Kalpana Patowary’s fizzy deal - Most expensive Bhojpuri Audio CD with maximum MRP of Rs 195/= launching from Virgin Records/EMI Music.

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. That seems to be Kalpana’s recent mantra. The Assamese singer and Bhojpuri icon has just signed on a whopping deal for her latest music project - “The Legacy of Bhikhari Thakur” with a London based music label – Virgin Records/EMI Music. She’s on the road to leaving her mark on the Bhojpuri music industry. EMI Music will unveil the most expensive Bhojpuri Audio CD disc in Mumbai priced at 195/- MRP. Says Kalpana, there is no recorded songs on Bhikhari Thakur till date and “The Legacy of Bhikhari Thakur” will be the first rare one of its kind. The album has earned the unique distinction of being the only Bhojpuri Audio project with maximum MRP launched from EMI Music.

EMI Music is one of the world’s leading music companies, home to some of the most successful and best known recording artists. EMI Music  record labels include Adele 21, Beatles, Angel, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Capitol, Capitol Latin, Capitol Records Nashville, EMI Classics, EMI CMG, EMI Records, EMI Records Nashville, Manhattan, Parlophone, Virgin Classics and Virgin Records. Artists on EMI labels include Lily Allen, Bat For Lashes, The Beatles, Beastie Boys, Luke Bryan, Coldplay, Depeche Mode, Gorillaz, David Guetta, Iron Maiden, Norah Jones, Lady Antebellum, Massive Attack, Kylie Minogue, Katy Perry, Pink Floyd,Corinne Bailey Rae, Sir Simon Rattle, Snoop Dogg, Tinie Tempah,Thirty Seconds To Mars, KT Tunstall and Keith Urban as well as international artists such as Amaral (Spain), Air and Camille (France),Empire of the Sun (Australia), Tiziano Ferro and Vasco Rossi (Italy),Flex (Mexico), LaFee (Germany) and Hikaru Utada (Japan).

The disc, entitled “The Legacy of Bhikhari Thakur” features nine songs by recording artist - the Bhojpuri Queen – Kalpana Patowary. A tribute to The Shakespeare of Bhojpuri Literature – The Legacy of Bhikhari Thakur is already bringing her applause in India and distant land countries like Africa, Russia ,China, the U K and the U S A .

As Kalpana adds, I could have released this project from any other music company who has proved themselves in the Bhojpuri market and doing good business but I did not want to tag this project at Rs 35/ to Rs 45/=  like any other Bhojpuri albums. I know, commercially Rs 195/= for a Bhojpuri CD would be risky. But here my intention is to take Bhojpuri music to a different class, different zone from where it now exists. I want the CD’s be available in all leading Malls, Planet M’s etc.

Bhojpuri music is always looked down upon in the mainstream industry. It is time that people & media believe in our work and let good music come out. Someone has to bear. I took the responsibility producing the album rather than complain.

Says Kalpana, I had been to Deva Sharif, Bara Banki U.P to pray for this exclusive project. In a press conference in Bara Banki, I had made a statement that Bhojpuri music has given me a lot and expressed my desire to the media to see Bhojpuri music in International markets. Many so called critics and some of my contemporary singer friends commented sarcastically and tried to prove my statement wrong. (by which songs I’ll take Bhojpuri music to that level….usually Bhojpuri songs has double meaning songs). I kept mum as I believe it’s was better.

But with this release, she proved herself once again, her devotion to Bhojpuri music. She has kept her word to take Bhojpuri music to International platform.

Bhojpuri listeners just want to hear good music.  I had released some classy Bhojpuri music classics like Kajree, Nirgun, Tajmahal ( Romantic songs) but due to low price tag and bad packaging it could not appeal in the market.

As Bhojpuri music are looked down upon, I want people to know about how the legend has shaped the future of Bhojpuri music whose songs are rich in imagery and heavy in Bhojpuri dialect.

This new album on Bhikhari Thakur will be a true benchmark in the annals of Bhojpuri Music Industry and will set new standards for the music industry. This album will give a chance to uncover the unique flavor of Bhikhari Thakur and listen to the unadulterated voice of Kalpana piercing right through to your soul

Virgin Records / EMI believed in my intentions and I thank them personally for acknowledging my passion for Bhojpuri music from the core of my heart.

