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Bhojpuri cinema survives by projecting the male star as its primary text and arranging a plethora of pleasures around his figure, including the bawdy registers that proudly claim the insignia of nativity.

Through Jaan Tere Naam (Prasad, 2013)-one among a series of successful films featuring Khesari Lal Yadav-I assess Yadav’s popularity, earned via his performances as a launda (female impersonator). I argue that the Bhojpuri stars benefitted most from the enforced reconfigurations as the film-texts became further subservient to stardom and the new aesthetic grammar was organized around the figure of the action-star. This paper explores how the Bhojpuri industry negotiated this challenge, particularly with the reconsolidation of the Hindi film industry. The success of the film industry had followed from a vibrant music industry in a few subsequent years, however, the success of the Bhojpuri film industry turned against itself, on account of the shifting balance between production and exhibition sectors. The soaring emergence of Bhojpuri cinema in 2004 took over the B/C segments of Hindi film distribution in most of north India. Drawing contrasts and parallels with the Hindi film industry, and drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical modeling of the field of cultural production, I locate the Deswa debate as a key moment in the contestations over subject positions, industry infrastructure, and linguistic affinities.

Arguing that the vibrant debate that took place on the fundamental distinctions of Deswa is animated by Chandra’s persistent desire to narrate Bihar’s lost glory and utmost disrepair, I assess in this paper the industrial constraints that shaped the journey of Deswa. Nitin Chandra’s ‘unreleased’ Bhojpuri film Deswa sought to alter the ‘vulgar’ orientation of this industry, but had to wait for nearly four years to finally release as a Hindi film. However, this emergence has also brought to the fore various questions around taste, class, region and representation. In the last decade, the Bhojpuri film industry has made its presence felt across most of north India, but also in many large cities of peninsular India.