Watching television these days, especially if you are tuning in for cricket matches, you would often have been interrupted by a short commercial for Cadbury Fuse chocolate that reinforces stereotypes that popular culture planted in the first place.

The advertisement features Bollywood actress Kriti Sanon playing a celebrity who is being complimented for her “grace, elegance and sense of style” by an interviewer. This is juxtaposed with her hysterical side as she gets up and runs frenetically after spotting someone in the audience unwrapping a Fuse chocolate bar.

The song played for portraying everything that’s supposedly the reverse of “grace and elegance” is a Bhojpuri number.

If not for being seen in the context of a discernible pattern, this could have been dismissed as a case of reading too much between the lines.

Such poverty of cultural imagination had also surfaced when Bollywood actor Sidharth Malhotra told us about having a “latrine feeling” on being asked to repeat a Bhojpuri dialogue on the reality TV showBig Boss. He was on the show to promote his Hindi movie Aiyaary. The actor went on to sit in a squatting pose, typical of an Indian-style toilet, or even open defecation, as he wondered whether he was in a bathroom.

Bhojpuri’s alleged role in stimulating Malhotra’s excretory system invited a furious reaction from the proud Bhojpuri-speaking community and the online protest was led by Bollywood actress Neetu Chandra, who hails from Bihar.

Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief and Bhojpuri singer and actor Manoj Tiwari  expressed shock at Malhotra’s comment and termed it an insult to the “22 crore people” speaking the language in different parts of India and abroad (the number of speakers differ with different estimates).

Facing the heat, the actor apologised on social media. That, however, isn’t any compensation for the cultural ignorance, if not indifference, that the episode has starkly exposed.

Given the philistine and insulated universe of tinsel town, it’s not surprising that one of its young stars couldn’t go beyond stereotypes in his public attempt to speak a language that has attracted the attention of linguists for its refinement and innate politeness.

The sheer scale of Bhojpuri’s demography makes it one of the prime arbiters of the cultural ethos of Purvanchal region. It’s a language of everyday use for a major section of people in the districts of western Bihar (Maithili, Magahi, Bajjika and Angika are the other major languages and dialects spoken in the state) and eastern Uttar Pradesh.

One can’t also lose sight of the fact that Bhojpuri has also survived as the mother tongue of generations of migrants who settled in countries such as Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana and Tobago, Fiji and Suriname.

Malhotra’s evocation of squatting as a mode of defecation is perhaps rooted in associating Bhojpuri with a poor man’s way of life. By extension, his boorish gestures tried to match the cheap thrills selectively associated with poor man’s entertainment, a lazy idea reinforced by raunchy songs that pervade Bhojpuri pop music and its film industry.

Malhotra seems to have avoided, or is oblivious to, sights in the city where he works (Mumbai), otherwise he would have an idea about the large number of people defecating next to the railway tracks, just like he imagined it as something exclusive to Bhojpuri-speakers.

If he was swayed by an urge to match the stereotypes of regional buffoonery and titillation, he need not have looked beyond Bollywood’s own history of bawdy songs and slapstick imagery.

It’s a kind of stereotyping that comes conveniently to an industry which had its sense of Hindustani mediated by the preponderant presence of the Punjabi-speaking community. It was this linguistic group which was dictating crucial sections of Hindi filmmaking from its early years.

That was despite the fact that the industry had people from other regions too, though not having the same degree of clout. Call it early bird advantage, accentuated by post-Partition Punjabi migrants to what was then the Bombay film industry, the cultural prism of the Hindi film industry had default Punjabi sensibilities.

The rest of India was captive to convenient stereotyping, the south was of course the comic Madrasi, and when the gaze was directed to the Hindi heartland – it never went beyond Awadhi-speaking regions of Uttar Pradesh as seen in the Dilip Kumar-starrer Ganga Jamuna (1961) and 40 years later in Lagaan (2001).

This fixation often resulted in Awadhi being fallaciously used as the language of even onscreen portrayals of a Bihari, in the process exposing Bollywood’s blinkered lingual imagination of the Hindi heartland.

As an alive lingual tradition which has in its fold Bhikhari Thakur’s Bidesiya and the folk tradition of Lorikayan, Bhojpuri has been staking its claim to be recognised as a distinct language in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution and not merely seen as a dialect of the Hindi language.

Maithili was successful in getting that recognition while Bhojpuri will have to struggle beyond the rhetorics of assurance. In 2012, such demands made by Ravikant Dubey, chairperson of the Bhojpuri Academy, resulted in P Chidambaram, then Union home minister, making a rare gesture of ending his assurance speech in Parliament with these words in Bhojpuri: “Hum rauwasabke bhavna samjhatani” (I understand your sentiments).

The association of poverty with a region produces its own set of stereotypical imageries. The “latrine” analogy for being made to speak the language of millions of Purvanchali migrants to Mumbai isn’t restricted to a cocooned section of the western India metropolis; it can be seen in academic campuses of the capital too.

“Tetanus”, recall many Bihari alumni in Delhi University, was the word used for them when they joined the university in the late 80s and early 90s. The word was some sort of a “quasi-racial backlash” (as Dr AN Das describes in his work The Republic of Bihar) unleashed by people who were elbowed out by the Biharis from premier institutions of the capital, with their academic excellence.

“Tetanus” was a derogatory reference to the “infection” that students from Bihar were supposed to carry because of the humble rusted steel trunks with which they boarded trains for New Delhi railway station.

From Malhotra’s imagined lingual instigators of excretion to Cadbury’s musical sense of showing a hysterical break from elegance, the curators of popular culture seem to be recycling stereotypes that reveal their own constricted frames of cultural imagination and blind spots.

What, however, they can’t undermine is the deep-rooted cultural confidence that sustains Bhojpuriya land. It can surely do without filmy baklols.