04 Sasanka Perera Humour and The Performance of Power in South Asia Anxiety Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times

HUMOUR AND THE PERFORMANCE
OF POWER IN SOUTH ASIA
This book critically examines the role and politics of humour and the performance
of power in South Asia. What does humour do and how does it manifest when lived
political circumstances experience ruptures or instability? Can humour that emerges
in such circumstances be viewed as a specifc narrative on the nature of democracy
in the region? Drawing upon essays from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, this
volume discusses many crucial historical and contemporary themes, including
dance-drama performances in northern India; caste and stand-up comedy in India;
cartoon narratives of citizens’ anxieties; civic participation through social media
memes in Sri Lanka; media, politics and humorous public in Bangladesh; the
politics of performance in India; and the infuence of humour and satire as political
commentaries. The volume explores the impact of humour in South Asian folklore,
ritual performances, media and journalism, and online technologies.
This topical and interdisciplinary book will be essential for scholars and
researchers of cultural studies, political science, sociology and social anthropology,
media and communication studies, theatre and performance studies, and South
Asian studies.
Sasanka Perera is Professor of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi,

India.
Dev Nath Pathak is Assistant Professor of Sociology at South Asian University,

New Delhi, India.
‘Perera and Pathak weave together a number of “serious” perspectives on humour.
Inaugurating a novel method to excavate the nuances of cultural politics in South
Asia, the book ofers useful insights that both refne and deepen scholarship in
South Asian studies. Edited by two prominent South Asianists, this book will proft
all social scientists who are willing to undertake serious adventures beyond the
predictable, formulaic and mainstream approaches. It is profoundly engrossing and
enriching – a must read!’
Ashok Acharya, Professor, Department of
Political Science, University of Delhi, India
‘Humour expands the feld of politics at innocent moments, but to dissect the codes
of subversive energy inherent in humour is extremely challenging. A pioneering
efort at south Asian scale, here, the subversive politics, the hidden layers of the
embedded past of the region and the cultural nuances of humour all come alive
brilliantly. From Punch to stand-up comedy, and from Khattar Kaka’s philosophical
forays to internet memes, the book ofers an extraordinary canvas of humour and
its subversive energy in South Asia.’
Sadan Jha, Associate Professor, Centre for
Social Studies, Surat, Gujarat, India
‘In complete seriousness, this amazing work examines humour in social and
political relations in diverse contexts! What makes the book diferent and iconic
in some senses is the unravelling of laughter and humour in classical frames of
analysis. It opens a new mode of understanding social reality: a lens which is often
ignored because it is considered trivial or merely funny. By taking it seriously,
anthropologists Perera and Pathak have opened up novel avenues for research in
our eforts to unpack a troubled world disrupted by political instability, violence,
anxiety, trauma, and much else.’
Meenakshi Thapan, Former Professor of Sociology and Director,
Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India
HUMOUR AND THE
PERFORMANCE OF
POWER IN SOUTH ASIA
Anxiety, Laughter and Politics
in Unstable Times
Edited by Sasanka Perera and

Dev Nath Pathak
Cover image: Anoli Perera, The Joke, pencil on paper, 17x19 cm, 2021.
First published 2022
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549
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CONTENTS
List of fgures vii

Acknowledgements ix
List of contributors xi
1 Introduction: cultural politics of humour in South Asia 1

Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak
PART I
Humour in literary and visual subversions 23
2 Colonial cartoons: Punch and vernacular Punch politics of humour

in colonial India 25
Divyendu Jha
3 Khattar Kaka’s subversive Hinduism: a case of literary-cultural

politics of humour 45
Dev Nath Pathak
PART II
Folkloric worldviews: laughter as performed narratives 65
4 Tales from Assam’s tea gardens: when humour becomes resistance

in the everyday life-world of labourers 67
Prithiraj Borah
vi Contents
5 Dramatic Haryanvi humour: a case of subversion in jakari

and ragni 81
Monika Yadav
6 ‘A Sri Lankan Arrives in Hell’: a case of laughing at ‘Sri Lanka’

and the ‘Sri Lankan’ in a collection of modern folktales 95
Lal Medawattegedara
PART III
Mediated messages for laughing and thinking 105
7 Humour, criticality and the performance of anonymous power:

internet memes as political commentaries in Sinhala society 107
Sasanka Perera
8 Humorous masculinity: Nepali men in mediated Indian

male gaze 139
Sandhya A.S and Chitra Adkar
9 Politics of performance and performance of politics: analysing

stand-up comedy in the Indian context 156
Sukrity Gogoi and Simona Sarma
10 Humorous public in Bangladesh: an analytical reading of

mediated politics 178
Ratan Kumar Roy
Index 192
FIGURES
1.1 A cartoon by Gameela Samarasinghe, Pravada (July-December 2001,

Numbers 19 and 20, p. 132) 13
2.1 John Tenniel, “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger,”
appeared in Punch on 22 August 1857. Source: Tenniel, J. Cartoons
from Punch, Vol. 1–2. Published in 1895 by Bradbury & Evans,
London. Courtesy of Hathitrust Digital Library 30
2.2 “The New Year’s Gift” by John Tenniel, published in Punch in
1858. Source: Tenniel, J. Cartoons from Punch, Volume 2. London:
Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Hathitrust Digital Library 31
2.3 John Tenniel, “Justice” appeared in Punch on 12 September 1857.
Source: Tenniel, J. Cartoons from Punch. London: Bradbury &
Evans. Digitised by Cornell University Library: Courtesy of
Hathitrust Digital Library 32
2.4 “Baboo Jaberjee,” an 1895 Punch illustration of Bengali Bhadralok
parodied in The Baboo Ballads by the English, who found the idea
of educated Indians hard to accept. Source: Courtesy of Project
Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org/fles/25129/25129-h/25129-h.htm 35
2.5 Lord Curzon ‘Propitiating Lord Ganesha’, a satirical response from
a 1902 edition of Hindi Punch. Source: Lord Curzon in Indian
Caricature being A Collection of Cartoons by Harishchandra
Talchekar, published in 1905. Courtesy of Public Library of India,
Government of India 37
2.6 “Elokeshi and Madhavchandra Giri,” Mahant ofers Elokeshi
childbirth medicine, to drug her before raping, ca 1880.
Folk art (Kalighat painting), author unknown. Courtesy
of Old Indian Arts: Historical Artworks of Indian Subcontinent
from www.oldindianarts.in/2012/09/kalighat-paintings-on-
tarakeswar-afair.html (accessed on 15 April 2020) 40
viii Figures
7.1 Sinhala-language meme on Sri Lankan presidential election, 2019 119

7.2 ‘Pad Man’ meme 120
7.3 ‘Pad Man vs Van Man’ meme 121
7.4 Meme No. 1 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate,
Sajith Premadasa 123
Sajith Premadasa 124
Gotabhaya Rajapasha 125
7.7 Meme No. 2 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate
Gotabhaya Rajapasha emphasising nepotism and intra-family
competitiveness 126
7.8 Sinhala-language meme on Sri Lankan Independence Day 127
7.9 English-language meme on Sri Lankan Independence Day 128
7.10 Meme on Sri Lankan Health Minister’s Covid-19-related
public performance 129
7.11 Meme on Sri Lanka’s increasing debt to China 130
7.12 Anti-Chinese Sinhala-language meme in the context of the
COVID-19 pandemic 131
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has come into being through a number of stages, at each of which the
help from specifc people and institutions have aided in taking it forward.
The initial idea for the book came via the discussions generated at the confer-
ence, ‘Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter
and Politics in Unstable Times’ on 27 and 28 June 2019, in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
This was one of the sabbatical period projects of Sasanka Perera. Without the intel-
lectual accommodation of the Board of Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences,
which gave its approval and leave from South Asian University, the conference and
the planning that went into it would not have been possible.
The editors are thankful to the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in
Colombo, Sri Lanka, for agreeing to host the conference. It attracted papers
from 19 researchers based on research in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. We
acknowledge our intellectual debt to all of the scholars who presented their work
for broadening our own knowledge and ideas on how humour works in South
Asia in unstable times. The fundamental set of questions we wanted to address
in the conference are captured in the following words from our concept note:
“What does humour do or how does it work when the political circumstances in
which we live experience ruptures or instability? Can we see humour that emerges
in these circumstances as a very specifc narrative on the nature of democracy in
the region?” We also noted at the time that “social sciences in South Asia – as a
collective enterprise” have not “posed such questions in intellectual terms so far.”
Moreover, “the basic premise upon which the conference [was] conceptualized is
that humour generated in these circumstances is not merely a matter simple ‘jokes’
with an inbuilt sense of liminality, but is meant to circulate over time with many
after-lives.” These initial ideas that drove the conference also continued to guide its
afterlife as this book began to take shape. In many ways, the book is an incomplete
answer to these questions and anxieties.
x Acknowledgements
We are immensely grateful to the International Centre for Ethnic Studies not
only for readily agreeing to host the event, and allowing us to move the conference
out of Delhi where we do most of our intellectual activities, but also for doing it
with such elegance and grace accompanied by great food. In particular, we are in
debt to the centre’s director, Mario Gomez and his colleagues, Mohamed Mowsil
and Lakmali Alwis, for their sense of collegiality, professionalism and hospitality.
The India-Sri Lanka Foundation in New Delhi very willingly funded the travel
and accommodation of all Indian participants who attended the conference, which
enabled the conference to be fuller in terms of ideas presented and where those
ideas were coming from. We acknowledge the foundation’s graciousness. Dev
Nath Pathak’s travel was funded by South Asian University’s recurrent research
grant scheme, for which we are thankful. The conference was organised amidst
considerable anxieties as just a month before, Sri Lanka had experienced a deadly
terrorist attack taking hundreds of lives, and advisories against travel to Sri Lanka
had been issued by many countries. In this context, we are thankful to the Sri
Lankan High Commission in New Delhi and the Consulate in Mumbai, as well as
the Sri Lankan government’s online service, for issuing visas quickly to Indian and
Bangladeshi participants.
From the conference to the book, we lost many papers for a variety of reasons.
These were mostly Sri Lankan writers. But we also gained a few other papers
since the conference ended. The publishing plan was frst presented at the end of
the conference itself, and we were able to adhere to our plan. We are thankful to
all the scholars whose work has fnally been presented in this volume after going
through two main and many subsequent phases of editing. Divyendu Jha, who is
a contributor to this volume, also ofered his time for editorial work associated
with the volume. Routledge’s Shashank Shekhar Sinha’s keen interest in the book
and the efcient handling of the book proposal by colleagues in Routledge’s New
Delhi ofce, including Antara Ray Chaudhury and Rimina Mohapatra, ensured
that Routledge would take the publication forward. We acknowledge their profes-
sionalism and interest in our work, and we are thankful for their patience. We are
also thankful to the anonymous reviewers who had commented on our proposal
and ofered us their advice, which we have taken in – to the extent possible. Finally,
we thank Anoli Perera in Colombo for doing the artwork titled, ‘The Joke’ (pencil
on paper; 17x19 cm; 2021) specifcially for this book at very short notice, which
now illustrates the cover.
We hope the book will generate an interest in the serious study of humour in
South Asia in times to come.
New Delhi
2 October 2021
CONTRIBUTORS
Sandhya A.S. is pursuing her doctoral studies at the International Max Planck
Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-
SPCE), Cologne, in association with the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University
of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany. She co-authored an essay entitled “Female
Employers and Their Maids in New Delhi: ‘This Is Our Culture’” for South Asia
Research. She recently received a grant to study the Nepalese migration corridor in
Japan as a part of her doctoral feldwork.
Chitra Adkar is pursuing her doctoral studies at the Centre for the Study of Social
Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her areas of research are
internet humour and digital sociology.
Prithiraj Borah is a PhD scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social

Sciences, at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. He broadly works
in the areas of trade union and student association politics, colonial history of the
plantations in South Asia, and class and caste politics in Assam.
Sukrity Gogoi is an M.Phil. Research Scholar at the Advanced Centre for Women’s
Studies (ACWS), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She completed
her Master’s degree in English literature from the Faculty of Arts, University of
Delhi. Her research interests include gender studies, performance studies, North-
East India, art and culture. Among her publications is the essay “Voices of Change:
Spoken Word Poetry in the Indian Context,” in Bound by Culture: Essays on Cultural
Production Signifying Gender edited by Selvy Thiruchandran. She previously worked
at The Assam Tribune and Northeast Now as a journalist.
xii Contributors
Divyendu Jha teaches political science as guest faculty at Kirorimal College,

University of Delhi, and is a doctoral research candidate in Political Science at
the University of Delhi, India. As part of his doctoral degree, he is researching the
broad area of humour and its relation with politics of identity and resistance. His
research interest lies in exploring alternative ways through which conventional
political theory, thoughts and Indian politics can be discussed and understood.
He has also contributed articles and book reviews in international journals and
chapters in edited volumes.
Lal Medawattegedara teaches English at The Open University of Sri Lanka.

His latest publication, “‘Your Majesty, your son is unable to learn?’: A study of
the notions of ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ inscribed in a sample of southern folktales
from ancient Lanka” appears in the OUSL Journal, Volume 14, Issue 2, 2019. He
is a fction writer. His frst novel, Playing Pillow Politics at MGK, won the 2012
Gratiaen Prize, which is the most prestigious award granted for a work of creative
writing in Sri Lanka.
Dev Nath Pathak is founding faculty of the Sociology Department at South Asian
University, New Delhi, India. He is Reviews Editor and Editorial Board Member
with the journal Society and Culture in South Asia and also serves on the editorial
board of Journal of Human Values. A few of his recent publications include: Living
and Dying: Meanings in Maithili Folklore (2018), Another South Asia (2017), Culture
and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication (2017), Intersections in Sociology,
Art and Art History: A Conversation with Parul Dave-Mukherji (2016), Narrating
Nations, Performing Politics: A Conversation with Vasudha Dalmia (2017), Decoding
Visual World: Intersections of Art, Anthropology and Art History in South Asia (2019),
and Against Nation: Thinking Like South Asian (2019). He was a visiting scholar at
the Brown International Advanced Research Institute, at Brown University (2013),
a Charles Wallace fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast (2015), and a scholar-in-
residence at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (2019).
Sasanka Perera is a founding faculty member at the Department of Sociology at

South Asian University, New Delhi, India, and was the Editor of Society and Culture
in South Asia from 2015 to 2020. He is the author of Fear of the Visual? Anthropology,
Photography and Anxieties of Seeing (2020), Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from
Darker Places in Paradise (2016) and Violence and the Burden of Memory: Remembrance
and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (2015). He has coedited various books and
co-wrote Against the Nation: Thinking Like South Asians (2019) with Dev Nath
Pathak and Ravi Kumar.
Ratan Kumar Roy is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Culture, Media and
Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. He was a residency research
fellow in the Asia Culture Centre, Korea, from July–November 2018. He received
a doctoral award from the Department of Sociology, South Asian University (A
Contributors xiii
University Established by SAARC Nations), New Delhi. His articles based on

empirical research are published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes,
including Media as Politics in South Asia and Culture and Politics in South Asia
(Routledge). He is the co-editor of the SWAN report on the Status of Women
in Media in South Asia, March 2020. He worked as a television journalist in
Bangladesh before pursuing his doctoral research on the relationship of audiences
and television news in Bangladesh. He is also the author of Television in Bangladesh:
News and Audiences (Routledge 2021). He has coedited SWAN-UNESCO report
on the Status of Women in Media in South Asia, March 2020. He is the editor-
in-chief of the SDG Newsletter published by the SIMEC Institute of Technology,
Bangladesh.
Simona Sarma is pursuing a PhD at the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies,
Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, India, and completed her post-
graduation study in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics and M.Phil.
in Women’s Studies from TISS, Mumbai. She coauthored an article entitled
“Contemporary ‘Folk’ Dynamics: Shifting Visions and Meanings in the Goalpariya
Folk Music of Assam,” in the international journal Folklore (Routledge).
Monika Yadav is a doctoral scholar in Sociology at the Department of Humanities

and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Mumbai, India. She
completed her post-graduation study in Sociology from the Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, India. Her research interests include popular culture,
folksongs, dance, sexuality, gender and visual media.
1
INTRODUCTION
Cultural politics of humour in South Asia
In the preface to his theoretical refection on humour, Terry Eagleton notes, “a

good many studies of humour begin with the shamefaced acknowledgement that
to analyse a joke is to kill it dead” (2019, p. 2). We may indeed stumble upon
many treatises on humour that may not trigger any sense of humour. This anxiety
becomes particularly visible in the attempts to theoretically reason with, while also
trying to enjoy humorous stuf. Could the two be performed simultaneously? This
is not necessarily possible, and that itself need not be mistaken as an obstacle. And
if the two could be performed simultaneously, it ought not be mistaken as a com-
promise for one in favour of the other. Also, humour and writing about the politics
of humour can be two very diferent things, which need not always come together
in a single forum masquerading as the same. After all, as Eagleton also says tongue-
in-cheek, “an anatomical acquaintance with the large intestine is no obstacle to
enjoying a meal” (Ibid., p. 4).
The objective of this collection of essays is not to promise a theoretically clean
understanding of what humour is or what it does as a fnal word. Instead, it is a pre-
liminary exploration to begin with, undertaken to depict the region of South Asia
as a turf of laughter and contesting emotions, particularly in difcult and uncertain
times, as against the turf for various kinds of wars, treaties, ties and acts of coopera-
tion as is often the case in many renditions of South Asia. And in so doing, we hope
it would be possible to create a sense of a tentative body of sociology-anthropology
of humour, which ought to be continued as an intellectual imperative in the after-
math of the discourse this book hopes to initiate. The basic contention of this
book’s ten chapters is that this turf called South Asia is fraught with instances of
laughter, giggle, gufaws and so on, often performed in quotidian circumstances
as well as in extraordinary moments. And through such contents, one can see the
emergence of a socio-cultural axis of politics if one were curious enough to look.
As a truism, behind everything we know there is a joke, and it is a challenge to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-1
2 Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak
our intellectual training to hear or see the barbs, wit, sarcasm, and if none of these,
laughter, for the sake of laughter.
The chapters in the book employ various philosophical and theoretical insights
as aids in unspooling the meanings tied around the spools of humorous narratives,
performances and simple jokes. However, seldom do we hear any of the authors
promising a fne theoretical conclusion even though there is fne theoretical reading.
Even though all of the chapters do not refer to Terry Eagleton’s ideas on humour
or Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of laughter, there is a sense that too much theorising
can undermine the interpretative depth of humour. In short, humour can be sac-
rifced at the altar of theoretical seriousness, so to say. This is in fact what Eagleton
had noted – as we have referred to earlier – as a ubiquitous anxiety among many
writers. This is not an unfounded fear. But the aim of this book is not to compile
an anthology of humour in South Asia in general or in difcult times. That is, to
present a cartography of how and when people laugh is not our intention. Instead,
our aim is to see how humour might work as signposts to a closer reading of South
Asia and its cultural politics, particularly in politically unstable times within which
the chapters in this book are broadly located. And in this regard, each chapter is
capable of tickling, provoking, enraging and pushing a serious reader to the laugh-
ter that may oscillate between coherence-incoherence, congruity-incongruity and
moral or morally apathetic. But more importantly, we hope it will allow readers to
go beyond the laughter and fathom the layers of politics that levity might gener-
ally camoufage. In other words, all of the authors represented in this volume are
willing to take the risk of reading humour even though it might “kill the joke” in
the sense referred to by Eagleton. But that is a necessary risk one has to take if a
corpus of humour in the region is to be formulated that goes beyond mere repro-
duction. We are also mindful that even those yarns that are reproduced by diferent
authors and memes and cartoons presented might be in any number of South Asian
languages other than English. The translation of these texts into English, which is
necessary for the task set for this volume, might impact upon the humorous sen-
sibility of a given text. Nevertheless, we consider these as necessary steps and risks
one has to take when moving humour from its day-to-day performances into the
domains of social science refection.
The point in all this is to suggest not to indulge in the anxieties that humour
might create, but instead to read the responses to such anxiety of humour – if any.
That is the most sensible domain in which to read humour in the past or today
may be found. One of the core objectives of this book, across its chapters, is to
fathom the meanings of humour as understood by diferent stakeholders, including
the authors, but also the people who narrate them as well as the people targeted
by humorous yarns, jokes, cartoons and memes. At times, humorous subversion is
simply mistaken for linear and simplistic rivalry, but then, in each such instance,
there is an inherent value-contestation, a hilarious interaction of moralities, and a
confict-ridden conversation of opposite groups. In a book such as this, one cannot
ascertain whether such humorous contents and contestations amount to a socio-
political transformation, whether they set anything right or perpetuate the wrong,
Introduction 3
or whether nothing happens at all. But the achievable bottom line is that humour
is a socio-political phenomenon, unregulated to such an extent that any scholarship
ought to be an unfnished project until the next book.
Anxieties in theorising humour

Taking humour seriously has always been a difculty and an anxiety-ridden proj-
ect, and hence theorising humour has also become associated with this difculty.
Even so, refections on humour in the region and the world are nothing new.
Early South Asian thinking was quite amenable to humour. When surfng across
the cultural history of ancient South Asia, it would be impossible to miss Bharata
Muni’s masterly treatise, Natya Shastra, written in about 500 BCE, that dealt with
what may be generally called dramaturgy and histrionics. It was a text that was
infuential throughout the region in its time. As part of his discourse, Bharata
Muni also dealt with the theory of rasas, or aesthetic sensibilities or emotions. The
treatise also discusses hasya (roughly, humour) as one of the rasas. In addition to the
basic characteristics and its performative dimensions, Bharata Muni’s text referred
to a special incident of great signifcance. He notes, “Once they had mastered
the scripture of dramatic arts, my sons began to ridicule everyone in the universe
with farces” (Siegel, 1989, p. 57). The trained artists, Bharata Muni’s sons, are also
known to have performed satire, teasing the reputed sages. This was apparently
a play employing ‘vulgarities’ to upset Brahmans, holy men and ascetics. Those
who knew how to mock the revered, poke fun at the powers that be, use wit and
sarcasm against the holier than thou, were instantly a reason for moral anxiety.
Similarly, the Sri Lankan mythic character Andare as a court jester was known for
not sparing anyone, from the king to his ministers as well as ordinary villagers; his
intelligence and wit rendered him respect and proft while also aided him in escap-
ing difcult situations.
Much of the difculties with taking humour seriously, including its theorisa-
tion, despite humour’s inherent association with the human condition, are linked
to its seeming extreme subjectivity. After all, how can something so seemingly triv-
ial, vain and open to interpretations be allowed into the clinical domains of analysis
in social sciences? In the domains of social sciences, embroiled in the virtues of
objectivity, such an anxiety is quite understandable. This still remains an anxiety
that has not been fully resolved, which we will revisit later in this chapter when we
discuss humour as a sociological category. Despite the difculties in theoretically
defning and arriving at any fnal classifcation, there have been various attempts to
comprehend humour.1 Humour, etymologically, originates from the Latin umor,
meaning liquid. It was assumed in an older system of medicine that the human
body with a balance of fuids such as blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile will
be healthy, and thus in ‘good humour’. This resonates with the South Asian tradi-
tions of medicine, too. For example, in Ayurveda, there is a conception of tridosha
(three elements or bio-energy), namely kapha (element of water and earth), pitta
(element of fre and water) and vata (element of air and ether). The right balance
of the three gives rise to a good-humoured body. But then the notion of ‘good
humour’ has undergone considerable change, and it has over time become associ-
ated with something incongruous with accepted norms.
Philosophers took upon themselves the onerous task of making a distinction
between acceptable and unacceptable humour in about the 18th century. They
looked down upon morally dubious forms such as sarcasm, mockery and wit that
could hurt or demean someone. Instead, they advocated cultivation of a sense of
humour that could be harmless. This is because the biting nature of humour was
formally recognised along with its political potential, and an attempt was made to
domesticate humour. Despite reservations, the terms humour, laughter, joking, com-
edy, amusement, mirth, etc. are used synonymously in 20th-century philosophy and
humour theory. The indeterminacy of humour, thus, inspires diverse theoretical
trajectories.
The ambition to theorise humour eluded philosophers and theorists for a long
time. As long as it was a search for a single-universal – a theory from nowhere – it
seemed to have failed the erudition of scholars. Then, there was a turn to a plural-
ism of theories, enabling scholars to read signifcance in a diversity of perspectives.
However, this was largely within the philosophical ambit. And thus a recent work
has admitted,
while concentrating chiefly on philosophical approaches to humour, this dis-

cussion inevitably moves into other fields such as cultural studies, literary
theory, religion, psychoanalysis, and psychology; the broad focus will hope-
fully make for a richer account of humour and its bearing on the human
condition.
(McDonald, 2012, p. 8)
This makes sense in a time when a purely theoretical discussion amounts to cre-
ating a body of arcane knowledge. Refecting on the multiplicity of humorous
expressions, Eagleton recalls William Hazlitt, who quoted fellow author Isaac Bar-
row in saying that
humour is so “versatile and multiform”, a phenomenon of which any

exhaustive definition is impossible to come by: Sometimes it is lodged in
a sly question, in a smart answer, in a quirkish reason, in a shrewd intima-
tion, in cunningly diverting or cleverly restoring an objection; sometimes it
is couched in a bold scheme of speech, in a tart irony, in a lusty hyperbole,
in a startling metaphor, in a plausible reconciliation of contradictions, or in
acute nonsense.
(Eagleton, 2019, p. 16)
Given the polysemy of humour, Eagleton considered it foolhardy of theorists

to try cramming all varieties into a single theoretical formula (Ibid., p. 16). More
so, in the milieu with little tolerance for grand narratives of legislators, and more
Introduction 5
inclined to the micro-narratives of interpreters, as announced elsewhere by the

theorists of postmodernism,2 the idea is to create and capture discourses rather than
defne with a dead end. Also, it would be mere recapitulation if one summarises
various theoretical takes on humour which have been done by others elsewhere, as
mentioned earlier. Hence, in the following pages, this introductory essay eclecti-
cally reads sections from works of philosophy and theory in order to acknowledge
some of the key strands that provide the collective hinge of the chapters in this
book.
(In)coherence and (In)congruence: humour’s characteristics

Laughter, a key denominator of humour, need not always be bound to a clear
category; it need not only be a coherent sign; it need not always refer to a sense of
clarity about congruity or incongruity with set norms and status quo. With Eagle-
ton (2019), it is worth looking back at the complex trajectory; in the beginning,
the evolutionary thinking (be it of Darwin or conventional ethnologists) consid-
ered a relationship of laughter with melancholic crying; and in another way, so did
Hobbes, who underlined that one wants to laugh at oneself in order to overcome
the inferiority of the past. He noted in Leviathan that laughter is an act in grimace;
despite the separation of the body and mind in Cartesian meditations, there was an
idea of the crying body’s expression in laughter. Mostly, the philosophers seemed
to operate with the idea of good humour, as opposed to bad ones, which may hurt
someone’s sentiment. It was much later that the apprehended badness of humour
became a source of subversive cultural politics. It gave a new currency to the idea
of congruous-incongruous, moral-immoral.
At times, some contradictory pleasures are entailed in humour as well. Recog-
nition of such inherent contradictions is indeed a latter development in scholarly
ruminations. For example, “the Irish have been known to savour anti-Irish jokes”
(Eagleton, 2019, p. 24). Similarly, the Sinhalas have often laughed at themselves in
their folktales and yarns, as typifed by the biting reference to Sinhalas by them-
selves as inherently stupid people whose only interest is to eat oil cakes, a local
sweetmeat made out of four and coconut treacle.3 Similarly, folks from Punjab in
India tend to circulate jokes about turban-wearing Punjabis, while Bengalis have
plenty of jokes about themselves. However, such joking assumes another level of
signifcance when there is an inter-ethnic, or cross-border, slur to it in the context
of which the target of ridicule moves from the self and selves to the other. The
Bengalis in Bangladesh often crack various jokes about Bengalis in India. One of
the better known of these jokes is, when you go to a Bengali household in India,
the host will ask you, “have you eaten your meal before coming to us, or will you
eat after going home?” Obviously, the host does not want to feed the visitor. Like-
wise, there is another dimension to Punjabi jokes, if they are cracked across the line
of control between India and Pakistan. While joking about oneself is of one kind of
interpretative signifcance, joking about others is of another. The target of ridicule
may get sentimentally ‘hurt’, that need not be mistaken for bad humour. Instead,
it is part of the culture of humour by inviting the hurt ones to frame their own
humorous retaliation. This was what generations of Bengali Kobi (broadly mean-
ing intellectuals) did in the practice of Kobir Ladai (duel of intellectuals) using barb
and wit, humour and even abuse, in order to join in with antitheses against pro-
posed theses of the opponents.4 And if Kobir Ladai is an extinct practice of bygone
times and many Bengali youth seem to be ignorant of it, there is the still prevalent
practice of adda,5 a kind of congregation of folks for humorous banter, which also
becomes a source of serious information.
There has been ample stress on the corrective measures that humour can pro-
vide. In one of the earliest discussions, Bergson (2008) developed a similar insight,
with the example of a man falling in front of a group of passersby; the man had
failed to successfully navigate beyond whatever hindrance he had come across in his
usual course of walking. In his words,
beyond actions and attitudes that are automatically punished by their natu-
ral consequences, there remains a certain inflexibility of the body, of the
mind and of the character that society would like to eliminate to obtain a
greater elasticity and a better sociability of its members. This inflexibility is
the comic, laughter is the punishment.
(Ibid., p. 11)
The comic comes into existence when fexibility, spontaneity, agility and creativity
are hindered. In this sense, in the context of the political upheavals and disruptions,
which mark much of South Asia, it is no accident that political humour emerges,
when democratic rights and personal freedoms are most seriously curtailed. And in
those conditions, humour inches closer to what André Breton (2001) had termed
‘black humour’, even though Breton’s concentration was literature from his sur-
realist perspective. Laughter sets it right by humiliating those responsible for the
hindrance. This is what Cameron also means when he notes, “the fear of ridicule
seems to be innate” and “although we may appear ridiculous in the eyes of oth-
ers it is only our awareness of the fact which can infuence our own behaviour”
(Cameron, 1993, p. 6). In this sense, for Bergson, laughter is moral in character
and implication. If stifness and rigidity are persistent, the object of laughter, the
butt of ridicule, turns ugly. The freely circulating humorous yarns about politics
and politicians in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka since the 1980s amply
demonstrate this tendency, where jokes become ‘nasty’ as life becomes more dif-
fcult, making politicians and their actions seem utterly foolish. In these situations,
humour is not simply moral in the sense explained by Bergson, but it also becomes
a kind of ‘weapon of the weak’ that is repeatedly used, but cannot be controlled
by those in power in the sense explained by James Scott in a very diferent situa-
tion (Scott, 1985). In other words, humour in these conditions, in whatever form
it might emerge, becomes an ‘art of resistance’ (Scott, 1990). And, in many cases
discussed in the various essays in this book, humour turning ugly cannot be dis-
missed simply because of its tone. That tone is part of its political articulation and
Introduction 7
meaning-making, and the idea of coherence and congruity, or incoherence and

incongruity, remains an abiding concern.
But then, all expressions of humour and their afterefects need not be so clearly
coherent that one can easily decipher anything more than instant afect. Everyone
is not bound by restrictions like a protocol-bound head of state or the leader of an
international institution who can laugh heartily in assigned circumstances, but not
hysterically. Ordinarily, and culturally, folks can laugh uncontrollably with deep
political suggestion, or laugh gingerly to mean a probable respite from repression.
Or many could laugh for the sake of laughter, humour for the sake of humour, as
was art for art’s sake elsewhere. Again Eagleton helps, when he says,
laughter signifies, then, but it also involves the breakdown of signification

into pure sound, spasm, rhythm and breath. It is hard to form impeccably
well-shaped sentences when you are thrashing helplessly around on the floor.
The disruption of coherent meaning to be found in so many jokes is reflected
in the disintegrative nature of laughter itself.
(Eagleton, 2019, p. 9)
Coherent or incoherent, congruous or incongruous, laughter nonetheless is not

