan Kumar directed the blockbuster Ganga Maiyya Tohe Piyari Chadhaibo. Hits like Maaeen, Ganga Ki Beti, Hamaar Bhowji and Bhaiyya Dooj appeared in the 1980s, but then this was followed by a shutdown of the industry in the 1990s, when new productions ceased altogether. In 2001, Saiyyan Hamaar made a star out of drama-school graduate Ravi Kishan, and jumpstarted the industry once again. In 2005, Sasura Bada Paisa Wala earned about fifty times its production budget of INR 4.5 million, working a similar alchemy on popular folksinger Manoj Tiwari, who now vies with Ravi Kishan as the most in-demand Bhojpuri film star.