The Appalling Hypocrisy Around Pawan Singh And Bhojpuri

All hell broke loose last week when the Bhojpuri Actor and Singer Pawan Singh was given a ticket to contest the Lok Sabha elections from Asansol in Bengal by a certain political party. 

The party had barely announced the actor’s name when social media erupted with snippets from Pawan Singh’s videos and films and Singh was declared unfit to be a candidate for Parliament because his work was ‘vulgar and obscene’. 

The next day, Singh himself declared that he was withdrawing from the contest. 

As this is not a political article but a cultural one, it will stay away from analysing politics, but point out the appalling double standards and hypocrisy around the entire issue.

Roughly speaking, Bhojpuri is the language of Purvanchal and the Nepal Terai; Eastern UP and Bihar, with roots in the Magadhi Prakrit and Ardh-Magadhi of the time of the Buddha. I belong to this region and Bhojpuri is, or was, spoken as the main language in my natal and marital family till the current generation. I know it as a beautiful, sweet language; one in which my mother is editing a Ramayana and we listen to melodious and rooted folk music.

But not so for the faux moralists, the political opponents of Pawan Singh from the state of West Bengal. His songs and music were an excuse to paint the entire language and its speakers as vulgar, obscene and regressive and create a high-octave brouhaha on this issue.

Pawan Singh is no outlier who uniquely revels in videos focusing on women and sex. The truth is that objectification of women is rampant across the entertainment sector. A survey of “ Bollywood” or “Kollywood,” even the “Tollywood” songs or the Bengali Film Industry will inform the listener and viewer that this problem is endemic and has crossed all bounds of “middle-class morality” which was supposed to govern the public sphere.

Go to YouTube, from where a majority of such content is consumed, search for “Party Songs” or “Top Hits” and then, sit back and be assailed by semi-naked women gyrating to music and questionable lyrics. Exhibition of the body and movements simulating the three-letter word which dare not be said aloud (except in some cases) will reward your efforts. There is an ocean of pelvic grinding, navels, cleavage so on and so forth out there.

Let us look at the perennially popular song “Sheela Ki jawaani” filmed on the actress Katrina Kaif, a song by Sunidhi Chauhan and Vishal Dadlani; all respected names, right?

It begins with “I know you want it but you're never gonna get it,” where “it” refers to the aforementioned three-letter word and the body of the female performer. Her “jawaani” or youth, nubility, and sexual attraction are up for teasing display while all around men are screaming at her to “take it off.”

The lyrics are a study in crass commercialisation and objectification of the female body articulated by the young woman herself. This is the version of female empowerment “Bollywood” believes in. The mandatory exhibition of the almost unclothed body, clad in mostly adaptations of western wear (except for one costume) and suggestive movements, expressions, and motions pepper the entire sequence.

Cut to “chalakat hamri Jawaniya,” an “objectionable” song of Pawan Singh in Bhojpuri. The lyrics put forward the same “jawaani,” i.e., the youth and nobility of the young woman. This is more a romantic song as it's a dialogue between her and her partner than Sheila Ki Jawaani.

The differences? The background here is humble, not a set worth crores; the performer is an unknown Shivani Singh, not Katrina Kaif; she wears a saree instead of western clothes; and the song is in Bhojpuri instead of “Hinglish,” the new Lingua Franca of the affluent in India.

All this apparently saves Sheila Ki Jawani from objectifying women, being vulgar, obscene and altogether unsuitable for viewing by the average Indian.

Do you see the hypocrisy here? If the objectification is done with Hinglish lyrics, slick sets, western clothes, and popular Bollywood heroines it is kosher. Not so if the performers are “ humble” Purvanchalis or Bengalis performing in their own language, wearing their own style of clothes (mostly sarees) and surrounded by their own cultural context. Lyrics in Hinglish are always dignified and other languages, especially Bhojpuri, are always vulgar and obscene.

I have done a specific comparison but this can be done across the board and Katrina Kaif substituted with any other Hindi film heroine. Telugu and Tamil films are perhaps a step up in suggestive movements and objectification.

Why single out Bhojpuri then? We return to this question below.

A specific song mentioned in the outrage against Pawan Singh was “Le aaib ja ka souten Bangaliye se.” Using the threat of a co-wife or a mistress against a wife or paramour has a long and hoary history in folk music. Again, this trope has been used in Hindi films in popular songs starting from “Nadi Naare na Jao“ filmed on the dignified Waheeda Rehman in the film “Mujhe Jeene Do“ where she starred opposite Sunil Dutt. The latter was a very respected political figure later in life. Or remember the film “Bobby” which made Dimple Kapadia the darling of the nation? Just listen to “Jhooth Bole Kaua Kate.” None of these actors were excoriated for this.

The charge of those outraged at Pawan Singh’s nomination was that Singh was specifically targeting and objectifying Bengali women in his songs. 

This pushes us to ask: how are women depicted in contemporary Bengali popular culture and cinema coming out of Bengal itself? 

The keepers of Bengali culture and music must have gone to sleep while listening to Rabindra Sangeet, in the interim, lyrics like “pagol ami already” and “Rimjhim Brishti” as well as songs classified by different parts of actresses’ body parts are all the rage.

Bengali films are objectifying women, exhibiting their semi-naked bodies and making them gyrate to grossly vulgar lyrics but these gatekeepers are conveniently blind, dumb and deaf. That Nusrat Jahan, MP from the constituency Sandeshkhali falls in, is herself an actress in Bengali cinema and has featured in similar videos and films, is a tragic irony.

So why single out Bhojpuri in this astonishing and dismaying act of hypocrisy? 

The bottom line is that Bhojpuri is the language spoken in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, that poor, benighted “Purvanchal” region; so it is fine, indeed mandatory to look down upon it. The same crass commercialisation, vulgar lyrics, obscene body movements, and focus on the breasts, buttocks, navels, and thighs of semi-clad women draws no condemnation when in other, more respected languages, especially Hinglish, the mongrel lingua franca of new India.

Bhojpuri is a more than 1400-year-old language with an amazing tradition if only these ‘outragers’ could also search for something other than vulgarity in the language.

Problematic aspects of modern culture are being singularly ascribed to Bhojpuri in an act of prejudice, bias and hypocrisy. If Pawan Singh is to be condemned then so must a large section of the media and entertainment industry. Why is he being targeted for being on the same commercially successful bandwagon as the rest of this industry?

Stop vilifying Bhojpuri, now!