dissociated from belief and assumptions. Perhaps this is why laughter and smile
could be distinguished. A newborn baby smiles, until a sense of meaning in rela-
tionship with the social world develops. That is when the smile is likely to change
into laughter; the biological-anatomical idea of the balance of fuid, humour,
reaches the social world of meaning, and it invites reasoning, enquiry and argu-
mentation. Furthermore, wit and farce bring about a sense of intellectualism to
humour. Not that the intellectual quotient was conspicuously absent when a baby
only smiled. Those who were capable of laughing could read a baby’s smile in
the larger intellectual framework of culture, society and politics. However, there
is an outrageously intellectual kind of humour as well characterised by wit, barb,
sarcasm, jokes, etc. It is not very difcult to establish the coherence and congru-
ity or incoherence and incongruity of such humour. Besides, it is always possible
to explore whether an instance of humour entails ‘convulsive merriment’, which
means, as Eagleton notes, “monkeys who bare their teeth in what appears to be a
smile may actually be issuing a threat” (Ibid., p. 25).
On the signifcance of laughter, and its impact on the socio-political order,
almost everything seems to revolve around the Bakhtin’s emphasis on the deep
philosophical meaning in Rabelais and His World (1965). For him, the festive car-
nival is a
subversive, disruptive, upside-down ‘second world’; in carnival the repres-

sive views, lies, and hypocrisy of the officially determined everyday world is
unmasked, challenged, and subverted. The language and tone of this ‘second
world’ is laughter.
(Ibid., p. 4)
Contrasting the ‘classic’ aesthetic of the church and ‘ofcial’ Medieval culture with
the ugly ‘grotesque’ aesthetics of ‘unofcial’ carnival time, Bakhtin outlines the
method of grotesque realism:
The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lower-
ing of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material
level, to the sphere of the earth and body in their indissoluble unity.
(Ibid., p. 20)
Carnival in this sense presents grotesque humour that could be subversive of of-
cial discourse. Degradation entails parodies to exaggerate features of the grotesque
body such as large noses, bellies, mouths, breasts, phalli, etc., to lower the values
of ofcial culture. When one turns to instances from South Asia, the bodies also
acquire more abstract forms, such as market, industry, state, ruling power, class of
owners or that of workers and even a virus and so on so forth. And in the same
breath, the bodies – qua the target of humour – also get associated with caste, class
and gender, as we will see in the various chapters in this book.
Degradation understood in this sense emphasises incompleteness, transformation
and unfnished, unbalanced and contradictory features. In various instances discussed
in the chapters in this book, there is a refection of grotesque realism, seeming exag-
gerations of social and political leaders and the ideologies they represent. The liberating
impact of a carnivalesque humour or such festivity, in which the social worldview is
at ease, is perhaps well admitted. There is continuity with Bergsonian laughter, a
moral responsibility to set something right. A key issue that emerges is the distinction
between humour and seriousness. It seems Bakhtin endeavours to rescue laughter by
showing its signifcant stature in cultural history, literature and society. Humour thus
is as intellectually signifcant as ‘seriousness’ is. He privileges laughter over serious-
ness, suggesting that the former could hold out more cognitive value with regard to
human feelings. The formal, class-culture, ofcial and authoritarian knowledge may
not reveal this in the informal knowledge of the folk. And thus Bakhtin envisages to
liberate the gay truth of the world from the veils of gloomy lies spun by the seriousness
of fear, sufering and violence, and thereby delivers a prototype to fathom the depth
of humour in the larger interest to understand how and where people are located in
the socio-cultural order. The various chapters in this book engage with Bakhtin’s for-
mulation to fnd conceptual strength, such as Monika Yadav’s essay on the subversive
humour in the Ragini and Jakari dance-drama performances in Haryana. And likewise,
there is also a tendency to turn to James Scott, who gave the conceptual tool vis-à-vis
hidden transcript to elucidate the possibility of cultural politics in the informal social
scheme. The humorous components of hidden transcript assume greater signifcance
in the maintenance as well as subversion of order. However, as Scott cautioned, and
Prithiraj Borah reminds us in his essay in this book,
we do not wish to prejudge, by definition, the relation between what is said

in the face of power and what is said behind its back. Power relations are not,
Introduction 9
alas, so straightforward that we can call what is said in power-laden contexts

false and what is said offstage true. Nor can we simplistically describe the
former as a realm of necessity and the latter as a realm of freedom. What is
certainly the case, however, is that the hidden transcript is produced for a
different audience and under different constraints of power than the public
transcript.
(Scott, 1990, p. 5)6
However, a word of caution is imperative in order to keep the idea of humour

open-ended and not be entirely restricted to Bakhtin or even Scott. Eagleton
points out the vaunted expectation from festivity, spectacle and carnival (Eagleton,
2019). Given the nature of his times, Bakhtin did not factor in the presence of
mediums such as television, which immensely beneft from carnivalesque events.
Everything that generates a liberating laughter could be part of an industry, too.
Hence, Eagleton sifts through pages of cultural history, to ofer us examples of vari-
ous kinds, and to show how so-called liberating laughter was indeed a harbinger
of sponsored violence, or in the same stretch of reasoning, a prop to maintain the
drama of status quo (Ibid.). After all, the hilarity of Indians banging on metal plates
and often walking in large crowds across their neighbourhoods in response to an
appeal by the Prime Minister of India, during the COVID-19 lockdown, shows
carnivalesque festivity doing more harm than liberation. It brought noise when
solitude would have been more enduring and crowds when congregations were
legally not supposed to take place in deference to the virulent virus. Not to be
outdone by the Indian Prime Minister’s carnivalesque innovation, Sri Lankan Air
Force helicopters liberally sprayed Buddhist holy water “blessed during a week-
long chanting of special stanzas” over diferent parts of the island to ward of the
‘evil’ of COVID-19 in an operation some have called a “spiritual ofensive against
the coronavirus pandemic.”7 Both activities, however, went far beyond their carni-
valesque performative platforms and captured the considerable attention of people,
as indicated in numerous responses in the form of cartoons, yarns and memes in
both countries.
Particularly in contemporary contexts, any attempt at theorising and socio-
logically comprehending humour needs to take one specifc aspect of humour’s
target into account. That is, who is targeted by humour or satire and how would
its politics manifest in contemporary societies? This is an important consideration
specifcally when we look at humour as a form of politics and resistance. In a recent
interview, responding to the question “what is the ideal role of political satire in
a tolerant and democratic society?” and what its limits should be, Tariq Modood
notes, “satire should be used to criticize or draw attention to abuse of power,
excessive power, or forms of oppression” (Modood, 2021, p. 4). As he rightly
further points out, “most satire is directed at politicians, government, and power-
ful people; it makes very good sense, and it’s a very good feature of a democratic
life where that is part of the democratic culture” (Modood, 2021, p. 4). Modood
makes a commonsensical but important distinction between this kind of humour as
a means of ethical resistance and a mode of repression and control, which is inher-
ently anti-democratic. As he notes,
when the same tools of satire are directed at minorities – a people who are
not powerful – I think that’s the wrong kind of satire. This offensiveness
against minorities is more like racism than it is like political satire or political
critique. I would make this fundamental distinction between satirising the
powerful and satirising the powerless.
(Modood, 2021, p. 4)
We think this distinction is an important one to make in both theorising and

understanding humour, a distinction that underlies this collection of essays as a
preliminary efort towards bringing humour to bear upon the sociological imagi-
nation of South Asia.
The discursive frame of this book operates with a third variant, in addition
to the moralistic concern about humour (good humour for the good of society)
and a perspective of release (from repression, through subversion, and thus libera-
tion). That is, people simply crack jokes and engage in other kinds of humourous
activities irrespective of the consequences. There is cultural support for such comic
narratives, in traditions and modernities, so to say. The literary and folk tradi-
tions, in their invented avatars, make folks playful with socio-religious canons and
authorities; the contemporary practices pertaining to merchandise of entertain-
ment, such as stand-up comedies as well as memes on social media, invite laughter
for the sake of laughing at everything that may be repressive. They all seem to join
in the larger scheme of everyday life, and hence folks laugh unlike serious scholars.
In other words, they do so simply because it is possible, seems natural, and is part
and parcel of everyday life. If so dire, they garble the joke back. The act of garbling,
however, is no less humorous.
Humour as a sociological-anthropological category

Sociologists and anthropologist don’t laugh, for they do serious stuf! Or if they
do, it is akin to burping under the breath, or farting stealthily in the middle of a
conference, or spitting in public slyly, as it were. We will get to fathom this pun in
awhile. To begin with, we need to see the background in which sociologists’ fear
of humour could be situated. Historically, humour has not been taken very seri-
ously by social sciences, as the anxieties over its theorisation would also indicate,
and this is very evident in sociology. Perhaps one reason for this was the signif-
cant distancing of humour from serious reckoning that was promoted by Greek
literary traditions and philosophical positions, a stance that seems to have been
adopted by western social sciences in general, which were later circulated globally.
In these older writings, the terminology used was not humour, but laughter. Per-
haps more important than these distinctions is the imperative to situate humour as
a sociological-anthropological object of enquiry. This is because humour will not
Introduction 11
be complete without a degree of laugher. Plato was very specifc when he noted
in Laws, “no composer of comedy, iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted to hold
any citizen up to laughter, by word or gesture, with passion or otherwise” (quoted
in Morreall, 2016, p. 15). So comic in this case was a matter-of-fact performance,
not as a means of letting one lose control in the midst of laughter. Plato, as a vocal
critic of laughter, also considered it an emotion that counters rational self-control,
and therefore it should be avoided (Morreall, 2016). He notes in the Republic that
rulers should not engage in laughter because, “ordinarily when one abandons
himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction” (quoted in
Morreall, 2016, p. 15). Clearly, the reference here is to a situation where engaging
in laughter makes one lose control, and all sensible things might become unravelled
as a result. In the same sense, laughter was also malicious in the thinking of Plato.
This is why he refers to the enjoyment of comedy as a refection of scorn in Philebus
(Morreall, 2016). As he notes, “the ridiculous is a certain kind of evil, specifcally a
vice” (quoted in Morreall, 2016, p. 16). The issue for him was that vice was seen as
self-ignorance, and laughter was the means to this vice (Morreall, 2016).
Thinkers after Plato also continued to perceive laughter in a negative sense.
Even though Aristotle thought of wit as an important aspect of conversation, he
was in agreement with Plato that laughter is a matter of scorn (Morreall, 2016).
Even wit he still considered as ‘educated insolence’ (Morreall, 2016). In Nicoma-
chean Ethics, he notes, “most people enjoy amusement and jesting more than they
should . . . a jest is a kind of mockery, and lawgivers forbid some kinds of mockery –
perhaps they ought to have forbidden some kinds of jesting” (quoted in Morreall,
2016, p. 17). In other words, Aristotle was advising rulers of the need to control
humour, particularly publically expressed humour.
This rather negative position on humour exhibited by infuential Greek thinkers
also impacted the thought of early Christian thinkers as well as European culture
more generally. This tradition seems to have infuenced early social sciences, too.
For instance, though folklorists did write about humour in the context of their
writings on folklore, this was not a theme broadly covered in mainstream sociology
or anthropology. Laughter, when it did capture the interest of scholars, tended to
be often located in the realm of psychology as an emotion or as a matter of cathar-
sis, whereas humour in the same sense has been a focus in the realm of philosophy
and literature, and not in sociology and anthropology. No wonder sociologists lack
a sense of humour, even though Murray Davis (1993) tried teaching them about
the theoretical signifcance of humour in sociology!
Elsewhere, we have made a plea for radically rethinking the disciplinary frame-
work of sociology to reason with core issues in the region of South Asia.8 This
was to suggest that sociologists and anthropologists need not distinguish them-
selves from each other in the way they practiced their disciplines. One of the
many crises that plagues sociology and anthropology in South Asia is this distinc-
tion that perpetuates the colonial connotations about sociology and anthropology.
But more crucially, it forecloses the possibility of sociologists in engaging with
issues of interest beyond the taken-for-granted zones of comfort, and likewise,
it creates a spectral methodological fear for anthropologists to take specifc cul-

tural expressions seriously. This is so despite the self-congratulatory notes about
sociology, and anthropology, respectively turning interdisciplinary. Had that inter-
disciplinary turn ever happened, sociologists and anthropologists would have read
philosophy, psychology and works on literature, performance and folklore to learn
about humour as a foregone conclusion in social structure like Davis (1993) did.
Let alone interdisciplinarity, the divide between anthropology and sociology has
resulted in distance from the diverse objects of enquiry, humour included. For
example, anthropology may have still firted with visuals and performances despite
a sense of methodological apprehension,9 mainstream sociology in South Asia in
fact does not even operate with that fear. Could one conjecture that this separa-
tion has caused a fear about humour, too? Or is it a fear of anything that does not
instantly sound adequately ‘serious’ that we confront in contemporary sociology
and anthropology in South Asia? And even when references to humour appeared
in anthropological works, particularly in ethnographic documentation of every-
day life, it generally remained within the pages in an ornamental sense not unlike
photos in family albums, tucked away safely, consciously removed from the messy
domains of scandals and family feuds. But this allegation ought to be comple-
mented with another set of observations.
As Eagleton (2019) observed, when one person laughs, it may be tragedy; when
two laugh, it is sociology. There were always implications of laughter in sociology
among various individuals in the rank and fle of the discipline, in private and in
gossip sessions and tea rooms, canteens, cafés and so on. Unfortunately, however,
sociologists with seemingly spurious bouts of training in some of the best known
universities and institutions of higher learning failed to hear the laughter, just like
they fail to get the jokes about themselves even now. In India, there is a fairly
prevalent sarcastic notion about sociologists, which everyone understands except
professional sociologists. That is, the folks who know primarily about caste and
gender are called sociologists! In Sri Lanka, a yarn circulating among sociologists
in the 1980s and 1990s narrated the story of villagers pasting a piece of paper on
their doors stating the name of the chief householder, the number of people in the
household and their average income in order to keep away intruding feld research-
ers from disturbing their routine lives. Likewise, the anthropologists are the ‘butt
of many ridicules’, as it were, which they fail to hear, or even if they might hear,
they fail to understand despite their training in hearing and understanding people
in the practice of ethnography. A famous 1984 cartoon about anthropologists by
Gary Larson in his single-panel cartoon series The Far Side10 shows tribesmen hid-
ing their electronic gadgets as they spot anthropologists walking toward the tribal
settlement. They caution one another about the arrival of the researchers with the
words, “Anthropologists! Anthropologists!” The cartoon seems to suggest, let the
fools remain prisoners of their intellectual paradise, and think that the primitive
are unchanging! Similarly, in a special issue on the sociology and anthropology of
Sri Lanka, the Sinhala-language journal Pravada published a cartoon by Colombo
University academic Gameela Samarasinghe depicting two young researchers from
Introduction 13
a local university interviewing a man from a local indigenous group and asking him
how they preserve meat using local technology; his answer was to ask his wife to
show their refrigerator to the two researchers, which she does (see Figure 1.1).11
In these kinds of humorous renditions, the sociologists and anthropologists are
interestingly depicted as intellectually fossilised entities. Perhaps, this may apply
FIGURE 1.1 A cartoon by Gameela Samarasinghe, Pravada (July-December 2001, Num-

bers 19 and 20, p. 132).
to many other social science disciplines and professional scholars working within
disciplinary confnes, who are reluctant to venture out of their intellectual comfort
zones in search of newer domains of research. It is in the same vein that a student of
international relations had once told one of the editors, “we don’t laugh about the
sources that are used by our teachers, just like a Muslim won’t laugh about the holy
book or the prophet.” The way social sciences are taught seems to preclude humour
as a matter of principle embedded in most pedagogic approaches.
The point is, whether the large tribe of established sociologists and anthropolo-
gists would understand something so simple, even though they tend to deal with
patterns, typologies, functions, interactions, inter-subjective relations and so on as
a routine part of practicing their craft. As a result, they have left behind instances
of laughter, as tragedy covered in blanket objectivity, and thereby creating a kind of
disciplinary and intellectual tragedy. In the preoccupation with ‘serious’ stuf soci-
ologists and anthropologists have ignored ‘serious humour’ as well as ‘humoured
seriousness’. Perhaps this was needed to paint the world, under the prevalent behav-
ioristic analytical scanner of every individual sociologist-anthropologist, in black
and white, evil and good, vice and virtue, politically correct and incorrect, right
and wrong. In general, 20th-century social sciences were besotted with binary
opposites as the most coveted intellectual device as well as reinforced conclusions.
One ought to turn to the intellectual and disciplinary history of various parts of
modern social sciences to take note of the possibility and constraints with famous
binaries, such as structure and agency, objectivity and subjectivity, and so on. In
spite of a Bourdieu,12 or even a Giddens,13 and of course a trail of post-positivist
deliberations that ofered an announcement on the ‘coming crisis in western soci-
ology’,14 sociologists and anthropologists have persisted with the binary, serious and
non-serious. And in the case of this discussion, one of the non-serious themes in
social inquiry happens to be humour. And thus, pedantic scholars unfortunately
could not see the hilarity of seriousness,15 so to say.
Powell and Paton, in explaining this lacuna in sociology, note that humour has
been commonly seen as an individualistic and spontaneous expression embedded
in creativity, in the context of which the social, structural and processual param-
eters of this creativity have been understood as “much less tangible and hence
not readily amenable to sociological conceptualisation and theorising” (Powell and
Paton, 1998, p. xi). They also fnd it unfortunate that sociologists have maintained
undue fears about intellectual creativity in some domains, and humour is one such
domain, which many sociologists believe should be “left to the realm of free will”
(Powell and Paton, 1998, p. xi). That is, in addition to the burden of the western
cannon in general, what has gone against the study of humour in social sciences as
well as sociology in particular is the assumption that it was too ‘soft’ or ‘irrelevant’
in terms of its intellectual value in the same sense post-1960s anthropology and
sociology looked at photographs and images more generally in the context of both
research and writing (Perera, 2020). Furthermore, Powell and Paton argue that
this neglect, or what they call the ‘imbalance’ that overlooks the social aspects of
humour in sociology should be rectifed (Powell and Paton, 1998, p. xii). But up to
Introduction 15
contemporary times, sociology in general or sociology in South Asia in particular

has not found it necessary to address this issue. This general disinterest in humour
is also evident in the social sciences in South Asia – as a collective enterprise –
except in situations where humour was part of ritual practices. As such, except in
such specifc contexts marked by religion, ritual16 and folklore, humour has not
been seriously engaged with in the region’s social sciences. Moreover, the pos-
sible correlation between humour and politics has seen even lesser engagement in
intellectual terms so far. As such, the chapters in this book have to be understood
within this somewhat obvious absence in South Asian knowledge production in
social sciences.
One can, however, not say that humour was entirely absent in the scheme of
anthropological documentation more generally. After all, we have read about the
hilarious encounters between Evans Pritchard and Zande youth, which eventu-
ated into local youths taking away the anthropologist’s tobacco without answering
his questions. Despite the controversies he has generated, Napoleon Chagnon’s
description on the Yanomamo ofers references to native people’s sense of amuse-
ment and hilarity at the anthropologist’s dress code and social practices.17 More
precisely, as a discussion on humour, Radclif-Brown’s essay, ‘On Joking Relation-
ship’ (1940), was interested in the joking relationships limited to a closed society.
He discusses joking phenomena through kinship interactions in non-western soci-
eties. Driessen (2015) duly informs us about the presence of a sense of humour in
the classical anthropological works, including that of Malinowski. And yet, a rela-
tive hesitation in dealing with humour in sociology and anthropology in the latter
part of the 20th century and so far in the 21st century cannot be denied. Informed
by the anthropological trajectory, of presence and absence of humour, Driessen
notes, “the frst comprehensive, comparative anthropological study of humor and
laughter appeared in the mid-1980s” (Ibid., p. 417); this turning point was with the
publication of Madhav Apte’s work (1985), following which a considerable increase
in case studies on humour in articles and books ensued. Yet, humour remains
for the most part a spin-of of other research topics, despite a growing awareness
among anthropologists that it provides clues to what really matters in groups and
societies. Meanwhile, one ought to admit the intensifcation of political humour
just before and throughout the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. The widespread use
of humour in cartoons, comedy, grafti and rap songs expressed subversion and
acted as a powerful vehicle for political activism (Driessen, 2015, p. 417).
In these circumstances, it would be useful to turn to an unusual anthropologist
dealing with serious humour. Working towards an anthropological framework to
study humour, Mahadev Apte notes,
humour should rightfully be taken seriously notwithstanding this so-called

oxymoron in the eyes of many academic scholars. I have to smile and yet be
patient in explaining why humour is an important topic of research when
scholars and other individuals ask me why I study humour.
(Apte, 2006, p. 153)
Apte places his fngers at the right place, by showing the abundance of discussions
on humour in the works of Greek, Hindu and Chinese philosophers and liter-
ary critics. In anthropology, however, the engagement with humour is sporadic
and uneven. “Descriptive accounts of laughter-evoking events, actions, situations,
individuals, and folklore texts are occasionally found in ethnographies but occur
marginally, only in connection with the description and analysis of cultural systems
that anthropologists consider important and fundamental” (1985, p. 22). Thus,
as noted earlier too, marginalised humour appears in discussions on joking rela-
tionship with reference to primary concerns over kinship, and in descriptions of
ritual clowning in relation to ‘primitive’ religions. This often shows in the teaching
materials for courses on anthropology in many major universities, too. Humour
seldom appears as a theme of enquiry in the course contents. The conventional
ethnographic method may be of no utility in describing forms, nature, content and
implications of humour. Hence, Apte proposes a comparative method to deal with
humour as a primary theme of analysis. Ethnographic discussions would eventually
amount to cross-cultural comparisons and examination of general typologies and
variations of humour. This could be one of the methodological possibilities that
could eventually lead a study to fathom the “interrelations of humour and socio-
cultural factors within the broad domains of social organizations and expressive
culture” (Ibid., p. 10). This means the form, substance and function of humour
will be meaningful due to the relationship with the diverse components of expres-
sive culture vis. kinship, age, sex, role, status and so on. The expressive culture
inclusive of language, religion and folklore would be modalities for the expression
of humour. And Apte tries to show as to how to execute such an anthropology of
humour.
Needless to say, the consequent anthropological framework is more loyal to a
Durkheimian-Maussean idea of anthropology with an emphasis on comparative
study as well as exploration of the function of humour. More crucially, it is dif-
fcult to ft into such a framework the instances of humour from modern literary
sources as well as contemporary mediated communication. After all, folklore is not
a fossilised entity frozen in a time warp; it is here and now, as well as it was there
and then. After all, traditions are as much of invention as they may be a source of
contestation about who is authentic, pristine and original. Therefore, an anthropo-
logical framework for any kind of reading ought to be perpetually in the making,
rather than being a fnished project. Having said that, one ought to accept Apte’s
discussion as an important starting point, which somehow could not make much
impact on sociologists and anthropologists in South Asia since the mid-1980s. The
often obvious absence of seriousness in internationalisation, professionalisation and
even global South Asianism in scholarship is vivid in the fact that Apte’s thesis is
seldom heard in the corridors of intellectual-disciplinary power that characterise
sociology and anthropology in South Asia. Had it been the case, manifold studies
and discussions on humour would have been a reality in the social science scholar-
ship in the region, and thus sociologists and anthropologists could have gotten their
own share of laughter!
Introduction 17
Structure and fow of the book

Within the refections outlined here, this book is an ofering into the relative
vacuum that one encounters in South Asia insofar as sociological-anthropological
scholarship on humour is concerned. It does not operate, however, with a promise
to ofer a framework for reading humour in the specifc context of South Asia,
which may nevertheless be an exercise worth its while on some other occasion.
There have been, however, some limited and largely incomplete attempts towards
the possibility of reading humour in the context of cultural specifcity in South
Asia,18 but these are by defnition rare occasions that have not been seriously fol-
lowed through. In this context, the aim of this book is to ofer an outline of
sociological-anthropological engagement with humour as part of a larger project
to develop a critical comprehension of South Asia. In so doing, while many theo-
retical strands have been borrowed from a variety of sources, there is also a more
pronounced fagging of the possibility of thinking of humour in South Asia some-
what diferently – based on how humour actually manifests in specifc places on the
ground and at specifc times. But the essays in this book do not hyper-emphasise
regional and local distinctions even though all of them deal with issues and mani-
festations of humour located in specifc places and times within the region. It is
difcult to do so, since the idea of South Asia is an elusive one.
There is a South Asia in the geo-political sense. This is the South Asia most
scholars deal with somewhat simplistically. But there is also a series of denials that
would not support the existence of any such entity. In the middle of all this, we
have postulated elsewhere the possibility of ‘another’ South Asia,19 which unlike
the formulation of SAARC, summons an approach that could be pithily identifed
as ‘against the nation’.20 That is, rather than being imprisoned by the dry geo-political
rendering of South Asia as an amalgamation of nation-states, why not explore
the region’s cultural fows, historical continuities and discontinuities, rhetoric of
politics, cartographies of travel and faith and so on in an attempt to arrive at a more
nuanced understandings of South Asia. One cannot be consciously bound to and
limited by national-territorial sovereign entities, and also try to think of South Asia
more broadly at the same time. That may amount to counting nation-states, as
well as perpetually paying homage to certain atavistic utopias in which the nation
bigger in size and resources would become more determinate. It is this intellectual-
political background that informs this book in its attempt to make sense of humour
in South Asia. Hence, the potential complaint that there are no essays dealing with
humour and politics in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bhutan and even Nepal and the
Maldives does not disturb the cultural imagination of South Asia in this book. A
discussion in the context of Sri Lanka could very well be identifable to a reader
sitting in Afghanistan. Similarly, readers in Bangladesh might be reminded of their
own circumstances while reading on the instances of humour in Nepal, Bhutan or
India. Putting together lineally representative texts from all the nation-states in the
region may be a requirement of a SAARC project or a similar venture with the
words ‘South Asia’ in the project title initiated by the Foreign Ofce of any South
Asian nation state. It is due to the impossibility of achieving this unimaginative

