How Indian comedy stands up, stands down, and sings (Part I)
No, this is not a history of comedy in India, not even a history of Indian standup comedy, but some thoughts on the widely varied receptions, in the social media, of political satirists such as Varun Grover and Kunal Kamra on the one hand and musically inclined comedians such as Jamie Lever and Sugandha Mishra. Since the 2019 reelection of Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister of India, the erosion of free speech that had already started with his first election in 2014 has accelerated. The assault on comedians who dare criticize the Hindu nationalist government’s excesses is reported nationally and internationally. However, as the market for laughter and outrage continues to grow on the internet and spread via social media in India, we see the growth of a safe comedic space as well. It’s all complicated.
It is not easy to define freedom of expression in the Indian context. While freedom of speech is guaranteed under Article XIX of the Indian Constitution, it has been haphazardly controlled in practice with the aid of a variety of devices ranging from the Indian Cinematograph Act (1952) to the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act of 1971 (burning the flag is a crime, for example). However, the rise of Hindutva — the political avatar of Hindu nationalism from the 1990s onwards — and its subsequent electoral dominance in the past decade have led to a redefinition of free speech and any form of dissent as ‘anti-national.’ Despite India’s heterogeneity, a Hindu majoritarian conservative pro-government sentiment has been sanctified by Modi’s government as true Indian nationalism. Repeated endlessly by the leaders of the ruling party in political rallies, this sentiment is also inoculated into the social media by hired bots (See Swati Chaturvedi’s 2016 book I am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army). For tens of millions of Indians, the social media serves as the only window to the outside world, and thus brings in an inherently biased worldview. Campaigns against budding dissent are planted and nurtured inside a well-orchestrated political machine. Citizens without the critical knowhow about the workings of the social media jump to conclusions about treacheries and anti-national activities without examining any evidence.
Into this minefield walked in a bunch of comics with razor-sharp wit, an absolute disregard for their personal safety, and of course, courage. They spoke in urban Hinglish, deployed the same tools that Modi’s machine did — internet and the social media — and gained almost overnight fame. They received threats, which they turned into comic bits on stage, and offered laugh therapies for all resident and global Indians who did not depend on WhatsApp for their intake of political news.
Varun Grover’s take on Narendra Modi’s quoting of the formula of a plus b squared while explaining India-Canada relations turned a political nightmare into comedic gold. Grover began with a longstanding Indian rumor — circulating via email and WhatsApp — that NASA somehow has tapped into the sound that emanates from the entire universe, and that sound is the Sanskrit sacred compound sound OM and concluded that NASA’s instruments recorded a perplexed ‘huh?’ in place of the usual serene OM on the day Modi regaled an Indian-Canadian audience with his clueless botched iteration of a basic algebraic formula.
While Varun Grover, an acclaimed poet/lyricist mixes a literary Hindi into English, Kunal Kamra, who, according to Grover is higher on the anti-national ‘hit list’ [the ‘hit list’ is not entirely imaginary; several journalists and activists have been shot dead, allegedly for their criticism of Modi and the BJP], uses the Hindi of Bombay/Mumbai, peppered with expletives. Kunal Kamra’s query, with perfect affected innocence, “Why can’t we vote for Mukesh Ambani [the Indian billionaire, instead of Modi, his instrument]? Nita Ambani [Mukesh’s wife] would be such an improvement as the first lady than Amit Shah [the home minister, and Modi’s right hand]…” in front of a live audience, with the feedback of roaring laughter from the crowd, was the sound of Indian democracy, raucously alive.
Despite the different styles, Grover has shown his support for Kamra when the latter was banned from flying after he confronted Arnav Goswami, an obnoxious right-wing television host, on a plane. Grover commended Kamra for heckling the heckler.
Grover and Kamra’s comedy thrived not in isolation, but in a virtual ecosystem of talented activist-artists who chose to be on the right side of history. At a time when politics had become divisive and bloody, they chose political comedy as their act. Rajeev Nigam and Akash Banerjee are two other comics who followed a similar path. Shyam Rangeela, who mimics Modi, has specialized in reenactments of Modi’s ‘performances,’ such as cleaning trash of the beach, posing with peacocks, and appearing in a ‘non-political interview’. The ecosystem spread beyond standup comedy or performance art. An author/artist, Gautam Benegal, drew cartoons for The Daily Eye, depicting a chicken shop (spelled ‘Chiken Sope’), with its owner ‘Salim Bhai’ as a Modi-lookalike, where chickens debated democracy and fought with each other while waiting to be chopped off and sold by Salim Bhai.
This is not to say that the Indian public or media sphere was teeming with protests. It was business as usual for most commercial television channels, as it was with Bollywood. Comedy, in the form of talk shows or standup competitions, had become part of the television channels and YouTube as well. YouTube channels such as All India Bakchod (AIB) and television shows hosted by Kapil Sharma practiced safe comedy, staying away from politics. AIB poked fun at benign social issues, and Kapil Sharma choose to capitalize on the bottomless pit of material: Indian cinema, mostly Bollywood. Bollywood and benign comedy can probably keep each other alive for a long time, as Bollywood has perfected the art of self-referentiality. The only historic past that Bollywood films have shown interest in, apart from the Hindutva-fueled dreams of virile Hindu heroes, is the Indian cinematic past. Remakes (of films which perhaps should not have been made in the first place), spin-offs, and tributes are the stuff that Bollywood is made of. There is no time or space in Bollywood (or in television programming based on Bollywood) for the real world and real time.
The safe space for comedy and performance, as I just described, is thriving. On the other hand, Kamra, Grover, and Rangeela have learned constraint. Kamra, after a lawsuit at the Supreme Court, had his first YouTube video posted after two long years. While the older videos of these comics still get record number of visits every day, new material by them is hard to find. The exciting time of growth for subversive comedy was 2016 through 2020, right up to the moment before the pandemic broke, and Modi’s government got the perfect excuse to break up several ongoing protests, against a draconian citizenship law (Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens) and a farming bill, among others. A poem composed by Varun Grover against the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) went viral before the pandemic, which attested to the fact that the ecosystem of progressive young minds was indeed growing.
It will perhaps take a long time for India to emerge out of the shadow of the pandemic and the excesses of Hindutva. Subversive laughter will grow back, slowly but certainly. However, what is worth observing is the endless power of Indian cinema to offer material for entertainment, both comic and otherwise. While Grover and Kamra, especially Kamra have been subjected to threats to their lives and have been forced to tone their rhetoric down (Kamra skillfully plays around the idea of political jokes in his latest YouTube video and Grover is offering online lessons in screenwriting), superbly talented performers are offering brilliant and anodyne comedy on the safe side of history. What and whom they mock tell us a lot.
Read Part II of this story.
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