Theorising Improvisation and Cultural Humour in Online India

In an episode of the American TV show Succession, the character of Shiv (short for Siobhan) Roy made skilled tactical moves and delivered biting one-liners. Responding on Twitter, user @GordonRamashray (a play on the famed chef Mr Ramsey and the South Indian restauraunt ‘Ramashray’), wrote: “siobhan roy you absolute goddess how are my shiv sainiks doing today.”[1] This silly joke refers to those who support the character ‘Shiv’ with the term used to describe the supporters of Mumbai’s Marathi political party, the Shiv Sena. The commonplace internet occurrence, where Indian commentators borrow terms of the West and impose them on the East, or vice versa, is a neat display of the aesthetics and politics of humour as itinerant and reflective of modern India. The tweet is an ‘inside joke.’ It is intelligible only to those who have been on the conveyor belt of Anglo-American culture, while viewing it from the outsider’s gaze –  raised in, and by, modern India. The inside joke does hefty work: it draws boundaries between who ‘gets it’ and who does not; it revels in, or challenges sociopolitical and culturalhierarchies of the macrocosm; it enlists artefacts of culture and nuggets of news from around the world in order to do so; and thus, it can be read as an intertextual object whose referents are nation, zeitgeist, and cultural horizon. 

Academic and popular discussions of India’s internet landscape have largely focused on trolling, fake news, propaganda, and activism through spreading information and connecting individuals. These are familiar articulations of the oft-lampooned ‘power of social media,’ or admonishments of its insidious epiphenomena. When scholars engage with this binary of boon or bane, the broader arc presented emphasises how what is happening online in India can be likened to a global wave of participatory politics, post-truth mistrust, and specular mental health concerns.[2] Like the introduction of democracy or coffee or causal dating, imported social media is understood to replicate the trajectory seen in ‘the place it came from.’ Original histories can be used as a prognostic to see what these disruptions are capable of. But like the introduction of democracy, coffee, or casual dating, the interaction between Indian and non-Indian culture on social media presents its own eccentricities and requires theoretical excavation. The term ‘cultural humour,’ can be used to describe such an inside joke that involves and refers to comedic interactions between different cultures’ sensibilities and artefacts. Cultural humour in India has erected its own repertoire, tones, and tensions. I submit that looking closer at it can tell us, descriptively and metaphorically, about curiosities in the seepage of ideas and objects into India.

This essay seeks to probe two meanings. First, in the literal sense. Humour is a politically potent force. It serves a reflective role – revealing truths about the status quo and its discontents – and also a positive role – as a space for catharsis, observation, and agitation. It is relevant to understand prevailing Twitter humour in admittedly elite sections of the English-speaking internet because of what it can tell us about the pulse of (at least some) the people, and what their cultural sensibilities look like. In the second sense, I propose that cultural humour can be a metonym for processes of modernization like capitalism, democracy, and secularism. In his essay ‘An Outline of A Revisionist Theory of Modernity,’ Kaviraj theorises modernity’s tendency of ‘improvisation’ in India: “Improvisation…not simply copying from other successful democracies, but fitting them to a society’s peculiar circumstances, is of the essence of the unfolding of the modern.”[3] He deconstructs modernity’s plural character in its operation in India, suggesting that institutional design is dependent not merely on an imported idea (say, democracy or capitalism), but also on the topography of Indian history and politics. Something happens to these ideas when they travel, there is discernible modification in their ‘essence’ to make them comport with another society. They are not hand-me-downs of the same thing. They become, and are always becoming, their own.  

In an essay published in The Atlantic, a British writer carps: “America won the internet, and now makes us all speak its language.”[4] By ‘us all’ she is referring first and foremost to Britain, but abstractly we are to assume, everyone on the English-speaking internet. She goes on: “Sharing the internet with America is like sharing your living room with a rhinoceros. It’s huge, it’s right there, and whatever it’s doing now, you sure as hell know about it.” She discusses how Britain’s discussions of race are now taking place in an American vocabulary. While blind to the similar but perhaps less over-bearing barrage of British culture, she has pinned down a crucial reality of the internet. America’s culture is not a monolith, but it, along with the UK, exerts soft power on the currents of the online world. A rough survey of their digital discourses reveals that America’s internet, while intranationally diverse, practices comedic and mediatic endogamy.

Primarily interested only in endemic political dynamics, Anglo-american internet discourse has not seriously been influenced by cross-continental cultures, at least in the mainstream.[5] They enjoy the status of the solipsistic default – arguably in international imaginaries, but certainly on the internet. It is true that populous developing countries like India have now begun to dominate the number of daily users for many social media sites. These countries have seen an exciting explosion of democratic creative power, for nobody more than those who previously did not have access to say something and message-in-a-bottle it to the rest of the country.

At the same time, elites occupying spaces of the internet in several developing nations around the world have always had asymmetric access to the valorized Western cultural model and its commodities. Today, they can afford an iPhone, they watch Netflix, and they tweet about Trump. In the Indian case, it is easy to see what colonization had to do with this. During the British Raj, several privileged Indians identified more strongly as white than colonized, having the cultural repertoire required to perform whiteness and a clean English accent to boot.[6] This is not because of any ‘weakness’ in antecedent local cultural imaginaries, but because of the empire weaponsied culture to make domination stick. Now, with the diffusion of English, the relative affordability smartphones and internet connections, the segment of people exposed to and engaging with softer Western culture has sharply increased. I argue that rather than leaning towards being absorbed by Indian lore and politics, or suffering terminally from a colonial hangover, prevailing cultural humour on the internet indicates that something else is happening here.