sense of ‘consent’ that core meetings at apex secretarial level of SAARC do not take
place regularly, and the ofcial idea of South Asia gets obscured by the inter-state
conficts between two nation-states that would cloud the perspective of all others.
But in the midst of all this, cultural fows and ideas in these nation-states continue
to cross borders. Bollywood cinema and music is one such example while contem-
porary art is another.
In this book, like elsewhere, we have moved away from this kind of geo-political
and simplistic rendering of South Asia, and have instead allowed the thematics of
discussion to cross borders and inform readers. And as editors we thought it was
necessary to fag this approach at this introductory stage given the dominance of
the usually deployed linear mode of representation of the region. Moreover, it is
practically not possible to put together scholarship from across the region for vari-
ous reasons. First, the intellectual training and temperament across the region is
not the same, and this we have noted on various occasions21 earlier, too. This is
particularly so at a time when writing and refection are no longer a simple matter
of passion, conviction or scholarship, but a forum for achieving utilitarian goals
mostly within discourses of development and fnancial gains. Secondly, a theme
such as humour is really a cup of tea that slips away from the lips of many scholars in
South Asia for the reasons we have outlined earlier in this introduction. Writing on
any issue with a sense of humour itself is a rare quality, and engaging in systematic
reasoning with humorous content would indeed be a Herculean task or a waste of
time, depending on how one looks at it.
In these circumstances, this book operates with a collection of a very select
number of essays, in ten chapters, organised within three broad subheadings even
though some themes run across most essays in all three sections, giving them a
sense of interconnectedness. Under the frst subheading entitled “Humour in liter-
ary and visual subversions,” we have presented two essays that broadly engage with
historical, literary and visual content. Divyendu Jha’s essay, “Colonial cartoons:
Punch and vernacular Punch politics of humour in colonial India,” looks at the
politics of cartoons presented in the colonial English-language magazine Punch as
well as counter-politics ofered by Punch-like local magazines at the height of colo-
nialism in India. Dev Nath Pathak’s essay, “Khattar Kaka’s subversive Hinduism: a
case of literary-cultural politics of humour,” ofers an engagement with Hinduism
through a close reading of the fctional character Khattar Kaka and its creator,
Hari Mohan Jha. Jha’s engagement that Pathak describes does not emanate from
the dry position that multiple discourses of secularism have now come to typify in
most circumstances. Instead, Jha’s character, Khattar Kaka, engages with specifc
positions in Hinduism with a deep understanding of its nuances and its scriptural
positions. And that too, with a sense of irreverence and humour that is culturally
rooted.
The second subsection in the collection is entitled “Folkloric worldviews:
laughter as performed narratives.” These essays foreground the signifcance of words
of mouth, oral and folk performances. Prithiraj Borah, in his essay, “Tales from
Introduction 19
Assam’s tea gardens: when humour becomes resistance in the everyday life-world
of labourers,” takes us on a journey to contextualise the difcult work conditions in
the visually scenic tea gardens in India’s Assam state. In his exploration, he shows
how humour becomes an almost invisible form of resistance for the labourers who
toil in these tea estates. Monika Yadav invites readers to focus on performances
known as Jakari and Ragni in Haryana, India, in her essay, “Dramatic Haryanvi
humour: a case of subversion in Jakari and Ragni.” Via a close reading of these
popular ‘dance-drama’ performances, Yadav proceeds to outline how they ofer a
specifc dialogic forum that undermines the gendered relations in North Indian
family circumstances that generally privileges masculinist and patriarchal positions.
She shows how this form of politics is undertaken in these performances with the
use of humour, satire and an erotic performative style. Lal Medawattegedara, in
his essay, “‘A Sri Lankan Arrives in Hell’: A Case of Laughing at ‘Sri Lanka’ and
the ‘Sri Lankan’ in a Collection of Modern Folktales,” takes as his point of depar-
ture a collection of contemporary Sri Lankan ‘folklore’. He proceeds to ofer a
reading on how and why Sri Lankans often laugh at themselves, and the ways in
which these narratives creatively undermine the idea of the nation as well as ethno-
national identities.
The contents in both previous subsections referred to connotations of media-
tion to some extent. But it is in the last subsection that mediated constructions
become the major focus. Entitled “Mediated messages for laughing and thinking,”
it brings together four essays that chart out the construction of the public, public
space and the notion of politics through humorous contents. Sasanka Perera, in his
essay, “Humour, criticality and the performance of anonymous power: internet
memes as political commentaries in Sinhala society,” argues in favour of internet
memes as a means for exercising anonymous power and criticality among Sinhalas
in Sri Lanka in that country’s politically difcult present. In their essay, “Humor-
ous masculinity: Nepali men in mediated Indian male gaze,” Sandhya A.S. and
Chitra Adkar proceed to explore how Nepali men working in India are caught in
the Indian male gaze in the context of which their sense of masculinity is often
feminised and located in the realm of ‘fun’. Stand-up comedy has become one of
the most popular performative forms when it comes to humour in South Asia.
Beyond live performances, these acts have numerous afterlives in the internet that
widens their reach. Sukrity Gogoi and Simona Sarma explore this phenomenon in
their essay, “Politics of performance and performance of politics: analysing stand-
up comedy in the Indian context.” As a powerful means of engaging directly with
evolving politics, Gogoi and Sarma fag the kind of issues stand-up comedians in
the Indian context deal with in terms of themes and undercurrents by looking
at selected performances. Ratan Kumar Roy, in his essay, “Humourous public
in Bangladesh: an analytical reading of mediated politics,” explores the jokes that
people crack with reference to television news and politics in Bangladesh. For Roy,
these jokes are revealing political commentaries of both politics in general as well as
how politics are presented on television – often devoid of humour and as politically
‘domesticated’ narratives. He argues, in the specifc context of Bangladesh he deals
with, that this kind of humour helps create a localised public sphere where humour
has more legitimacy and power.
In the fnal analysis, all of these essays unfold in a way that would aid us in
understanding humour’s location in what we have called ‘unstable’ times. What is
unstable, however, can vary from colonial India to contemporary Sri Lanka, Ban-
gladesh or India to tea gardens in Assam, to theatre performances in Haryana and
the unregulated internet in Sri Lanka.
Notes
1 For example, one can take into account the works of Keith-Spiegel (1972), Bakhtin
(1984), Raskin (1985), Attardo (1994), Driessen (2015) and Eagleton (2019), etc.
2 See, for example, Bauman (1987).
3 The original verse goes “sinhalaya modaya, kevun kanna yodaya.” It was made popular
in the political discourses of Angarika Dharmapala during his campaign for revival of
Buddhism in late 19th-century Sri Lanka. His complaint was about the perceived lack
of energy among Sinhalas in the twin projects of anti-colonial activism and Buddhist
revivalism.
4 There is a more systematic and philosophically sound discussion on it in Chatterjee
(2018).
5 For a rare discussion on adda, see Chakrabarty (1999, 2021). A discussion about the
humorous interjections in adda was even more lucid and contemporary at Galp Lok,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AfRmDTuAME.
6 Quoted from the essay “Tales from Assam’s tea gardens: when humour becomes resistance
in the everyday life-world of labourers” in this book.
7 www.news18.com/news/world/blessings-from-the-sky-sri-lanka-fights-coronavirus-
with-buddhist-holy-water-sprinkled-from-helicopters-2554127.html (accessed 19 April
2020).
8 See Kumar et al. (2018).
9 See Pathak and Perera (2017), Perera and Pathak (2019).
10 Gary Larson’s cartoon The Far Side can be accessed via the follwing link: https://
anthropology.net/2007/09/14/watch-out-the-anthropologists-are-coming/anthropologists-
anthropologists/ (accessed on 1 April 2020).
11 Pravada, July–December 2001, Numbers 19 and 20, pp. 132. Colombo: Social Scientists
Association of Sri Lanka.
12 For an appeal and convincing discussion on the problems of the binaries, see Bourdieu
and Wacquant (1992).
13 A similar, yet differently oriented appeal has come from Giddens (1993).
14 Gouldner (1970).
15 A more detailed account on this failure of sociologists and anthropologists to operate
within methodological ambivalence is described in the forthcoming book, To Be Socio-
logical Or Not To Be! by Dev Nath Pathak (scheduled for publication in 2021 by Orient
Black Swan).
16 For a comprehensive presesntion of humour in the religious and ritual domains in South
Asia, see Selva J. Raj and Corrine Dempsey eds., Scared Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in
South Asian Religions. Albany: SUNY Press.
17 For more information, see Napoleon A. Chagnon, 1984. Yanomamo: The Fierce People.
New York: Holt McDougal.
18 For example, see Osterheld and Zoller (1999).
19 See Pathak (2017).
20 See Perera et al. (2019).
21 Op cit. Pathak (2017) and Kumar et al. (2018).
Introduction 21
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PART I
Humour in literary and
visual subversions
2
COLONIAL CARTOONS
Punch and vernacular Punch politics
of humour in colonial India
Divyendu Jha
The art of cartooning had never been an existent and admired form of expression
in India or perhaps anywhere in the world before the advent of print culture. It
was in the early 19th century that India witnessed the ‘art of cartooning’ and its
utility for powerful expression and imagination. Interestingly, the British cartoons,
or interchangeably caricatures, ignited Indian interest in this art, leaving a long-
lasting impact on Indian print media. Emerging institutions of art schools and art
societies gradually but efectively made their presence felt in the socio-political
life of Indians. It eventually helped to establish the authority of academic art in
Calcutta, Bombay and Gujarat, etc. Although these institutions enjoyed the colo-
nial master’s patronage, they were modern innovations that induced Indian artistic
imaginations, sensibilities and creative expressions. Simultaneously, the introduc-
tion of print technology and the process of production and circulation of images
started fourishing independent of the state. With the setting up of an increasing
number of printing presses, by the end of the 19th century, visual images could be
easily reproduced and circulated in multiple copies. Mitter notes,
Wood engravers, who used to make wood blocks, set up shops near the let-
terpresses and were employed by the print shops; Cheap prints and calenders,
easily available in bazaar (market), were used to decorate the walls of homes
or places of work.
(Mitter, 1995, p. 25)
These prints began shaping popular ideas about modernity and tradition, religion
and politics, society and culture, etc. In a way, a new visual culture was in the
making.
Such a mechanical production and reproduction of printed images provided
endless possibilities for the socio-political expressions that were captured by the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-3
26 Divyendu Jha
Indian print media at that time and circulated through newspapers, magazines and
journals, etc. These mediums of mass communication made a further efect on
Indian sensibility, transforming urban India into a ‘visual society’, dominated by the
printed image, which afected both the privileged and the ordinary people (Ibid.).
Located in this historical context, the English-owned comic-satirical magazine
Punch (founded in 1841) inspired the scenario of political cartooning in India. The
interaction between Punch and the emerging print industry in India infuenced
many writers and artists to start Indian versions of Punch, distinct in their style,
taste and expression. Some of these versions, such as Parsi Punch and The Delhi
Sketch Book, were mostly published in English, whereas others including Oudh
Punch, Gujarati Punch, Basantak, and Sulav Samachar were published in vernacular
languages. This allowed the existence of a mixture of humorous traditions and
semantic linkages that led to new ways of visual associations for readers. Though
English Punch cartoons infuenced the “art of cartooning” in India, at times even
such cartoons were reproduced by Indian cartoonists. Yet the visual vocabulary,
representation and style of humour in Indian cartoons were much diversifed and
rooted in their own social-cultural location. Indian cartoons, both Punch versions
and non-Punch versions, were not simply a copy of their English counterparts, but
rather Indian cartoonists’ made the art of cartooning their own through shared
idioms, symbols and Indian ways of looking and laughing.
Bengal Hurkaru and Indian Gazette were the earliest Indian newspapers to carry
political cartoons in the 1850s. In the following decades when colonial politics,
exploitation and domination became the legitimate targets of journalists, cartoons
started appearing in newspapers owned by Indians. Cartoons were being published
in journals, newspapers and magazines, commenting on social and political issues.
Some caricatures ridiculed the educated Indians’ fascination with western tastes,
lifestyles and clothes, whereas others expressed and asserted ‘native’ traditions due
to the fear of social change and modernity’s logic of subsuming the native practices.
British cartoons or early Indian cartoonists were usually representing the benevo-
lent nature of imperial rule and engaged in legitimising occidental gaze, except
some occasional cartoons that satirised the British ‘Civilising Mission’. On the
other hand, various Indian newspapers and booklets started caricaturing the state of
India under colonial rule, the exigencies for the nation, and the interaction of soci-
ety with the governance pattern of an imperial throne through humorous cartoons
(Khanduri, 2014). Such an interaction between Indians and Britons, curated by
Indian cartoonists through their cartoons, points to a rich repository of the cultural
politics of humour and cartooning in colonial India. But the interaction between
British and Indian cartoons was not simply an artistic interaction; instead, these
cartoons were a deliberate design of ‘dialogical discourse’ that carried manifesta-
tions of cultural politics of assertion and resistance.
Artists such as Sir Charles D’ Oyly initially poked fun at the Anglo-Indian
lifestyle in the early 19th century; they soon turned into the object of mirth.
Interestingly enough, so did the early Indian cartoonists (Ibid.). The signifcant dif-
ference was that the British cartoonists in India viewed the Indian subjects from the
Colonial cartoons 27
lofty heights of puritanical moral certainty. Indian cartoonists, on the other hand,
were generally engaged in self-parody, social comment and humorous criticism
(Hasan, 2007). Various vernacular newspapers and magazines, however, used the
art of cartooning to resist and re-negotiate the cultural and political space of ‘see-
ing and expressing’ diferent from the politics of Britons and Indian elites. Among
these, Harishchandra Talcherkar’s collections of cartoons of the Viceroy Lord Cur-
zon (1905) ofer an early indication of cartoons in Oudh Punch, Parsi/Hindi Punch,
and Gujarati Punch.
Indian Punch versions used certain technicalities of cartooning, and at times
even reproducing some of the cartoons of its English counterpart. But even these
were not simple acts of imitation or copying western idiocies and styles. Rather,
within their zones of contact, they were able to artistically emulate, absorb and
re-emit the visual narratives with new and transformed semantic elements situated
in an Indian socio-cultural context. While doing this, Indian cartoonists’ visual
vocabularies and humorous representations were more inclined towards a ‘cathartic
humour’ instead of simple laughter or fun. Indian cartoons in the 19th and 20th
centuries were driven by the assertion of diference and aspirations of social change,
and thus were engaged in carving out a national imagination while exposing the
vicious and immoral character of imperial cultural dominance, colonial politics
and internal hierarchies of power relations. Oriental Review gave a snapshot of the
history of humour in India, comparing it to the West. The Hindi Punch cartoonist
had “caught the highest phase of humour – the laughter that is ever near to tears,”
and the infuence of such humour was “cast on the side of purity and progress in
social life and sobriety and dignity in politics” (Banerjee, 2018). The reading of
such cartoons suggests that cartoons evoked sense and sentiment, emotional and
rational, and the aspects of cultural and politics. Thus, the way of seeing and laugh-
ing with the cartoons “ofers insightful clues to the afective register of the imperial
experience” (Khanduri, 2014, p. 6).
This essay moves beyond the evaluation of the elements of cartoons to their
reception. It tries to engage with and situate the discourses and discussions around
the cartoons. This reveals that a profound understanding of cartoons involves a
way of knowing. While doing so, the essay weaves new terms of engagement
with visual repertoires at the intersection of history, politics and culture. In this
framework, cartoons are an epistemic tool accompanying a range of discourses and
counter-discourses. The essay does an historical analysis of cultural politics based
on cartoons in colonial India. It returns to the colonial times and refects upon
the imperial experiences and interactions through cartoons published in popular
British and Indian newspapers and magazines. In this regard, it engages with narra-
tives embedded in Punch and vernacular versions of Punch cartoons, which narrates
British and Indian ways of experiencing, representing and knowing. Therefore, it
claims that cartoons in colonial times composed a fascinating humorous tale about
the critique of colonial exploitations and essentialisations, shifting aesthetic sensi-
bilities and the ways in which colonial impressions confgured and reconfgured the
cartoonists’ visual politics.
28 Divyendu Jha
Organised in two parts, in the frst part the essay looks at the conceptual prem-
ise through which it can situate the colonial cartoons in a proper context. Then
it moves on to refect upon the representation and vocabulary of British cartoons
and how their visual politics meant to legitimise their cultural and political supe-
riority, by laughing at the native Indians’ uncivilised social and cultural lifestyles.
The second part deals with the Indian cartoonists’ representations that challenged
the British gaze while interacting and responding to the British narrations. It, thus,
highlights the ways in which Indian artists used the visual politics to resist the
colonial essentialisations. And lastly follows a conclusion that seeks to further the
discussion, with a sense of inquisitiveness, towards the possibilities of exploring
humour and politics in shared social and cultural spaces.
Cartoons and the empire’s occidental gaze

Despite the signifcant presence of caricatures as visual narratives of socio-political
processes across various disciplines, there is a general ambivalence about the use of
images to understand these socio-cultural experiences. There are critiques of the
‘physiognomic fallacy’ of images (Gombrich and Kris, 1938; Ginzburg, 1992). This
fallacy unfolds because images are interpreted for analysis based on archival sources.
Caricatures, therefore, tend to perform an act of supplement to the social experi-
ence and theories of culture. In this framework, images and cartoons can neither
produce knowledge nor represent social experiences or realities. In a similar tone,
Elizabeth Edwards, while highlighting the ambiguities of photography, argues that
“in many ways a photograph denies history” (Edwards, 1994, p. 3). For Edwards,
newspaper photographs and cartoons rooted in an immediate context and topical
nature along with catchy captions certainly complicate the relationship between
evidential power, cultural entanglements and the idea of history.
However, Mitchell (1995) among others underlines images with a life of their
own, earmarking an ‘iconic turn’ in social science disciplines. This work treats
images as cultural texts to derive knowledge about the everyday processes by under-
standing people’s relationship with the images. Similarly, Stuart Hall also argued
that every picture afects the meaning-making processes and therefore is capable of
constructing or giving meaning to the realities (Hall, 1997). Images in this sense are
embedded in the social-cultural space, wherein it refects and represents the politi-
cal and social relations. Christopher Pinney has argued that images are part of the
‘sensory experience’ through which social and cultural relations can be understood
(Pinney, 2003). Furthermore, during the colonial period, spaces of religion and
culture were considered out of the domain of colonial governance, thus the public
sphere had to engage in politics through alternative routes. Cartoons, in such a
context, played a pivotal role in unmasking the politics from the everyday level to
the public at large. Cartoons, in such a context, apart from its traditional role of
representing the realities, also engaged, subverted and at times resisted the existing
power relations and hierarchies while being in dialogue with British cartoonists’
politically motivated oriental vocabulary. In South Asia, there have been a couple
of notable attempts to generate a discourse on the fear of visuals, which could be

extended to a generic fear of performative as well as humorous content (Pathak
and Perera, 2017; Perera & Pathak, 2019). Such attempts open up possibilities for
enquiries into the realms of visuals, performance and humour.
Such a pictorial turn, coupled with a turn to performance and humour, in
social science opens up the space for cartoons to be interpreted autonomously
and simultaneously with the other sources of knowing. Cartoons with a trope of
humour become crucial in a sense that they utilise visual exaggeration, which is
highly emotive and afects the consciousness. Perhaps its emotive nature provides it
an impactful reception in political discourses. This is what George Orwell meant
when he suggested that “every joke is a tiny revolution.” Moreover, Andersons’
(1983) infuential work linking newspaper cartoons and the imagination of modern
nation-states provides insightful clues on the importance of cartooning (Anderson,
1983). Meanwhile, cartoons also were malleable in new contexts, a quality of soft
cultural forms. It means that the popularity of vernacular versions of Punch car-
toons ought to be seen as a departure from their kinship with the British Punch.
Beginning as a trading company named the East India Company in the 17th
century and gradually transforming itself into a political power by the mid-18th
century, signalled an emerging colonial relationship that was formalised with
Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1877. By the end of the 19th century, direct impe-
rial rule got engaged in exploitation and violence while concealing it through
methods of modern cultural superiority vis-à-vis the native uncivility. At the same
time, the political fabric in colonial India was also witnessing a growing sense
of belongingness, self-identifcation and aspiration for freedom. These transitions
and complex interactions were transmitted to both Britons and Indians, primarily
through newspapers, journals and magazines published in English, Hindi, Urdu
and various vernacular languages. While some newspapers utilised visual illustra-
tions to represent the political and cultural repertoire of imperial rule, others used
a variety of humorous cartoons shaped by visual technologies.
“Some artists-cartoonists like James Mofat (1756–1815) and James Gilrey
(1775–1815) tried to reverse the empire’s unethical politics of lust, greed, bigotry
and violence through colour engraving and dropping speech bubbles in their artis-
tic works” (Khanduri, 2014, p. 8). James Gilrey, in his cartoon, A Sale of English
Beauties in East Indies published in 1811, portrays that a group of English courte-
sans has just arrived in Calcutta and is being sold by an auctioneer. Some Indian
and Arabian people can be seen in the cartoon, waiting to place their bids. This
cartoon of Gilrey was meant to expose the English Hippocratic attitude towards
Indian people, whom they used to treat as inferior and uncivilised. Early British
cartoonists emphasised deformity instead of perfection to articulate the politics
essential for the empire’s existence in its colonies. These were not cartoons that
legitimise colonial civility; on the contrary, they were representing the ugliness of
imperial politics. However, such cartoons were gradually replaced by Punch’s gen-
tler cartoons, which began publication in 1841. Within a period of a decade or so,
Punch cartoons gained widespread popularity among imperial citizens and colonial
30 Divyendu Jha
subjects. As an authoritative cartoon magazine, it inspired Indian cartoonists and

cartoon magazines such as Hindu Punch, Oudh Punch, Gujarati Punch, etc.
Critics pointed out that this was a refnement in the art of British cartoon-
ing. The shift in the form of caricature from the grotesque to a palatable
likeness and various visual tropes made cartoons increasingly lean toward the
category of art.
(Ibid.)
Punch regularly portrayed imperial politics and, in particular, caricatured colonial

India. But it was after the 1857 rebellion, known as the First War of Independence
or sepoy mutiny, that its presence became much more dominating. The analogies of
Punch cartoons and employing animals and objects in representing imperial politics
and human experiences were visual narrations of colonial afect. This was not simply
a process of anthropomorphism. Instead, through cartoons, Punch categorises human
experience and produces colonial afect. A famous cartoon by John Tenniel in the
Punch dated 22 August 1857 was captioned: “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the
Bengal Tiger” (Figure 1.1). The tiger is shown on the body of an unconscious woman
with a baby in her arms lying underneath. The lion is shown leaping over, to scare the
tiger away and snatch the kill. It was obvious that the cartoon sought to tickle and tell
the viewer about the pitfalls of the evolutionary theory vis-à-vis survival of the fttest.
FIGURE 2.1 John Tenniel, “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger,” appeared
in Punch on 22 August 1857.
Source: Tenniel, J. Cartoons from Punch, Vol. 1–2. Published in 1895 by Bradbury & Evans, London.
Courtesy of Hathitrust Digital Library.
The content of Punch cartoons had an undertone of the image of the Orient com-
ing from the Occident. “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger” caught
the public imagination. It was a widely reproduced cartoon that conveyed the empire’s
political troubles during a widespread soldiers’uprising in 1857. The various mentions of
this uprising as a mutiny, war of independence and rebellion convey the diferent stances
taken by scholars on the nature of this movement. Cartoonists and popular imagina-
tion at that time grabbed this moment of unrest, though under the prevalent fear of a
‘native’ threat to British women and children residing in the colony. There was a sinister
moral tone in these cartoons. Another cartoon from the Punch magazine captioned as
“The New Year’s Gift” (see Figure 1.2), published in 1858 after the rebellion of 1857,
is worth recapitulation. Sir Colin Campbell, the 1st Baron Clyde, had been appointed
Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India. He lifted a siege on foreigners in Luc-
know and evacuated the survivors, and brought in British troops to suppress the uprising
among Indian sepoys in the British East India Company’s army. In this cartoon, Sir
Campbell gifts a tamed Indian tiger to Lord Palmerston, British Prime Minister, who
hesitates in receiving the gift. Sir Campbell is holding a stick in his hand with a map of
India in the background, symbolising the brute force needed to neutralise the animalistic
behaviour of native Indians. This cartoon makes a reference to the ofcial scepticism
amongst Britons about the wisdom of usurping direct political control over India after
FIGURE 2.2 “The New Year’s Gift” by John Tenniel, published in Punch in 1858.
Source: Tenniel, J. Cartoons from Punch, Volume 2. London: Bradbury and Evans. Courtesy of Hathitrust
Digital Library.
32 Divyendu Jha
the East India Company’s failure in resolving the uprising of 1857. Eventually, in the
end, the government intervened and took control of the political power.
Such a representation of a native Indian rebel is the visual expression that
unfolds the empire’s occidental gaze that goes hand in hand with their rule; it was
an imperative to control the brute force of the Indian rebels. The cartoonic repre-
sentations of the native reproduced and reafrmed the narrative and validity of the
“Victorian morality”; the visually exciting medium of cartoons disseminated this
narrative among the natives so as to make them respect ‘the high moral order’. The
cartoon (see Figures 2.2 and 2.3) by John Tenniel on the 1857 rebellion, published
FIGURE 2.3 John Tenniel, “Justice” appeared in Punch on 12 September 1857.

Source: Tenniel, J. Cartoons from Punch. London: Bradbury & Evans. Digitised by Cornell University
Library: Courtesy of Hathitrust Digital Library.
in Punch on 12 September 1857, conveys the British moral superiority and obliga-
tions. In this cartoon, a ferce British lady with a sword and shield in her hands is
crushing the native Indians, symbolised as rebels of the 1857 movement, under her
feet. A wailing cry of Indian women standing beside the ferce lady can be seen in
the cartoon, and this cartoon is captioned as “Justice.”
Mitter persuades us to see,
What kept the Britons together was a tacitly shared ideology of the imperial
calling which permeated Victorian self-image and threw into bold relief of
the essential ‘otherness’ of colonised. . . . If such a mentality informed British
attitudes towards the ‘Orient’, the Indians further suffered from racial hostil-
ity that attended the uprising of 1857. British public opinion at home and
abroad fed on the reported atrocities during the rebellion. The stereotype of
Oriental behaviour was aired much by Punch at home as much by the British
owned comic magazines in India.
(Mitter, 1997, p. 17)
Furthermore, a cartoon by John Doyle named “Serpent Charmers: Exhibiting

Their Astonishing Feats,” published by Thomas Mclean Lithograph in 1836, cari-
catured domestic politics in relation to the British government by drawing upon
the image of snake charmers blowing a pipe and controlling the entranced cobra
as it emerges from its round, covered box. These images became enduring tropes
that refect upon colonial Indian politics as well as politics in Britain. From vari-
ous Indological descriptions of India, we have learnt that in the European gaze,
the colony was populated by snakes and snake charmers, followed by rope-walking
native gymnasts, shamans and human-eating witches. The orientalism of cultural
imagination guides such cartoon works too, although Doyle’s work is supposed to
present a critique of the British policy. It is to emphasise that the orientalist idioms
aided in self-deprecating discourse of the colonial cartoons. And hence, a linear
perception of orientalism stands to be partially revised in the wake of colonial
cartoon culture. On the one hand, cartoonic orientalism reinforces the superiority
of western civilisation, and on the other it also lends a trigger to a critique of the
British colonial policy.
The orientalist complexity in these cartoons notwithstanding, caricatures in the
British-owned magazines were a depiction of the traditional native Indians, who
in turn need to be modernised and inducted into the modern world of humor-
ous sensibilities. In the larger analysis, British cartoonists tried to satirise colonial
politics, but their vocabularies, idiosyncrasies and shared idioms were refections of
the orientalist constructions of Indian society, culture and politics. Charles Dick-
ens, while ofering one of the earliest commentaries on Punch versions in Indian
languages in his journal All the Year Round (1862), presumed an absence of “Asiatic”
temperament for comedy and, instead, a contemptuous laughter among the natives
(Dickens, 1862). It was perhaps because of the emerging popularity and salience
of various Indian cartoons, including Indian-language Punch magazines, that made
34 Divyendu Jha
British humourists and cartoonists ambivalent towards Indian wit and humour, but
it was not the only reason. The vernacular cartoonists, the natives from the colony,
being increasingly aware of the power of this art form, started returning humorous
punches back to the colonial masters, their politics and worldviews. For instance, a
cartoon captioned “A Wholesome Diet,” which appeared in Hindi Punch in 1889,
portrays Queen Victoria requesting milk from an Indian woman, who is milking a
cow. Congress is written on the belly of the cow and resolution is engraved on the
milking pot. This cartoon makes a humorous jibe at colonial politics and power-
driven Indian political elite. It was, therefore, difcult for the empire to accept that
in their own art form, Indians were getting higher sensibilities and satirical contents
against the empire’s occidental gaze and imperial politics.
Cartoons in the Punch often poked fun at “natives” in their attempts at copying
British cultural practices. For example, the Indian Charivari, an English-language
comic newspaper published in colonial India, in successive frames carefully dis-
sected the Babu’s “progress” into a failed copy of the modern British subject. These
Babus were English-educated natives, conversant in English law, literature and cul-
tural sensibility, but they often tended to mix the local cultural idioms with the
English ones. Caricaturing the Babu’s morality, his loyalty and acquisition of Brit-
ish sartorial taste, the full-page panel cast sophistication and progress as a cultural
inheritance that the Babu did not own. Elsewhere, following Edward Said’s thesis
on orientalism, Mitter (1995) underlined the connection between the visual, racial
and cultural colonial interpretation of Indian architecture and art. Moreover, it led
to the production of knowledge about India through an interpretative framework
based on western aesthetic principles.
Baboo Jaberjee was a comic Bengali character in a novel successively published by
the Punch in the 1890s. The cartoon of Baboo Jaberjee (Figure 2.4) represents Ben-
gali Bhadralok (a section of Brahmins from Bengal) wearing modern clothes trying
to emulate British cultural practices by taking of his hat as a gesture of respect to
the British lady. But, the English woman standing in front of him laughs at his
attempts. The cartoon symbolises the inherent displeasure of Britons for educated
Indian people, particularly Bengali Bhadralok. In the context of Queen Victoria’s
proclamation in 1858 promising equal treatment of all subjects, this encouraged
Bengali Bhadralok to compete for respect and higher positions in imperial bureau-
cracy. But, this idea of gentlemen Bengali Bhadralok seemed to be alien to the
British worldview. Thus, Baboo Ballads – a collection of cartoons refecting upon
the aspirations of Bengali Bhadralok – mocked such ambitions of Indian–educated
elites.
In turn, the Hindu Punch, published by Bombay Presidency, which started its
publication in 1925, ridiculed the accessories of modernity embodied by foreign-
returned Babus through its cartoon captioned Saheb Babu published in 1927. Such
a Babu carried a cigar, put on trousers and a jacket, adorned a hat, showed of a pet dog,
and more importantly, had a white wife on his arm. Such representations fourished
in Indian newspaper cartoons and comic magazines. The making of such car-
toons and the ability of the natives to appreciate humour was well received by that
FIGURE 2.4“Baboo Jaberjee,” an 1895 Punch illustration of Bengali Bhadralok parodied in

The Baboo Ballads by the English, who found the idea of educated Indians hard to accept.
Source: Courtesy of Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org/fles/25129/25129-h/25129-h.htm
36 Divyendu Jha
time. But, one of the signifcant things that the Indian cartoons did was that they
resisted, with due wit and humour, the occidental constructions of the Orient;
Indian cartoons foregrounded the everyday politics and politico-cultural relations
between the empire and the colony. The vernacular and Indian cartoons essentially
portrayed both the external and internal subjugation and dominations; they pre-
sented well-humoured critique of the then-predominant mindset of superiority
and inferiority. Moreover, such cartoons chose to refect upon the socio-political
processes in the need to resist both internal and external exploitation. Such Indian
cartoons tried to construct a collective social consciousness of the nation alongside
the other colonial cartoons that were perpetuating the orientalist ideas about India.
Cartoons and national imagination

The existing frames of the imagination of a nation and capturing the national con-
sciousness are more or less either dismissive or do not account for the role of the
cartoons that they played in colonial India. The subaltern claim does have some
signifcance, but it is misguided in a sense that it doesn’t give much attention to the
contribution of caricature in the socio-cultural imaginations of the people at large.
Perhaps, it is apparently due to an assumed understanding of cartoons having mod-
ern elitist tendencies and sensibilities. However, an important paradigm that makes
Indian cartoons diferent from the British ones was the wider circulation and con-
sumption at the pan-Indian level. Cartoons in vernacular languages fourished after
the 1870s, with signifcant local content that was critical not only of the imperial
rule’s misgovernance but also of the existing power relations. Sensitive to the Indian
conditions, national caricatures and especially vernacular caricatures depicted
Indian conditions while seeking to locate the collective consciousness of the soci-
ety. Despite such contributions, there has been hardly any attempt by theorists to
chart out a trajectory of cartoonists’ cultural politics and national imagination.
A new set of vernacular overtones over the widespread tradition of cartoon-
ing is also evident in parallel discourse with the English magazines. Unlike most
of the magazines, Hindi Punch enjoyed a long life, founded as Parsi Punch in 1854
from Bombay Presidency. The Parsi Punch was more focussed on the interaction of
the Parsi community with imperial politics. Later in 1859, it changed its name to
Hindi Punch due to practical reasons of circulation and consumption. It also cleverly
adapted popular prints such as those of Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), a famous oil
painter and artist, in addition to the other Punch-inspired drawings. Highlighting
the importance of vernacular cartoons in India, Hasan (2007) notes that vernacular
cartoon magazines were able to satirise and challenge British authority with abso-
lute impunity. This gave them a political space through which cartoonists could
invoke and represent the Indian experiences as well as interact with and challenge
the British cartoons’ visual politics and gaze.
In response to the 1895 cartoons of the Punch on Baboo Sahab, the Hindi
Punch gave an appropriately humorous reply with Lord Curzon’s cartoon. The
cartoon captioned “Propitiating Lord Ganesha” (Figure 2.5) depicts Lord Curzon
FIGURE 2.5 Lord Curzon ‘Propitiating Lord Ganesha’, a satirical response from a 1902
edition of Hindi Punch.
Source: Lord Curzon in Indian Caricature being A Collection of Cartoons by Harishchandra Talchekar,
published in 1905. Courtesy of Public Library of India, Government of India.
pretending to be Lord Ganesha, the Hindu diety that symbolises goodness and hap-
piness, presiding over his own self-aggrandising celebration by two Indian priests.
The cartoon satirised the British gaze of the Orient through indirect inversion of
Indian traditional idioms, practices and symbols. This cartoon is a befttingly witty
reply to the Baboo Sahab because it shows the manner in which some Indian
people, here two Indian priests, willingly submit to colonial authority. The two
priests represent the people of India who saw British traditions as superior in rela-
tion to the Indian ones and often praised western civilisational values’ association
38 Divyendu Jha
with modernity, while denigrating the traditional values and systems such as the
caste system, which had sustained Indian civilisation on the contentious normative
grounds for centuries (Mitter, 1995).
This bifurcation of Indian people into anglicised Indians and the masses who
chose to be insulated from the British cultural values can be credited to Empress
and Lord Curzon. Such a grand strategy of branding colonial culture proved to be
successful in dividing and conquering Indian society and its people. Furthering
such a strategy, the profound and deep-rooted orientalist constructions helped to
get it better packaged, subsumed and ruled (Cohn, 1996).
Sulav Samachar, a Bengali newspaper founded in 1870 whose editor was Umanath
Gupta, actively criticised British policies, exploitation and violence. Through its
cartoon of “Dead Coolie” published in 1870, the newspaper put the Indian case
forcefully by highlighting blatant injustice that Indians had to face by the colonial
masters with absolute impunity for Britishers. Indians were often beaten up by
Europeans to an extent that lead to death for any kind of petty reasons. In any case
if the crime was reported to the court, the victim’s enlarged spleen was blamed for
his death. The cartoon of “Dead Coolie” portrays a dead coolie with a wife cry-
ing by his body and European doctors performing a post-mortem. Indiferent to
immoralities and criminalities, the coolie’s killer is smoking a cigar. “The cartoon
with its tone of collusion between European authorities and the ofenders was one
of the seditious pieces that provoked the imperial rulers to impose Vernacular Press
Censorship in 1878” (Mitter, 1997, p. 16). This act was meant to curtail freedom
of the press and, in particular, prohibit criticism of the government and its policies
in vernacular newspapers and magazines. Within a week of passing this act, Amrit
Bazar Patrika – a weekly Bengali newspaper – converted to an all-English weekly.
Even after two weeks of this act, publishers were wondering about its provisions.
In the following years, many vernacular newspapers appeared and disappeared in
quick succession due to failure of gaining support with their poverty of language
and thought. Thereafter, when publishers got to know about the repressive mea-
sures of the act, they rallied mass protests against this act, and fnally it had to be
repealed in 1887. One can safely say that cartoons became one of the powerful
tools in the hands of the weak to resist the colonial subjugations, of course, with
wit and humour. This proved to be an efective instrument of resistance to imperial
politics by subverting the existing discourse of ‘inferior subject’ into a more expres-
sive and equally mindful people who knew how to channel the humour to capture
and captivate the popular imaginations.
Let’s look at other examples of cartooning by the natives in colonial India.
The Oudh Punch was a pioneer Urdu comic magazine in north India founded in
1877 by Sajjid Hussain. Focused mainly on politics and society, it also used to deal
with problems such as communalism even heatedly. It also used literary reference,
following the western style, such as in the John Tenniel cartoon “Rebellion Had
Bad Luck,” published in 1865 in Punch and reproduced by Oudh Punch in 1881.
The cartoon by John Tenniel shows John Bull, an English character incorporated
by John Gilrey in his cartoons and that later appeared in John Tenniel’s cartoons
as well, kicking out an Irish Fenian activist, who is struggling for the separation
of Ireland from Britain and the overthrow of the Queen’s authority over Ireland.
Native cartoonists, Oudh Punch reproduced it in 1881 and interpreted this cartoon
by drawing a correlation between British intervention in education policy and
treatment with Indian and Irish nationalists with an Urdu punchline, “Good Ridi-
cule of a Bad Rubbish,” Director of Public Instruction, Bengal. The reproduced
cartoon in Oudh Punch refers to the student unrest in Bengal, and shows the Direc-
tor of Public Instruction as John Bull, who had sent down student activists after a
political demonstration. It was a deliberate reworking by the Oudh Punch as protest,
to ridicule the attitude and behaviour of colonial ofcers towards native Indians in
general and Indian nationalists in particular.
Although some Indian cartoons were linked to the celebrated British Punch, they
also evoked traditions familiar to the emerging middle-class constituency in India.
Dalmia (2001) duly recognises in these dual lineages, the embodied license to clown
and critique and to assert contesting authority. The Punch character was, among other
things, a fusion of the vidushaka, the clown and commentator in traditional Sanskrit
drama; they also contested Sarpanch, the title of the judicial head of an Indian village.
But there was something more involved in natives adopting Punch in the newspaper
titles as well. Both offcials of the colonial state and newspaper proprietors were cog-
nisant that using the British Punch as a template for humour and aesthetics ofered
a particularly efective challenge to British claims of liberal governance. The Punch
versions in India thus need to be cast not merely as a derivative form of a colonial
modernity but also as a tactical and tactile sensibility for subverting colonial politics.
Cartoons, as a prime device for parodying contemporary conducts, made the
most signifcant modifcation from literary parodies to pictorial equivalents, which
existed throughout the Bengali cultural renaissance. The short-lived publication
made way for the famous Basantak, a renowned Bengali magazine started in 1874 by
Prannath Datta that lasted only for two years, yet made signifcant contributions by
highlighting the plight of Indian people resulting from the faulty policies and gover-
nance of the imperial throne. For instance, it allowed Bengali cartoonists to expose
and explore subjects ranging from urban discomfort to corruption of Calcutta’s
civic administration, women’s emancipation and the vagueness of the love-hatred
relationship that characterised the urban elite society in the form of printed images.
Its primary target was to expose the intimate relationship between British ofcials
and Indian elites. The cartoon of Basantak, “British Mismanagement of Famine,”
shows an obscenely fatty Brahmin being fed by British army soldiers while the cover
is surrounded by the utter depravity to which Calcutta had sunk.
Cartoons as a systematic weapon of social criticism made a distinctive genre of
popular art, called the Kalighat painting, which rose in colonial Calcutta in the
19th century; the Kalighat artists caricatured social types, the status of henpecked
husbands, courtesans, spurious Vaisnava mendicants, and sheepish lovers and more
prominently, the Tarakeswar afair or the Mahant-Elokeshi afair, which depicts the
illicit love afair between the elokeshi and the head priest (mahant) of the Tarakeswar
Temple. For example, the Mahant-Elokeshi (Figure 2.8) afair depicted the priest’s
40 Divyendu Jha
FIGURE 2.6 “Elokeshi and Madhavchandra Giri,” Mahant ofers Elokeshi childbirth medi-
cine, to drug her before raping, ca 1880. Folk art (Kalighat painting), author unknown.
Courtesy of Old Indian Arts: Historical Artworks of Indian Subcontinent from www.oldindianarts.
in/2012/09/kalighat-paintings-on-tarakeswar-afair.html (accessed on 15 April 2020).
attempt to drug Elokeshi with childbirth medicine before making an intimate

