- Pushpesh Kumar and Debomita Mukherjee
 |
| Image sources: TikTok, Brute India |
“This will create a huge vacuum in my life as I was
using my time in something creative... I used to make 5-6 videos a day…No
platform gives you such a wide audience ... I uploaded my first video of a
Rajasthani Meena song a year ago and people liked it very much. Using my TikTok
popularity, I started my channel on YouTube, but I may not now get such
popularity ever.”
Anita Meena, Ukeri, Rajasthan (quoted in Srivastava, 2020)
“I and my wife used to run a salon and during the
lockdown, we started making videos on TikTok and soon we became popular. When
we heard about the ban last night, we were disappointed because now we will
have to start everything from the very beginning...”
Dinesh Pawar, Jamde Village, Dhulia, Maharashtra (ibid)
“This is a platform of the marginalised
people from rural India and those who don’t come from rich families. I hope
there can be some settlement between the company and our government. TikTok
never paid us anything, it was just a platform to become famous and that might help
build a career.
Sanatan Mahto, Kusmantand Village, Jharkhand (ibid)
“TikTok was easy and a home for marginalised
sections like us. We felt like home on TikTok. Other apps like Instagram are
complicated. Nobody cheers us on other apps like the users on TikTok that appreciated
us. We can’t imagine big people writing about us if it was not for
TikTok,”
Prakash Chawan, a TikTok user with partial visual disabilities, Jamde, Maharashtra (quoted in Yadav 2020)
The Under(privileged) TikTokers
The
Indian government announced a ban of 59 apps developed by Chinese firms over concerns
of “national security” on 29th June 2020. Among the apps that
India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT has ordered to ban include ByteDance’s Til Tok. The questions that this essay
seeks to explore are the following.
How did this small bit of history (the state decision) impact the personal biographies (the overnight fame, visibility, lakhs of ‘likes’ and then its sudden end) of the Tik Tok performers? How do we understand the sociology of Tik Tokers who are primarily drawn from a rural and unprivileged India? How different are the videos of the urban middle-class TikTokers from the rural Dalit-Adivasi TikTokers even as they dance to the same Bollywood beats?
The distinction appears in the aesthetics of the scenic background, sartorial sensibilities, make-up, body and hairstyling, and sometimes, the choice of updated Bollywood songs and dialogues. The formers’ videos are shot in the backdrop of a swimming pool, upmarket spaces and elegant drawing rooms or upper-class neighbourhoods. Performers are in branded apparel and their comportments- reminiscent of globalized transnational subjects (Bhaskaran 2004) with some desi chic style. Their bilingual and multilingual tongues, their ability to juggle and mix them, and their enviable knack for Bollywood updates match with the rapidity of 15 or 30 seconds TikTok videos. Some of them made it to TikTok stardom, sometimes earning lakhs and even crores.
In contrast, the subaltern Dalit Adivasi young TikToker appears in ordinary clothes bereft of make-up and brands. The background is of rural huts and arid agricultural fields. Unlike their urban elite counterparts, the Adivasi TikTokers mostly speak their regional tongue and some struggle to speak in Hindi in their YouTube interviews. They choose to dance to regional songs or the Bollywood romantic numbers of the 1990s, unlike their elite urban peers who pick more recent and trendy songs.
In this context, what sociological sense should we make of the underprivileged TikTokers feeling devastated with the ban?
Popularity/Mobility or Oppressive Conformism
Adorno and Horkheimer saw the culture industry within capitalism as oppressive conformism, and not as a transformatory tool in changing the structures of oppression and inequality (Bernstein 1991). For them, cultural production is an integrated component of a capitalist economy aimed at complicity, ideological illusions, and social control (ibid). How relevant is this to understand the Tik Tok phenomena?
TikTok, the widely popular social media networking and video content creating app, is owned by Byte Dance, a Chinese multinational internet technology company, and significant pillars for promoting brands (Mohanty 2019). The parent company has recently offered a brand platform ‘TikTok for Business’ offering current and future solutions for brands (Perez 2020). The app was launched in China in 2016 as Douyin and was subsequently released worldwide in 2017 (Iqbal 2020), allowing the users to create short 15 seconds videos and filters like music and dialogues (Omar and Dequan 2020).
How does one look at the lip-syncing and dancing of some of these subaltern TikTokers - stars waiting for a break? The songs, the dance, and playful acts are not able to hide the subalternity written on the bodies of these performers. Their plainness shot against the materiality of subaltern rural might look exotic to the urban elites. Many of them do like and promote such videos but see their subalternity which is naturalized and dehistoricized in popular perception. The 15 and 30 seconds of TikTok videos are not enough to explain the history and political economy of this marginality.
