From Lockdown Blues to OTT Boom:  How ‘Bidurbhai' Became a Streaming Sensation in Assam

One of the unwitting consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns during 2020-2021 have been its deep impact on the media economies in India and elsewhere. Newspaper sales dropped distressingly, while layoffs were seen in both national and regional level television news networks. On the other hand,significantly, audience habits seem to show an unwavering turn towards varied forms of online media. According to a recent report published by consultancy firm KPMG India and OTT platform Eros Now, 80 percent of the audiences who subscribe to over-the-top (OTT) services accept that all their entertainment needs are being fulfilled through online content available across different OTT platforms.

As per this stat, 38 percent of the viewers are planning to give up on the traditional content viewing mediums such as the TV. What these aspects reveal is that media trends which were forecasted for the near future in the last decade or so became tangibly real in the post Covid-19 world. The OTT (over the top media-service) phenomenon, most clearly, signals to this new media ecology. Conventional commercial television as it developed its form was shaped by its symbiotic equation with advertisers and sponsors.

Television schedules, arranged accordingly, led to the emergence of genres like soap operas with their long-winded narratives and delayed denouements. Years ago, British cultural critic Raymond Williams, identified the intermittent, stopgap rhythm of television programmes as ‘flow’. The concept of television flow refers to the fact that we are not exactly viewing a particular programme on television per se as commercial breaks stop the viewer from having a more wholesome experience of the programme.

From the perspective of the producer and the advertiser this quickly became a routine mandatory exercise as it became a mutually beneficial affair. In this process, the victim has been the audience and their interests. Their involvement and interest are both manipulated and mutilated with such relentless cynicism that the majority of us who watch television regularly have become immune to such practices. However, in the last few years, with the emergence and popularity of US streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, viewers are finally finding a way out of the existing television regimes as they have the option now to watch a variety of films and television content produced in different regions of the world without ad breaks. Irrespective of the debilitating effects it may have on extant business models of broadcast media, the OTT platform is great news for content creators and audiences as it brings about an engagement which is potentially mutually fulfilling.

Marshal McLuhan, the Canadian maverick philosopher of media and communications, active during the decades of 1960s and 1970s, suggested that when media technologies combine, they establish new ratios among themselves, thereby affecting both their form and use. Accordingly, we can see the developing equation between television and OTTSs in such terms. While OTTs have picked and appropriated television genres like serials to give them more room and breadth, television as a service is betting on high-definition picture and sound (both results of digitization) to sustain and grow in a changed media environment.

Netflix India came up with Sacred Games (2018), while Amazon Prime followed it up with Paatal Lok (2020) and both turned out to be huge hits among various audience segments. What is interesting is that both are crime shows and delve into the nexus between politicians, mafia and police. Apparently, this is nothing new but what these two shows collectively achieve is that they have given the same staple material of prime-time TV and popular Bollywood films more heft and depth through narrative arcs reminiscent of a distinctively Indian way of storytelling.

For varied reasons, films could rarely achieve that quality, while a mass medium like television frittered away that opportunity by its own trappings. Regional language specific OTT platforms like the Bengali Hoichoi too have now come up, among others in other languages too, which have kind of opened up a field of opportunity for bright new creative professionals and provided choices for eager groups of varied audiences spread through the social structure. On the flip side, too many such sites have now come up creating further fragmentation in a world of already scattered sets of viewers.

In terms of content too, they are throwing up lurid and tasteless amalgamations of sex, violence and crime in the competition to arrest the interest of a generation whose attention span seems to match the few seconds long Instagram reel. So, the horrors of a formulaic commercial media system are far from over, and it is just round the corner to haunt us in various forms. Whether such developments indicate the case of a as ‘more things change, the more they stay the same’, it remains to be seen. If one goes by the news of a breakout star of new wave and OTT space like Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s views on the gross commercialization of the online entertainment media scene in India (he called the profusion of OTTs as dhanda {racket} for big production houses and actors who are now so-called stars on the OTT) then we are headed in the same old highway to a new postmodern kitsch hell.

However, in the present circumstances, in spite of systemic traps, OTTs and streaming sites are the go-to place for people who want to tell fresh new stories in laid out and wholesome narratives. The success and connect of shows like Kota Factory (2019) created by the team at The Viral Fever production and run on their YouTube channel is indicative of this new field of content production and reception. Curated by young people for the younger generation who hardly watches mainstream television, these shows have exploited the existing disconnect between youth and hackneyed content on TV by crafting narratives which speak directly to them and their issues.

The viral popularity of the recent Assamese web series Bidurbhai (streaming on YouTube) is part of this new dynamic. Although in the last few years, OTTs featuring content from Assam and its adjacent states have come up, none of their content or shows were able to really break the clutter in the local media universe. Bidurbhai is the first web show or series in Assam which have been able to do this. Made by a team of young writers and a director (Suvrat Kakoti) the first episode of the show was aired in October 2021, and the first season consisting of six episodes concluded on 19 December, 2021.