Bhojpuri not comparable with Creole, by Rafic Soormally.

Bhojpuri not comparable with Creole 

By M. Rafic SOORMALLY

Bhojpuri is not a ‘Creole language’ born in slavery. It belongs to the Indo-European/Iranian/ Aryan group with Bihari languages like Maithili, Magahi and Bhojpuri as a sub-group. It is spoken in Western Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh with around 150 million speakers worldwide.

Bhojpuri is a dialect of Hindi and it also interacted with several other languages such as Bangla and Persian and has a huge and rich vocabulary shared with Sanskrit, Hindi and Urdu. It is written in the Devanagri script like Hindi.

Politicians Lal Bahadur Shastri and Chandra Shekar, and writer Viveki Rai are famous Bhojpuri personalities. Bhojpuri cinema ranges from Gunga Jumuna (Dilip Kumar & Vyjayanthimala) and Ganga (Amitabh Bachchan & Hema Malini) to Sasura Bade Paisewala (Manoj Tiwari) and Udit Narayan’s film ‘’Kab Hoii Gawna Hamaar’’. Bhojpuri words have always been part of the Bollywood lexicon.

Had Mauritius distributed the hundreds of films produced in Bhojpuri and also attempted to make its own, the culture would have flourished.

The 1960’s Mauritius saw Bhojpuri catalogued as a village language, “langage bitation”, which some also referred to as “Motia Hindi” (vulgar Hindi), while “Broken French” was promoted as a town’s “modern” language under the name of Creole of European/Haitian import. Urban folks and villagers fell victim to such propaganda and shunned Bhojpuri in public while ignoring the politics behind it all. Indo-Mauritians started to lose their identity.

Defining Creole

But, the Portuguese/Spanish term Creole is faced with a huge definition problem. A Creole can refer to ethnicity - a White European born in slave colonies such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, Mauritius.

It also refers to plants and animals in those colonies. Creole was also the spoken language imposed by the Slave Masters on African slaves in those colonies, language which they treated with contempt and through which they became known as Creoles, meaning those who speak Creole. Alternative names for Creole language in Mauritius are mind boggling – Morisyen, Kreol, Kreole, Mauritius Creole French…African-American Professor John McWhorter is promoting a “Creole Genesis Theory” according to which the first human language was a Creole and that there is allegedly a bit of Creole in all of us, without any empirical evidence.

Creole is necessarily based on a European language, such as English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. In freedom, liberated slaves left behind the language of slavery and moved on. They also interacted with other Mauritian non-African immigrants. The lingua franca that emerged was not Creole anymore but a Mauritian “sabir” or “patois” enriched with Hindi, Bhojpuri, Urdu, Tamil and Mandarin vocabulary and expressions, spoken differently in different parts of the island, but still French-based. It can be phonetically written in any script (Latin, Devanagri, Arabic).

A Risky Experiment

Academically speaking, a patois is spoken but not written and does not form literary works. By stripping it of most of its Asian ingrowths and outgrowths “épuration linguistique”, an ethnopolitical movement has, since the 1960’s, tried to revive the dead slave language by grafting it on to the evolving Mauritian patois, which they call “Kreol”, written by systematically butchering academic orthography and phonology through the use of a ‘new’ script called tantôt “Grafilarmoni” tantôt “Grafi Armoni”, now acclaimed by some as “prestigious” and allegedly deserving to be used and taught in our primary education system where children are at their most vulnerable. The Seychelles tried a similar experiment but it failed dismally. Although the term Creole is still used in common parlance, Creole was a spoken language of slaves local to the colony and rejected in freedom.

A fabricated language (since the 1960’s), called by any name, which teaches a child to spell “l’éducation” as “ledikasyon” and which butchers the French language can never be benefi cial for the child and should never be introduced in the school curriculum, even as an option.

Bhojpuri and Creole are not comparable languages. Bhojpuri is a fully-fl edged ancestral language of around two-thirds of the Mauritian population, with a script and literature which date back several centuries.