The Bollywood dance craze that swept the transnational middle class in the post liberalized India was accompanied by the rise of elite dance institutes. Choreographic dances became an integral part of weddings showcasing the agency, confidence, and wealth of the elite and corporate middle class (Morcom 2015). The rise of dance entrepreneurs like Shaimak Davar imparted new meaning to dance as ‘stress-busting’, fitness and fun, a means to lose weight with several gyms doing “Bollywood workouts”. It fitted in well with the ascendency of the individualized neoliberal subjects (ibid).
In contrast, the lower middle class and poor Dalits and Adivasi persons’ occasional entry into dance competitions on Sony or Zee TV programs like Dance India Dance is marked through scripts of struggle and hardships, evoking the paternalistic compassion of celebrities acting as jury on stage. The occasional success of a few such participants as cultural entrepreneurs, if that happens, does not write off the miseries and experiences of structural inequality within the urban ghettos and rural segregated hutments of Dalit Adivasi households.
The questions that arise then are: Was this an unreflective participation in an unequal world? A claiming for space in hitherto unavailable social media platforms and hopes of stardom? Are they drawn into believing that there is no alternative to capitalism where competition in an unequal world is the unquestioned norm? Or, is it the magic of Bollywood music and the seduction of popularity and public visibility among these marginalized youth that pushed them to the TikTok platform?
TikTok as “Shudra” of the Internet? Or, the space of Dignity?
In a journalistic piece entitled ‘TikTokers Dubbed ‘Shudras of Internet’, the author Jyoti Yadav (2020) highlights how a section of Indians think that TikTok is mainly for the‘lower castes.’ Some upper castes and, of course, upper-middle classes find this video sharing app ‘frivolous’, ‘idiotic’ and ‘cringeworthy’ (ibid). Yadav further mentions a Tweet that went viral; later deleted, where a user categorized YouTube and Instagram under the Brahmin category, Twitter under ‘Kshatriya’, Facebook under ‘Vaishya’ and TikTok under ‘Shudra’(Ibid.).
At the end of the piece, Yadav (2020) asks - ‘But why are TikTokers subjecting themselves for the mockery?’ And she answers – ‘Because they are not ashamed of their torn clothes, tanned skin, malnourished bodies, and, most importantly, their poverty’ (Ibid.). Despite caste-class marginality and the lack of cultural capital, these TikTokers had millions of likes and lakhs of followers. Their larger presence on TikTok is because of the primacy of video creation on the social media platform which does not require any formal literacy and special skill. The only requirements are smartphones and the internet. Smartphones are affordable; and Jio made internet accessibility cheap!
Dinesh Pawar from Jamde village in Dhule district of Maharashtra, along with his two wives, has thirty lakh followers and had become famous throughout Maharashtra. He is getting other offers from the Marathi entertainment industry paving way for better income and status. He belongs to the Pardhi community in Maharashtra (Update in Marathi, 2019), which is the most marginalized nomadic community in the region. He is a school dropout and runs a salon. While a majority of the villagers from Jamde village are illiterate, there are more than ten couples here who became TikTokers (Yadav 2020). Sanatan and his elder sister Savitri from an Adivasi village in Jharkhand (Srivastava 2020) had 2.7 million followers and 57.7 million likes on TikTok but hadn’t received any payment except gift vouchers for shopping sites (ibid).
Sanatan said, “TikTok never paid us anything, it was just a platform to become famous that might help build a career. I have gained a lot of confidence through this platform unlike YouTube, where many people abused us and made fun of us in the comments section” (ibid).
The TikTok ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ may be a way of exoticizing and consuming the simplicity of rural India by affluent consumers. It may also contain hopes for the subaltern youth who support one of their community members to multiply the likes and following for the latter.
TikTok made a possible career in the entertainment world happen to many like Dinesh Pawar whose community embodied the stigma of criminality for generations. Likewise for the brother-sister duo Sanatan and Savitri from rural Jharkhand dancing to Romantic Bollywood numbers TikTok opened new possibilities.
Dinesh Pawar in one of his YouTube videos narrates how- ‘people name you and shame you but if you become famous, they associate with you, they follow you. This is a digital world and we should adapt to the changing world’. This local popularity may accrue tangible benefits. Suraj Chauhan from a village of Baramati Tehsil in Maharashtra belongs to a nomadic community. He is an 8th class pass TikTok star, famous for his funny videos in Marathi. His popularity led local elites to build a pucca house for him; some people donated money, while local plasterers and bricklayers volunteered to work without a wage.
However, it would be rather hasty to conclude that
every TikToker or even a large number of them will go on to become brand
ambassadors like cricket players and beauty queens. And while brand promotion
and advertisement would enable a few TikTok stars to earn fame and affluence, this
mobility and empowerment are limited to a few individuals. Their occasional
success will not pave the way for structural transformation. It might breed
frustration among many of the non-successful subaltern TikTokers who would
remain resourceless and excluded from the ranks of the highest-paid TikTokers.