All the episodes have a rough running time of around 20 mins, which can be binge watched with ease. However, the thing to note is that it is not merely the length of the show but the deft sense of dramatic development and narrative sequencing displayed which makes it a breeze to watch. Dealing with the personal tribulations faced by three friends during the prolonged Covid-19 pandemic lockdown last year, it is both a comic caper and a part commentary on the socio-economic precarity in Assam’s villages.

Thematically and plot-wise, all the principal characters in Bidurhai find themselves affected in one way or the other by the micro-finance crisis which has ravaged village populations across Assam in recent times. Micro finance banks and institutions were developed after liberalization of the economy in the 1990s to meet the small-scale financial requirements in rural India. However, due to various regulatory missteps, these institutions have contributed to considerable financial handicaps instead of relieving them.

Assam has been one of the hardest hit states in this silent financial quandary resulting in suicides and destitution, among other forms of distress. According to a report published on the leading English news and current affairs portal Scroll.in, the indebtedness of microfinance borrowers in five districts of Upper Assam is almost four times the national average (Jan 6, 2020). The loans are provided to gots (groups) and the group members are collectively responsible to return the loan money in stipulated time periods. If even a single member defaults in the periodic payment of the borrowed sum, peer pressure has on multiple occasions led to taking away of personal assets of borrowers.

Due to years of generally bleak socio-economic indicators, Assam has seen mass unemployment and a gradual decline in agricultural activities in her villages and townships. In the circumstances, liquor consumption is quite rampant amongst the youth, among other vices susceptible under a neo-liberal and sectarian society of spectacle. It is such a milieu that drives the characters and thus the plot and narrative of Bidurbhai. To corroborate the matter, probably, it would be more appropriate to say that the creators have read the immediate social crosscurrents intelligently and have found the hook around which to pull the strings in the narrative.

The idea and the objective were of course to create and find humour in distressful situations and one can’t sustain it if there was no thought behind the entertainment offered. This is what sets Bidurbhaia part from other Assamese shows on YouTube or on the local television channels. The locally produced VCD films which were meeting the entertainment needs of Assamese society till a few years ago were often loud, formulaic and sketchy which stopped far short of being either good television or cinema. Bidurbhai is exception to these since it is lean and economic in its structure and craft and pointed in its storytelling.

Moreover, it achieves what it set out to do; that is providing plain and raw entertainment with ample amounts of humour. To its credit, it achieves this without hitch and although the intent of the show was never to instruct and only entertain, like all good comic works, it finds the sources of humour in socio-economic anomalies. All the principal four characters from whose intersubjective view the events unfold have a reason to think and behave the way they do, and it rings true because their motives are squarely located in real socio-economic fissures. Accordingly, the overall aim of plain diversion is counterbalanced with sincerity because of the show’s willingness to expose and engage with emotional geographies of the characters.

One of the four protagonists, Ujjal, who runs a small grocery shop is insecure emotionally and financially since he is plain broke with regular installment payments to micro-finance firms. His younger unmarried friends, Nitu, on one hand, had his motor bike seized because of repeat default of loan payment, and jobless Bolin, on the other, is faced with the prospect of losing his lady love to a sly local manager of the micro-credit firm operating in their village. The fourth friend, Dip, a lower ranked police official, is witness to hierarchical inequities of the system, while his wife Minati faces the threat of being hounded by other groups members of micro-credit since she has defaulted on her dues.

Thus, Bidurbhai, through a well anchored approach towards representing the respective dilemmas faced by its characters, draws all its thematic leads from the local headlines of the day. Whether it is the brewing micro-finance crisis or the remuneration related crisis of the PSO servicemen in the state, and how men and women in rural areas have been affected by these crises, all of it finds a way to the plot of the show quite seamlessly.

Since, the creators have chosen the format of the web series rather than film to tell the story, it works to their advantage. The form of the web series gives them scope to flesh out the characters and the situations and yet keep the narrative neat and focused throughout without distracting detours. One of the means through which the series is able to do this is through the delineation of a local polyphonic universe around characters that are of the same age group, yet each one of them is squarely relatable and individualized. The content of the dialogues reflects both the themes of the show as well as reveal the specific personality of the characters. As individuals, all of them have their quirks, and yet when it comes to their socio-economic well-being, their lives are intricately connected.    

Interestingly the making process of the show was pretty ad hoc in nature as the makers revealed in a television interview (that they didn’t really have a long story to tell). Now that this successful show is being turned into a film for its sequel, what we are witnessing is a one of its kind examples of spin-off in the world of Assamese film and shows. Probably nothing is more indicative of the spin of Web 2.0 and the resultant media ecology in its local avatar have for makers and viewers in a marginal cultural space like Assam. Indeed, to quote Raymond Williams again: ‘culture is ordinary’.