Who Gets to Call Bhojpuri Vulgar? From Cultural Memory to Commercial Hook

There was a time when Bhojpuri entered Hindi cinema not as exotic folk but as part of its moral and cultural ambiance. In the decades after Independence, Hindi films borrowed generously from Bhojpuri songs, dialects, folk idioms and performative traditions. These were not decorative inclusions and rather embodied the memory, migration, labour and social reality that Bombay cinema needed to imagine "India" beyond the metropolis. 

Films such as Ganga Jamuna (1961), Teesri Kasam (1966), and later Nadiya Ke Paar (1982) did not use Bhojpuri to merely signal backwardness or to romanticise an idealised village. Their cinematic worlds were embedded in rural language, folk melody such as Birha, Phagua and Chaita, performative traditions like Nautanki and Launda Naach and the emotional landscape of village life. 

From a world to cinema and OTT

The rise of over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms over the past decade has reshaped the relationship between cinema and its audience. In recent Hindi cinema, Bhojpuri tends to return as a “moment” – a song, a hook, a dance number or a viral beat – instead of a world. The journey from Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) to Stree 2 (2024), Netflix’s Maa Behen (2026) and Welcome to the Jungle (2026) traces how Bhojpuri-inflected music has become a commercial shorthand for energy, humour and “desi” authenticity.

Gangs of Wasseypur marked an important turning point in this arc, though not simply as a case of appropriation. Songs such as “Jiya Ho Bihar Ke Lala” and “O Womaniya” used Bhojpuri-tuned music not as tokenism but as the texture of the social world in which the film is situated. In this sense, the film’s music was inseparable from its cultural geography. The film’s success, nevertheless, demonstrated to the wider Hindi film industry that Bhojpuri-inflected music could travel well beyond its regional audience.

The vulgarity debate

Wider circulation has intensified an older but more relevant debate about vulgarity in Bhojpuri songs. The charge is neither imaginary nor made by a uniform public. In February 2026, Bihar Police launched a statewide campaign against vulgar and 'double-meaning' songs, describing their circulation as a social problem affecting women and children.

Here, I define “vulgarity” as a contested moral judgment that produces sexually evocative lyrics, double meanings and certain portrayals of women. However, it is not an inherent quality of the Bhojpuri language itself. Its application varies with context, audience and class. 

It would be evasive to dismiss every objection to Bhojpuri popular music as class prejudice; the genre has produced songs that reduce women to bodies and reproduce aggressive masculinity. But it is worth questioning why the charge so often expands from particular songs to Bhojpuri culture as a whole.

One possible answer lies in who consumes these songs. When working-class audiences, in Bihar, eastern UP, Delhi’s migrant settlements or Gulf labor circuits, consume such music, it is labelled as cheap or ashleel (obscene). A comparable musical idiom, when choreographed by Bollywood, promoted by a streaming platform and consumed in a multiplex or at a metropolitan party, is instead hailed as "raw," "rustic" or "folk energy."

The content may not be identical, but the gap in cultural legitimacy is difficult to ignore. Bhojpuri media has long been associated with non-elite, migrant audiences, which makes judgments about its cultural value inseparable from judgments about those who consume it. 

The 'Bhojpurisation' of bollywood

Stree 2’s “Aayi Nai”, sung by Pawan Singh with Sachin-Jigar and Welcome to the Jungle’s “Ghis Ghis Ghis,” sung by Vikram Montrose and Supriyaa Paathak, exemplify what I call the "Bhojpurisation" of Bollywood: the absorption of major Bhojpuri stars and performance styles into mainstream Hindi film music, converting a regional idiom into a pan-Indian cinematic commodity. Netflix’s Maa Behen followed the same pattern with the track “Kaari Kaari,” promoted as the film’s signature track and a hit with wider audiences. 

This success is not accidental. It draws on the already existing popularity of Bhojpuri music while “polishing” or “sanitising” it through Bollywood’s production machinery: selectively modifying dialect, reworking instrumentation and composition and adjusting choreography and visual presentation to make it palatable and respectable for metropolitan and pan-Indian audiences. Bhojpuri-coded music has thus become more than a regional touch; it caters to a larger marketing grammar of the Hindi film industry, a process OTT had only intensified. Regardless of genre, one can agree that adding a Bhojpuri-tuned song can give a film a second life on social media and YouTube.

Circulation or appropriation?

My argument here is not that Bhojpuri music should remain confined to Bhojpuri cinema. No folk or musical tradition belongs permanently one region and popular culture survives through circulation. The real question is whether that circulation tips into appropriation.

When Hindi cinema borrows Bhojpuri without engaging with the people, histories and labour that produced it, the result is cultural extraction. Bhojpuri is welcomed as a rhythm but not as a language, as vulgar fun but not as a social world. The irony is that Bhojpuri music has always been modern and melodious, travelling through migration, orchestral performances and transnational labour routes.

Bollywood did not discover Bhojpuri, it discovered that Bhojpuri already had an audience. What has changed is not the music’s popularity, but the respectability and hierarchies of its consumption.

The challenge, therefore, is not to sanitise Bhojpuri music – that would only repeat the moral policing long associated with regional popular cultures. The challenge is to ask why Hindi cinema most readily recalls Bhojpuri when it needs a hit song.

If Bhojpuri can make a film trend, it can also carry stories, characters, histories and conflicts. It deserves more than a three-minute appropriation. It deserves the cinematic and artistic seriousness it once had. The test for Hindi cinema is not whether it can slot in one Bhojpuri song; it is whether it can acknowledge Bhojpuri as a culture, not just as a formula for commercial success.

Vidyasagar Sharma is a doctoral researcher in Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany. 

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