185 12 The Aesthetics of Pirate Modernities: Bhojpuri Cinema and the Underclasses 1 Akshaya Kumar Can we anticipate the rise of a people in the rise of their cinema? Or is it the other way around? At any rate, the cinematic encounter allows the audience in the dark conines of the ilm auditorium a certain lexibility to shift between the registers of singularity and collectivity, homogeneity and heterogeneity. Therefore, it is vital to grapple with the paradoxical and simultaneous rise of many vernacular cinemas nearly a decade after globalization’s footprint became unmistakable. Not only are these located in their own cultural and linguistic milieux, they lourish precisely because of the avenues of identiication they offer to the community. The key question would be: what are the aesthetic contours of this vernacular resurgence? Also, if we are to see ilm as a transaction, as a prominent arbiter of the political, how are we to assess the aesthetic terms of vernacular politics? While this chapter tries to make sense of the various tensions within Bhojpuri cinema and its reception, at its core remains an enquiry of the aesthetic disdain towards the other – the audiences, the theatres and the cinematic object. I situate the audience of Bhojpuri cinema in the context of (i) urban spatial segregations and (ii) aesthetic subversion of the populations that interrupt the world-classing of Indian cities. I borrow from Ravi Sundaram’s concept of ‘pirate modernity’ and focus primarily on the accounts collected in Delhi to propose certain analytical formulations towards the research questions at stake. Due to processes of globalization, there has been a direct and indirect mixing of imaginaries, refracting the sense of one’s location through several discursive regimes of subject positioning. The self, in this scenario, is confronted by communitarian, regional, national as well as international belonging, all of which project themselves through various media forms. Not only does the global subject repeatedly adjust her location, often inhabiting multiple locales, she may also not see them as conlict- ridden. Given the caste-, class-, gender- and religion-based positioning of the self in the contemporary environment, negotiation between social conditions and narrative schemes continues to breach and shift identiicatory orbits. However, within the 9781472519306_txt_print.indd 185 31/07/2014 11:00