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Security guards to UPSC aspirants to Bollywood stars, why Bihari tag won’t leave them

For Biharis, migrating to metros is only half the job done. Class struggle comes next.

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New Delhi: There is a one-word slur that Indians throw around too casually — Bihari.

It has become a byword for all things lowly. And it’s a class war by another name. It’s not about caste, it is not strictly class either. As Bhavya Roy’s abusive rage at WishTown Noida showed, ‘Bihari’ has become a catchall phrase for anything an Indian is contemptuous of or feels superior to.

How a person from Bihar reacts to the ‘Bihari’ tag depends on who they are. If you are a construction worker in Noida, you would perhaps just silently stomach it. If you are a property broker in Delhi, you would invoke Bihar’s glorious Mauryan past. And if you are a globally renowned US-based author Amitava Kumar, you would call it a prejudice and praise Biharis for their ‘provincial cosmopolitanism’.

In the wake of the viral video from Noida, where an elite woman abused a security guard by calling him a ‘Bihari’ among many other things, the debate on why ‘a Bihari’ invokes the image of “backward”, “uncouth”, and “illiteracy” for the gated societies of Indian metros surfaces once again.

But the stigma toward an ‘ordinary Bihari’ from the Indian elites is not new. For long, the ‘B’ of Bimaru states stood for Bihar, or ‘berozgari’, it stood for a certain kind of backwardness that was eternal, irreversible. But ‘B’ can also be for boundless. Caught between the extremes of ‘berozgar Bihar’ (unemployed) and the ‘badhta Bihar’ (growing) is the ambitious, hard-working migrant Bihari – security guards to UPSC aspirants to Bollywood stars.

“Even before a Bihari walks into a room, their Bihariness precedes them,” says actor Pankaj Tripathi in an effortless capture of the predicament that signals both pride and plight. “We just can’t help it.”


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Cultural inferiorisation

For a state, whose 50 per cent households are exposed to migration for livelihood, the “identity” politics — both outside and inside the state — always captures the public imagination. If UP-walas were derisively called ‘bhaiyas’, then Bihar-walas were just ‘Biharis’. Or if you were a student at St. Stephen’s in Delhi University in the 1980s and the 1990s, then the term was just “Harries”. In JNU, being a Bihari student meant you could out-jam and out-debate anybody in politics. Bihar was, after all, the laboratory for Indian politics and political ideas.

“The history of India is essentially a history of Bihar,” Yogendra Yadav wrote quoting a friend recently.

Of late, there has been pushback too — Lalu’s call to celebrate Chhath Puja outside Raj Thackeray’s house in 2008 when he was the country’s railway minister. And Nitish Kumar’s call to send 50 lakh Biharis’ DNA samples to PM Modi’s residence for his denigrating remark about the CM’s DNA in 2015.

Both these acts by the former and current CM of Bihar were public acts of owning the identity and celebrating it in defiance of the unfortunate stereotypes.

“This cultural inferiorisation was a conspiracy by the upper castes/class — both inside the state and outside,” says Dr Awanish Kumar, a British Academy Newton International Fellow, who has written the research paper called A Class Analysis of the ‘Bihari Menace’. “Yes, there was migration during the colonial times too but during the 90s, when the new politics arose, this problem amplified. Who propagated and subscribed to it? The upper castes/class who form the gated societies in urban setups.”


Also read: The Great Gate Rage—Noida’s security guards are up against a new class war


New politics in Bihar?

A lot happened in the 1990s, in fact, apart from just the nationwide phenomenon called Lalu Prasad Yadav. With economic liberalisation, the disparity between the labour-producing states and the industrialised states also widened and became hard to ignore. Bihar had a lot of catching up to do in the new India story, even though it was calling the shots in national politics – from Chapra ke babu JP, to Lohia’s socialist politics to Mandal, to Lalu’s aggressive defense of pluralistic politics, to Nitish Kumar’s cycle and alcohol welfarism.

“We did not benefit from the Green Revolution, 90s economic liberalisation, or the IT boom, unlike southern states. So you would find a Tamil guy having more confidence in New Delhi than a Bihari,” says a Bihari bureaucrat posted outside the state.

Pankaj Tripathi has a different view on this. He says, “During the 90s, the TV channels found in Bihar a lot of fodder for crime reporting. Hindi cinema’s portrayal of a Bihari also probably led to this inferiorsation. For example, a villain or a corrupt person would speak “Bihari” language.”

During the 90s, Bollywood created a new, saleable language, mannerism and looks for the characters of lower strata. It was the Bihari. It didn’t matter where the characters came from, but the Bihari template was foisted on them.

“We often come across people saying Bihari bhasha but in reality, it does not exist. There is Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili but there is no Bihari language,” Tripathi explains. It has been used to lampoon people.

That the slur is not about economic class is clear. Even an IAS officer and an IT engineer are dismissed or mocked as a Bihari. Though it is the working class, which is at the receiving end of everyday humiliation, the aspirational IIT student is not spared.

“During my college days, a fellow, who also hailed from Patna, used to say that he is from Pune. The man now earns more than Rs 50 lakh, but to our core college group, he is from Pune,” Shashant Shekhar, an IITian and political strategist from Patna shares this anecdote with ThePrint.

“So the loss of self-esteem does not have to do with economic growth,” he says.

