Skip to main content
Open Book Publishers

4. Fluid Texts: Bhojpuri Songs and World Literature

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
Title4. Fluid Texts
SubtitleBhojpuri Songs and World Literature
ContributorFrancesca Orsini(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0405.04
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0405/chapters/10.11647/obp.0405.04
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightFrancesca Orsini;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2025-01-31
Long abstractA “model of world literature that does not include orality is comparable to an act of self-amputation: it entails the excision of a huge field of human cultural endeavour”, argues Liz Gunner. As “verbal art, it belongs to a universal practice of making or creating in language” (116). And yet, many have noted, it has been enduringly difficult to include orature, “the great unwritten” (Levine), within models of world literature. Although the ubiquity, portability and power of orature on digital and live platforms are undeniable in our contemporary globalising moment, so little of it seems to qualify as “literature”, even in the most capacious sense of world literature. So much contemporary orature is worldly and travels “outside its culture and language of origin”, and thus qualifies as world literature according to David Damrosch’s circulation-based definition, but is it “read as literature”? Here the ball seems to drop. In this chapter I argue that a located (or multi-located), multilingual and ground-up approach to world literature, such as that of our MULOSIGE project, can help us out of this conundrum, as the work of Karin Barber and Liz Gunner has already shown. Barber and Gunner have studied the entextualisation of verbal arts and have compared forms of oral praise poetry and epic across African languages and traditions to show the enduring vitality of orature. My chapter will not compare across languages and traditions but takes one example, that of Bhojpuri songs in India and in Mauritius, which have been studied in great depth by Catherine Servan-Schreiber. Bhojpuri, spoken in eastern north India and with a rich tradition of oral epics and songs, was carried far and wide by migrant labourers and traders in India and beyond, most notably across the oceans along the coolie diaspora. In Mauritius, Bhojpuri became one of the linguae francae of the island alongside Creole, particularly in the agricultural inland, and the most recognised among the Indian languages there. It has acquired a status there that it has never quite managed to acquire in India. Over time, the position of Bhojpuri in Mauritius, and its relationship with Hindi and Creole, have changed, and the traditional (folkloric) repertoire of songs and performance style have been enriched and transformed through the encounters with Creole Séga, Western music, and Hindi film songs. If, as Servan-Schreiber notes, the history of Mauritian Chutney music and songs is tied to a great extent to the evolution in the status of Bhojpuri, this relationship is now reversed and it is the success of Chutney music that supports the status of Bhojpuri on the island. My presentation will reflect on the “footprint” of Bhojpuri song orature in India and Mauritius and its parallel lives and meanings in verse and prose genres within different languages (Bhojpuri, Hindi, Creole, English). In many cases Bhojpuri orature embodies an attachment to or longing for a rural identity, but in others it also imagines new presents and futures. Does this extensive footprint count as world literature?
Page rangepp. 145–168
Print length24 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Francesca Orsini

(author)

Francesca Orsini is a literary historian interested in bringing a located and multilingual perspective to Indian literary history and world literature. She is the author of The Hindi Public Sphere (2002), Print and Pleasure (2009), and East of Delhi: Multilingual literary culture and world literature (2023), and the editor of, among others, Tellings and Texts: Singing, Story-telling and Performance in North India (with Katherine B. Schofield, 2015), and The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (2022, with Neelam Srivastava and Laetitia Zecchini). She led the ERC-funded research project Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: for a new approach to world literature, from the perspective of North India, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa. She co-edits with Debjani Ganguly the series Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures, and with Whitney Cox the forthcoming Cambridge History of Indian Literature. She is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

