The loudest music in India

Search for bhojpuri daru songs and you get single tracks, one page each - Daru Band Bhail Bihar, Daru Home Delivery Ba, Botal Me Botal, Jab Daru Pike Aitai - and not one page anywhere that collects them. That is not a small oversight. Bhojpuri is spoken by tens of millions of people across Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh and their entire migrant diaspora, and Bihar itself has been under total prohibition since April 2016, which has done nothing detectable to the volume of songs about drinking. The demand is enormous and the supply of anything organised is zero.

The industry's biggest record is not a daru song at all, and it is worth knowing what the ceiling looks like. Hello Kaun, by Ritesh Pandey with Sneh Upadhyay, went past a billion views on YouTube in 2020 - the first Bhojpuri song ever to do it - off a hook that is two words of a phone call. There is no film, no national radio play and no English-language press coverage anywhere in that story.

The names that carry the party set are Pawan Singh, Khesari Lal Yadav, Manoj Tiwari and Dinesh Lal Yadav, and the shape of their careers tells you how big this is. Manoj Tiwari sang Rinkiya Ke Papa, one of the defining Bhojpuri records of the 2000s, and then became a member of parliament from north-east Delhi and the head of his party's city unit. Pawan Singh's Lollypop Lagelu, from 2008, is the record everyone in the region can still recite and nobody will translate for you.

One honest note about content, because a lot of writing about Bhojpuri pretends otherwise. The double-meaning song is the dominant commercial form here, not an aberration. A version of this set with every innuendo removed would not be a cleaner Bhojpuri playlist, it would be a different genre with a much smaller audience. What we have kept out is the gun-and-outlaw strand, which is a separate thing from the bawdy strand and reads much worse in a room with strangers in it. If you want the regional overview rather than the Bhojpuri slice, the desi room covers all three traditions.