The crisis of confidence is not unique to people from Bihar. People from almost every state experience some degree of diffidence when they encounter other states or big cities — an unfortunate outcome of state-formation based on ethnic and linguistic identities. But Bihar suffers from much more. The stickiness of the ‘Bihari’ slur transcends class, caste, language.

“When my identity was attacked in the initial years, I used to cite the hard work and honesty of Bihari workers along with our state’s rich cultural history. But it came from an emotional place, not from confidence,” Subodh Bihari, a property broker from Samastipur, now based in Shalimar Bagh, says.


Also read: Vir Das was right, there are 2 Indias, and they aren’t getting any closer together


Provincial cosmopolitan

The Bihar story has more than one side. Culture, especially in new India, isn’t a one-way street.

“The figure of a worker is central to this cosmopolitan identity. The worker is a communicator, negotiator, and organiser. But he is also a carrier of culture, an ambassador if you please, and it’s not a one way exchange,” says RJD MP Professor Manoj K. Jha. “They cross-pollinate the home and the host cultures, be it music, food, literature.”

In an ode to Bihari resilience, a Bhojpuri rap by Manoj Bajpayee captures well the plight of millions of migrant labours from Bihar who build India—roads, metros, skyscrapers—and assimilate into the local economy at the cost of leaving behind their society and family comforts. A line in the song encapsulates the social alienation Biharis face on a daily basis while living in big cities: ‘I don’t understand the manners of metros, so am scolded every now and then,’ sings Bajpayee in Bhojpuri, underlining the disconnect between the two classes.

Filmmaker Prakash Jha, who hails from Bihar, sums it up saying: “What Bihar is to India, India is to the world.”

The Chhath renaissance has played a big part in Biharis’ political and cultural assertion. Chhath has turned the burdensome tag of a ‘migrant labourer’ into one where the host city and state celebrates their presence. It is both a political necessity, because of their huge numbers, and a belated but important recognition of their role in the economic activity of the host city.

“We haven’t shed our past. The women and men from Bihar perform Chhath puja in different metros scattered across India,” says Amitava Kumar. “The signs of a rural past, jhadis on bamboos and words like chulha, in places as far away as Mauritius and Trinidad.”


Also read: What unites Bihar and Kerala young men? It has to do with jobs


Alternate cultural space

Like every debate in India nowadays, there is a social media angle to the Bihari identity too.

A look at Instagram reels, usernames and Twitter threads, would tell you the story of creation of an alternate cultural space by the newer generation Biharis.

At times, they are owning their Bihariness in poems, and they are owning their sexuality when called unattractive. But at times, they are ashamed of it too.

This alternate space is visible in picturesque locations of Kaimur and tourist hubs of Gaya and Nalanda shared on social media, in Nitish-Lalu jokes, and UPSC memes. And in local cuisines such as Thekua, Dal Peetha and Litti Chokha. Festivals such as Teej and Chhath also symbolise the collective confidence.

Pages like Bihar se haiExplore Bihar, Bihari hai, Proud Bihari have gained lakhs of followers on Instagram and the comments section filled with the aspiration to break free from the “Bimaru state” tag.

These pages are a marker of the ‘change in perception’ that Biharis are seeking, in an attempt to project the alternate identity before India. And these are closely followed by those living away from their home state. Those who track the ‘change’ – be it an update about an upcoming startup, a new airport or a restaurant in their respective town.

A recent tweet by Aishwarya Subramanyam, a woman from Aandhra Pradesh, called Biharis unattractive. A Gen Z Bihari gave it back. How? By ‘thanking’ her on behalf of all the Bihari men.

Bihar, with its 51.91 per cent population, is categorised among the poorest states in India, according to the Niti Aayog’s Poverty Index. And with 61.8 per cent literacy rate, it features lowest in the national literacy rate, according to 2011 census. Niti Ayog has also ranked Bihar lowest in health infrastructure.

“You would see the cult Bihari personalities talking about a village in paradise where everything is about plucking mangoes, walking beside a river and lying on cot. That is not what all goes into the making of an ordinary Bihari worker. The image that the middle class or elites carry in their hearts is the image of an ordinary Bihari worker, a fruit seller, a labourer,” Kumar says.


Also read: Uttar Pradesh began declining after the 1980s. Old industrial cities played a big role


‘Ek Bihari, sab pe bhari’

Apart from migration songs that often mention poorb (east), there are fewer instances of assertion of Bihari identity in folklore.

Actor Pankaj Tripathi always had a keen interest in the folklore but he paused for a while to think of anything new that has been created on identity. “The last song I heard about Bihari identity was ‘Jiya ho Bihar ke lala.’

“But that was more a Hindi song,” he corrected himself.

Away from the media glare, pop culture reels and intellectual threads, Banka’s 27-year-old Sushil Kumar Yadav still gets humiliated, “Ae hat Bihari.”

At the construction site of Adani Data Centre in Sector 80 Noida, 17 labourers from his village Palniya, left their families to earn wages some thousand kilometers away. Almost everyone in the group has experiences to share vis a vis the treatment they get in the big city.

Pardes mein aaye hain, yahan dab kar hi rahna padega na,” Yadav laments.

At a distance, Nitish Kumar Yadav, 15, a fruit seller, has learnt to give it back.

Ek Bihari sab pe bhari,” I read it on Facebook, he says.

This article is part of a series on the class wars in Delhi NCR. Read all here.

(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)

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