References
  1. Agrawal, Aarushi, ‘The World of Pandey Kapil’s Phoolsunghi: Gautam Choubey on Translating the Novel, Bhojpuri Literary Culture’, Firstpost (2020) https://www.firstpost.com/art-and-culture/the-world-of-pandey-kapils-phoolsunghi-gautam-choubey-on-translating-the-novel-bhojpuri-literary-culture-9113031.html.
  2. Amin, Shahid, Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984).
  3. Badri Narayan, Bidesia: Migration, Change, and Folk Culture (Allahabad: North Central Cultural Centre, 2005).
  4. ——, Culture and Emotional Economy of Migration (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2016).
  5. Bhopali, Asad, ‘Kahe tose sajna’, https://www.hinditracks.in/kahe-tose-sajna-lyrics
  6. Brown (Schofield), Katherine Butler, ‘The Social Liminality of Musicians: Case Studies from Mughal India and Beyond’, Twentieth-Century Music, 3.1 (2007).
  7. Damrosch, David, What is World Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
  8. Doniger, Wendy, ‘Fluid and Fixed Texts in India’ in Boundaries of the Text: Epic Performances in South and Southeast Asia, ed. by J. Burkhalter Flueckiger and L. J. Sears (The University of Michigan: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1991), pp. 31–42.
  9. Ghosh, Amitav, Sea of Poppies (New York: Picador, 2009).
  10. Ghosh, Avjit, Cinema Bhojpuri (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2010).
  11. Ghoushal, Somak, ‘Phoolsunghi: a Bhojpuri Classic Revived in English’, mintlounge (2020), https://lifestyle.livemint.com/how-to-lounge/books/-phoolsunghi-a-bhojpuri-classic-revived-in-english-111605847235303.html
  12. Grierson, George A., Bihār Peasant Life: Being a Discursive Catalogue of the Surroundings of the People of that Province, with Many Illustrations from Photographs Taken by the Author (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885), https://archive.org/details/cu31924072688025
  13. Gunner, Liz, ‘Ecologies of Orality’ in The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, ed. by B. Etherington and J. Zimbler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 116–132.
  14. Haurélio, Marco, Literatura de cordel: do sertão à sala de aula (São Paulo: Pia Sociedade de São Paulo-Editora Paulus, 2014).
  15. ‘Kaise Bani’, from the film Bhaiya Dooj, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xWMRfis5hQ
  16. ‘Kaise Bani Kaise Bani – The Chatni song Dabanng 2’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTPVQtNT10w
  17. ‘Kaise Bani lyrics’, https://genius.com/Kanchan-kaise-bani-lyrics
  18. Kanchan and Babla, ‘Kaise Bani’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDduRClBAGU
  19. Kumar, Akshaya, Bhojpuri Cinema in the Comparative Media Crucible (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021).
  20. Kumar, Akshaya, ‘The Insurrectionary Lateral-ness of Bhojpuri Media’ in Hinglish Live: Language Mixing Across Media, ed. by F. Orsini and Ravikant (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2021), pp. 223–258.
  21. ‘List of languages by number of native speakers in India’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers_in_India
  22. Mani, Venkat B., ‘Multilingual Code-Stitching in Ultraminor World Literatures: Reading Abhimanyu Unnuth’s Lāla Pasīnā (1977) with Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), Journal of World Literature, 3.3 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00303009
  23. Manuel, Peter L., Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
  24. ——, East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tān-singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).
  25. Mohammed, Aisha, ‘Love and Anxiety: Gender Negotiations in Chutney-Soca Lyrics in Trinidad’, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, 1 (April 2007), https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/april2007/journals/aisha_mohammed.pdf
  26. Morcom, Anna, Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion (London: Hurst & Co., 2013).
  27. Novetzke, Christian L., ‘Note to Self: What Marathi Kirtankars’ Notebooks Suggest about Literacy, Performance, and the Travelling Performer in Pre-Colonial Maharashtra’ in Tellings and Texts, ed. by F. Orsini and K. Butler Schofield (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), pp. 169–184, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0062
  28. ‘Phoolsunghi: The Scent of a Text| Jaipur Literature Festival 2021’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neT0WUm045Y
  29. Ramnarine, Tina K., Creating Their Own Space: The Development of an Indian-Caribbean Musical Tradition (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001).
  30. ‘Roundtable on Contemporary African Oral Traditions’, SOAS, University of London, 20 November 2019, http://mulosige.soas.ac.uk/contemporary-african-oral-traditions-recording/
  31. Servan-Schreiber, Catherine, Chanteurs itinérants en Inde du Nord: la tradition orale Bhojpuri (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999).
  32. ——, Histoire d’une musique métisse à l’île Maurice: chutney indien et séga Bollywood (Paris: Riveneuve éditions, 2010).
  33. Sundar Popo, ‘Kaise Bani’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnMSmWgoupc
  34. Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
  35. Tripathy, Ratnakar, ‘Music Mania in Small-town Bihar: Emergence of Vernacular Identities’, Economic and Political Weekly, 47.22, 2 June 2012.
  36. Unnuth, Abhimanyu, Lal Pasina (New Delhi: Rajakamal Prakashan, 2010).
  37. Upadhyay, Krishna Dev, Bhojpuri lokgit, 2 vols. (Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, 1954 and 1956).