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Abstract
Since the early 2000s, the rise of Bhojpuri screen media – films, songs, music videos, and more recently, digital media artefacts like short fiction videos – has imparted wide recognizability to the Bhojpuri language in India. Such is the appeal of these Bhojpuri media artefacts that they circulate widely beyond the Bhojpuri-speaking region of India as a larger, vernacular, model of media production, contrasted with those circulated by global media industry centered around the Hindi language, aka Bollywood. Bhojpuri as language, however, continues to seek official recognition as a language from the Indian state, which considers it to be a dialect of the North Indian hegemonic standard, Hindi. Bhojpuri language activists, intellectuals, and media workers are thus situated across a divide where Bhojpuri media’s popularity does not translate into wider, official recognition for the very language that these media objects nominally represent. On the contrary, the subordinate status of the Bhojpuri language as a dialect of Hindi is deepened by the perceived inferiority of Bhojpuri media, considered to be lowbrow, derivative forms by the more established language media industries of India. Bhojpuri thus presents an atypical situation where language and screen media are joined at the hip, where the vernacular ceases to be a mere speech form and language is more than a nominal classificatory category for screen media. Taking Bhojpuri as an atypical, but increasingly routine, paradigm of forging vernacular, ethnolinguistic identity, I ask what makes Bhojpuri a site of investment by screen media creators and language activists alike, and how. The dissertation argues that Bhojpuri screen media and language both distinguish themselves through semiotic processes that enact specifically Bhojpuri perspectives on the world. I unpack three processes at work here: chronotopy, voicing/imaging, and enregisterment. Chronotopy, a Bakhtinian concept denoting the mediation of experience through the ways in which representations link time, space, and personhood, conjures up the figures and scenes of social life that scaffold Bhojpuri screen media and literary writing. Imparting a perspective to these scenes by voicing and imaging them in a way that can be registered and recognized as Bhojpuri by those who receive it, Bhojpuri is made into a recognizable paradigm of doing things in the world in contrast to others. Despite incorporating features and qualities that are not local to the Bhojpuri-speaking region, and are often transnational, Bhojpuri is made into and registered as a local, vernacular category distinct from others that one can belong to. This semiotic enregisterment of Bhojpuri – its establishment as a contrasted and distinct category of persons, speech, images, media, community – as a vernacular way of acting in the world has significance for the social and political life of postcolonial India where the vernacular is increasingly made a force of decolonization. The dissertation is based on ten months of continuous ethnographic fieldwork, supplemented by over six months of phased intermittent fieldwork, in three Indian cities – Delhi, Mumbai, and Varanasi, all major centers of Bhojpuri cultural production. Drawing on this ethnographic research featuring interviews with Bhojpuri media creators, participant observation at institutional and informal sites of media production and language activism, group discussions with Bhojpuri writers and intellectuals, this thesis argues that sounding Bhojpuri is not merely a matter of producing speech in a language – rather, it amounts to the making of situated perspectives for social action. By analyzing Bhojpuri ethnolinguistic identity as a phenomenon whose sites are spread across media and language use, this dissertation contributes to the growing literature on ‘cultural’ media in media studies and to the semiotic analysis of media in anthropology. The dissertation makes the claim that cultural media, such as the practices named Bhojpuri, reveal how the black box of ‘culture’ is made an everyday object of concern.