physical relation and raping her in the compound of the Tarakeswar Temple.
The ‘Kalighat pats’ acted as a catalyst for the improvement of Hindu women’s
condition and social status, which gathered force in the 19th century. Numer-
ous Kalighat paintings and Bat-Tala woodcut prints were created after the scandal
depicted the immoral afair, the gruesome murder and the resultant trial. The
movement for improving Hindu women’s condition gathered force then. The
practice of Sati was abolished, but there remained other disabilities for women,
such as a low level of education and infant marriage. But of all the social problems
and issues, women’s emancipation was an obsession with Bengali cartoonists, who
played on men’s concealed fear. For example, the humorous portrayal of a liber-
ated woman appears prominently in cartoons; Jatin Sen’s “A Cigar-Smoking Lady”
(1919) and Benoy Ghosh’s “Consequences of Folly” represented the collapse of the
male domain. The deterioration of social values under the impact of westernisa-
tion remained a favourite topic of Bengali cartoonists. The concomitant cartoons
culminated to the level of high art with the works of Gaganendranath Tagore
(1867–1938), a nephew of Rabindranath Tagore. Gaganendranath’s great sense of
humour found expression in some remarkable cartoons. His brilliant sketches were
lithographed and began to appear from 1917 onwards in three volumes, Birup Bajra
(Play of Opposites), Adbhut Lok (Realm of Absurd) and Naba Hullod (Reform
Screams). Birup Bajra and Adbhut Lok were published in 1917 and Naba Hullod in
1921, and were satirical lithographs that refected on a variety of social and political
challenges. Gaganendranath Tagore’s cartoons depicted bloated fgures exhibiting
savage intensity. The lithographs were the culmination of the tradition of self-par-
ody in Bengal. Since the 1870s in Bengal, cartoons had been a prime device in art
and literature for exposing pretension and mocking contemporary manners. The
satirical tradition continued into the 20th century, but few matched the unsenti-
mental eye of Gaganendranath Tagore (Sunderson, 2016).
As the nationalist movement entered into a phase of widespread unrest and vio-
lence, the Hindi Punch fell out of step with mainstream politics. It lived on beyond
Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement in the 1920s, but the mass upheaval did
not inspire any powerful cartoons thereafter. Increasingly, caricatures in the early
20th century became more sensitive to the internal problems that can be degen-
erative to the idea of the national imagination and politics surrounding it. For
example, M. Verma’s cartoon captioned “Uncle Tom Touchy and Untouchable
Child,” published in 1929 in Svang Chitravali, was a cartoon album published from
Kanpur that represented the pervasive Brahmanical hypocrisy and the practice of
untouchability in a quite forceful manner.
This cartoon is a humorous representation of the inhumane logic of the prac-
tice of untouchability, with a Brahmin priest shown “touching” and holding a
child of the untouchable caste and reprimanding him for his attempt to enter into
the temple in the background. The man standing in front of the Brahmin priest
with a broom is perhaps the child’s father, staring in disbelief at the priest, who
touches and reprimands the untouchable child. In the Hindi description of the
42 Divyendu Jha
cartoon, Uncle Tom Touchy, while reprimanding the child, says that, “A sorcerer’s
shadow is polluting too. If you ever touch again the temple steps, I will eat you
raw. You lowly scavenger, sorcerer.” The cartoon tickles the credibility of Hindu
social thinking.
Conclusion
The cartoons in Punch had such a long-lasting impact on the Indian print industry
that Indian artists could not resist the temptation of thought-provoking humorous
expressions and imaginations of cartoons. Taking inspiration from Punch cartoons,
several Indian artists and publishers initiated the production and circulation of
various Indian Punch and non-Punch versions of comic weeklies. These comic
magazines were published in both English and vernacular languages, such as Hindi
Punch, Oudh Punch, Gujarati Punch, Sulav Samachar and Basantak, etc. By 1854,
political cartoons had become an inherent part of the newspaper culture and a
source of everyday political discussions, debates and knowledge. These political
cartoons efectively represented the pressing social and political issues of that time
by ridiculing and satirising the attitudes, behaviours, values and practices of both
external and internal elites. Such cartoons became extremely popular among the
masses due to their simplicity, efectiveness and afective overtone and competed
with photographs and flms as a persuasive representation.
Within a dialogical discourse, it is clear that English cartoons and Indian car-
toons are engaging in deliberative politics over a range of issues such as freedom,
representation, violence, denigration of Indian social life and the oriental con-
struction of India, etc. In the early 19th century, English cartoonists such as Gilrey
and Mofat tried satirising colonial practices, but soon their art turned out to be
an epitome of mere amusement or laughter. English Punch, the most dominant
cartoon magazine, made cartoons apparently to satirise the British policies but ulti-
mately ended up reafrming the Victorian moral principles and legitimising the
occidental gaze of the oriental Indian. For instance, John Tenniel’s cartoon “Brit-
ish Lion’s Vengeance” and John Doyle’s cartoon “Serpent Charmers,” although
projected to be a critical humorous take on colonial politics, yet reinforced the
oriental life as animalistic, violent and flled with snakes and witches. One must
not ignore here that cartoonists’ visual vocabularies, idioms and ideas are rooted in
their shared ways of cultural practices, sensibilities and social context. Such shared
idioms and symbols rooted in the socio-cultural lives of British cartoonists were
refected in their cartoons being submerged into the visions and gaze of colonial
politics.
As the Indian versions of Punch and vernacular cartoons started gaining popu-
larity by the latter half of the 19th century, they soon started challenging the
pervasive occidental gaze and colonial cultural politics. In addition, these Indian
cartoons also took up a variety of issues of everyday life such as violence, exploi-
tation and corrupt policies of a colonial government with tropes of humour
informed by an Indian sense of taste in looking and laughing. Through such
cartoons, Indian cartoonists’ visual politics tried to arouse a sense of Indian col-
lectivity or community in order to efectively provide an Indian response to the
occident. However, this is not the end of the story, on the part of Indian cartoons,
because apart from challenging the occidental gaze and colonial politics, Indian
cartoons were also engaged in social criticism and self-introspection. They proved
to be a breeding ground for various ideas, discourses and the imagination of
national community.
Indian Punch versions used certain technicalities of cartooning, and at times
even reproduced some of the cartoons of its English counterpart, but even these
were not simple acts of imitation or copying western idiocies and styles. Rather,
within their zones of contact, they were able to artistically emulate, absorb and
re-emit the visual narratives with new and transformed semantic elements situated
in an Indian socio-cultural context. While doing this, Indian cartoonists’ visual
vocabularies and humorous representations were more inclined towards a ‘cathartic
humour’ instead of simple laughter or fun. Indian cartoons in the 19th and 20th
centuries were driven by the assertion of diference and aspirations of social change,
and thus were engaged in carving out the national imagination while exposing the
vicious and immoral character of imperial cultural dominance, colonial politics
and internal hierarchies of power relations. Oriental Review gave a snapshot of the
history of humour in India, comparing it to the West. The Hindi Punch cartoonist
had “caught the highest phase of humour – the laughter that is ever near to tears,”
and the infuence of such humour was “cast on the side of purity and progress in
social life and sobriety and dignity in politics” (Banerjee, 2018).
Every cartoon has a story embedded in it, but a variety of cartoons together
makes a connecting narration. The primary aim of this essay was not to his-
toricise the story but to narrativise and interpret the connecting links working
behind the cartoons of colonial India. It is quite obvious that a huge corpus of
literature exists on the history of colonial India using some or the other source
and archival resources, and quite a few are also about the history of political
cartooning in India and South Asia. This essay is neither an ofcial history of
colonial India nor a history of cartoons, but rather it traverses the historical
facts and explanations to understand the inner life of the cartoons. The essay
has attempted to locate and explicate the complex interactions and intersections
among culture, history and politics through visual vocabularies, representations
and styles of cartoons’ humorous narratives. Historically, quite a lot of diversity
exists with regard to cartoons as well, depending on regions, nations and cul-
tures, etc. So is the case with the diversity of humorous traditions. However, the
essay makes a generous attempt to open up a space where cartoons of diferent
nations sharing civilisational and cultural afnities can meet and dialogue about
the cultural politics and experiences. In resonance with the introduction chapter
in this book, it is pertinent here for South Asia to avoid its material boundaries
and enter into a dialogue with the traditions of humour and cartooning in this
region, which would further illuminate our understanding of South Asian ways
of looking, laughing and knowing.
44 Divyendu Jha
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Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Psychology, 17: 319–342.
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thetic of Colonial India. South Asian Studies, 32(2): 129–143.
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D.B. Taraporewala & Co.
3
KHATTAR KAKA’S SUBVERSIVE
HINDUISM
A case of literary-cultural politics of humour
Dev Nath Pathak1
The cultural politics of humorous accounts operate with a distinct scheme, within
an unusual philosophical paradigm, in which subversion and resistance do not trig-
ger the same anxiety as they might in the other modes of politics. Though such a
premise may not be applicable to the context and content for the kinds of humour
other than what this essay deals with, it ought to be stated as a theme for debate
in the ultimate analysis. Insofar as the ‘sense of humour’2 in everyday life is con-
cerned, even subversive attempts could hold a seemingly sweet and all-pervasive
afect. This is the case emerging from the literary genres, placed within a specifc
historical framework, that would shed light on the negotiations of tradition and
modernity, ambivalence of value orientation, and thus literary sources can be seen
as a refection of everyday socio-cultural life.3
This is the premise of this essay, seeking to deal with a fctional work that
renders the fction writer as a partner in the game plan that flled humorous
content with enormous interpretative cultural politics. The cultural politics of
the content in this essay reafrms the importance of the logic of everyday life. It
is with this logic that a light-hearted yet critical engagement with the seriously
taken-for-granted socio-religious notions comes into the picture. In this scheme,
the logic of kinship, relational ties and obligations, the value of emotion in intel-
lectual reasoning is inevitably far more important than the canonical, priestly and
organised religion. The mundane and banal are crucial in the scheme of humour
in everyday life. Arguably, the socio-religious contents are as much a submission
of the will of the followers, as they are for self-critical humour. In interpretive
engagement with the humorous accounts, we get a sense that an alternative his-
tory of Hindus need not operate with the sharp break in parts of textual (oral and
printed) traditions; there need not be two diferent versions of Hindu dharma, one
of the priestly class and another of the ordinary folks.4 Essentially socio-cultural
in character, such everyday Hinduism would be inherently self-efacing, to say
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-4
46 Dev Nath Pathak
the least. This is signifcant in the wake of an exhaustive historical trajectory

of Hinduwa politics that sought to portray an unequivocal sense of Hinduism.
There is an illustrious body of critical scholarship that informs about the interface
of manipulative politics and selective emphasis on Hindu pride and prejudices.
This is, however, not the mainstay of this essay that explores the other possibil-
ity, so to say, of the ordinary Hindu practices in which faith is more fuid than it
appears in the framework of rigid religiosity,5 while dealing with such complex-
ity about the characteristics of religiosity, inches closer to a relativistic approach
in anthropology of humour that renders humour a “culturally shaped individual
cognitive experience.”6 In such a framework, the essay in this chapter reads the
biographic parts of the creator Hari Mohan Jha and his creation Khattar Kaka
at the onset in the following. This is followed by a more focused reading of the
Kaka’s humorous discourse, which leads the essay to glance through the primary
value orientation of Kaka. The latter frequently invokes Charvak, a propounder
of the Lokayat philosophy, and it underpins the discourse which generates a
critical view of the Maithili-speaking Hindus’ worldview. Sufce it to say, Kaka’s
humour amounts to a critique of the ritualistic (popularly known as karmkandi)
Brahmanism prevalent among the Hindus. It is internal critique which does not
dismiss the signifcance of socio-religious life.
Against such a premise, this essay operates with dual protagonists, the charac-
ter named Khattar Kaka and his creator, the Maithili litterateur Hari Mohan Jha,
accredited to have brought about realism in Maithili literature in the frst quarter
of the 20th century. The character of Kaka7 appeared frst in Maithili8 in Khattar
Kakak Tarang (Brainwaves of Khattar Kaka) in 1949, and it gained such popularity
that Jha decided to write Hindi versions of the various segments of the book for
the then-popular Hindi literary magazines, such as Kahani and Dharmayuga. This
fuelled Kaka’s popularity across north and central India, creating more demands for
writings in Hindi on Kaka Jha, after his retirement from his professorial occupa-
tion, published a Hindi version of the book in 1971. The character of Kaka was
essentially a diehard follower of his own philosophy, which was aptly expressed in
Sanskrit as ‘rasam pitwa rasam vadet’ (1971, p. 8). Simply translated, this meant: con-
sume aesthetics and aestheticise the whole world. But this was not merely about
syrupy humour that the character stands for.
In the Maithili version, by way of introducing the character, Jha made Kaka
speak, ‘I don’t only serve juice, I pepper it with black chilli too’.9 The aesthetics
in Kaka’s philosophy entailed humour, sarcasm, wit, barb and relentlessly critical
comprehension of everything normative. In this scheme, however, even sour-
ness appears sweet, obscene abuses palatable, and subversion as mouth-watering
‘chilli-pickle’. Moreover, it ought to be also noted at the outset that the cultural
elite during the time of Hari Mohan Jha were unsure about Khattar Kaka’s
deliberation. They wanted to celebrate it, since the character and his interjec-
tions seemed very close to everyone’s socio-cultural lives, but there was also an
explicit discomfort with Kaka’s content. Indeed there was a kind of ‘social ban’
on Khattar Kaka literature imposed by the elders of the family and kinship;
Khattar Kaka’s subversive Hinduism 47
young boys had to, metaphorically, smuggle Khattar Kaka literature into their
‘very private’ spaces in order to read them, talk with peers about them and join
in the laughter.10 Many of us, including the author of this essay, growing up
in the decade of the 1990s did not know that smuggling in a ‘healthy literary
work’ preceded the then-prevalent youth practice of buying the ‘unhealthy’,
cheaply produced porn literature such as kokshastra at the railway stations and
reading them in hiding. Such ambivalence also refected in the way parents used
the name Khattar Kaka as a reprimanding epithet for anyone talking against
the grain. Evidently, Kaka’s contention had yielded social unrest of some kind,
despite the fact that everyone laughed when a mention of Kaka was made any-
where. The discomfort with Kaka and his deliberation is understandable in the
Maithili society notorious for the dominance of Brahmins and other upper-
caste groups, as well as for an entrenched system of patriarchy. Hari Mohan Jha
(2011) admitted that there was a hilarious controversy over his Khattar Kaka
work in the magazine Mithila Mihir in the period of May–November 1954. He
does not provide the details of the controversy, but one can safely guess, given
the incongruity between the content of Kaka’s deliberation and the prevalent
norms of the Maithili-speaking society. The predominant inclination to Hindu
canons, prejudices of priestly class, and a fairly conservative Maithil society,
however, also exhibit openness to culturally creative deviance from the standards
and norms. Making fun of one another has been characteristic of Maithili every-
day life. Thus, Lothar Lutze puts it aptly when referring to Kaka’s relevance in
Maithili society:
They laugh at it, most heartily and unabatingly. In Khattar Kaka they rec-
ognize themselves; when they laugh at him, they are laughing at themselves.
His greed and his gluttony, his indolence and his selfishness- all his human
frailties are their own, and so are the principal instruments which he uses to
cover them up: his Brahmanic eloquence and verbosity, the sophistry which
enables him to ‘make the Ganga flow upstream’ and to convert the śāstras into
a reservoir of excuses for the satisfaction of the most elementary of his needs.
(1999, p. 31)
Khattar Kaka perhaps becomes the frst-ever literary creation vending a critique
of the politics of Hindu fundamentalism, Lutze passingly suggested. But it ought
to be mentioned that Kaka’s critique is unlike the familiar versions that dominate
the reading lists of students of politics of religion in India. In this, there is no
‘unmasking’ or ‘debunking’; the purpose is not to disclose something shocking so
as one can get rid of an envisaged evil. Instead, there is an invitation for a more
intimate engagement with gods, goddesses, scriptures, canons, priests and practices
in order to fnd reasons and logic, for a humorous understanding. In implication,
Kaka enlightens a humane existence with Hindu dharma riddled with karmakanda
(priestly rituals), and due to such humaneness, Kaka can poke fun at even the
divine.
48 Dev Nath Pathak
As this essay will show in the remaining section, there is a keen interest in an
alternative interpretative politics insofar as Kaka’s act of subversion was concerned,
if that was indeed the case. It is neither modern nor traditional, since Kaka says,
my uncle matar jha said, jai jagdmba jai jagdish (hail, goddess and god), and
that is what I must repeat; whoever gives me to eat dahi-chura (curd and rice),
I am on their side; it all depends whose food I am eating, and how much and
what kind, accordingly I will decide my side.11
It may seem to be light-hearted banter, but it bears a deep signifcance. This essay
seeks to divulge precisely that signifcance by taking a plunge into the world of
Kaka and reading his humorous dictums in relation to what he frequently invokes
as Charvak philosophy. Sufce to say, Charvak philosophy, also known as Lokayat,
establishes the logic of everyday life that seems to underpin Kaka’s humorous self.
Let’s commence with an excerpt from what the authors of this essay mean
in terms of the content that this essay seeks to foreground. The following is an
excerpt to anchor into the Maithili cultural world of Khattar Kaka:12
That was a day of the festival, Holi. Khattar had consumed bhang (pasted
hemp leaves) twice, and was preparing for the third round. As soon as he
saw me, he invited to join and consume. I told him, ‘Kaka, I don’t consume
bhang’. Though inebriated already, Kaka retorted, ‘why do you give up your,
sanatan Vaidik dharma, the eternal conduct guided by the ancient Vedas’. I
amusingly asked, ‘how is it to do with the Vedas’. Kaka said, ‘the Vedas are
replete with the admiration of som ras’; I doubted, ‘but how do you know
that som ras is bhang’?
Kaka went on to give the details of the Vedic mention of som ras, a particular
potion consumed by the gods and saints, and its equivalence in bhang. However it
got worse, as the conversation advanced, and as the interlocutor, indicated by the
pronoun ‘I’ in this conversation, said,
but, if, som ras in the Vedas is actually bhang, how did those sages give such
profound Vedic ideas?
And as it happened, with every new question of the interlocutor, Kaka delved
deeper into more troubled waters.
He said, ‘gentleman, it gets profound as you go deeper with a deepen-

ing material like bhang, and hence those sages have revealed deep secrets
of humans, one of them being the secret of erotic feelings. Indeed the
Vedic literature is inimitable in the world for its description of sexual
intercourse . . . hence I believe, the students and celibate must not read
the Vedas’.
Obviously, Kaka continued to provide details, citing the verses in Sanskrit from the
Vedas, to prove his point. And the point was to show the art-erotica, sexual dis-
course and attachment with the worldly pleasures in the Vedic literature. This was
typical of Khattar Kaka, or one can say, of the creator of the character Hari Mohan
Jha. Just like the life of Kaka is flled with witty humour, so is that of Jha. They
both provide us with details that are otherwise muted in the serious discussion on
profound issues. The Vedas may mention many of those details, but the celebration
of Vedic Hinduism may delete them in order to keep out the alleged non-serious,
hilarious, obscene and details of sensory pleasure.13
Hari Mohan Jha and Khattar Kaka:

two protagonists, one tale
Before his death in 1984, Hari Mohan Jha wrote in his posthumously published
autobiography titled Jeevan Yatra,
when I look back on my life, it presents itself like a drama in which God,
the supreme playwright, seems to have assigned me the role of a comedian.
Some scenes have still to be acted out before the final curtain falls.
(Mishra, 1986, p. 109)14
This perhaps allows us to read the two, the creator and the created, in one scheme;
this also allows reading the witty dialogue of the character in relation to the intellec-
tual and philosophical orientation of the creator. The cultural politics of humorous
deliberation thereby assumes a clarity of confguration.
In an illustrious literary career spanning three decades, Jha began with the
novel Kanyadan in 1933, which appeared initially in serialised parts in a magazine
called Mithila published in Laheriasarai, Darbhanga, and then in a book form.
Jha recounted that he was forced to contribute something to the magazine, and
he almost hastily wrote some of those stories, which became a landmark of
modern Maithili literature, although the historian of Maithili literature Jaikant
Mishra15 deemed Jha a far better writer of the fctional galp, dialogues in fc-
tional framework, but without the usual fctional plotting. The novel catapulted
Jha to such a literary limelight that readers demanded its sequel, and the then-
popular Bengali flmmaker Phanindra Majumdar adapted it into a well-known,
frst-ever Maithili flm with the same title. The apparent sequel of the novel was
titled Dwiragaman in 1943 and another one called Pranamya Devta in 1945. All
of these set a new benchmark in modern literary works in Maithili, and more
importantly, set the stage for the emergence of the character of Khattar Kaka.
The sense of Kaka began to appear since Kanyadan, and it also acquired hilarity
in the cultural context of Mithila in Pranamya Devta. Many of the rustic uncle-
fgures were part and parcel of those fctional works. But, it was yet to become
a character that humorously subverted the set norms prevalent in the Maithili-
speaking Hindu world.
50 Dev Nath Pathak
The unique literary style of Jha combined hilarity and orality, folklore and
modernity. The characters of his novels were intricately enmeshed in the Maithili
folklore and worldview. And this was not surprising since in his childhood days at
his village Kumar Bajitpur in the Vaishali district in Bihar, he heard stories from his
grandmother who he called daiya, her widowed daughter bahin-dai and that of his
own mother. These stories about fairies and gnomes, vivid faces of relatives in the
village, ceremonial rites and rituals, and many religious festivals have been graphi-
cally described in Jha’s literary works. The characters were rustic and endearing,
charming and intriguing at once. Besides, Jha imbibed a lyrical-poetic tendency
from his poet father Pundit Janardan Jha, who was an accomplished scholar of
Sanskrit poetry and philosophy and editor of Mithila Mihir,16 the then-prominent
local literary magazine, published from the city of Darbhanga; at an early age,
when he accompanied his father to his ofce, the child Hari Mohan spent time
reading articles from the editor’s fles. He had acquired a familiarity with the liter-
ary works in Maithili, as well as of the then-prominent Bengali writers including
Bankimchandra, Rabindra Nath Tagore and Saratchand, in addition to that of G
P Srivastava and Deokinandan Khatri. Moreover, his mother was a daughter of an
equally renowned Sanskrit scholar Raja Shiva Singh. So, it seemed quite likely that
the child memorised shlokas (hymns) and prosody from the old scriptures of the
Hindus and learnt to play with puns and alliterations with ease.
His oeuvre ofers many milestones in literary accomplishment. “His most
famous literary tour de force, however, was his Khattar Kakak Tarang (Brainwaves
of Khattar Kaka)” (Mishra, 1986, p. 110). Jha’s accomplishment reached an inimi-
table height with his creation of Khattar Kaka. The latter is seemingly an addict
of bhang (peppered hemp leaves), witty and charming, critically engaging with the
literary sources from the Vedas to the epics such as the Ramayana and Mahab-
harata, presenting pun and sarcasm, and humour-dipped dialogue with his bhatija
(nephew). It assumed such an importance among the readers that humour became
synonymous with Harimohan Jha in modern Maithili literature. The character is
indeed an alter ego of the author, Jha, who is erudite, logical, articulate and sub-
versively humorous. And to distinguish Jha’s comic genius, Mishra says it “is of a
rare variety, it is neither malicious nor slapstick. He pokes fun at many social evil
of his times, but never assumes the role of a preacher” (Ibid., p. 111). It is hilar-
ity in the mode of avuncular relation, given the exchanges between the Uncle
Khattar Kaka and his nephew, who is mostly agent provocateur, adding necessary
grease to the intellectual mills. Kaka always interacts in the grammar of kinship,
and hence his deliberation is always in conversation with his bhatija (brother’s
son). This relational mode makes the exchanges curious, and it demands a recall-
ing of the folkloric idea about the avuncular relationship, particularly between
the uncle as well as aunt and nephews. There are still songs in which the nephew
wittily requests the maternal uncle to share a pinch of tobacco. Besides, there are
popular songs addressing Kaka, the uncle character, in various songs, which were
in circulation on audiocassettes. Many such songs have resurfaced on YouTube as
videos, too.17
And many more such instances from the folk context instantly validate the
dialogic relationship between Khattar Kaka and his partner, the relatively worldly
wise and seemingly a representative of the status quo, the nephew. In such a rela-
tional mode, Khattar Kaka is seemingly “as much an ‘incarnation’ of Gangesh
Upadhyaya, the famous logician of medieval Mithila as of Gonu Jha, well known
for his cunningness, presence of mind, and humour of everyday life” (Jha, 1994,
p. 29). The two names, Gangesh Upadhyaya and Gonu Jha, instantly underline
the profundity of Jha’s deliberation through Kaka. Gangesh Upadhyaya was a logi-
cian who propounded a school of epistemology, in 13th-century Mithila, known
as Navya-Nyaya. Sufce to say, Upadhyaya sought to lay out the logical apparatus
to distinguish various types of perceptions and inferences in a logical discourse.
This tendency resonates with Kaka’s logical enquiries, too. Gonu Jha, on the other
hand, was a jester in the typical sense in the court of the king Shiv Singh around
the 13th century; several folktales about Gonu Jha still fnd mentions in the Mai-
thili-speaking households. And each of such stories proves one point, i.e., Gonu
Jha has a brilliant presence of mind to deliver a thoroughly witty answer to the
most challenging of the intrigues. This too manifests in Kaka. The author Harimo-
han Jha, thus, coalesces the sober seriousness of a logician (Upadhyaya) and lightly
humorous but intelligent answers of a folksy character (Gonu Jha) in Khattar Kaka.
The historians have noted that the humour of Kaka, by the virtue of colloquial
Maithili, loaded with reformist vision, is what made Hari Mohan Jha an inimitable
writer; and, precisely, some of these qualities are also responsible for making Jha,
and his Kaka, contentious.18
This was in the making ever since his socio-cultural orientation during his
childhood. In addition to early exposure to literary tradition and works, he
developed a critical approach to the gendered privileges typical of a patriarchal
society in Mithila; he witnessed the deprivation of his young wife’s educational
pursuit. It pinched him in his youth that there was a social ridicule about a wife,
or a girl in general, getting educated. His frst novel, Kanyadan, was in many
ways a critical and yet duly humorous narration of this issue. Moreover, his own
modern education provided him with intellectual conviction that continued to
show in his poetic verses when he was a student pursuing graduation in English
Honours at the then-prestigious Patna College. He could not continue to do
his post-graduation due to lack of fnancial support, and in the 1920s he began
to work for a key publishing hub called Pustak Bhandar at Laheriasarai in Darb-
hanga. Curiously, he wrote for the publisher some of the kunji (guidebooks)
such as Sanskrit in 30 Days and English in 30 Days to earn money. While doing
such mundane chores to accumulate money for higher education, fortunately
he got exposure to literary works in Hindi and Maithili. Pustak Bhandar was an
attractive place since a lot of modern Hindi literary works were published from
there, including the then-signifcant Hindi literary magazine Balak. Jha got an
exposure to writers of eminence, such as Acharya Shivpoojan Sahaya, Janardan
Jha ‘Janaseedan’, Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ and several others, along with artists
such as Upendra Maharathi.
52 Dev Nath Pathak
His relations with the Maithili language and its literary ideas developed in the
foregoing scenario. Against the hitherto prevalent Maithili literary idealism, Jha
sharpened a literary realism to depict the Maithili-speaking society. He accumu-
lated sufcient money by working at Pustak Bhandar to join the post-graduation
philosophy program at Patna, and performed with such fying colours that he
obtained a gold medal, a rarity for Indian students in colonial India. Subsequently,
he started teaching at B N College, Patna in 1933, and later he joined as a professor
in the Department of Philosophy in Patna University. Needless to say, those were
days of academic glory at Patna University. His engagement with philosophical
issues attracted the University Grants Commission in 1970 to invite him to write
on a critically acclaimed work, Trends of Linguistic Analysis in Indian Philosophy,
which was published in 1981 by Chaukhamba Orientalia (Varanasi), a publisher of
oriental antiquarian sources. The book covered a wide panorama of philosophical
materials, including the Nyaya, Mimamsa, Vedanta, Vyakarna Darshan and Alankar
Sastra, in order to fnd answers to some of the signifcant questions, such as how
is speech constituted, how does sense emerge from sound, key verbs on which
a sentence hinges, and how to distinguish fgurative and implied meanings. Jha
was indeed responding to the linguistic turn in philosophy all over the world by
revisiting the traditional sources from ancient India while also re-reading western
philosophers such as Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Ryle, Austin and so on.
In implication, this work of Jha brings forth a fne example of linguistic hermeneu-
tics informed by the ancient textual tradition of South Asia as well as the western
philosophical development.
As was the case with many of the literary geniuses in colonial and post-colonial
India, Jha did not live a life of abundance. He said, in due wit, “In my search
for ‘plots’ for stories I forgot to purchase a ‘plot’ of land for a house of my own”
(Mishra, 1986, p. 115). The ordinary life of the author notwithstanding, was the
ground for the humorous content and the character of great signifcance to emerge.
Humorous Hinduism of Khattar Kaka

