Nitin Neera Chandra is on a mission. The National Award-winning filmmaker from Bihar is not only making films in the local languages of his native state, but is also determined on changing the people’s perception of cinema from the region. Blaming the “imposition of Hindi” on the Maithili, Bhojpuri and Magahi speaking people of the eastern Indian state, Chandra says: “The basic problem in Bihar for the identity or culture, including cinema, literature and music, to get stereotyped in Bollywood or the churning of sleazy, crassy or lowbrow cinema comes from the fact that Hindi has been imposed in Bihar so organically and for so long that now the people are too disillusioned or far from this issue.”
As a result, people from Bihar have gotten disconnected from their own languages, adds Chandra, who is known for films such as Mithila Makhaan (in Maithili) and Deswa (in Bhojpuri). While Mithila Makhaan won the National Film Awards in 2016, Deswa premiered at the International Film Festival of India in 2011.
He is the elder brother of actress Neetu Chandra, whose production house Champaran Talkies produced the film, Mithila Makhaan and several films, including documentaries and music videos.
The middle class and upper middle class have abandoned the language, laments Chandra, which has led to a “peculiar phenomenon” in Bhojpuri cinema. “Usually, cinema is heterogeneous all over the world and it doesn’t target a particular group. For example, everyone is watching the Telugu film, Pushpa. But in the Bhojpuri industry, the films mostly target rickshawallahs, autowallahs, migrant labourers or other such underprivileged people. It’s because they are the only ones speaking Bhojpuri and form the majority of the language’s speakers,” he explains.
At the same time, Maithili is still intact because of the caste factor, which is rooted in culture, and upper caste people such as the Brahmins and Kayasthas of the region have been able to largely keep the language in good shape, says Chandra. He also says another prominent language, Magahi, is dying for a simple reason — that people have abandoned their own language. On Bhojpuri, he says, “In the upward social movement, the middle class could not provide the linguistic pride in Bhojpuri because they started being the slave of Hindi, be it novelist Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, poet Kedarnath Singh or writer Kashinath Singh. Writers, poets and artistes from Bhojpur region worked largely in Hindi.
Will having a censor board help then? Chandra doesn’t think so. “The solution lies in making the younger generation, especially from the middle class and upper class sections of society, to compulsorily study one of their mother tongues at the school level,” he says.
According to Chandra, there’s no dearth of good content from Bihar, and subjects are endless, if one decides to make movies in or about the state. “The big names are not coming forward because they think good work is not being done and, even if the process has started, there is not enough audience,” he says.
All that is changing now, slowly but steadily, the promising reception for Chandra’s films on social media being a case in point. In the comments section of the trailer videos for his films, overwhelmed movie watchers profusely thanked the filmmaker for “reviving” the language and cinema from Bihar.
And why wouldn’t they? Chandra’s Mithila Makhaan is the first film from Bihar or Jharkhand to get a National Film Award. Featuring actors such as Anurita Jha, Kranti Prakash Jha and Pankaj Jha, the film is about the emotional and thrilling journey of a man who works in Toronto but comes back to his village in Bihar to establish his grandfather’s company, which was closed down 35 years ago.
While in Bihar, he is confronted with migration, corruption and apathy and finds out that his grandfather used to be a makhaan farmer in the 70s and was killed due to business rivalry. He vows to start the company Mithila Makhaan Pvt Ltd and the story is a poignant detailing of fighting the odds and triumph of human spirit.
The idea of the movie came to Chandra when he was working with an NGO during the 2008 Kosi floods and thought of the need for people to migrate to find work elsewhere. The movie has songs sung by Udit Narayan, Hariharan, Suresh Wadkar, and Sonu Nigam. Hariharan’s Aaeeb Geliyo Pardes has carved a niche fan following on social media, along with other songs.
Chandra wants people from Bihar to reconnect with their language and take it as their moral responsibility to keep it flourishing. This sentiment is reflected in one of the user’s comments on IMDb, where the film has a strong rating of 9.1, “This [film] was successful in interleaving the beautiful culture of Mithila, and the problems that have crippled this region. If you are a Maithil, you will love the movie and instantly feel the urge to do something for your motherland.”
Chandra’s movies are a breeze of fresh air. His Bhojpuri film Deswa (2011) was remade in Hindi as Once Upon a Time in Bihar and released in October 2015. His 2023 Maithili crime-thriller Jackson Halt (featuring ‘Bhushan’ aka ‘Banrakas’ Durgesh Kumar of Panchayat fame) is available on government OTT platform Wave and Chandra own’s Bejod.
On IMDb, watchers have commended the film. “It has all the potential to become a thriller franchise like Conjuring or Silence of the Lambs if consecutive movies remain true to the plot,” says a user.
Meanwhile, his just-released film Kariyatthi is based on a Bhojpuri short story from Saroj Singh’s book Tetari on the subject of culture around skin colour in the villages of Bihar. “When I read the story, I could not sleep for several nights,” shares Chandra, who approached mainstream OTT platforms to showcase his films but they refused to feature them, which prompted him to launch Bejod. All his films can be watched on the platform on a pay-per-view basis with some free content.
The Bhojpuri film industry produces 300 to 400 films a year with a turnover of Rs 2,000 crore, according to reports. It is also said that music videos in the language generate over Rs 500 crore annually. Despite the promising figures, cultivating a culture around the language to be proud of or to make it flourishing has been a tall order so far, but definitely not impossible going forward, as filmmakers like Chandra are trying to prove.