Owning Up To My Bihari Roots

My journey to find my cultural identity beyond the stigma and the stereotypes

- Ravi Raj

Four years ago, during a trekking adventure in Himachal Pradesh, the guide, upon learning of my Bihari roots, joked if I carried a gun back home. His next question—how far my hometown was from Wasseypur—carried the weight of narrative tropes I'd grown accustomed to. I laughed it off, but his words left a deeper imprint.

Perhaps no visual medium has swept over me with an all-encompassing force like the chilling violence, the bloodshed, and the grisly crimes depicted in Anurag Kashyap's Gangs of Wasseypur. Set in a small mining town of undivided Bihar, it's a tale of a gory tussle between criminal dynasties. Having spent my formative years in Bihar, I am not oblivious to this world soaked in violence, and this familiarity partly explains the obsession I once had with this movie.

I must admit that I have seen guns, even held once. It was my first visit to my paternal village in Bihar in more than a decade, to attend my granduncle's funeral. As the women of the family mourned in the courtyard, a man in his early thirties with political aspirations, fired three shots into the sky. In his words, he was paying tribute to the deceased. It was a custom; nothing out of the ordinary. But I stood frozen. Later one afternoon, while visiting his home for some family matter, I saw a sleek pistol resting beside his pillow. When he saw me eyeing the gun, he handed it to me and casually described its features—it was as one would explain the functions of a new tech to a kid.