For generations, Bhojpuri songs, stories, rituals, and oral traditions have carried the memories, experiences, and aspirations of communities across time and place. Bhojpuri World moves beyond viewing folklore as a decorative part of regional life. It examines it as a living cultural framework shaped by nature, women, labour, migration, memory, and struggles for justice.
The book brings together five interconnected themes. It first explores the relationship between nature, women, and culture, showing how traditions such as Chhath place women at the centre of relationships between community life and the natural world. It then turns to Virahini and Urhari traditions to examine migration through women's experiences of separation, labour, responsibility, and social marginalisation. Banijiya, Sipahiya, Bidesiya, and Girmitiya broaden this history, revealing different forms of mobility and their enduring impact on identity, memory, and belonging.
The book also recovers fading traditions such as Harparauri and Rudan, where women created spaces of solidarity, mourning, and social expression. Finally, Bhim-geet brings questions of equality, liberty, fraternity, caste, and Bahujan consciousness into the folk sphere. Bringing these strands together, Bhojpuri World presents Bhojpuri culture as a dynamic tradition sustained by memory and movement. This book with its interdisciplinary approach will interest scholars and readers of folklore, literature, gender studies, migration studies, environmental humanities, and South Asian cultural studies.