Let’s return to the fundamental of the dual protagonists. The brief outline of the
biographical trajectory of the author Hari Mohan Jha enabled us to fathom the
rationale behind his literary creations. Jha dedicated his Hindi version of Khattar
Kaka to the readers, who are, in his ornate words, “full of emotions and aesthetics,
hearty and able to understand joy, rejoice poetry-scriptures-and humour, love to
taste the syrupy conversation and relishes sweet-sour materials as though it were
delicious sauce” (Jha, 1971, p. 5). Instantly, after this culturally colourful dedica-
tion, we hear of the fundamental characteristics of Khattar Kaka, a self-contained
person, high on the hemp leaves, his sense of humour and critical understanding,
and ever ready to employ his unrelenting logic. If there is any parallel, according to
Jha, Khattar Kaka is like the medieval saint poet Kabir Das, who could present his
insightful critique of almost everything that crossed his path in a most jovial and
logical manner. He does not spare gods, let alone humans, and seeks to develop a
relationship with all of them. He deems gods, sometimes, as his mausa (mother’s
sister’s husband) and sometimes his Samadhi (father of the bridegroom). Such a
relationship with the divine obtains him a kinship network in which joking rela-
tions19 are permissible. Kaka’s jocular association with his kith and kin is in an
essentially agrarian Maithili-speaking society. Moreover, in this context, a joking
relationship does not distinguish the mortal and the immortal, the human and the
divine. Hence, he does not mind calling the divinity, paradoxically, an atheist or a
villain. He tickles with evident objective; he humours for a reason that he meticu-
lously explicates; he holds out pinches of sarcasm for the logic that he spells out.
Jha informs that one can consider Khattar Kaka a direct heir to Charvak, who
is known to have propounded the Lokayata philosophy; the latter was, among vari-
ous other things, a philosophical celebration of existential materialism of humans
in everyday life. This is a plausible suggestion since Kaka returns to Charvak several
times, and so would this essay in the latter part. In comparison, Kaka does not seem to
invoke Kabir Das as much as he articulates afnity with Charvak. This is in addition
to the suggestion, mentioned earlier in this essay, about Kaka’s proximity with Gonu
Jha, the court jester in medieval Mithila. A large corpus of folktales about Gonu Jha is
hitherto popular amongst the Maithili folk, and hence it is almost irresistible for them
to perceive Gonu Jha in the character of Khattar Kaka. As the author, Jha does not try
to ascertain the exact location of his character in historical or mythological kingship
or kinship. He is more interested to leave the certainty of his socio-historical location
suspended, so everyone could relate to Kaka as an uncle next door, whom everyone
hears in everyday banter, and who may resurface any fne day despite social changes.
The author articulates his key objective behind his creation; he says,
as the poet Jaydev known for his classical poetry titled Geet Govindam in
Sanskrit delivered the readers a ras-nimantran (an invitation to partake on
aesthetics), I deliver in this work hasya-nimantran (an invitation to join in
humour) and laugh it out.
(Ibid., p. 10)
This seemingly innocuous invitation notwithstanding, Jha makes Kaka speak of the
danger of this exercise. Kaka anticipates abuses hurled at him when the readers will
get to know of his “big-mouthed, precocious, and seemingly unpalatable truth”.
‘I’, a pronoun that suddenly seems to allude to the author Jha, says, “Kaka, when
your gapp (eloquent narration) will be published, trust me, even those who abuse
you in day light will read them in privacy in the dark nights.”20 Even though Kaka
upsets the set world of Hindus, it is irresistible to listen to him. And what does
Kaka do throughout his narration? He simply, jokingly, logically and with proper
citations subverts the status quo. He chisels out a hilarious world for the Hindus.
Let’s refect on some of the specifc instances, in the following excerpts:21
It was the festival of Ramnavami (celebration of the birth day of lord Ram);
Khattar Kaka was cleaning raisins for his falahar (fast in which folks eat only
54 Dev Nath Pathak
fruits). I asked him, ‘Kaka, are you coming to watch tonight’s performance
of Ramlila (the folk performance that narrates various episodes from the epic
Ramayana)’.
Kaka wanted to know as to what was about to happen in tonight’s per-
formance, to which I replied, ‘exile of Sita’. And in no time Kaka said, ‘then
I won’t go’. I was intrigued and said, ‘why Kaka, there are such wonderful
ideals maryadapurushottam (the finest embodiment of best conduct) Ram
shows us’. This led Kaka on his trail, and he said,
“yes, indeed, he has shown us the example of maryadapurushottam, by
causing pathos to a helpless woman, exiling a chaste wife, chopping a wom-
an’s nose, shooting arrow on a woman. His heroism commences by making
women cry, and that’s where it ends too . . . see, he started as a student by
killing Taraka, the female demon, his teacher Vishwamitra was such a bad
one who commanded him to kill the woman just to maintain the status quo
as a royal teacher, and he destroyed Ram’s future.”
(Jha, 2011, p. 15)
Each answer of Kaka drove the interlocutor ‘I’ to the layers of intrigue; it seemed
never-ending, logically justifed, a series of answers, until ‘I’ accepted them. Kaka
went on questioning the idea of justice in the story of Ramayana:
He underlines that even Ram’s father Dashrath was no less, he exiled his
son since his wife, Kekeyi (Ram’s step mother) asked him to do so; and
hence his son only continued the tradition of injustice as he sentenced Sita
to exile without a fair trial. Even though Ram’s subject requested to revise
the sentence, the recalcitrant Ram did not relent. A king who does not listen
to his pleading subject is hardly a just one. And then, to top it all, he had a
subservient and unthinking brother Laxman, ever ready to be a blind partner
in Ram’s crime. He chopped off the nose of Shuparnakha, the sister of the
Lanka king Ravana, and drove Sita to jungle in the dead of night to leave her
forever. Kaka insisted on thinking logically, and asked the question which,
according to him, the women of Mithila had asked. Why did Ram decide to
walk across a large swathe of jungle when it was possible to spend his exile
in a nearby jungle called chitrakoot and keep his father’s words? But, he was
always blinded by his own fancy, and hence he made the tender and nubile
Sita walk on foot across miles of jungle, and put her in danger. Ram never
understood the language of love in his obsessive love for the throne of Ayod-
hya. Sita made so many sacrifices for him; he, none. Even though Sita came
out with flying colors in the fire ordeal, he did not reverse his decision to
exile her; even though Sita was in the eighth month of pregnancy, Ram was
callous about the would be mother. Kaka was not only angry; he was also on
the verge of crying while narrating his criticism of Ram. A conversation that
started on humorous note began to get emotionally serious. With his moist
eyes, he rebuked the interlocutor, I, who was still not giving up his praise
for Ram, “tell me, would I throw your aunt out of my house just because of
an idiot washerman’s complaint.” No wonder, the ignorant and ill-educated
Ram could not answer the allegations made by the women of Mithila, and
irritatingly said, “since he read Gautam’s philosophy, he turned out to be a
jackal.” Kaka emphasizes the significance of reading logic in Mithila. And
he believes, “had Ram read the philosophy of Nyaya in Mithila he would
have known what nyaya (justice) means. In fact, Kaka believes Ravan was far
more conscientious than Ram. Ravan abducted Sita, and did not keep her
in the residence of his queens in the palace. With due respect to the chastity
and will of Sita, he decided to keep her in the ashokvatika (garden of ashoka
tree). Even though a demon, Ravan was far more civil and just.
Inundated by Kaka’s acrimony, I, finally asked him, “if such is your feel-
ing for Ram, why are you observing fast on Ramnavami.” Kaka says, “for
a simple reason, I still consider Ram important. He did not marry another
woman after Sita’s exile. Instead, Ram made a golden statue of Sita and loved
it for ever . . . having said that, however, I have rights to complain about
Ram’s behaviour since I am a Maithil, from Ram’s in-laws side, and I am
entitled to abuse Ram and his family by the virtue of kinship rules; in any
case, even gods cannot shut me up since I am a Maithil.”22
A humorous and passionate version of the Hindu world emerges from this dis-
course, and it receives more vigour as Kaka goes on dismantling the socio-religious
common sense. He considers an emotionally bewildered Arjun in the battlefeld
of the Mahabharata to be far more conscientious since he had a clear sense about
who’s who of his kinship; he did not want to shoot at the other side of the battle
since he saw his uncles, grandfathers, cousin brothers, teachers and so on; and this
awareness made him humble and humane. But, the so-called great preaching of
Krishna misled him, as he said ‘neither any weapon cuts it, nor fre can burn’.23
If this is so, why don’t you kill me, and then go to your aunt and tell her, “why
are you crying aunt; instead, sing the songs of celebration, for, our uncle has only
changed his body!”24 The interlocutor, I, insisted that Kaka is ignoring the phi-
losophy of detachment, anasakti yog, that Krishna sought to teach in the Gita. Kaka
sniggers and refutes such an idea, saying
if it is about renouncing all desires, for anaksakti, then why the temptation of
the heaven and state that Krishna offered. . . . Krishna said, Arjun, fight and
kill; if you die in the battle, you will get heaven, and if you win, kingdom
of Hastinapur.25
Kaka gufawed and added that Arjun was miserably gullible since he had no idea
of logic, to which the interlocutor chided Kaka, complaining that he inserted his
logic everywhere. And once again, in order to establish the supremacy of logic,
Kaka said, while cracking areca nuts for his consumption, “why not, after all logic
is the most important knowledge and skill of our world.”26 But it is not that Kaka
56 Dev Nath Pathak
denies any signifcance of the lessons from the Gita. He asks us to think of the
shloka that meant ‘do your actions, without thinking of the fruits (results)’. Kaka
mischievously smiled, and said, here ‘fruits’ means ofspring, the babies, which
come out of the sexual intercourse. So the lesson from the Gita is appropriate for
family planning, allowing everyone to have unlimited sex without reproducing
‘fruits’. On a relatively more serious note, such lessons are dangerous since it vali-
dates harmful fatalism amongst those who are in a miserable situation; why should
then the workers protest against poor wages and exploitation, if actions and fruits
should not relate!
Kaka had a lot more to ofer on the hilarity that he perceived in the so-called
profundity in the Mahabharata. He poked fun at the characters celebrated for vir-
tues such as dharmaputra Yudhisthira, the eldest of the Pandav princes. According
to Kaka, Yudhisthira violated all of the kinship norms by accepting his younger
brother’s wife as his own and eventually lost her in the game of dice with the cousin
brothers. Upon the defeat, Duryodhana ordered his younger brother named Dush-
ashna to drag Draupadi as his slave in the court and denude her. Her husbands, the
Pandawas, sat with heads down, and thus Draupadi said, ‘none of these husbands
are really like husbands’. And Draupadi herself was so blinded by her own beauty
that she arrogantly passed deeply ofending remarks when Duryodhana tripped on
the ground. She said, ‘the son of the blind father is no less blind’.27 Obviously, it
had to lead to the great battle of egos in the end.
With the similar logic, or logical consistency, Kaka approaches another sensi-
tive issue belonging to the Hindus’ religiosity. It is about worshipping the goddess
Durga. The following is an excerpt:
A priest was seated and chanting sholkas from the book Durgasaptsati usu-
ally read in praise of the great mother goddess. Khattar Kaka passed by and
overheard the chanting that meant begging for quality, victory, esteem, and
everything that one socially values. He could not resist his quick interjection-
why are you begging helplessly. The goddess gets bored with the beggars,
and loves those who have will and conviction to get everything by their right
actions.28
For a change, I, the interlocutor, was a relatively more poised receiver of Kaka’s
interjection.
I asked, ‘since when and how have we developed this bad habit of begging,
Kaka’.
Evidently, ‘I’ had invited Kaka for another discourse. And Kaka went about giv-
ing an historical trajectory, from the Vedas to the Upanishads, from Brahmins to
Buddhist monks, from socialist India to capitalist America, to show the widespread
epidemic of begging. One or another mantra, from Sanskrit scripture to modern
politics, serves the purpose of begging. We recite them and expect our disease,
pathos and poverty gone. So Durgasaptasati is no diferent. The Hindu worshippers

beg for everything, from good luck to good wife, from good fortune to good tri-
umph over enemies. Kaka also discloses the greed of the priest craft, for example,
when they command the sacrifce of chhagal (young-tender goat) for the goddess
Kali, while worshipping the goddess as a nurturer of everyone. Kaka pokes fun as
he asks, is goddess not nurturer of the sacrifcial goat, too? He notes that the god-
dess has been saddled with an enormous responsibility to save humanity, while the
latter takes little responsibility of anything. In addition to taking potshots at the
religious matter, Kaka does not spare various other norms pertaining to a believer’s
belief in astrology, solar-lunar eclipse and the rituals that the priests insist on per-
forming almost on every occasion in the rite of passage. All such arrangements,
related to priest craft, are primarily meant to beneft the Brahmins. Khattar Kaka
humorously dismantles them, invoking Charvak and the logic from Lokayat.
Charvak’s lokayat and Kaka’s humour

Hari Mohan Jha makes Khattar Kaka speak of Charvak many times. It is hence
imperative to quickly fathom what it means and how Kaka embodies Charvak.
Sufce to say, Kaka’s humour renders Charvaka as a sublime ghost hovering over
Maithili everyday life. It absolves the author Jha and his Kaka of the allegation of
individuated iconoclasm. It also transforms the reformist vision of the protagonist
duo as an integral component of the Maithili socio-cultural world. Hence, seldom
do we hear the protagonists of this chapter launching on a clear didactic journey.
The edifcation, if any, is mufed in the barbed wit and laughter, leaving one with
adequate freedom to do both, accepts or rejects Kaka’s humorous accounts. In this
regard, Jha and Kaka are distinguishable from the Bengali renaissance men of let-
ters. The reformist vision of Kaka, if any, does not make perpetual references to any
exogenous source of inspiration and infuence, percept and prejudices; it does not
dwell on the construction of an orient; we don’t see an occidental orientation at
work as it were in colonial caricatures or visual arts, or even in the modern satiri-
cal theater.29 Instead, it invites us to look back in time at some of the forgotten or
denigrated names from philosophical posterity in South Asia. Hence, Kaka and
Charvak come along, though neither is unequivocal.
This was much before a sophisticated modern theoretical conceptualisation of
everyday life began to be read and referred to in social sciences that a body of
thinking on the logic of everyday life existed in South Asia. Hari Mohan Jha’s
philosophical orientation, and so that of Kaka, derives strength from such a logic.
That was a logic that existed between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, the philosophi-
cal system of the literate elite, mostly Brahmins, and that of the Buddhist scholars.
Both the champions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy were seemingly uncomfortable
with the logic of Lokayat, alternatively called Charvaka or Barhaspatya, or Asura
philosophy, too. In philosophical discourses, it was held to be a manner of think-
ing inclined to the world of sense or sensory experience, or that belonging to the
people. And hence, any reference to them was in bits and pieces, mostly presenting
58 Dev Nath Pathak
the Lokayat in a negative light; it was so in the Mahabharata, Upanishad and even
in the Buddhist and Jaina commentaries. It did not come easily in the reckoning
of the commentators and chroniclers of the orthodox philosophy, since the refer-
ences were truncated, negative and unft for any established body of philosophy.
Some of the modern historians of philosophy, and philosophers, tried to put those
fragments together, to make sense of the Lokayat. S N Dasgupta followed by Debi
Prasad Chattopadhyaya30 were some such chronicler philosophers who revisited the
Lokayat to develop a sense of homegrown everyday logic in South Asian thinking.
Most discussions on Lokayat, or Charvaka, present an idea that it was related
to the asura, literally, demonic thinking. However, we learn that the ordinary folks
operating with the sensory logic were deemed to be demonic. The Lokayat logic
entailed vitanda-vada, an idea given by a Buddhist scholar named Buddhagho-
sha.31 If vitanda stands for argumentation or disputation, vada alludes to a system
of thinking and logical thesis. Such a bare minimum method enabled the Lokayat
thinkers to critically question everything, from divine to the canonical injunctions,
from metaphysics to the ritual practices, from noble ideas to all the philosophi-
cally sophisticated promises. As a result, the Lokayat thinkers succumb to the label
of atheist, irreverent, heretic and overall demonic. There is a sense of Lokayat
materialism equivalent of deha-vada, which could be translated in two ways: one,
material interest of humans shall be pivotal to their thinking and rational choices;
two, rational knowledge is essentially embodied in nature – the embodied knowl-
edge is accessible only if a knower does not distinguish intellect and emotion.
Chattopadhayaya also underlined the relationship of this people’s thinking with
the widespread tantrism that engulfed both Hindus and Buddhists to a large extent,
giving birth to various types of tantrism in South Asia.32 Tantric practices deemed
deh, a body, as a microcosm of the universe, and hence promoted the usage of
madya (wine), mamsa (meat), maithuna (sexual intercourse), mudra (fried cereals) and
matsya (fsh). Given such a tendency, tantric thoughts and practice are said to be
referring to proto-materialistic thinking, a kind of primitive materialism wrapped
in archaic fantasy.33 The tantrics, also known as vamacari, indulged in periodic pro-
miscuity. Though the popular meaning of vama is ‘left-inclined’, it actually alludes
to the female body and Eros (kama). The Lokayat thinking exhibits most of these
tendencies, although it is evocative of everyday life rather than as a spectacle of
trained chosen tantrics.
Sufce to say, the tendency to see everything against the grain, poke fun at the
established normative ways and reject the canonical authorities have been invariably
associated with Charvaka thinking. This is so much so that we have heard usage of
the name Charvaka in everyday life in a manner to reprimand anyone speaking in
favour of bodily-sensory pleasure, consumption of taboo ingredients or liberty in
pursuing desire. All of these ultimately take us to the idea of an ‘embodied rationality’
where body and mind, emotion and intellect, sentiments and reason come together.
Hence, Hari Mohan Jha is correct in making Khattar Kaka evoke Charvak. It
could be safely guessed that Jha was aware of this variety of philosophical thinking,
and he employed it with due care for the linguistic peculiarities of the Maithili
context; he was already steeped in the socio-cultural specifcities of the region

of Mithila, which amply exhibit cultural engagement with Shakt and Shaiv tant-
rism. The Maithili-speaking Hindus’ devotion to mother goddess Tara, a Buddhist
Mahayana deity, is well known, along with various local art forms, which dwell
on tantric motifs.34 And in such a scenario, it is not surprising that Jha and Kaka
speak tongue-in-cheek on almost everything under the sun following Charvak’s
deh-vada. This ought to be noted that there is a sense of anatomy in Kaka’s well-
humoured deh, literally meaning body. Most of his deliberations reply on the idea
of kinship relations. Indeed, the format of dialogic deliberation afrms that faith
in relationships. On several occasions, we hear Kaka teasing his interlocutor ‘I’,
expressing hesitation in revealing his sexual pun and innuendos. And this sense of
kinship relations sharpens the humour and criticality, too. Kaka’s vitanda is thus
not aimless. There is also a sense of reformism at work, and in that sense Kaka’s
humour underlines the incongruity between the practical everyday world and the
metaphysical-textual-priestly imagination. Though it is not the same variety of
evangelical reformism that dominated early 20th-century Bengal, we rarely hear
of a proselytising reformer looking down upon his subject while looking up at
the ideals enshrined in the modern sources of information. Moreover, in Kaka’s
deh-vada, there is a little more than mere celebration of body-sensory pleasure. In
addition to his advocacy for eating dahi-chura or fsh, there is also a heavy celebra-
tion of kinship relations. Human relations are evidently more important than the
metaphysically guided transcendence; ihlok (this-world) is no less important than
parlok (that-other-world). Kaka seeks for democratising this-worldly pleasure for
all. And in doing so, he also brings the marginalised to the centre of discourse. Let
alone humans, he does so for the sweet-meats, too. For example, a particular sweet
meat called khaja (layers of four fried in oil and dipped in sugar syrup) popular in
rural Mithila is brought in comparison with rasgulla of Bengali and laddu of Punjabi.
Kaka’s reformist vision does not sever ties with the available cultural moorings,
primarily the humorous linguistic specifcities. Both Jha and Kaka seem to be
equally steeped in the culture of humour in Mithila, and hence able to play with
the colloquial idioms, metaphors and usages.35 There is humorous subversion of
various established norms, notwithstanding the literary historian Jaykant Mishra
noted a criticism. In his words,36
There is an uncivil tone in Jha’s humrous narratives; the Maithili readers have
felt a heretic attempt in them that destabilizes the belief in the texts of reli-
gious significance. Even some of the glorious parts of culture and tradition,
useful for humanity, succumb to Hari Mohan Jha’s subversive humour. And
most importantly, such humorous accounts destroy the culture and tradition
without offering an alternative faith.
(1998, pp. 238–239)
The criticism, however, does not fetch the logical strength too far, since Kaka has
invariably tried alluding to an alternative faith by referring to Charvak. In this
60 Dev Nath Pathak
alternative faith, there is no attempt to entirely annihilate Hindu dharma alto-

gether. Instead, it is to provide a space, aptitude and value orientation in laughing
at one’s own socio-religious belief. In this sense, Kaka is not a proselytising agent-
reformer holding out a new cult, or a new society, or a new religious formation.
He continues to remain a Hindu, Maithil brahmin, as a greedy-glutton as tradi-
tionally expected. And yet, he pokes fun at everything, employing his version of
Charvak-rationality inclusive of deh-vad and vitanda-vad. When it comes to the
allegation of speaking in the tone of a hilarious uncle, he makes it clear that he is
not there to deliver a ‘sickly-sweetly-spoken-lie’.37 Besides, Kaka also mentions the
logic from another ancient philosophy called Nyaya, one of the six orthodox sys-
tems of philosophical reasoning from ancient India. Earlier in this essay, there was
a mention of Nav-Nyaya of the philosopher from Mithila named Gangesh Upad-
hyaya. Both Nayaya and Nav-Nyaya are sophisticated epistemological discussions
on evidence, perception, inferences and overall logic. In Kaka’s humoured critical
discourses, however, such sophisticated epistemologies are only in the background.
More foregrounded is the Lokayat philosophy, which connects the subversive dis-
cussion with the folk context of Mithila.
Conclusion
One can perhaps conjecture that Khattar Kaka paved the way for a series of real-life
literary personalities to come to the foreground of cultural politics in India, per-
sonifying in many ways what the fctional character Kaka stood for. This essay has
not dealt with the contemporary manifestations and relationship of the discourse
with the social changes, but then it is tacit throughout the essay that the discur-
sive background comprises the contemporary. Sufce to say, during the heyday of
what might be called the ‘cassette culture’38 in India, and the concomitant modernity
spreading across through sound, there were humorous poetic interjections on
the then-burning issues in India. Mostly grey haired, bald-headed and wrinkle-
faced poets recited their humorous verses with uncanny youthful enthusiasm.
Kaka Hathrasi, Shail Chaturvedi, Ashok Chakradhar, Surendra Sharma and Hullad
Moradabadi were some of the household names of such personalities. This was
the time before television arrived, and radio was the most intimate object in every
household. Many of these poets read out their humorous poetry in kavi sammelan,
the public meetings of these poets. We heard them almost every week through
those cassettes played back on tape recorders and record players. They also pub-
lished their poetic parodies and reached out to the masses through various means.
Many of them exhibited their political afliations. For example, Kaka Hath-
rasi’s parodies39 played a role in the electoral campaign of the Bhartiya Janta Party.
Likewise, the only television channel owned by the state of India, Doordarshan
had its own Kaka character, in 1988, in a popular series titled Kakaji Kahin (Thus
Spake Kaka). This was a serial directed by Basu Chatterji based on the novel Netaji
Kahin (Thus Spake the Leader), written by the novelist and script writer Manohar
Shyam Joshi, who was already renowned for creating witty-humorous characters
in his novels. The Kaka character essayed by the veteran actor Om Puri was witty,
hilarious, cunning and most importantly, entirely working for political groups as
well as his own survival. A vast area of enquiry opens up if one were to explore
these instances with a degree of self-refection. All such avuncular characters may
not be the same as Khattar Kaka. This is mostly because the latter did not have a
clear political agenda associated with any organised political party. The lineage of
the genre of political humour referred to by all these manifestations, however, stem
from Hari Mohan Jha’s cultural politics via the dialogic deliberations of Khattar
Kaka. And that style of critical humour tends to be prototypical of the many Kakas
in post-independent India’s socio-cultural history of humorous cultural politics.
This essay has initiated a more attentive reading of the post–Khattar Kaka trails that
respond to spatio-temporal changes and politico-cultural dynamics.
Moreover, as this essay has elucidated, the idea of subversion in humorous
deliberations need not be a plain case of showing an anomaly for the sake of a con-
version from one faith to another. For Kaka, himself a Brahmin, does not radically
break his sacred thread; he continues to don the sacred thread almost as a license to
present his hilarious barbs against the sacred-thread-wearing folks. In this regard,
Kaka is distinguishable from the various modern Maithili-speaking, educated folks
who followed the suit of 19th-century social reform movements. An often heard
anecdote40 suggests that many Maithili-speaking men who went for higher edu-
cation to various universities (Patna and Allahabad) broke their sacred thread,
burnt them into ashes, mixed the powdered remains in alcohol and drank up.
This was one kind of critique of the ritualistic Brahmanical Hindu belief and
practices. Such an approach, however, was also a butt of ridicule for many of the
staunch Maithili-speaking Hindus living in villages and small towns. This action
was deemed dismissive of the socio-religious lives of the ordinary folks. Likewise,
most of the criticism of the Hindus and Hinduism in academic scholarship is a
20th-century practice in response to the rise of the Hindutva politics. They have
been either anti-religiosity or restricted to the anomalies of the interface between
religion and politics vis-à-vis Hindutva. And in that context, Hari Mohan Jha’s
deliberation through his character, Khattar Kaka, is of enormous signifcance.
It is an open-ended format in which a humorous-critical engagement with the
notions prevalent in a religious community ruptures the idea of religiosity. This
is aimed at a more self-critical existence of the Hindus, rather than dismissing the
socio-religious life. In the same way humans tease each other, they could tease the
divine as well and canonical-religious authority, too. The logic of kinship allows
that space in which one can declare a god or a goddess to be in a personal rela-
tionship. The way Kaka speaks of gods is precisely to hint that they are not distant
from his logic of kinship relations. This is clearly extremely relevant information
in the present time of socio-political intolerance to anything remotely or closely
related to the religion of the majority or the minority. Perhaps, this is the reason
why Kaka, and his creator Jha, together ought to be considered an important
chapter in the cultural politics not only of India, but also that of South Asia more
generally.
62 Dev Nath Pathak
Notes
1 Acknowledgements: I would like to express my gratitude to scholars who benefited this
essay; Prof. Sadan Jha for his detailed comments on the draft of this essay and words of
encouragement; Prof. Sasanka Perera for showing the gaps in the draft; and Dr. Mithilesh
Kumar Jha for pointing out the philosophical background to Hari Mohan Jha and send-
ing me the photos of a rare philosophical treatise during the time of pandemic lockdown
(2020) in India. Gratitude is also due to Divyendu Jha for technical help.
2 Lothar Lutze (1999) operates with this idea, vis. sense of humour, since the European
idea of humour may not be applicable to the literary instances in South Asia. In general,
the challenge to offer a universal definition of humour is widely acknowledged despite
the attempts to create theoretical typologies of humour, such as in Attardo (1994).
3 See Dalmia (2017) for a broader discussion along this line that establishes fiction as a
mode of social history.
4 The essay is thereby a modest critique of the distinctions that were there in conventional
anthropology of Hindu society, as well as an approach that emphasises the uniqueness
of the folk’s Hinduism, such as Wendy Doniger’s (2010) approach. This is the hinge of
discussion elsewhere in Pathak (2019).
5 Elsewhere, in Pathak (2021).
6 See Apte (1985), discussed in Oesterheld and Zoller (1999).
7 The usage Kaka literally means uncle, without specifying which uncle in the kinship
network; it could be an uncle from the mother’s side (mother’s brother or mother’s sister’s
husband and so on) or father’s side (father’s brother or father’s sisters’ husband and so on).
8 Maithili is a regional language spoken in northern India, with a concentration in the state
of Bihar and across the border in Nepal. It has a strong oral tradition in folklore as well
as a more formal practice of literature in print that is distinct from Hindi literature.
9 See in a recent local edition published in 2011, page number 7.
10 Manindra Thakur, professor of politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and conversant in
the Indic philosophical sources, mentioned this in his comments on a paper on Khattar
Kaka presented by this author at a conference on Indigenous Knowledge System and
Youth Empowerment, on 2–3 March 2017, at the National Educational University of
Planning and Administration, New Delhi.
11 Jha (2011, p. 215).
12 The translations throughout the essay are by the author of this chapter unless stated
otherwise.
13 An erudite deliberation along this line was in Basham (2004), which aided in our under-
standing of a heterogenous and inherently contested Vedic Hinduism.
14 Also in Jha (1994).
15 Mishra (1998, p. 238).
16 Mithila Mihir was cosmopolitan in outlook, published essays in Hindi, English and Mai-
thili in the beginning, and also manifested reformist zeal. See Mishra (1998, p. 224).
17 See, for example, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzcwu99U0sI (accessed on 1 April
2020).
18 See Mishra (1998, p. 231). Also, Jha (2011) has admitted that there was hilarious contro-
versy on his Khattar Kaka work in the magazine Mithila Mihir in May– November 1954.
It is worth exploring this controversy on some other occasion.
19 An anthropologist such as Radcliffe-Brown (1940) perceived the prevalent joking relations
only in the primitive world, in kinship relationships among humans.
20 Jha (2011, p. 8).
21 The text in italics is a translation from Maithili to English by the author of this chapter
unless stated otherwise.
22 This abridged version is titled Ramayan in Jha (1971, pp. 13–19).
23 This is a verse from the Gita that almost every common Hindu has heard.
24 Ibid., p. 21.
25 Ibid., p. 23.
26 Ibid., p. 23.
27 Ibid., p. 29.
28 Ibid., p. 45.
29 The 20th-century reformist vision in Bengal had to perform the job of creating a new
cultural order in the light of rationality they had imbibed through modern education.
There was a kind of orientalism entailed, and this has been a matter of critical discus-
sion in many works, including that of Mitter (1994) and Kumar (1993), that gave details
about the negotiation of tradition and modernity in art and aesthetics and social reform
movements, respectively. Also, see Radice (1999).
30 Henceforth, the discussion is in the light of the cardinal work of Chattopadhyaya (1959).
31 Cited in Chattopadhyaya (1959, p. 24).
32 Also see Bhattacharya (1982) to understand the widespread influence of tantric religion.
33 Ibid., p. 53.
34 A descriptive detailing along this line is in various texts, including Pathak (2019).
35 A Maithili literary critic named Shrikrishna Mishra is known to have shown this con-
nection. See Mishra (1998, p. 256).
36 Translated from Maithili to English by the author of this essay.
37 Jha (2011).
38 Peter Manuel is hitherto an important informative source (1993).
39 See Banerjee (2014), Rao and Mudgal (2017), in addition to Manuel (1993).
40 In a personal communication with Prof. Sadan Jha.
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Indian Sub-continent Before the Coming of the Muslims. Delhi: Pan Macmillan.
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Publishing House.
Dalmia, V. 2017. Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern India. Ranikhet:
Permanent Black.
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Rights and Feminism in India (1800–1990). Delhi: Zubaan.
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and Gods, Brahmans and Babus: Humour in South Asian Literatures (pp. 9–22). Delhi:
Manohar.
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University of Chicago Press.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Rao, S. and Mudgal, V. (eds.). 2017. Journalism, Democracy and Civil Society in India. Delhi:
Routledge.
PART II
Folkloric worldviews
Laughter as performed narratives
4
TALES FROM ASSAM’S
TEA GARDENS
When humour becomes resistance
in the everyday life-world of labourers
Prithiraj Borah1
The popular imaginary of Assam’s tea gardens has been concentrated on the history
of atrocities and exploitations. Before entering the tea gardens for the mainstay of
discussion in this chapter, I must admit that once I stayed for eight months inside
a couple of tea gardens mostly from the Brahmaputra valley of Assam, my percep-
tions and the ideas of resistance changed completely. If one closely observes the
everyday resistance politics of the adivasi2 (tribal) plantation labourers, the element
of laughter and humour becomes an interesting point of study. The essay elaborates
the life-world of labourers in the tea gardens of Assam, and it seeks to understand
how humour plays an important role in their day-to-day lived experiences.
‘Garden’ is a material concept grounded in the history of atrocities to the plan-
tation workforce. The disciplined workforce is produced through the culture of
patronage, wherein the ‘planter-manager-sahib’ stands tall. In the contemporary
situation, the fgure of burra sahib (senior manager) is the outcome of colonial
lordship. Social practices inside the garden are explicitly patriarchal, and a man-
ager’s hukum (order) works through a hierarchy of overseers and supervisors who
all are men, but the role of sardarni is also ‘masculine’ in nature as well. Work and
domination inside the garden, due to its colonial roots, carries oppressive material
practices. The relationships maintained between planters and workers are in the
form of mai-baap (paternalistic), which is still a reality inside tea gardens. Gender,
class, caste and ethnicity are also closely embedded within the plantation practices
of diference, power and hierarchy.
I discuss the tea gardens as a social site to locate humour in it, taking a cue from
the introduction chapter in this book. To do so, there is an attempt to explore and
capture the intricacies of hidden voices, anger, bitten tongues, rumours and sarcasm
as complex social practices of resistance and protest by adivasi labourers. But hidden
is not unilinear; it straddles between hidden and unhidden, because it includes both,
the motives and intentions, as well as humour as a form of resistance. In the broader
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-6
68 Prithiraj Borah
context, I study the subjective experiences of a tea garden labourer when s/he makes
a strategic move in the presence of the sahib/babus/sardars through the weapon of
humour. The chapter also includes ethnographic work related with four events;
frstly, killing a pet (labrador) of a garden manager; secondly, the use of local slangs in
the feld/garden; thirdly, the adivasi folksongs and how the labourers try to generate
laughter out of these songs; and lastly, the workers throwing stones at the manager’s
bungalow during the night. Such incidents of humour are not just from one planta-
tion; there have been multiple instances of humour-guided ridicule across various tea
gardens of Assam. This essay, therefore, explores and engages with everyday forms
of resistances inside tea plantation gardens. In doing so, it amounts to showing the
subjective side of class relations experienced by the plantation labour force.
For the collection of ethnographic material, I stayed in various tea gardens in
the Tinsukia, Dibrugarh and Sonitpur districts of Assam. I had spent more days in
the tea estates of the Sonitpur district in comparison to my stay at other tea gar-
dens, and most of the narratives in this chapter are drawn from the Dhekiajuli and
Doom Dooma tea estates. In the course of participant observation inside the tea
gardens, I reached out to the respondents in the feld, at the factories and even on
the streets. While interacting during the study, I did encounter hesitation, so the
interviews were conducted in public spaces such as in the feld and factories, where
the participants were at ease. Over a period of time, I managed to develop cordial
relationships with my participants.
Life-worlds and constructing a ‘garden’