Following the model of America or the UK would predict that Indian social media spaces would also be insular, rife with preoccupations of only the national – both in the realm of culture and in that of politics. However, for at least the privileged urban Indian, there is no analogous humour bounded only by the goings-on of territorial India and its cultural output. Put another way, India, or ‘Indian’ humour, is culturally plural, and the forged result of intervention, syncretism, and hybridity. Kaviraj notes that there is neither analogous democracy nor secularism. Consider two reasons why this may be true. First, we know better. Indian democracy guaranteed universal adult franchise from its inception, unlike its European prototypes. The constitution had a reserve of reference points to draw upon when drafting its statutes. But it is equally true that we do not know better, or at least that some problems spring eternal: right-wing extremism, democratic backsliding, and identarian polarization are cosmopolitan in their reach. This is true online and off.

There is second, more significant reason why these institutions are not analogous. The illusion that the internet is amorphous by design, is just that – an illusion. Its airs are not gases taking the shape of the container. Rather, the cultural imaginary of the internet is an infinite palimpsest, upon which every stray thought restructures its history, and establishes new trajectories of trends, shifting the needle of public discourse ever-so-slightly or all-at-once. This can be taken in two senses. First, that there is something specific about the legacy of the internet that was handed down to us. In its infrastructure (or, by institutional design), the internet privileges certain forms of communication; you will find conspiracies on QAnon, porn on Tumblr, cancellations on Twitter, and education on YouTube. The mechanisms of these media, like, share, comment versus retweet, quote tweet, and bookmark, enable and disable cognitive and cultural patterns of engagement from their users. The second sense in which the palimpsest can be read is that when the internet is encountered in a place that was not its origin, this travel is generative of new kinds of tension. To put it in Ramanujan’s words, “the ‘modern,’ the context-free, becomes one more context, though it is not easy to contain” (57)

            American internet culture rose on its own, without another reference point. By Ramanujan’s typology, it rose in ‘context-free’ terms, a historically blank slate open to be used and abused however things would turn out. This maps onto some western experiences of democracy and nationhood like France or Germany. The principles of critical thinking, individual choice, and rationality could exist unfettered by widespread contradictory – or at least, complicating – histories and habits. Chronologically, India’s internet culture did not rise up on its own. From the beginning, there were Western models of what engagement should look like, what media to cite, and what aesthetics to deploy to earn currency. One view could empahsise the lack of agency in India’s cultural contact with the West (colonization, to begin with), but equally significant to contact are also the differences in the social fabric of India and its media, and the peculiar design realities of the internet. As a framework for expression, the internet’s economy has a different ‘market logic’ and formula for virality and success in India.  The social fabric of India has a culture of receptivity, stemming from a familiarity with synthesizing the self and the other. The internet has created a modern online presence wherein cultural contact is unavoidable, seepages are inevitable, and syncretism is inbuilt.

India is inundated by texts and symbols – indeed the ubiquitous ‘melting pot’ imagery of the nation refers to language, food, religion, and political organization. The majority religion has too many Gods to count, our people have too many dialects for AI to compute. Colonizer modernity and globalisation’s modernity both attempted, in broad strokes, to universalize the particular, because India’s particulars were uncountable. What we now see, in the modern, even postmodern stage of the internet, is that these attempts at universality have not made India ‘context-free.’ It is the context that makes cultural humour possible, and indeed, funny.

Gautam Adani’s swift downfall coincided with the crest of success of the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. Several film accounts were sharing screencaps of the dialogue: “in another life, I would’ve really liked just doing taxes and laundry with you” – and going viral.  Twitter user @DrCheruvarun edited the quote “in another life, I would’ve really liked just doing money laundering and tax evasion with you” onto a photo of Narendra Modi and Gautam Adani embracing. The layering of culture from cinema to trends to the close relationship between Prime Minister and a businessman are all required context for the gag to work.

Sometimes, contrast is enough to make the joke. And this can be surprising in that the contrast is not funny because the joke is on India, on its creepy Facebook men or its rural population whose English is not perfect. The contrast works because the interface of the internet has made fusion and fissure necessary – you are speaking the language of modernity when you write on the internet, but by breaking open that language to express a radically different cultural perspective, the meaning of what you are saying disrupts fixed ideas of nation and identity. You are always polysemic. You are not laughing at India nor are you laughing at whichever new form of slang America has adopted today. There are new ontologies emerging from the infrastructure of America in the hands of India.

Like the internet, democracy too was a new way of engaging with the world, its ideas and culture. Quickly seeping into the soils of India, the practices of democracy and expression have become habit, but habit that always leaves room for novelty. Democracy and the internet – and indeed any forces of modernity – erect changes that seep into other fields of life.  These modern institutions, instead of creating predictive frameworks to understand where history is unfolding, have created the conditions for creative surprises. These are surprises in funny jokes, but also surprises in the ways we think of the self, the other, media from other cultures, and politics at large.  These are the surprises of improvisation.

            Bibliography

Rahman, Aziz, et al. “The British Art of Colonialism in India: Subjugation and Division.” Peace and Conflict Studies, 2018, https://doi.org/10.46743/1082-7307/2018.1439.

Lewis, Helen. “The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War.” The Atlantic, 16 Nov. 2022, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/internet-world-trapped-americas-culture-war/616799/.

Kaviraj, Sudipta. “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity.” European Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, no. 3, 2005, pp. 497–526, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003975605000196.

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[1] @GordonRamashray on Twitter, 2023

[2] Baishya, The conquest of the world as meme

[3] Kaviraj, “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity,” p. 522

[4] Lewis, “The World is Trapped in America’s Culture War.”

[5] Lewis, “The World is Trapped in America’s Culture War.”

[6] Rahman, “The British Art of Colonialism in India: Subjugation and Division.”