Globalization, while creating hopes for emancipation through communication and online technologies as Giddens claims, (Giddens 2002) has also created undemocratic enclaves of gentrified neighbourhoods, cappuccino bars, and militarized ‘public spaces’ surrounded by ghettoized, dilapidated slums (Lewandowski 2003). The face of this global inequality is also characterized by a limited number of high-end employment opportunities in sectors such as banking, finance, and information technology that in turn rely on a vast army of low wage, informal and casual labourers such as clerks, cleaning and maintenance personal to sustain them (Saskia Sassen quoted in Lewandowski 2003). Such pools of labour are supplied from the socio-economic strata and racial/ethnic groups to which the subaltern TikTokers belong to.
And herein lay the limits of brand-market mediated freedom through online spaces like TikTok. The visuals of their community surroundings emerging through YouTube interviews show their dismal subsistence living. The romance and playfulness of Bollywood songs in TikTok videos are intermittently fractured by abjection and poverty as the camera moves along.
We can understand the accommodation of such subaltern constituencies on the TikTok platform oriented to a brand advertisement through Adorno’s argument that the culture industry in late capitalism is defined entirely by the logic of marketing, seeking exchange value. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of television soaps or advertisements or Tik Tok videos depend not so much on the subject matter as on classifying, organising, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasised and extended.
This is aptly illustrated in Chaudhuri’s (2014)
essay on the politics of gender, mass media, and popular culture revealing how
market and communication research strategically combines ‘feminism and chauvinism’
to promote products without the commitment to feminist emancipation. In the
context of Dalit emancipation in the 21st century, Guru (2000) calls
for the Dalits to reach the more tolerant negotiable collective self to engage
with the structural inequality intensifying in a globalizing/privatizing India.
The precarity of subaltern TikTokers is no happenstance. How can it be trusted with
scripting democracy and transforming Dalit-subaltern lives?
References:
Bernstein, J. M. (1991). Introduction. In T. W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (pp. 1-28). Routledge.
Bhaskaran, S. (2004). Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/National Projects. Palgrave Macmillan.
Chaudhuri, M. (2014). Gender, Media, and Popular Culture in a Global India. In L. Fernandes (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia (pp. 145-159). Routledge.
Giddens, A. (2002). Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping our Lives. Profile Books.
Guru, G. (2000). Dalits in Pursuit of Modernity. In R. Thapar (Ed.), India: Another Millenium? (pp. 123-136). Penguin Books.
Iqbal, A. (2020, June 23). TikTok Revenue and Usage Statistics (2020). BusinessofApps. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/
Lewandowski, J. D. (2003). Disembedded Democracy? Globalisation and the ‘Third Way.’ European Journal of Social Theory, 6 (1), 115-131.
Mohanty, S. (2019). TikTok Marketing Strategy for Business: A Guide for Beginners. Vidooly. https://vidooly.com/blog/tiktok-marketing-for-business/
Morcom, A. (2015). Terrains of Bollywood Dance: (Neoliberal) Capitalism and the Transformation of Cultural Economies. Ethnomusicology, 59(2), 288-314.
Omar, B. & Dequan, W. (2020). Watch, Share, or Create: The Influence of Personality Traits and User Motivation on TikTok Mobile Video Usage. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies 14(4), 121-136.
https://doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v14i04.12429
Perez, S. (2020, June 25), TikTok launches TikTok for Business for marketers, takes on Snapchat with new AR ads. TechCrunch.https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/25/tiktok-launches-tiktok-for-business-for-marketers-takes-on-snapchat-with-new-ar-ads/
Shrivastava, S. (2020, July 1). Stars of TikTok, Safe Haven for Artistes, Voices on India's Margins, Speak Out on Sudden Ban. The Wire. https://thewire.in/culture/chinese-apps-ban-tiktok-stars
Update in Marathi. (2019, November 21). Real Story of Viral Couple, Raveena Tandon Tweeted about Viral Couple, Trending Couple Dance. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9d5E2IFTtg
Yadav, J. (2020, March 3). TikTokers dubbed ‘Shudras of the Internet’: Indians didn’t spare even social media from casteism. The Print.https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/tiktokers-dubbed-shudras-of-internet-Indians-didnt-spare-even-social-media-from-casteism/377759/
Yadav, J. (2020, June 30). ‘We’re devastated, my wives cried’ — TikTok stars in Maharashtra village crushed by app ban. The Print.
https://theprint.in/india/were-devastated-my-wives-cried-tiktok-stars-in-maharashtra-village-crushed-by-app-ban/451772/Pushpesh Kumar is a Professor in
the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad. Debomita Mukherjee is a Research Assistant in the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad).
Comments
Post a Comment