Jharkhand Jhollywood: Do-it-yourself, do it for less

Poor actors have come up with their own alternate cinema.

RANCHI: In one of India’s poorest, most violence-wrecked states, being a movie star means doing your own make-up in a car mirror and then dancing to a soundtrack from a mobile phone. Los Angeles has Hollywood, Mumbai has Bollywood and then there’s Jhollywood, a tiny but enthusiastic film industry in the eastern state of Jharkhand.

“This is the biggest problem of working in our films, you have to do everything yourself. Apply your own make-up, supply your own costumes,” says Jhollywood’s leading female star Varsha Lakra. On a sunny Sunday morning in Ranchi, Lakra, 24, is on location at her latest shoot. She sits in her small car, applying pink eyeshadow, layers of foundation and powder as the traffic whizzes past.”Our films are made keeping our culture in mind. We show our villages and how, as Jharkhand develops, people are leaving the villages to go work in towns.”

Producers raise capital by cashing in anything from pieces of land to abandoned cars, and some of the film industry’s key players are shopkeepers who have day jobs selling mobile phones and CDs. Jhollywood’s stars may have lives far different from Bollywood’s adored big-name screen legends, but they are hugely popular in the state. Lakra and her actor husband Monuraj, 25, are household names and are regularly mobbed by fans.

With limited funds and few cinema owners willing to screen Jhollywood over Bollywood fare, however, the industry barely two decades old is fighting to stay afloat. Unlike Bollywood, most Jhollywood productions are shot on digital video and in the local languages of Sadri, Nagpuri and Santhali and the budget is between INR250,000 and INR500,000.

The fact that in last 19 years, only one Jhollywood production is thought to have broken even, shows that film-making is a costly labour of love in the state of Jharkhand.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2011.