The tea gardens are an amalgamation of life-worlds. One such life-world is that of
the adivasi labourers with their stories of resistance. Assam appears to be a promising
example of such a space. Tea gardens have a long historical signifcance associated
with the notion of paradise and civilisation. The Europeans perceived the gardens
as an empire, flled with the collection of fora and fauna accumulated from the
lands they had discovered and colonised. Assam appeared to be a promising exam-
ple of such a space for Europeans. In 1840, Charles Bruce pioneered the use of the
term ‘garden’ alongside its vernacular equivalent bari in his reports (Sharma, 2006,
p. 448). In the pre-colonial Assam, the term bari had a diferent meaning that relates
to the lands suitable for the garden sites, but the cultivation of wild ‘forest’ to pos-
sible ‘garden’ was a phenomenal task. The cultivation itself is a project dependent
upon human action. Labour was corporal at the heart of this cultivating enterprise.
The colonial eforts to radicalise the economy in order to construct ‘gardens’
was dependent upon the native labourers. The planters and plantation owners were
dependent on the local communities, and if peasants were unwilling to work, then
they used to bring tribal communities from the hills for ‘forest’ clearing. In an early
description of hill communities in Assam, one planter notes:
Arrangements had been made for a batch of 250 Naga hill tribesmen and
swarms of Singhpo. I soon had 750 of them, both men and women hard at
Tales from Assam’s tea gardens 69
work. The men were given axes to cut the trees and clear the jungle. They
fairly ate into the jungle and with amazing agility and ran skimming over the
tangle to felled jungle and bamboos with bare feet.
(Ramsden, 1945, p. 65)
His explanation of the tribal labour to clear the forest is assembled with almost
animal-like ease. These racialised labels ofer the concept of work and the daily dis-
ciplines of plantation labour. Such a construction of settlement and labour practices
holds the key to the colonial construction of ‘garden’.
The life-worlds of labourers has been a signifcant focus of this study. In The Cri-
sis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), Edmund Husserl
explains life-worlds as intersubjective experiences that make scientifc objectifying
knowledge meaningful. He attempted to establish a science that could identify the
fundamental structures of consciousness. For him, consciousness is always directed
towards objects whether real or imagined. His concept is related to how the subject
is not enclosed in itself, but it is instead the subject in the life-world. The colonial
objects such as bungalows and factories are refections of the hegemonic power
relation inside the gardens. The bungalow seeks to map a powerful structure within
and beyond the garden space. Even Husserl explores the human experiences in the
life world in relation to the objects. To make such a universal structure is to depict
how the world is experienced by the subjects (Husserl, 1936, p. 142). Even during
my feldwork, the workers in the garden used to throw stones on the manager’s
bungalow during nights, signifying the amount of the labourers’ anger and anxiety
towards the particular object. This is to make a clear understanding how the work-
ers and the garden are connected to each other along with the ‘ontology of the
life-world’. Husserl observes such a connection as ‘a priori’ and universal.
Moreover, for Schutz, the conception of the life-world is based on the sociolog-
ical foundation of Max Weber’s action-based interpretative sociology. According
to Timothy M. Costelloe (1996), Schutz conceives the life-world in pragmatic
terms, emphasising everyday life as well as the lived experiences (Costelloe, 1996,
p. 249). In this essay, I look at how humour plays an important role in defning the
resistance politics of the tea garden workers as their daily routines inside the gar-
den. While doing so, the essay conceptualises ‘garden as a space’ that can be seen,
engaged with and understood as a life-world, where humour as resistance is present
in day-to-day subjective as well as inter-subjective experiences.
The popular literature associated with the tea plantations in Assam have mostly
dealt with the economic development of tea during colonialism. Studies on the
early phase of tea planations have been carried out mainly by historian Amalendu
Guha. In Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam (2006),
he is concerned about the parliamentary debates and role of the legislature dur-
ing colonialism. His work deals with the social history of Assam from 1826 to the
dawn of independence in 1947. He also describes how the political development
in Assam was related to the economic development of tea. The existence of cheap
labourers was the basis for the establishment of the tea industry in Assam, because
70 Prithiraj Borah
during the formative years of plantation activities, the colonial government did
not have any idea about the wage and type of work required. He also discusses the
unorganised indentured labourers and how the planters started to exploit them
for long hours with minimal wages. Furthermore, he mentions that the condition
of women and children inside tea plantations were mostly afected, as their wages
were even lower than those of their young male counterparts. Guha notes that
planters not only made profts out of the tea estates but also played a dominant role
in administration, legislatures and local bodies.
A study about the work in tea plantations is Rana P. Behal’s One Hundred Years of
Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Assam (2014). He describes
the scientifc, political and economic development of tea plantations in colonial
Assam; his work is mostly based on archival sources. He discusses how ‘imperial
science’ and botanical knowledge were used to discover the wild tea in Assam that
led to the present formation of tea gardens. He notes that the labour-intensive
methods of work in tea estates generated a great demand for wage labourers, but
planters failed to mobilise native peasants to work in the tea estates. Due to this,
indentured labourers were forced to produce tea. Behal contends that the inden-
tured labour in Assam was based on deception and coercion, which has produced
a history of the ‘sense of un-freedom’ inside the tea gardens of Assam. There are
other important works about the history of tea, addiction and exploitation, such as
Sharma (2011), Moxham (2009) and Evans (1992). Such literatures are only limited
to the colonial exploitation, and the post-colonial scholarship of tea plantations in
Assam are restricted to the economy and labour relations.
In this essay, I argue humour as a method that allows the plantation labourers to
speak and resist on their own terms. The essay also brings out the adivasi folksongs
as symbols of resistance and humour and how they have contributed to the labour-
ers’ politics of emancipation. From the feldwork I observed that humour acted as a
powerful tool of resistance, serving as a ‘weapon of resistance’. It is common-sense
knowledge that the plantations are powerful structures that have been controlled by
the planters’ class and the authoritarian management. What has been less discussed
is how the labourers are trying to break such hegemony, and the essay focuses on
humour as a form of protest through an ethnographic lens. Anthropologists and
social historians studied Assam’s plantations as spaces of exploitation and humili-
ation, but they hardly studied the relationship between humour and resistance
politics. During the research, the plantations were a place where I shared a lot of
joy with the workers; there were tales and jokes, gossip and food, but there was also
the sharing of sorrows and problems.
With these insights, this chapter turns to the feld and thereof humour. Scholars
such as Marjolein’T Hart (2007) studied how humour strengthens the social pro-
tests. She examined that humour was used in diferent political and social protests
against repressive authoritative regimes. The notion of humour and mockery as
forms of resistance is a popular theme in humour studies (Weaver, 2010, p. 34).
Weaver acknowledged the potential of ridicule and mockery, when it was directed
against the powerful. Stokker (2001) examined how humour infuenced the
resistance politics of the Norway’s anti-Nazi struggle. She found that humour pro-
duced/reproduced solidarity, which was vital during such authoritarian rules. She
also criticised the scholars who completely ignored humour in creating nationwide
solidarity and spontaneous resistance.3 My purpose of this essay is to study the rela-
tionship when a tea garden labourer makes a tactical approach in front of the sahib
through the ‘weapon’ of humour. The humour creates a ‘new’ political space for
the historically and politically excluded communities to resist on their ‘own’ terms.
During the study, the element of humour and laughter was constant. The
women labourers making fun of the managers at the plantation sites, perhaps, are
an apt point of departure. One woman labourer said:
The way managers and their families are exploiting us from generations; it is
never going to stop. But the way we are managing our own world of exis-
tence, the managers will never come to know. Whenever we get a chance to
abuse any manager, we use our local sadri4 slangs which they do not under-
stand. For them our language is too lowly for them to learn. We try to take
advantage of their ignorance. These managers are so murkho (dumb) that they
don’t even recognise these slangs. We confuse them and we derive pleasure
out of their confusion.
(Translated by the author)
These narratives of resistance through laughter, deceit and humour are found in
Maurice Said’s (2016) work in a coastal village in southern Sri Lanka. His work is
also based on ethnography through the direct experiences of being deceived and
discovers that he had been deceived, being the subject of deception and actively
participated in the process of it. However, in the case of Assam’s tea garden, the
manager is so uniformed to characterise the slangs or the way the labourers are
deceiving them. Said explores the deception and ridicule of foreigners by villag-
ers in the aftermath of the tsunami. He illustrates how men express friendship
and brotherhood through elaborate deceptions. Some few points in his paper are
problematic where he tries to normalise stalking as humour. He tries to explain
that the women are likely to be followed by the males in Po. He does not try to
study power relations in the village where he stayed during his study. His research
is only limited to how males in the coastal village of Po get drunk in the evening
and crack jokes about their personal lives with friends. Said contends that through
drinking and socialisation, men attempt to negotiate domestic and communal ten-
sion through idioms and jokes.
Telling tales in the tea gardens: humour as resistance

I have previously mentioned that during my stay inside the Dhekiajuli and Doom
Dooma tea estates, I found most of the narratives of everyday forms of resistance
politics of tea plantation labourers in their humour and laughter. But such strategic
use of humour and laughter for resistance to the power relations exists in almost
72 Prithiraj Borah
all of the tea estates. Through those humorous incidents, I argue that humour is
a form of resistance that acts rhetorically against hegemonic dasturs (customary
practices) of a garden. Due to the coercive repression and subjugation, the tea
garden labourers of Assam are still recognised as a subordinate class. So one of my
important objectives is to provide a more general account of how an individual in
a garden, who is ‘less powerful’, according to his/her socio-economic and cultural
conditions, responds to the ongoing process of ‘planters’ raj’.
During my feldwork, I noticed that during durga puja,5 the assistant manager
(appointed supervisor to supervise the workers) displayed his appearance while
throwing coins to the adivasi dancers. In turn, a ‘prominent man’ in the garden
greeted him with a gamosa (article of signifcance in Assam) and a basket of fruit. I
later came to know that the prominent man was a trade union activist. This public
ritual of an appearance of a mai-baap6 relationship still exists inside the garden, but
during the ritual I noticed that dancers did not entertain the mai-baap at all. Later,
I asked one of the dancers about the ritual, and she explained:
We perform jhumur in every festival, the manager babu always offer us coins.
But we don’t care much about this; only the trade union members entertain
him a lot. We even told the trade unionist that he is a stooge who always side
with the babu. Because of these chamchas (sycophants) we have to dance in
front of the babu.
For them, calling the trade union leader a chamcha becomes an act of authority that
they perceive as their domain, which evokes laughter, and at times a smirk or a
glee. Later she said that the babu gives judgement over marriage disputes with the
magisterial powers. And most of the times the idea of mai-baap is not limited to the
manager only; the authority is also shared by the bura-sahibs (senior manager) and
even the doctor. She said:
How can someone give judgement over someone’s marriage? In one inci-
dent, my friend eloped with a boy of a nearby village, and she didn’t come to
work for few days. Later, the babu abused her during the garden work, at that
moment we could not intervene. They always consider themselves as ‘god’, I
find it funny because we are not allowed to play with ‘god’ like character. We
don’t show our anger directly to them. We always take our time to respond,
so we planned to kill their dog.
In a manager’s bungalow, there are at least fve to six men and women who work
from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. They have to take care of the bungalow as well as the man-
ager’s wife. If masculinity carries one of the important characters of the mai-baap
image, then another image of leisure is created by the planters’ wives. The bunga-
low, which symbolises the power and leisure, is the world of memsahib (manager’s
wife). The memsahib is entertained by the servants and a cook; she retains consider-
able power over her bungalow. During my feldwork, I stayed for a few days with
a chota sahib (junior manager), who is working in Doom Dooma tea estate, while
his wife (chota memsahib) remains isolated in the bungalow. She hardly used to go
outside the bungalow and was rarely seen by the plantation communities. Memsa-
hib’s role as a domesticated and feminised housewife is contrasting with an outdoor
and masculine sahib. Memsahib’s physical presentation inside the garden signifes not
only her status but also her husband’s position. She is referred to as an ‘add-on’ to
her husband, his love for power and its exercise over his subordinates.
During the lunchtime, servants of the bungalow have to serve food to the mai-
baap and memsahib, then to the labrador (dog). According to one woman who
works inside the bungalow, the memsahib does not allow any labourer to go near
the labrador. The labrador gets better treatment and food, compared to the work-
ers. Sometimes the labourers have to bring food from home; the memsahib does not
allow the workers to have food cooked in her kitchen. She said:
The memsahib loves her dog so much; we have clicked several photos of her
with the dog. Even she scolded one of my friends because he called the ‘dog’
a ‘dog’. The dog gets better treatment than anyone who is working inside
the bungalow. I first never agreed to the idea of killing our memsahib’s dog.
But one morning, while I was working in the kitchen, the dog came to me
and bit me. I told this to memsahib, [and] instead of taking me to the hospital,
she yelled at me. I was really sad that evening after the incident, my friends
took me to the garden hospital. After that incident, we all favoured the kill-
ing of memsahib’s dog. For us the dog was not only a pet, but he was also our
memsahib’s favourite. So one morning we mixed rat poison in the dog’s food,
and he died after a few hours. That day our manager sahib and memsahib cried
a lot; they buried him in the garden of their bungalow.
From her narrative it became clear that the labourers equated the dog’s life with the
memsahib’s life. She started laughing while narrating the following story:
We treat the dog like memsahib. Have you heard the story about the princess’s
life is inside a parrot’s body? In the bungalow the same story was going on,
the memsahib’s life was inside the dog. It was sad that dog had to get killed but
the thought of our mighty powerful memsahib’s life inside a barking and bit-
ing dog was hilarious. We could equate the dog’s behaviour with that of hers.
This story is celebrated inside the Doom Dooma tea estate, and the woman who
works inside the manager’s bungalow explained it humorously. The story strikes
the ‘modern’ listener as unfunny and peculiar. The inability to get the humour is
an indication of the distance that separates us from the workers of a tea plantation
74 Prithiraj Borah
in Assam. Her story of killing a dog served as an oblique attack on the manager and
his wife. The planter’s instructions created a hegemonic character in the garden,
for the workers, he was known as mai-baap. The mai-baap signifes the authorita-
tive personality of plantation patronage and power. The symbolic display of leisure,
non-work was the sign of his superiority, and the mai-baap served to enforce the
planter’s power to organise a family within the garden. The family was constructed
in terms of consent and legitimation. The planter resembles a symbolic father stay-
ing in a big bungalow, playing polo at the club and standing at the centre of the
plantation garden where workers were his children. Through the construction of
the family centred upon a paternalistic relationship, mai-baap attempts to create a
legitimate spirit contacting both consent and coercion.
The labourers also use the objects and local slangs to identify the power holders
in the tea gardens. A plantation garden’s clerical staf are known as babus, and they
have primary duties in the ofces and factories. These members take orders from
the sahibs (managers) and supervise the feld production. Unlike the managers, who
are recruited and usually get changed by others after sometime, babus inherit jobs
from their fathers. They were hired in the colonial period; most of the babus are
Assamese or Bengali, usually a man from an upper-caste middle-class background.
The British administrators were dependent on this emerging middle class having
a clerical knowledge and innate intelligence. Most of the babu families follow the
upper-caste traditions of strict codes of separation from the plantation labourers.
Staf families settled in plantations and were also given large plots of land for cul-
tivation. Because of their clerical work (garden administration and accounting),
most staf members are in daily contact with the workers and the planters. Daily
experiences in the feld helped me to understand the social hierarchies between
babus and workers. The babus enact their administrative rule and maintain their
class and status diferences. But such administrative rules, formulated by babus, are
not visibly associated with the colonial racialised terms; it is mainly maintained
through customary upper-caste understandings. The otherness inside the garden is
reconstructed through the material cultural politics of the staf and sahibs. One of
my respondents told me:
The babu does not maintain the hazeera (attendance) book properly. He
comes to the field once in a day, and tries to find out mistakes done by our
fellow women pluckers. One day we all decided to destroy some tea leaves
from our garden and threatened the babu with our sickles. We did not want
to destroy the tea leaves because we have been working in the gardens from
a long time, but our anger against the babu made us do so, we all call him tej
xuha babu (bloodsuckers).
The labourers categorised them as tej xuhi khua babus, and it happens in day-to-day
lived experiences. The women workers always call the babus the slang of blood-
suckers, and sometimes they show their sickles to the babus. In the feld, the babu’s
hazeera book represents the surveillance of women’s work as a basic term of the
control of labour and body. Women’s names are grouped under the overseer’s
name, which signifes that contemporary women’s work has inherited the structure
of labouring kinship from their foremothers of the colonial plantation. First she was
angry while explaining the incident, and later she called him a kela (penis), and this
word became amusing. She continues:
The babus are such a kela!7 One day he shouted at three months’ pregnant
women. Even though we judge his masculinity that he does not have cour-
age to fight with the management.
They compared his existence with the dick along with the factor of impotency. A
person who is assumed to be impotent becomes a source of jokes. Calling him kela
with an underlying notion of impotency was about infusing humour with resis-
tance, because the babus with their caste, class and gender privileges surveillance the
work and daily routine of the women workers. She literally called him a dick in
front of the other women workers, and also challenged his masculinity.
The popular discourse about the tea plantations of Assam has represented the
anxieties and problems faced by the adivasi communities. There are few literatures
mentioning the resistance politics of the plantation labourers during colonial time.
In post-independent discourses, labourers are mostly categorised as the ‘docile’
subjects. The cha-bagan (tea garden) is constructed as the base for exploitation and
not as a site of resistance. Even the jhumur (folk dance form) song represents the
narrative of oppression in the popular music industry of Assam. But during my
feldwork, I came across the labourers who were mocking the jhumur songs. I am
explaining two popular jhumur songs, and how the labourers are singing a parody
of these songs.
1) Assam Desher Chah Pat Assam, the land of tea

Pani Boli Bar Mitha Where the water is sweet
Chal Sakhi Chal Jabo Friends, let’s go!
Bagane Tulbor pata anand mane We will pluck leaves from the gardens with joy
2) Sardar bole kam kam Sardar says work work

Babu bole dhori an Babu says nab the fool
Sahab bole libo pither chan Sahab threatens to peel the skin from backs
Re Jaduram Oh Jaduram!
Phanki diye bandu pathali Assam You deceived us to Assam
Song 1 depicts that the labourers were brought to Assam by giving false hope. The
colonial authority said that Assam is a land of hope, opportunity and work. But
these hopes were shattered as soon as they reached Assam. Song 2 harps on how
the labourers were trapped in the disciplinary practices of the garden. These songs
76 Prithiraj Borah
portray historical reasons and meanings about the process of exploitation and the
nature of work inside the gardens. Though these two songs still have relevance
in Assam, in the contemporary time, there are few songs that speak about their
resistance politics. Jag jag adivasi jag is a song of identity assertion of the adivasis in
Assam; the songs are now becoming a slogan for them. One research participant
told me:
These songs used to be songs of oppression and anxieties, but we really

do not find dukh/dorod (sorrow/sadness) in these songs. These songs have
become the protest songs, but we are making ridicule out of these songs.
Like the British told our ancestors that the water of Assam will be sweet.
When did we even taste any sweet water? I don’t think we even know where
to find it. We could not find it, so the only companion we have is our alco-
hol. Our employers will find this alcohol as sweet as the water here is to us.
(He gives me a wink while enlisting the irony of having sweetness in drinks
in Assam, a land where they have only being exploited.)
Thus, an element of humour in these songs of resistance is inside the garden,

and making a mockery of the babus with a slang of dick can be seen as implicit
forms of resistance. The explicit forms of resistance are not possible in certain cases
inside the garden, because of the fear of its repercussions. So, these implicit forms
of resistance are the social product of the conditionalities imposed by the power
relations that exist inside a tea garden. Along similar lines, Chad Bryant (2006)
argues how the Czech nationals used humour as a form of resistance against the
Nazi occupation. Bryant describes everyday experiences of the Czech nationals as
a form of resistance: “jokes with their ironic tones and ambiguous messages, few
underneath the radar of the nazi authorities” (2006, p. 140). Bryant also acknowl-
edged that jokes were contributed as overt and harmless political strategies:8 “jokes
demonstrated that Czechs opposed the regime . . . jokes in other words, showed
the resistance existed” (Ibid., p. 145).
These events provided me with a valuable methodological and analytical way
for a better understanding of the ‘local’. It allows me to understand everyday
life in the gardens and how power relations are overturned during the nights.
One night, I also saw the labourers throwing stones onto the manager’s bun-
galow. The bungalow seeks to map a powerful structure within and beyond
the garden space. The burra (big) bungalow is the house for managers and the
chota (small) bungalow is the residential quarter of assistant managers. There can
be two categories of burra bungalows, one is mati bungalow and the second is
chang bungalow. The mati bungalows are built at the ground level, but the chang
bungalows are built 10 to 14 feet above the ground. The bungalows were more
than a house, because they carry status and class privileges (Kapur, 2012, p. 28).
It explores the material experiences of the mai-baaps and still continues to shape
their experiences.
When someone enters a tea garden of Assam, they will frst come across
the factory or the bungalow. The bungalow and factory hold power inside
a tea garden. The labour lines usually are at the margins of a garden. Thus,
the labourers try to dismantle such hegemonic structures inside the garden.
Though throwing stones will not eliminate the material existence of a bun-
galow, but eventually alters the power relations inside a garden during nights.
The labourers told me:
After getting drunk at night, we all recall the amount of work we have done
during the day. Our generations have been staying inside these tea gardens;
monotonous life inside a garden can make anyone’s life miserable. So, on our
way back to the lines, most of us drink in the evening. Some of us throw
stones and use cuss words to disturb the manager.
The labourers shared these stories while having dinner with a lot of amusement.
They continued:
We find pleasure and fun both while throwing stones on the manager’s bun-
galow in the night. Because we disturb his xubidhabhogi (privileged) sleep
inside that big bungalow. And the funniest outcome of the event is that the
manager is unable to find the culprit. We just hide behind the tea bushes after
throwing the stones. He behaves like a child whose sleep is disturbed. It is
funny when powerful men act like kids.
The incident of excitement and jollifcation does not exist only inside one
tea garden. Instead, various plantation labourers can tell us multiple stories of
such kinds of humorous resistances. These gardens are the social sites to locate
humour in it, where hidden voices, anger and bitten tongues are generated and
the surveillance and control by power holders are least able to reach. Because
of the fear of retaliation, a plantation worker uses humour as a form of resis-
tance against the planters. While doing this, worker groups have established
techniques that include anonymous threats, escape, passivity, rumour, sarcasm,
laziness or humour.
Conclusion
Elsewhere there was an attempt to bring out the tales of humour from the
Assam’s tea gardens into the public domain, as Pathak and Perera noted: “our
efort is to transport these seemingly hidden transcripts from private to public
sphere” (2018, p. 2). In this chapter, I emphasise the humour and laughter, which
includes resistance politics in the life-world of a tea plantation labourer. Exist-
ing colonial and post-colonial studies on the tea plantations of Assam are based
78 Prithiraj Borah
on the conventional discourse of resistance. Resistance is not only through guns

and sticks, as is popularly understood in the case of adivasi labourers, but they
are capable of much more creative strategies of resistance, which somehow is
underestimated in the conventional academic discourse. The idea of the chapter
is, thus, an attempt to rescue such narratives of creative resistance and humorous
performance.
This essay does not categorise the plantation community as ‘violent’, which the
dominant discourses have wanted to project. I am not even writing of the ‘roman-
tic’ notion of resistance; instead, this essay maps and engages with the day-to-day
humorous interactions inside the gardens. Interestingly, during my feldwork,
the women plantation labourers knew how to build and maintain a relationship
with me as an ‘outsider’. They often call me lambu, maybe because of my height.
They knew how to maintain themselves and ‘outsiders’ by drawing humour and
deception.
This chapter relates how far we can study and understand the everyday forms
of resistance which are political, and they do constitute a form of collective
action. Symbolic and covert resistance inside the gardens is an integral part of
class and identity-based resistance. Archives fall short of telling us about the day-
to-day resistance politics in a garden. Archive’s power is also limited to specifc
categories. By looking at the everyday resistance politics inside a garden, I am not
overlooking the vital role of power relations in a garden. Because the labourers
have to avoid open confrontations with the managers and babus, a revolutionary
appropriation can be seized in the name of justice. I rediscovered, through this
essay, peripheral vision of an ethnographer discovering important things where
s/he is not looking.
Notes
1 Acknowledgement: I am obliged to all of my research participants. I am grateful to Pro-
fessor Rowena Robinson for her guidance. I am also thankful to Pooja Kalita for being a
patient reader and an honest critic.
2 The adivasi communities are composed of Gonds, Bhumij, Oraon, Munda and Santhal,
and according to S. Indwar (2012), there are 108 adivasi communities in Assam. In con-
temporary times, the adivasis of Assam are often misrepresented as ‘tea-tribes’. The ethnic
movements among the adivasis contends that ST status would help them move forward as
‘tribes’, not as an anthropological category but as a politically conscious group. Through
the contemporary ethnic movements, the adivasi communities of Assam are asserting their
identity and self-esteem, and demanding rights and resources.
3 According to Zijderveld (1983), the anthropologists have failed to examine the phe-
nomenon of humour. Kuipers (2016) also critiques the understanding of humour both
in academics and public debates. He observed that humour needs a scholarly attention,
which depends on the context in which they are told and practiced. On similar notes,
Driessen (2016) also discusses that for the ethnographers humour is particularly important
regardless of the main research theme.
4 Sadri is a language commonly spoken in the tea gardens of Assam. The language has its
origin in the Chotanagpur plateau.
5 Durga puja is an annual Hindu festival that pays homage to the Hindu goddess Durga.
6 The colonial relationship between management and labourers as a parental and, in fact,
paternalistic one (mai-baap, literally ‘mother-father’) has been critically examined by Piya
Chatterjee (2001). In the contemporary period, from my interviews, it becomes evident
that the garden managers continue to think of themselves as the mai-baap of the tea planta-
tion labourers.
7 Kela is a regional slang in Assam that means ‘a penis’.
8 According to James Scott, the hidden transcript or implicit forms of resistance have simi-
lar features to folk culture, which exists only to the extent it is practiced, articulated,
enacted and disseminated within these hidden off-stage sites. The off-stage social sites
where hidden transcript grows are themselves an achievement of resistance; they are won
and defended in the teeth of power (Scott, 1990, p. 119). His idea of ‘everyday forms of
resistance’ also associates the peasant with avoidance, theft, humour and laziness, which are
manifestations of alternative resistance politics. This essay tries to go beyond Scott’s idea of
‘everyday forms of resistance’ and attempts to bring out the resistance politics against the
routine repression by the garden authorities.
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5
DRAMATIC HARYANVI HUMOUR
A case of subversion in jakari and ragni
Monika Yadav
In the performance traditions of a region, one fnds a great deal of information about
the cultural realities of people. The arena explored in this chapter is a sub-category
of the jakari and ragni genre of performances of Haryana, that employ humour as
a major precept. These humorous performances are labelled as chatpati (piquant)
jakari/ragni in the local parlance. These performance traditions are explored to
comprehend how humour works as a powerful subversive tool in upsetting the
existent cultural realities. This inversion of the gendered and normalised everyday
cultural realities provides a space to gather, laugh and enjoy. The humorous con-
tent in these performances may not sound funny for an audience that is unaware of
the localised cultural setting. Thus, this work argues for a non-universal nature of
humour; humour has cultural conditionalities that make it funny or laughable. The
discourses that may sound obvious, or in conformity, or inversion, to the actual
cultural realities may be humorous depending on the cultural setting, as “jokes bear
the imprint of the interactive situations in which they are told and in which they
are found to be funny” (Seizer, 1997, p. 63).
Ragni and jakari are popular cultural performances in Haryana, and humour is a
signifcant component of both genres. The focus in this work is on those specifc
performances from both genres that engage with humour to critique the gendered
interpersonal relationships, thus they are taken as a single analytical category in this
endeavour. The jakari and ragni performance genres dwell on humorous contents to
refect the internal cultural realities, the interpersonal conversations within a family,
and the negotiations with the patriarchal veracities. These performances present
heated perspectives on the regulation of women’s sexuality and the attempts at its
confnement in the institution of marriage and household – presenting the gender-
ing that takes place in a Haryanvi family. The author argues that the apparent satires
and ability to laugh at them lie fnely over a more evocative subtext of disapproval,
providing a text for the concerns of women.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-7
82 Monika Yadav
The present work comprises data collected from two sources: the ethnographic
study of the jakari performance genre and the analysis of the ragni genre of perfor-
mances that exist on digital media (YouTube). YouTube, a video-sharing website,
allows users to upload, title, view, rate, like, dislike, share, add to favourites, report,
subscribe and comment. Thus, the users of this medium are not passive audiences
where they just consume data but are active participants who interact and control
the content of the information. In digital ethnography, although the data is easily
collectible and available to the ethnographer, making sense of this easily collectible
data is complex. Also, for the digital ethnography, the ethnographer has what is
present on the screen, as getting in touch with participants is complicated and may
even take away their intended privacy and anonymity.
The chapter includes a brief section from existing literature to draw linkages
among performance, power, subversion and humour. The work further investigates
some of the jakari performances collected during the feldwork in the three villages
located in the southern part of Haryana, namely Khairana and Nayagaon of Mahen-
dragarah district and Kishangarh Balawas of Rewari district of Haryana. In the case
of ragni, specifc ragni videos that employ humour as a chief canon are examined.
The jakari performances have a meagre presence on digital media, making their
analysis on digital medium less prolifc. The ragni genre enjoys massive popularity
on digital media, making the comprehension of ragni videos substantial. Thus, the
author analyses jakari performances collected from physical locales and studies ragni
performances collected from the digital space.
The analysis engages with a scholarly discussion on performance and humour.
The amalgam of performance, power, parody and subversion is crucial in Mikhail
Bakhtin’s cultural performance debate, playing a powerful performative func-
tion of subversion (Bakhtin, 1984). Bakhtin pointed out the impact of humour
in popular culture in the milieu of the late medieval and early modern period.
The carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the
established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical ranks, privileges,
norms and prohibitions (Ibid., p. 10). The carnival, for him, led to the creation
of particular forms of “speech and gesture, frank and free, permitting no distance
between those who came in contact with each other and liberating from norms
of etiquette and decency imposed at other times” (Ibid., p. 10). Here, in this sec-
ond world, we fnd abundant “parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations,
comic crownings and uncrownings” (Ibid., p. 11), and he calls this second world
a parody of extracarnival life in which the humour denies, revives and renews.
He discusses the complex nature of carnival laughter, which is ambivalent, uni-
versally directed at everyone, and it asserts, denies, buries, and revives. And a
critical trait of this festive laughter is that it is directed at those who laugh. In this
way, the carnival festivities endorse the articulation of the world turned upside
down, a humorous and provocative way to play with the conventional rules and
hierarchies. The reversals fashioned by the performance genres of laughter bring
marginalised people to the centre, making them visible and reversing their exclu-
sion from hegemonic power.
Dramatic Haryanvi humour 83
The harsh socio-cultural political realities and discontents can be readily pre-
sented through parody and satire, and parody generally doesn’t invite censures, as
replying in a severe way to humour is ordinarily not ideal. Marjolein’t Hart points
out that humour can be seen as a safety valve that lessens discontent among the
oppressed, and it can also serve social protest, so these double efects are difcult to
separate (Hart, 2007). The comic forms invert “the relations of subject and object,
agent and instrument, husband and wife, old and young, animal and human, master
and slave” (Stallybrass and White, 1986, p. 56). Humour is a distinctive discursive
mode demarcated by its acceptance of ambiguity, paradox, manifold interpreta-
tions of reality and partially resolute incongruity (Mulkay, 1988). Humour in the
form of jokes, witticisms, sarcasm and puns allow speakers to address the otherwise
taboo topics (Sev’er and Ungar, 1997). Humour often perforates through signif-
cant hurdles better and more compellingly than a serious mode can, because the
censure expressed in a joking way is more problematic to disprove by persuasive
arguments. Humour is conceptualised as a mode of discourse, and its ambigu-
ous nature allows the entry of socially unspeakable topics to become part of the
mainstream discourse. The author argues that similar deliberations and discussions
surface in the analyses of jakari and ragni.
Jakari and ragni in Haryana

