Constituting a Diffuse Region: Cartographies of Mass-mediated Bhojpuri Belonging

Abstract

Contemporary Bhojpuri cinema has been celebrated as demonstrating a renaissance of regional culture, but also derided as commercially opportunistic, producing inauthentic regional cultural products. Instead of judging the authenticity of Bhojpuri media, this article addresses the ways that regional cinema produces durable ideas of geographic regionality by addressing a region that is constantly on the move. 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. Without a stable geo-linguistic referent, and without an unbroken history of filmmaking by linguistic insiders, contemporary Bhojpuri filmmakers shift Bhojpuri cartographies to address Bhojpuri migrants across the country. This article traces the shifting maps sketched out by recorded cassettes and cinema in Bhojpuri. I argue that through these modes of shifting geographic mapping, Bhojpuri media calls a diffuse public into being—one that does not consolidate pre-existing geo-linguistic borders, but suggests new, diffuse cartographies of mobility and belonging.