Jakari is categorised as women’s oral tradition. It is about the everyday life expe-
riences of Haryanvi women in a non-urban context, focusing on the ensnaring
of their interpersonal relationships. They are created and performed by women,
and these performances also evolve through dynamic adaptation to new circum-
stances. The spaces where they are performed are occupied exclusively by women,
although they discuss their relationships with men in great detail. Most of these
tales are in frst-person narration, where a woman is narrating her story. A woman
autobiographically recounts some of the incidents that happen in her life. Jakaris
follow a chronology, and the story unfolds and proceeds further with each line of
the song. These song-dance performances are short accounts of romance, separa-
tion, desire and confict. Through these narrations, women can relate to their
everyday life experiences. The signifcant purposes behind the performance of
the jakaris are associated with the merriment of Haryanvi women, making these
gatherings of women occasions for bantering and laughter. For example, when a
woman in one of the jakaris conveys to her husband: ‘baith mere ghode pe balam roya
na kariye’ (Husband! do not sit on my lap and cry), she mocks the masculinity of
her man and simultaneously invites the laughter of the female audience. The details
of this framework are discussed in the section dealing with ethnographic details
of jakari performances. Ragni is categorised as men’s tradition as men perform
these at local levels. The content of these performances centres around male-female
interpersonal relationships. Gloria Goodwin Raheja argues that the men’s songs
and narrative genres “tend to portray kinship tensions and fractured solidarities
as emanating not from contradictions in the kinship ideology itself, but from the
84 Monika Yadav
essentialised ‘women’s character’ that is seen as dangerous to kinship solidarities

centered on males” (Raheja, 2003, p. 206). Raheja claims that “ragnis is never sung
in the presence of women” (Ibid., p. 210), and men generally forbade women
from attending such performances. She mentions that men perform ragnis with or
without musical instruments as they sit in the felds during the night, and ragnis
are also sung by semi-professional singers when men gather away from women at
weddings. In the current scenario, ragnis have gained widespread popularity and
have become part of large-scale popular performance events. These performances
have changed, and now women are not forbidden from participating or attending
these events as performers or audience members. This is not to deny that the kind
of ragni performances described by Goodwin Raheja are non-existent; those also
continue at local levels.
Ragnis, accompanied by dances, have become a common and popular enter-
tainment medium of the Haryanvi people in non-urban settings. In the large-scale
organised events centred around ragnis, the female performer plays a central role
in attracting a vast male crowd. Some of these female performers have attained
wide-scale popularity, which is often more than their male counterparts. Their
widespread popularity has made them famous on the digital platform, and even
the recorded versions of the performances enjoy popularity on websites such as
YouTube. Thus, in the changing context, women have become a central part of
ragni performances, and there is a change in the texture of these performances
within the broader framework of male outlook. A woman’s countenance emerges
in these genres in the form of the dialogic banters, and this stance mocks men’s
virility and manliness humorously with the generation of laughter. For example,
when a woman banters her husband saying ‘maane na lage chuha bhi hoga tere’ (I don’t
think even a rat will be born to you), she invites the laughter of the audience, as
she concurrently makes a mockery of the virility of the man. The details related to
these fragments are discussed in the section related to the analysis of ragni videos.
The discussion on jakaris is based on collecting and analysing oral renditions, the
observation of spaces where they are performed, and the conversations that ensued
on the performance spaces. The inquiry related to ragni is based on the analysis of
the recorded versions of these performances on YouTube. In the current set-up,
the analysis of these performances from physical and digital spaces is pertinent for
a thorough comprehension.
This work attempts to decipher the assumptions that shape the stories present
in the performances; these assumptions allow deeply hidden realities to come to
the surface, presenting a window into people’s beliefs, practices and experiences of
a culture. As the accounts and parodies present in them are contextual, subjective,
temporal, liminal and multi-layered, the analysis of these anecdotes is complex.
There is a possibility that the researcher’s assumptions and knowledge about the
culture get embedded in this analysis. I argue that the jubilant lyrics mock the
typical heterosexual norms via the tempering of the gendered roles. One impor-
tant aspect is that these performances make possible the ‘unimagined’ via humour,
furnishing an outlet for expressions not voiced ideally in a male-dominated society.
These performances of men and women build familiarity via articulating shared
meanings, leading to the construction of a civic of shared compassion about life’s
paradoxes. The inversion of gendered relations and the humour surrounding these
inversions is mainly contextual and is situated in the Haryanvi locale and may
sound obvious or non-humorous for any other audience.
In the following jakari, women visualise an imaginary space and parody the
normalised cultural connotations and create laughter out of these alternate
presentations.1
Yeh joh suni suni aaurat hai, inhe kya kahte hai-lugaai?
Mahare sarsabagh mai inhe kaali-kutiya kahte hai.
Yeh chote chote bache inko kya kahte hai-bache?
Mahare sarsabagh mai barsaatiya-mindak kahte hai.
Yeh mucho wali aadmi inhe kya kahte hai-patidev?
Mahare sarsabagh mai inhe kaale-kave kahte hai.
Yeh joh badhayi dene aate hai inhe kya kahte hai-chakke, hijre?
Mahare sarsabagh mai inhe hoor ki pariya kahte hai.
These beautiful women, what do we call them – lugaai (wife)?

In our sarsagaon (name of an imaginary place), they are called kaali-kutiya
(black-bitch).
These small kids, what do we call them – bache (children)?
In our sarsabagh, they are called barsaatiya-mindak (rainy frog).
These moustached men, what do we call them – patidev (husband, God)?
In our sarsabagh, they are called kaale-kave (black-crow).
Those who come to give blessings, what do we call them – chakke, hijra
(sixer, eunuch)?
In our sarsabagh, they are called hoor ki pariya (beautiful fairies).
These lines are from a jakari performance by an efeminate man amid a female
gathering. This performance takes place as part of a pre-marriage function in the
Khairana village of Mahendragarh district. The efeminate man pays attention to
all details in transforming himself into a beautiful woman. He identifes himself
as a ladka (boy) and mentions that he is born with efeminate qualities. He does
make-up with kajal (smut), lipstick, foundation, bindi (beauty spot); wears a wig on
his head; wears a bra and stufs it with clothing; and wears a suit-salwar dupatta and
payal (anklet).2 While performing this jakari he dances, sings and acts. His chitchat,
singing, dancing and the constant poking of women seated around him make all
of them laugh. He touches his breasts with his hands and does hip gyrations as he
dances, and the laughter of the audience is louder on the specifc steps related to
breast and hips. There is laughter and giggles when he calls women ‘kaali kutiya’
(black-bitch), men ‘kaala kave’ (black crow), children ‘barsatiya mindak’ (rainy frog),
and eunuchs ‘hoor ki pariya’ (beautiful fairies). In this jakari, sarsagaon is an imagi-
nary place that provides space for the mockery of the dominant arrangements.
86 Monika Yadav
This enactment of alternate representations and the parody of existent normative

understandings makes a critique with the production of laughter.
In Haryanvi society, the decisions related to a woman’s life are generally taken
by the man in her life, especially the concerns related to her marriage and sexuality.
Through the narratives present in some of these performances, a discourse speaks
of women’s sexual desires actively. These expressions represent subversions to patri-
archal forces via building laughter on the virility and masculinity of men.
In the following lines from a jakari, a woman is speaking of her sexual desires
and taking a dig at the virility of her man:
Kisi ne mere hath mai zanzeer dali eh,

Khana dhara se mej pe sarkana na chahiya,
Jima ga aapa doh jana sharmana na kariye,
Baith mere ghode pe balam roya na kariye,
Jiya mai jiya daal ke tarsaaya na kariye
Somebody has chained my hands,

Food is kept on the table, it should not be put aside,
We two will eat it together, don’t feel shy,
Dear husband! Don’t sit on my lap and cry,
After putting your heart into my heart, don’t make me distressed.
The performance of this jakari takes place during a pre-marital ceremony, during
night hours, in the village Kishangarh Balawas of Rewari district. As a part of this
performance, a group of women sing this song, and a woman dances along. In the
narrative of this jakari, a woman is expressing romantic feelings for her husband
by presenting herself chained in the desires of her own making. She embodies her
feelings of sexual desires via ‘food’, conveying their sexual liaison as being awaited
in their relationship. Here, the ‘eating of food together’ epitomises her desire for
togetherness. She is alluring him to perform the ‘sexual act’. The open invitation
of a wife to her husband to eat together via dance-drama becomes laughable as
women are expected to be shy, timid and non-expressive, especially regarding their
sexual feelings. In this jakari, the woman, by asking her husband ‘to not feel shy’,
‘not to sit on her lap and cry’ invokes a sense of lack of confdence in her husband,
an attempt to irritate and mock his virility. The assignment of these qualities to
men by women gives women a reason to mock and laugh. As the conquest of
women is seen as a feat performed to prove signs of one’s masculinity and viril-
ity (Lancaster, 1994), here in this narrative, this feat is seen to be performed by
women, thus thought-provoking the masculinity of men. There exist arguments
from a socio-cultural perspective that many cultures deliberately strive to suppress
female sexuality and desires (Baumeister and Twenge, 2002).
During the performance, a woman dances – constantly revolving, tapping her
feet, raising her hands and touching her breasts and other parts of the body, rais-
ing her thigh and patting it on the lyric ‘do not sit on my lap and cry’, and other
women sing and watch her performance keenly, constantly smiling and giggling
as the song goes along. Her dance moves in the form of patting of the thigh, her
touching of her body parts, and her constant smile produce laughter from this
erotic performative style, poking fun at the masculinist underpinnings. This perfor-
mance projects a contest to masculine valour via sarcasm, lyrics, dance moves and
laughter. The presentation of the woman as sexually assertive and desirous and the
man as hesitant, shy and timid questions the dominant notions of masculine and
feminine humorously. Sudhir Kakar, an Indian psychoanalyst, discusses the posses-
sion of bhuta of an aunt by a young girl and marks this as typical of the projection
of unconscious and unsatisfed desires of a girl in a conservative society, marking it
the representation of a girl’s own sexual wishes (Kakar, 1991). So, similar to the case
of possession, there are various means via which the repressed sexuality and sexual
desires of Indian women get an outlet, and one such medium is the performance
of songs, dance and dramatic enactments. These enactments of women where they
openly express their sexual desires and mock the virility of men are a source of their
entertainment and laughter.
Similar to the jakari entertainment genre, the ragni genre is also about male-
female interpersonal relationships. Compared to jakari, the ragni genre has much
more infltration, organised large-scale performances featuring ragnis is a popular
entertainment medium of Haryanvi society, and the videos of these performances
are also very popular. Thus, the ragni performance videos on YouTube are worth an
analytical discussion. These videos are accessible by typing the keywords ‘Haryanvi
ragni comedy’ on YouTube. The videos that are selected for analysis in this chapter
are based on the criteria of humour and popularity (the number of views). The
videos are professionally taken videos by some music companies such as Sonotek,
Mor, Haryanvi Maina and Trimurti. The videos have signifcant views (number
of times they have been watched), ranging from hundred thousands to millions.
There is a need to see internet spaces as continuous and embedded in other social
spaces, and back-and-forth research between cyberspace and social spaces helps
make the research more eloquent and exhaustive. The online presentation of per-
formances – titles, editing, duration of videos, the virtual interactions, the likes,
dislikes, and comments on the videos – has its intricacies that are very diferent
from the physical presentation and the face-to-face interactions between perform-
ers and audience that ensue during the performances. The nature of the viewers
and the form of the interactions in both spaces vary in many ways.
The content of the ragni videos encompasses songs, dialogic banter, video titles
and viewer comments, among other details. The chitchat or bantering is one of the
central components of these performances, apart from the song and dance. I focus
primarily on the bantering that is the main part of these performances. It plays a
central role in producing humour and laughter and simultaneously ofers a critique
to patriarchal underpinnings in a ludicrous way. The audience of online videos
includes those who watch these performances online and like, dislike, share, save
and comment on these videos. This section, apart from the content of the videos,
examines the titles and comments of the Haryanvi dance videos. The idea behind
88 Monika Yadav
looking into these aspects is to comprehend how these performances are presented
and perceived.
The digital versions of these performances include details related to performers,
camerapersons and producers, among other persons associated with the perfor-
mance. The camera primarily focuses on the performers, occasionally showing the
energy level of the audience. In the videos one can see a high-rise stage, and the
audience can be seen sitting and standing near the stage, and there is a clear separa-
tion of male and female audience members. Some large posters are hung on stage
that mention the details of the occasion and include the performers’ photos. The
content of these posters is hard to observe minutely in the video, because the focus
is mainly on the performers and sometimes on the audience. The performances
generally include a male and female performer who sing, dance and do satiric chit-
chat in-between. There is no fxed order for the music, dialogic conversations and
the dance. The content of these performances centres on interpersonal gender(ed)
relations within the family, for example, a conversation between husband and wife,
a woman and her younger brother-in-law, and a man and his younger sister-in-law.
One crucial dimension here is the obscurity of the object of witticism, and this
obscurity holds a vital facet in escaping repression and generating laughter. The
jokes appear to be centred on the particular male performer, even though the joke’s
target is often unmistakably the larger patriarchal groundworks.
In these ragni performances, the female performer generally wears tight-ftted,
bright-coloured salwar-suit/kameez and dupatta. The dress preferred has an associa-
tion with the cultural context. One of the preferred attires for women in Haryana
is a salwar-suit and dupatta; with the dupatta, they are expected to cover their heads
and breasts and veil their faces. In many of these performances, the dupatta becomes
a prop used by the female performer in particular ways; the veiling and unveiling of
the face with dupatta plays a central role in enticing the viewers and keeping them
entranced.
The ragni videos have signifcant views (the number of times they are watched),
ranging in the millions. The videos have both ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ ranging in the
thousands, though, for most videos, the likes are more in number. The title of the
videos is a signifcant aspect of the accessibility of videos to online viewers. It also
plays a role in creating the imaginings of the ragnis on online spaces in terms of
how they are presented to the virtual audiences, which in turn infuences how the
broader online viewers perceive them. In the titles of ragni videos, the name of the
performer is mentioned, a small comment is made related to the performance and
the frst line of the ragni is mentioned. The length of the title is kept short with
one or two sentences.
The comment the virtual viewers make on the videos is based on the images in
the videos, the ‘poster’ of the video (frst image of the still video) and the video’s
‘title’. There may exist diferences in how an audience who physically attends
the performance reacts and how a virtual viewer who watches the performance
responds, receives and perceives. On the websites below the videos of the per-
formance, one can express one’s opinion more freely than when one is openly
confronted with giving an impression about the performance; a certain degree of

anonymity guarantees viewers this freedom. Diferent meanings are found to be
attached to the content of the ragni videos and the performers presented in these
videos. Two key groupings appear: the frst is the set of viewers who do not object
to these videos and appreciate the ragnis and the performances. The second is a
set of viewers who fnd these videos problematic and give negative comments.
YouTube mentions that the comments below the videos are ‘public’, making the
statements available to everyone, and there is also an option to ‘report’ the video.
The authority to delete the video and comments remain with YouTube and the
individual who uploads the video. From the analysis of the comments, one fnds
that diferent perceptions surface and the aspects on which comments are made
on the videos range from a general comment of liking and disliking of a ragni to a
remark on the performer and her/his appearance.
The following section will discuss the videos of two very popular Haryanvi rag-
nis; several versions of these ragnis are performed on diferent occasions by diferent
performers available on YouTube. As a part of this endeavour, the author analyses
the content of the videos and the comments that are made on the videos.
A ragni titled ‘patla dupatta tera muh dikhe’ (Your dupatta (long scarf) is very thin,
your face is visible through it) is very popular, and several versions of it are avail-
able online. The analysis here is based on two versions of this ragni. These versions
are published on YouTube by Sonotek Haryanvi and Haryanvi Maina music com-
panies in the year 2016, and these videos have more than two million views, and
the time duration of these videos is around 18 minutes. The video title mentions
the performers’ names, the frst line of the ragni, the name of the music company,
and mentions that this video is a Haryanvi ragni and comedy. The performers in
the videos are Sapna Chaudhary, a Haryanvi singer and dancer, and Pepsi Sharma,
a Haryanvi singer; one of the videos also features Jhandu, a very popular Haryanvi
comedian. While all three are popular Haryanvi performers, Sapna Chaudhary has
gained nationwide popularity, and her dance and comedy videos are viral on social
media platforms.
In another version of the ragni, ‘patla dupatta tera muh dikhe’,3 streamed in August
2016, there is dialogic bantering where the male performer is concerned about the
thinness of the dupatta of the female performer, who is his wife in the performance.
He is worried because the thinness of the dupatta makes her face visible. The
clothes we wear play a role in constructing an appearance, defning how “clothing,
body, and performance come together in dress as embodied practice” (Hansen,
2004, p. 372). The way a woman uses her dupatta becomes a mark of her character
and the masculinity of her man in the Haryanvi society, presenting how the dupatta
is allied to the hypermasculine deliberations. In this particular performance, on
being chastised by her husband for her thin dupatta, the woman makes a mockery
of his comment. The woman communicates to the audience members: ‘areeh koi
batao tauji isne, ki muh hi toh dikhe seh, aur toh kuch na dikhe seh, yuh hi balwa ho raha
hai’ (hey, someone tell him that he is getting mad just like that, only my face is
visible and nothing else is visible). It is not only the comment but also the style in
90 Monika Yadav
which this comment is delivered that invites the mockery of the male performer
and the laughter and clapping of the audience. The woman performer smiles,
changes her tone, makes it softer and brings mischief when she delivers the above
line, highlighting the absurdities of his concerns in a very subtle and humorous
way. This bantering between male and female performers produces laughter in
the audience. This concern over the veiling presents the patriarchal anxieties over
female sexuality. The banter by the female can be seen as a satirical contest to the
hypermasculine concerns. The male performer confates female dressing with the
male sexual attention she is expected to garner via the visibility of her face, present-
ing how clothing strategies for females are meant to “de-eroticize and desexualize
their female bodies, so as to channel their potential for chaotic passion towards
helping to maintain social order” (Mossière, 2012, p. 119).
In yet another version of the same ragni, ‘patla dupatta’,4 streamed on 29 Novem-
ber 2016, the male performer asks the female performer not to use a thin dupatta to
veil her face as many boys sitting and standing there make comments on her. The
female performer informs the audience that this is the latest fashion and no one
should have a problem. She reprimands her husband: ‘yeh joh chore kahe hai na ki
teri birbani nuh, teri birbani nuh,nuh,nuh.kehan deh meh toh nuh hi chalugi’ (these boys
who are saying that your woman is like this, your woman is like that . . . let them
say, I will be like this only). While delivering this dialogue, the female performer
starts with a loud and harsh tone and suddenly mellows her voice, combines it
with softness, transgression and pride when she says: ‘let them say what they want
to say, I will be like this only’. This comment generates humour and laughter and
concurrently crackles the patriarchal foundations that expect a woman to dress and
behave as per its standards. On listening to her disagreement to obey the commands
of her husband, a third performer sitting on the stage comments to the male per-
former: –‘baat toh kasuti hai, dharti bhi haale seh, tut toh yuh hi mard ban raha hai, garha
toh teri lugai ki chala hai’ (there has happened something shocking, even the earth
is shaking, you are becoming a man just like that, it is your woman who rules the
house). The woman interferes at this comment, stopping her husband from speak-
ing, and informs the person who commented that this is a matter between her and
her husband, and who is he to comment as a third person. Via the means of not
allowing her husband to speak, the woman contests the masculine performances of
strength and valour to note how the everyday nuances of male action are gendered
within the Haryanvi culture. Humour allows the widely held conventions to be
overthrown; in this case, the husband’s control over his wife is swiftly overtaken,
making her subversions acceptable.
The responses of the audience who watch these performances live and those
who watch the videos of these performances difer in varying degrees due to the
change in the audience composition and change in the medium of watching. The
nature of the physical and virtual audience difers in varying degrees; the physical
audience is mainly the local Haryanvi men. In contrast, the virtual audience has
a multicultural nature and includes both men and women in large numbers. The
online comments on these videos include an appreciation of the ragni, applause
for the male and female performers, but some comments also include censuring
of the performers and the performance. The appreciatory comments include ‘Mja
a gya’ (it is a lot of fun), ‘Best comedy of jhandu’, ‘best ragni’, ‘very very nice Pepsi
& Sapna’, ‘dono ki jodi super’ (you two make a good combo). The adverse com-
ments include ‘Chee kya ghatiyaa baate kr rh h . . . isko comedy khte h cheee bukwas’
(what atrocious talks they are doing . . . do we call this comedy, this is nonsense),
‘kya chutiyapa hai ladki ka to thoda accha hai baki wo chutiye ko nahi rakhna chahiye tha
pure dimak ki ma c . . . diya’ (what the f--k is this!, the girl is still fne, but the guy
should not be in the performance, whole mind is motherf--ked), ‘Full bukchodo . . .
sapna tu nachte huy hi achi lgty h’ (full nonsense, Sapna you look nice only when you
dance). The pluralistic nature of online viewers makes the comments diverse. A
dialogue or banter, which is a joke for an audience of a particular locale, may sound
ofensive to the viewers of diferent social locations and settings.
Another popular ragni, titled ‘Manne Milegi Lugai’ (I will get a wife), involves a
dialogue between a ‘devar-bhabhi’ (woman and her younger brother-in-law), and
several versions of this ragni are available on YouTube. This work will discuss two
such versions, published in the year 2018 by Sonotek Ragni and Sonotek Haryanvi
music companies. The videos have a time duration of around 15 minutes and have
more than 1.8 million views. The performers in these videos are Sapna Chaudhary
and Pepsi Sharma. One such version (streamed on 3 February 2018)5 begins with
chitchat between the devar and the Bhabhi; here the devar is requesting her bhabhi
to get him married to someone. On this request, the bhabhi ridicules the devar by
commenting that she has tried his proposal with many girls, and no one agrees to
marry him. She asks the woman sitting on the stage whether she is interested in
marrying him, and the teasing continues. The female performer interrupts and
teases the male performer again, remarking that she has selected someone and
points to a man she has selected. The song and dance continue; the central lyrics
are: ‘Manne Milegi Lugai, Hoye Ramji, Mai toh baatuga mithai, Hoye Rammji’ (I will
get a wife, O’ God, I will distribute sweets, O’ God). The lyrics present how get-
ting a wife becomes a desire and achievement for a man, making the attainment
of a wife a cradle of displaying masculine prowess. The teasing of the female per-
former in terms of the non-acceptance of his proposal by anyone ofers a contest to
the maleness that the man wishes to proclaim. When the male performer sings the
lyrics ‘hoyege keye kai bache’ (will have many children), the female interrupts, laughs
and takes a satire on him saying, ‘maane na lage chuha bhi hoga tere’ (I don’t think even
a rat will be born to you). This comment generates laughter in the audience pres-
ent in the physical locale. The symbolism of ‘rat’ is drawn to make a blow on the
man’s virility in a comical way. In the patriarchal set-up, children become a symbol
of virility and sexual prowess of a man, because the more children he has, the more
virile he is considered to be. In such a scenario, the assertion by the woman that
she doesn’t think even a rat will be born to him becomes a defeat to his virility,
denigrating his masculine sexual prowess.
In another version of the same ragni, ‘manne milegi lugai’ (streamed on 29 June
2018)6 the devar requests the bhabhi to get him married, she denies and mocks
92 Monika Yadav
him saying that no girl is made for him, and further ridicules him by saying, ‘who
will get married to you after seeing you’? The performance includes song, dance
and drama. The female performer asks the male performer to dance, ridiculing
him via commenting, ‘aaj yeh basanti naache gi and ham dekhege’ (today this Bas-
anti will dance and we will watch), and this comment generates a burst of loud
laughter in the audience. Basanti is a very popular character of a Hindi movie
Sholay (1975). In this movie Basanti, a young lady, played by a Bollywood actress
Hema Malini,7 is made to dance in front of a male audience for their entertain-
ment, and her dance is aimed at saving the life of her love interest. Here, calling
the man Basanti and asking him to dance to entertain a male crowd evokes an
insult to his masculinity, eliciting a mockery of the masculine characteristics asso-
ciated with men. He is put in front of a group to be ‘gazed at’ and to entertain
them. This humour pinpoints the gendered boundaries afrmed by patriarchal
interests, and this satire provides an impetus for the physical audience to laugh
hilariously. Apart from the physical audience, whose reactions can be noted in
the video, the viewers who watch these performances online also respond to the
performances in the form of comments. These videos invite comments similar
to the ones discussed for the other two ragni videos. The comments include: ‘so
funy’ (so funny), ‘bhai pepsi maja kadha kar diya’ (Brother Pepsi! You have given
so much entertainment), ‘Gazab comedy sapna ji’ (hilarious comedy Sapna), ‘nice
comedy’, and some comments which censure the performance and performers
include: ‘Randi to h hi saali. Mindset bhi ghatiya h. 10–10 saal ki 2 dila dungi bol rhi
h’ (She is a whore only, her mentality is also cheap, she is saying she will get two
girls of 10–10-year-old for him), ‘How can this be on trending, wtf wrong with
the net nowadays’, ‘pepsihyi hyi kyu kerte ho gand me ungli de rekhi h ke‘ (Pepsi, why
do you make ‘hyi’ sound, have you placed your fnger in your ass?), ‘Character-
less, classless, nonsense Sapna’, ‘Is this really trending for #27 in YouTube? Come
on, guys’. The comments on these videos present how some audiences fnd these
videos funny and comical, whereas others fnd the content of the videos and
the performers objectionable. On the one hand, some commenters appreciate
the witty act and performers and their performances, but on the other hand,
some make adverse comments that include cusswords for both the content of the
comical act and the performers. The social settings of the viewers who watch
these performances are diverse, and the digital locale makes tracing the viewers
and their social positioning very difcult.
Conclusion
The Haryanvi comical enactments in the form of jakari and ragni are majorly cen-
tred on interpersonal relationships. The discourse present in these genres illustrates
a form of negotiation to the gendered cultural standards in an entertaining and
satirical way. This chapter draws the jakari and ragni as a single analytical category
to convey the modalities of dramatic Haryanvi humour and gendered subversions.
The chapter relies on physical and digital locales for these purposes, bringing in
the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of humour from both of these spaces. The chap-
ter argues for the contextual nature of humour; enactments that are funny for a
particular audience might not be laughable for an audience of a diferent setting.
This is argued by the analyses of the videos of the comical acts and the comments
that a multicultural audience makes in the context of these videos. There exist both
appreciatory and denunciatory comments from the viewers of the digital space,
bestowing the eccentricities of humour and online spaces.
There emerge specifc arguments from the analysis of ethnographic details of
jakari and ragni performances: a woman’s countenance appears in the form of lyrics
and dialogic banter. This stance makes a mockery of masculinity with the genera-
tion of laughter. This work doesn’t claim these performances to be ‘carnivalesque’
in a Bhaktian sense and argues that certain facets of these performances do show
resemblances to the ritualistic act of ‘carnival’.8 The socio-cultural critique in this
context comes in the guise of entertainment and serves as a powerful communi-
cation tool. The performances via humour form low-profle forms of protests/
resistances, generating contests of a non-belligerent kind.9 Humour can be seen
as appealing to the emotional charm, disguising the target at which the satire is
directed and coaxing listeners into seeing alternate viewpoints that they are prob-
able to discard outrightly if ofered plausibly. Thus, this work argues that these
humorous performances in the context of Haryana negotiate and build a dialogue
with the gendered realities.
Based on the analysis of a subset of the Haryanvi performance genres, this work
focuses only on those jakari and ragni that have humour as a major percept; there
exist many other themes, such as violence, separation, sexual desires, romance and
patriotism, in the content of these genres. Thus, the jakari and ragni performances
that I have looked at as humourous subversions can also be studied from a dis-
parate perspective. The jakaris and ragnis can also be studied from other themes
of romance, tease and sexual desire. The data for the analysis of jakari and ragni
performances in this context is collected from both physical and digital domains;
this restricts the analysis of one particular genre on both the mediums, lacking the
to-and-fro talk between both spaces for a specifc genre.
Notes
1 The jakari and ragni used in this chapter are reproduced in Roman script followed by
translation in English by the author.
2 The salwar is baggy trousers, the suit is a long shirt, and the duppata is a long scarf.
3 Sonotek Haryanvi. Patla Dupata Tera Muh Dikhe || Sapna, Pepsi || Haryanvi Ragni [Video].
YouTube, 2016 Aug 11. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Qw_Dz7Mq0 (Last accessed on
10th January, 2020)
4 Haryanvi Maina. Sapna | Naukjhok | Pepsi, Jhandu | Haryanvi Ragni & Comedy | Patla Duppta
Tera Muh | Maina Haryanvi [Video]. YouTube, 2016, Nov 29. www.youtube.com/watch?v=
nUEglFBdHkk (Last accessed on 15th February, 2020)
5 Sonotek Haryanvi. Manne Milegi Lugai | Sapna Chaudhary & Papsi | Shikarpur Compitition
2018 [Video]. YouTube, 2018, Feb 3. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PppTh1aEU58 (Last
accessed on 12th January, 2020)
94 Monika Yadav
6 Sonotek Ragni. Sapna Aur Pepsi Ki Hitt Jodi I Manne Milegi Lugai I Badshahpur Progaram I
Sonotek [Video]. YouTube. 2018, June 29. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE6nlxqUN-A
(15th February, 2020)
7 Hema Malini is an Indian actor, and she has been part of over 100 projects, primarily in
Hindi films.
8 Carnivalesque is a literary mode that undermines and liberates the conventions of the
dominant style or atmosphere through humour and chaos. It originated as “carnival” in
Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and was further advanced in Rabelais and
His World.
9 James C. Scott, an American political scientist and anthropologist, is a comparative scholar
of agrarian and non-state societies, and his primary research has centred on peasants of
Southeast Asia and their strategies of resistance to various forms of domination. He called
these strategies ‘weapons of the weak’, which he terms as the everyday forms of resis-
tances. See Scott, J. C. Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
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versity Press.
6
‘A SRI LANKAN ARRIVES IN HELL’
A case of laughing at ‘Sri Lanka’ and
the ‘Sri Lankan’ in a collection of
modern folktales
Lal Medawattegedara
Folkloric speech acts, like folktales, are traditionally perceived as essential constitu-
ents of a nation’s heritage and even a mirror image of its cultural traditions – in
the words of a folklorist, they are “autobiographical ethnography” or a “people’s
own description of themselves” (Dundes, 2007, p. 55). Moreover, folktales, like
any other type of narrative, are not born in a vacuum, nor do they inhabit one;
folkloric texts carry biases, prejudices, beliefs and values through time and space,
often “unconsciously or unselfconsciously” (Dundes, 2007, p. 55). This latter idea
of Dundes provides the impetus for this chapter as it attempts to critically examine
a collection of humorous tales whose primary object of comedy is the Lankan state.
The collection under scrutiny here is titled Wit and Humour, a compilation of orally
transmitted items of folk speech, namely folktales, anecdotes and ballads/poems/
songs whose common theme is humour. This chapter focuses on a section of this
book titled We Are Sri Lanka, which comprises humorous tales about ‘Sri Lanka’
and the ‘Sri Lankan’. A surface reading of these tales suggests a denigration of, if not
a direct afront on, the nation-state and its citizens. If folktales are a self-description
of a group of people who create/tell/listen to (or read) them, then what do those
humorous tales tell us about the nation-state and about the creators/tellers/listeners
(or readers) of those tales? Do the tales belittle the nation and the people as a sur-
face reading suggests? If so, why would a storyteller resort to ‘humour’ as a modality
to deploy such an act? Or do the tales rise above disparagement of the nation and
people and achieve something unpredictable, as many literary texts in public circu-
lation tend to do? All speech, according to Macherey, “envelopes in the unspoken
in order to reach utterance,” and this “silence” (Macherey, 2016, p. 93) informs us
of the “precise conditions for the appearance of an utterance, . . . its limits . . . real
signifcance” (Ibid, p. 93). The ‘silences’ that envelope the humorous engagements
of the tales under focus here would be put under scrutiny in this study as it attempts
to explore the potential answers to these questions.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-8
96 Lal Medawattegedara
Folktale tradition of Sri Lanka

Folklorist Ratnapala (1991) argues that Sri Lanka has a tradition of folktales that goes
back to the approximate time of the nation’s conversion to Buddhism upon an initia-
tive sponsored by the Mauryan emperor Asoka in approximately 300 BCE.1 Peris
(2003), supporting Ratnapala’s argument, posits that the Buddhist Jataka Tales2 were
deployed by the founder Buddhist missionaries from India to disseminate this religion
in ancient Lanka. Of course, Jataka Tales are considered some of the oldest surviv-
ing folktales in the world, being inspired by regional folktales of India of the time, as
well as Greek myths that were introduced to India by the retinue of King Alexander.
As Davids (1987) suggests, the Jatakas are “the most reliable, the most complete and
the most ancient collection of folklore now extant in any literature in the world”
(Davids, 1987, p. 208). In parallel to the Jataka Tales, there were other folktales minus
the Buddhist infuence which existed in ancient Lanka and in 1910, a colonial (Brit-
ish) irrigation ofcer named Henry Parker collected, annotated and published 266 of
them as Village Folk Tales of Ceylon in three volumes.3 It took 60-odd years for folktale
collectors of native origin to emerge, and thus appeared the tradition of publishing
folktales of Lanka identifed by the region and ethnicity – leading to folktale collec-
tions with region-inspired titles such as Folktales from Kandy and ethnicity-based ones
such as Muslim Folktales from the Eastern Province etc.4 Yet, despite the large number of
folktale publications available for public consumption in the Lankan market, despite
the local print media focusing on children publishing Lankan and global folktales for
moral edifcation, and despite the school textbooks using selected local and global
folktales for cultural comprehension, there have not been any focused attempts to col-
lect and publish orally and digitally transmitted folktales that humoured ‘Sri Lanka’and
the ‘Sri Lankan’, although such tales exist among Lankans at any given time. Neither
have there been academic studies on such unpublished folktales. Of course, one need
not go further than a couple of Prefaces composed for modern folktale collections to
locate the reason. Take, for instance, Tharindu Sudharshana Abeysinghe, an exhaus-
tive collector of folktales from the gem miners of Sri Lanka. He says that his tiresome
endeavor is to “protect the folkloric and cultural traditions of the gem miners for pos-
terity” (Abeysinghe, 2018, p. 03) Theoretically, this trend arises because folktales tend
to preserve “common cultural traditions” (Weerasinghe, 1986, p. 34), and those ‘com-
mon traditions’, one could safely assume, are conventions with afrmative values and
not the ones that raise eyebrows. In this light, the folktales under consideration here
gather importance, for they are the narratives that print capitalism has distanced itself
from. By studying these tales, one could understand the potential reasons behind their
(deliberate?) omission from the school textbook, the bookshelf and the newspaper.
Folktales and humour

This writer, who grew up in southern Sri Lanka, heard, laughed at and re-told
humorous folktales about Sri Lanka as a part of his growing-up experience. At a
surface level, such humorous tales deny the nation-state by exposing its seemingly
‘A Sri Lankan Arrives in Hell’ 97
fundamental faws and failings. These tales usually focus on the perceived ‘inef-
fciency’ and ‘lethargy’ of the Sinhala ethnic community5 or the crafty nature of
all Sri Lankans in any given context. What elicited laughter was the blending
of the known (perceived beliefs about Sri Lanka) and the unknown (a narrative
with suspense). The tales under focus here are a sample of similar folktales, those
nation-denying, citizen-denigrating narratives. These irreverent tales are identi-
fed as folktales for the purpose of this chapter owing to two reasons: their mode
of transmission, which is orally or digitally (email), and their representation of
the Lankan ‘reality’ – a folktale, says Sri Lanka’s foremost Sinhala novelist Martin
Wickramasinghe, is “born out of people’s real-life experience” (Wickramasinghe,
1968, p. x), where they constructed a “real approach” (Wickramasinghe, 1968,
p. x) to life.
Though Lanka’s southern folklore has attracted scholarly engagements in Sri
Lanka from scholars such as J.B. Disanayaka, N. Ratnapala, S. Ariyaratne, Martin
Wickramasinghe, N. Wijesekera and P. Vitharana, there have been no extensive
studies on the humorous aspect of the tales or for that matter on humorous folk-
tales. There have been no known scholarly studies of Lanka’s Tamil and Muslim
folkloric humour either.6 Medawattegedara (2016), in an unpublished thesis on the
gendered universe in Sri Lanka’s largest and the frst collection of southern Sinhala
folktales,7 focuses on the use of humour as a means of negotiating gender in the
folktales. He argues that Lankan males used humour as a means of dealing with
the anxieties of being cuckolded by their wives. By transferring their anxieties of
infdelity into humorous imaginative narratives, the males achieved two purposes:
frst, they chided themselves into believing that a ‘cuckolded husband’ is a prod-
uct of the imagination, or an event that is unreal; second, they warned the male
listeners about the possibility of ‘adultery’ in their households. A study of Andalu-
sian humorous folktales found similar conclusions, suggesting that “jokes provide
both an afrmation of confict between the sexes and a means by which men can
minimize, however incompletely or ephemerally, the importance of the confict”
(Brandes, 1992, p. 52). It would be of interest to observe if the modern folktales
about the nation-state facilitated similar functions, i.e., transferring ‘fear’ into fcti-
tious spaces in order to deal with them.
“We are Sri Lanka”

Wit and Humour is a collection of folk speech acts compiled by a group of collec-
tors who identify themselves as ‘The Jolly Crew’. The book comprises over 700
humorous tales, songs, ballads, poems, rhymes and proverbs, which the unidenti-
fed compilers claim to have either told, heard or read. All materials are categorised
under 24 themes, ranging from “Husband and Wife (Home Sweet Home!)” to
“Senior Citizens” or from “‘Liberal’ Afairs” to “Bishops, Priests, Churches.” The
stories under study here appear in a section titled “We Are Sri Lanka.” There is
a short introduction to the book, which lacks details that could be of interest
to a folkloric researcher, such as contexts from which the stories were extracted
and detail identities of the tellers. The mode of collection of folktales have been
identifed and defned by the discipline of folkloristics. The Lankan folklorist
Weerasinghe (1986) asserts that the entire context of a tale being told needs to be
documented: settings, biographical details of the tellers/listeners, facial gestures/
voice intonations of the teller, responses of the audience – all this needs to be
recorded when collecting the tales. The unidentifed compilers, ‘The Jolly Crew’,
of the tales under study here have not resorted to such scientifc modes of tale
collection in their endeavours, which is a major shortcoming of this collection.
Yet, the collectors have ofered the reader (and researcher) a rare collection of
humourous folk speech acts in one space, which make the Lankan state and the
citizen as its focus of comedy, and which is a creditable act considering the fact that
even the experienced folktale collectors of Lanka have neglected or have distanced
themselves from such tales. As far as this writer is aware, this is Sri Lanka’s only
collection of humourous tales focusing on the nation and its people in either of the
two national languages (Sinhala and Tamil) or the link language English.
Of the seven stories that focus on ‘Sri Lanka’ and the ‘Sri Lankan’, six stories
are used in the present discussion. One story had been left out owing to its incon-
sistency with the main theme, which is story No. 13, focusing on fnding a marital
partner. For the convenience of discussion, the seven stories are categorised under
the following themes: spatial shift, power dynamics and irreverence. Each folktale
in the book is only identifed by a numeral, e.g., No. 1, No. 2, etc. Thus, the sto-
ries drawn into the following discussion are given their relevant numerical identity.
Spatial shift
Tales No. 12 and 15 begin as follows:
In the year 2050 AD, the earth people had started to colonize the Moon,
and each country had been allocated a part of this new colony, and asked to
develop their land.
(Tale No. 12)
A Sri Lankan arrives in Hell, where there are dormitories maintained by

different countries.
(Tale No. 15)
The narratives of both the tales open in unaccustomed territory: a lunar landscape
colonised by humankind and the metaphorical topography of ‘hell’. The introduc-
tion of impossible settings for these tales could be ofered two diferent readings:
frst, the contents of the tales become symbolic or metaphoric in the sense that
the events of the tales cannot be taken literally. A metaphor is a fgure of speech
that resorts to importing literally unrelated images to represent an object, whereas
a symbol is a sign that stands for a meaning not literally related to that sign. Sec-
ond, both are ‘absent’ landscapes, thus they ofer the will for a story creator/teller
to sustain his or her narrative enterprise without impinging on defned political

territories – in this case the nation-state of Lanka. The contexts of both stories
ofer protection for the storyteller and increase his or her ability to articulate unpal-
atable events.
A summary of Tale No. 12 would be as follows: it is the year 2050 and the moon
has been colonised by humankind, with space allocated for each nation to develop
its sector. After a certain time has elapsed, several national leaders who are holiday-
ing on Earth are interviewed on electronic media about the progress achieved on
the moon. USA claims to have a functioning capitalist economy, while the Russian
leader boasts about the re-establishment of communism in their lunar space; the
British intend to form the empire, welfare state and introduce the game of cricket.
When the Lankan leader gets his turn, he stammers and his speech is slurred. No
progress has been achieved by his nation because “every day is Full Moon, no! So,
every day is a holiday, no!” The background to this utterance is as follows. In Sri
Lanka, every full moon day is a national holiday on account of the belief that the
signifcant events of the Lord Buddha’s life, the founder of Buddhism, took place
on full moon days. Thus, the followers of Buddhism, the religion of the majority of
Sri Lankan people, are expected to engage in spiritual endeavours on this day. Yet,
this holiday is also an occasion for some people to engage in the worldly pursuit
of consuming liquor. Since the liquor shops are mandatorily closed on a full moon
day, it is customary for such people to stock up on liquor early in preparation for
this day. Thus, the fctitious Lankan colony on the moon living in such extra-close
proximity to the full moon every day has been unable to stop consuming liquor.
The accessible thematics of this story are: the Lankan character trait of exces-
sive alcohol consumption even on a day of religious signifcance, Lanka’s inability
to initiate an ambitious drive for systematic development, and a lack of discipline
among Lankans. The story thrives on the general perception among many Lankans
that their nation lags behind in development owing to many reasons, with inertia,
lack of discipline and corruption being some of them.8 Though politicians might
not readily subscribe to this view, and Lankans might not openly speak about it,
one cannot ignore or deny the existence of this standpoint – and perhaps the best
way to handle this is through humour. Thus, by shifting the geographical context of
the story into a fctitious space, the storyteller has found a new freedom to explore
and articulate this belief. This exploration of an ‘irreverent’ view about the nation-
state can be understood at two levels. The obvious meaning is the bleak future that
awaits Lanka – when a technologically advanced world moves to the future, just
30 years from now, the Lanka state will be what it is today, a nation whose growth is
stagnant. But, a reading of the attentive ‘silences’ in the narrative ofers an alterna-
tive suggestion: the Lankan state is seemingly happy to continue their present state
of existence into the future. In other words, Sri Lankans are content with who they
are, and need not build an identity based on concepts that have already attracted
criticism, such as capitalism, communism and imperialism. An inebriated state of
afairs is an ideal state of mind for Lanka and the Lankans, and this state of afairs
has not stopped Lanka from existing in the future and gaining real estate in the
lunar landscape. Thus, one could say that this story ofers a double-edged sword
consisting of blades with opposite tendencies – one that cuts and one that shields:
the story negates the nation-state and also preserves it.
In the second story, No. 15, the context is once again ‘hell’. There are diferent
‘dormitories’ in hell managed by diferent nations, and the Lankan-managed section
in ‘hell’ has the longest queue, with people struggling to get in there, suggesting
that the Lankan-managed hell is the most popular ‘hell’ to be. There is a man who
ofers strategic information about this most-sought-after hell, but of course for a fee:
“it is strictly forbidden to refer to these as bribes,” says the narrator. This informant
reveals to the customers who bribed him that in the Lankan-managed hell, the tor-
ture equipment malfunctions due to negligence; the eforts to purchase fresh spare
parts for the machines have failed due to corrupt practices of ofering kickbacks
for interested parties. The torture-machine operators were stereotypical state-sector
employees who work less and spend more time idling. Thus, the reason why every-
one wants to be in the Lankan Hell. Once again, the reader of the tale is confronted
with three issues that are seemingly rampant in the Lankan state sector – bribery,
fnancial corruption and apathy. This story, like the previous one, ofers a warning
for the state: unpalatable national characteristics could transcend death and could be
found in realms of the afterlife. Yet, the unarticulated ‘silence’ of the story ofers a dif-
ferent perspective. The inherited inevitable Lankan characteristics become useful at a
critical point in human existence. In other words, living in Sri Lanka is also a prepa-
ration for the extremities of afterlife. ‘Hell’, according to this tale, is an inevitable
reality for anyone since the many nations in the world are represented there. And the
torturous ‘realities’ of hell are better negotiated by Lankans than anyone else owing to
their unconstructive managerial skills of corruption and apathy. The Lankan apathy
and corruption do have their benefts – they make “hell ain’t a bad place to be” to
quote a lyric from the heavy-metal band AC/DC. One could also assume that the
‘hell’ represents the Lankan state in this world, thus living in the Lankan state is also a
useful training opportunity for the potential challenges of the afterlife.
Power Dynamics
Roger Scruton locates amusement as an “attentive demolition” of a person or some-
thing connected with a person and goes on to argue that laughter has the means to
“devalue its object” in the eyes of the subject.9 There are three humorous stories
in the collection that invert this power equation. Tale No. 18 has a Lankan citizen
known as Vismapala – this is a hyperbolic name; it means someone who achieves
unbelievable tasks and is usually given to character who is unable to do so. An unem-
ployed Lankan living in the UK applies for the vice president post of a vast business
empire and lies his way to the fnal short list. There are two fnalists for the post, and
both are required to converse with each other in a tribal language. Vismapala conf-
dently speaks to the other in Sinhala:10 “Yakho, umbha kohe indalada awey?” (Devil,11
where did you come from?). In reply, the other candidate expresses his surprise
and camaraderie in Sinhala: “Ado umbath Lankavenada” (Mate,12 are you also from
Lanka?). Both Lankan candidates have hoodwinked the interview panel, who end up
hiring them. Here is a tale that prioritises the perceived Lankan apathy and craftiness
over merit and hard work, reminding us of an expression from the British poet Philip
Larkin’s poem titled Toads: “allow me to blarney, My way of getting the fame, the
girl, and the money” (Larkin, 1955, p. 26). Both Lankan candidates have ‘blarneyed’
their way to the vice president’s post of a prestigious company. Vismapala is a fctitious
Lankan who has the least respect for the discipline, diligence and industry, yet pos-
sesses craftiness and brashness. Yet an alternative reading suggests otherwise. There are
limitations in the interview process for this prestigious post: the mode of evaluation
of the candidates had clear shortcomings, which allowed the Lankans to overcome
them; and the Lankans did possess certain skills with which they came to the fnal list,
and the interviewers failed to take note of them. Vismapala, in that sense, attracts the
empathy of the reader – here is a man who had been insignifcant all his life, and then
achieves the fame and the money in his own unique ‘Lankan’ way.
Tale No. 16 features an account of a Lankan who had lived in the UK in the
1950s. He recounts how the Lankans used “frozen water discs” that imitated real
coins to acquire gas. The Scotland Yard had to be summoned to solve this mystery.
“Hats of to Sri Lankans!!!”, the tale ends, thus celebrating the collective act. It
is the ‘silence’ surrounding this act of celebration that forms an alternative read-
ing of this tale. Lankans here have been ingenious or imaginative – they created a
mode of payment that deceived the machine, the ultimate symbol of progress and
industrialisation; and their act required the involvement of a senior agency of law.
Here are a group of Lankans, the tale seems to say, who have disrupted or who have
outmanoeuvred the might of the Brits, the former colonial masters of Ceylon. And
it has only taken a coin made from ice to do so.
In Tale No. 17, we meet a dying oil-rich sheikh purchasing extravagant gifts for
his younger sons. Thus, the son who wanted a toy aircraft is given an actual Boeing
jet; the son who wanted a play boat is ofered a real battleship. The youngest son
demands a Mickey Mouse, and unable to improve on this gift, the ailing man con-
sults his advisors for a solution – they recommend buying the Lankan bureaucracy
for this son. Once again the story ends with the acclaim: “Well done Sri Lanka!!!”
The tale ofers the seeming interpretation that the Lankan bureaucracy is a meta-
phoric rat that nibbles away the nation, and one is better of selling it to a Middle
Eastern sheikh who lacks common sense and who has money to waste. Yet an alter-
native reading would be that Lankan bureaucracy has its reason for existence, and
its workings, trappings and machineries are sophisticated enough to be traded of at
a high price – thus the hearty approval, “Well done Sri Lanka!!!”
Irreverence
In Tale No. 19, we have three Christian priests who narrate how they share their cash
collection with the Almighty. The priests from the two other nations – the nations
are not named – are sincere in their act of sharing: one draws a line and throws the
money up, and what falls to the left is for him, while the rest is for the Almighty; the
second priest uses a small circle to achieve the same task – when the coins are thrown
up, what falls within the circle is for the Almighty and without for him. The Lankan
priest uses a totally diferent method: he throws the money up with a plea to the
Almighty to take all the money. “What He collects, and stays up, is His. What comes
down is for me.” At the outset, this tale suggests the irreverence and craftiness of the
Lankan priest when it comes to engaging with the Almighty – he knew beforehand
that the money thrown up will inevitably give in to the force of gravity. It would
also suggest that the church till might not be full for the priest to be generous with
his Creator. Yet an alternative interpretation is also possible: the tale articulates the
slightly diferent version of the body/soul dichotomy of Christianity – the Almighty
is ‘present’ in spirit though ‘absent’ in body. In that sense, the seemingly irreverent
priest does ofer his collection to the Almighty through his will (spirit), and collects
the physical (body) coins himself. At the same time, the tale also suggests that the
perceived Lankan ingenuity and craftiness is also present in the sphere of religion.
These humorous tales analysed so far difered radically from the traditional folk-
tales often associated with cultural heritage. Whereas a traditional folktale would
ofer a reprieve for a listener/reader by punishing/obliterating a ‘wrongdoer’, the
tales under discussion here achieved the opposite: the wrongdoer was valorised or
saved. At the same time, the humorous tales boldly addressed issues that traditional
cultural discourse would evade, such as the perceived Lankan characteristics of
apathy, idleness and guile. The stories seemingly thrived on the supposed notion
that the nation-state is a place to live without the stress of productive regimentation
and rules. In the stories, individual will takes precedence over civic responsibility,
and what ensues is a witty, humorous and even chaotic mode of living, whereby
inebriation takes precedence over development, lethargy over efciency, irrever-
ence over reverence, and craftiness over candour.
Also considered in the light of current thinking on ‘performative communication’
by Pathak and Perera (2018), these humorous tales become sites where binaries of
social, cultural and political, and even individual ‘will’ fuse into a play of possibilities
(and impossibilities), whereby the listeners/readers are seemingly denied their much-
anticipated conclusions and their textual sense of justice. Thus, the colonised moon
is a presence and absence at the same time; ‘hell’ is a dark and lighter experience; a
priest is reverent and irreverent. Just as much as literature tends to deny fuid begin-
nings and endings for texts, Pathak and Perera (2018) too opt out of closures and ofer
a sense of inconclusiveness for works that combine performance and communica-
tion. Such indeterminacy, they say, accommodates the variety of cultural and political
experiences in a work of art. The Lankan humorous tales through their inconclusive-
ness follow similar trajectories: they bark at the reverent (traditional) folk discourse
with their irreverence, and they unleash unarticulated notions about the Lankan state,
thus embarrassing the stereotyped articulations, while stage-managing that ‘embar-
rassment’ with ‘absent’ landscapes and contexts. The fnal outcome is a merging of
a ‘truth’ (cultural) and an ‘untruth’ (political) or ‘palatable’ and the ‘unpalatable’. If
a phrase used by Pathak and Perera (2018) may be invoked, these tales are ‘farting
silently’ at the fossilised notions of folkloric speech acts that holds the nation sacred.
Conclusions
This study originally set out to make sense of centres as well as the peripheries of the
folktales that ridiculed (or respected) the nation and the people. Just like the folk-
loric court jester in ancient Lanka called Andare frequently disrupts the power of his
employer, the king, the folktales under study here dismember the nation from the
reader. Milan Kundera, in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, articulates this
better when he says that: “Laughter . . . is an explosion that tears us away from the
world and throws us back into our own cold solitude” (Kundera, 1996, p. 198). The
humour that is depicted in the tales about the Lankan state is instigated by the ‘will’
of a narrator to broach a subject matter mired in controversy. This narrator’s ‘will’
gives ‘order’ to the tale to disrupt the predictions of the listener/reader: thus, there is
Lankan inaction in ‘hell’ that makes ‘hell’ a better place; or Lankan red tape fetching
record prices. The ordering of the tales help sharpen the focus of the issue at hand –
perceived Lankan bureaucracy, apathy, guile – and ofer it for the listener/reader for
his/her inevitable participation in terms of laughter. Thus begin Kundera’s ‘explosion’
and ‘solitude’. Explosion is the identifcation of the issue at hand (like, Lankans in
‘hell’ are as inept as they are in this world); solitude is the absorption of the bitter pill
with humour as the sugar coating (thus, Lankan ineptness has its uses at least in hell).
One could safely assume that the listener/reader of these tales has a tacit approval of
the nation of Lanka as ‘home’ and a tacit disapproval of the nation for its perceived
lacks. So, how does one balance these opposites? Or justify afection for a nation with
perceived lacks? This is where imaginative fction comes in; it ofers an imaginary land
for an idea to re-root; and the more one represents an idea in language, the more that
idea tends to blur. Just as the presence of an observer could change the behaviour of
quantum particles, the articulation of a national lack in fctitious space has a tendency
to blur it. The humorous tales under discussion here achieve that purpose: they blur
the issue by identifying and then causing laughter. Thus, humour which involves the
Lankan state does not demean the nation, but rather it afrms it. It does not ofer
refection or escape, but rather humour returns the listener/reader to the imperfect
nation with the notion that it is the only nation that there is. The Lankan state for all
its imperfection must be faced, absorbed and lived, reminding us of the Indian author
R.K. Narayan’s famous 1961 utterance “India will go on,” which was understood by
V.S. Naipaul, the diaspora Indian writer and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Lit-
erature in 2001, as an implicit retreat from the self-contradictions that characterised
India’s political landscape. Sri Lanka is a complex nation with its own intrigues and
incongruities. So, could Lanka go on? Only humour could tell.
Notes
1 This date is contested by scholars; a date that is generally being used is employed here. A
discussion of this concern is beyond the scope of this chapter.
2 Jataka (meaning birth) Tales are 550 in number and are purported to be narratives of the
Buddha’s previous lives; they are popular modes of disseminating Buddhist thinking even
at present.
3 Parker’s tales show greater affinity to those from India, Europe and the Middle East.
4 Modern collections of folktales published in Sri Lanka are frequently given ethnic-based
titles, such as Sinhala Jana Katha (Sinhala Folktales), Demala Jana Katha (Tamil Folk-
tales) and Muslim Jana Katha (Muslim Folktales). The modern nation-state underwent a
30-year brutal civil conflict whose grounding ideologies were ethnically motivated, and
this might have contributed to this textual orientation.
5 “Sinhalaya modaya, kevun kanna yodaya” is a folkloric phrase popular among the people of
Sri Lanka. It literally means that the Sinhala ethnic community is inherently stupid and
is only interested in consuming oil cakes, a delicacy made of flour and treacle.
6 Medawattegedara has a study on Muslim Folktales from the East, see OUSL Journal, 2017
Vol. 12, No. 2, (pp. 5–17)
7 Henry Parker was a colonial (British) irrigation engineer who collected 266 Sinhala
folktales and published them in 1910 in three volumes under the title Village Folk Tales
of Ceylon. That was Ceylon’s first folktale collection.
8 According to the Central Bank website, Sri Lanka’s economic growth for 2020 was 3.6%;
inflation up to March 2021 was NCPI (y-y) 5.50; the country’s per capita income is US
$3,682. Extracted from www.cbsl.gov.lk/en/sri-lanka-economy-snapshot 10:17 pm on
09/07/21
9 Extracted from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
humor/; 8:47 pm, 11/06/21
10 Sinhala is the language spoken by the Sinhalese ethnic community, who form the majority
population in Sri Lanka.
11 Yakkho, literally translated as ‘Devil’, is an intimate form of address among the Sinhala
ethnic community in Sri Lanka. Yakkho in Sinhala is a term connoting an all-powerful
devil, and such devils are treated with respect in Sri Lanka. Thus, this form of address
automatically offers the addressee power and prestige.
12 Ado is an extremely affectionate form of address among Sri Lankans, but the English
translation unfortunately fails to convey that affection.
References
Abeysinghe, T.S. 2018. Sabaragamuwe MenikKathandara saha Sinharaje Withthi. Colombo: Godage.
Brandes, Stanely. 1922. Metaphors of Masculinity, Sex and Status in Andalusian Folktales. Pennsylvania:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Davids, R. 1987. Buddhist India. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Dundes, A. 2007. The Meaning of Folklore. Logan: Utah State University Press.
The Jolly Crew. 2017. Wit and Humor. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications.
Kundera, M. 1996. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: Harper Perennial.
Larkin, P. 1955. The Less Deceived. London: Marvell Press.
Macherey, P. 2016. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge.
Medawattegedara, L. 2016. “We Must Make Men”: Construction of Masculinities and Femininities
in Parker’s Village Folk Tales of Ceylon. Unpublished Thesis.
Pathak, D.N. and Perera, S. 2018. Culture and Politics in South Asia: Performative Communication.
New Delhi: Routledge.
Ratnapala, N. 1991. Folklore of Sri Lanka. Colombo: The State Printing Corporation.
Weerasinghe, A. 1986. Sinhala Janashruthiya Hederima. Colombo: Sanskruthi.
Wickramasinghe, M. 1968. Jataka Katha Vimasuma. Colombo: Sarasa (Pvt) Ltd.
PART III
Mediated messages for
laughing and thinking
7
HUMOUR, CRITICALITY AND
THE PERFORMANCE OF
ANONYMOUS POWER
Internet memes as political commentaries
in Sinhala society
Sasanka Perera
At the height of his power in Sri Lanka, President J. R. Jayewardene1 ruled the
country with an iron fst, changing the country’s constitution and the Westmin-
ster system of parliamentary rule that was in place since Independence in 1948
to an executive presidency. With that transformation, he ensured that absolute
concentration of power was vested in the presidency. In efect, he established the
foundations for the relatively dictatorial presidential politics Sri Lanka experienced
under this system afterwards. Jayewardene’s political power was often described by
critics and supporters alike with the words, “the only thing he cannot do is to turn
a woman into a man and a man into a woman.”2 On his own, he promoted himself
as ‘the elder statesman of Asia’ with an uncanny sense of political craftiness. Sup-
porters often referred to him using the same terminology, but combined with the
adage, ‘Asia’s greatest mind’.3
Nevertheless, throughout his tenure as both Prime Minster and later as President
of Sri Lanka, numerous irreverent jokes and humorous yarns about him circulated
freely. One of the most popular which was circulating throughout the 1980s fowed
as follows:4 After a devastating food in the country,5 the president and two of
his ministers, the Minister of National Security, Lalith Athulathmudali, and the
Minister of Mahaweli6 Development, Gamini Dissanayake, who was in charge of
the country’s irrigation development and agriculture, along with the head of the
Anglican Church and a senior Buddhist prelate, few in a Sri Lanka Air Force heli-
copter to survey the devastation. At one moment, the helicopter developed engine
trouble and was likely to crash, and the pilot said, “there are only four parachutes
though there are fve of you. Please decide which of you would use these and save
your lives and who will be left behind to die. I don’t have a choice anyway. This is
my job.” As the story goes, Jayewardene, in his characteristically deep and serious
voice, said, “I am the elder statesman of Asia and its greatest mind. My death would
impact the entire world. So I must live.” With these words, he grabbed the frst
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-10
108 Sasanka Perera
parachute and jumped out of the helicopter. Similarly, the Minister of National
Security said, “without me, the security of the country will be in peril. So I must
live.” With these words, he too jumped out with the second parachute. Then, the
Minister of Mahaweli Development said, “without me the country’s agriculture
and water supply will be devastated, and people will die of starvation. So I must
live.” He too jumped out of the helicopter with the third parachute. Now only
one parachute remained with the two religious leaders. The Christian priest then
told his Buddhist colleague, “we are both religious leaders. We believe in an after-
life too. It does not matter whether we live or die today as long as we have lead
an exemplary life so far. Reverend, please take the last remaining parachute and
save your life. I will meet my maker today.” To this, the Buddhist prelate answered
calmly: “Don’t worry, Father, both of us have parachutes. Asia’s greatest mind
jumped of with my umbrella.”
This story typifes the structure of what might be called ‘political jokes’, or more
accurately, humours political yarns that were in circulation at the time. These yarns
often consist of a somewhat detailed narrative like this one, even though others are
very short. All, however, have a specifc commentary on a well-known political
fgure. Here, it was not only Jayewardene’s so-called ‘intelligence’ that was ridi-
culed, but also his ministers’ sense of selfshness and self-preservation in the midst of
a crisis, while it also referred to the virtues of the religious leaders and the air force
ofcer in a secondary and more subdued narrative. But the primary narrative was
clearly focused on poking fun at the President countering the dominant positive
narratives of himself, which he and his supporters promoted.
This is not an unusual narrative. There were hundreds of such yarns in circula-
tion at the time and throughout Sri Lanka’s recent political history. Some had a
very short life span, and lapsed from people’s memory soon while others – such
as the one above – lasted for years. While they were generally narrated in family
circles and schools during times of leisure, they were more often ‘performed’ when
people congregated in weddings, birthday parties, funerals and similar gatherings.
Some people were good at performing these with an element of acting and voice
modulation, and were in high demand to perform these whenever opportuni-
ties arose. This performative aspect was quite important from an entertainment
point of view at a time when television was not well established, and the internet
did not exist. Others, however, simply narrated the yarns intermingled with their
own laughter. At the end, there would be peals of laughter from the audience that
would mark the end of the performance, and some discussion on the politics the
yarns referred to would ensue. Those discussions would reiterate the political posi-
tions the narratives promoted.
If the story narrated above is taken as a specifc genre of humour, what does
humour of this kind do or how does it work when the political circumstances in
which we live experience ruptures or instability? Are they not refective of the
times in which they are generated? Are they not critical commentaries of the indi-
viduals and politics that made those times unstable? The kind of ‘JR yarns’ such
as the one presented above did not emerge at the very beginning of Jayewardene’s
Humour, criticality and anonymous power 109
rule, but manifested themselves as his political power increased and as the draconian
political moves he was experimenting with through constitutional manoeuvres,
tampering with the administration with questionable political appointments and so
on became very apparent. That is, these stories were critical political commentaries
about the man and his politics. More generally, such narratives were about selected
people and the political processes such people unleashed, which ordinary people
were wary of, though they may not have the power or the political space to engage
with them openly and directly. It seems to me, humour that emerges under these
kinds of socio-political circumstances can be understood as a very specifc narrative
on the nature of democracy and politics in the region, and in this specifc context
in Sri Lanka.
The basic premise of this chapter is that humour generated in these circumstances
is not merely a matter of simple ‘jokes’ meant for laughter in liminal moments.
Instead, narratives of humour are meant to circulate over time with many afterlives,
and would critically comment on specifc kinds of politics and political processes.
They would lapse from people’s memory and go out of circulation only after the
people and events they comment upon cease to exist or newer narratives about
more recent events and people take the place of older ones. Typically, these sto-
ries had no known authors, but they were nevertheless ‘owned’ by everyone who
narrated them and became willing members of audiences to such narratives. In
this context, such a body of commentary on contemporary politics deserves more
sustained scrutiny. This chapter will attempt to achieve two interrelated objectives:
1 To sketch a very specific understanding of how humour has been perceived

over time in Sinhala culture to situate contemporary memes in this broader
context of humour
2 To look at memes circulating via the internet in contemporary times to explore
what kind of issues they deal with and the degree of their criticality.
The actual reading of memes will be done by focusing on the following three
political moments in recent Sri Lankan political history:
1 The presidential election of 2019, in which Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was elected

president
2 The Sri Lankan Independence Day 2020
3 The COVID-19 pandemic from February 2020 onwards
Lapses in recognising humour as a sociological category

Historically, humour has not been taken very seriously by social sciences, and this is
very evident in sociology. Perhaps one reason for this was the signifcant distancing
of humour from serious reckoning that was promoted by Greek literary traditions
and philosophical positions, a stance that seems to have been adopted by west-
ern social sciences in general, which were later circulated globally. In these older
110 Sasanka Perera
writings, the terminology used was not humour but laughter. In the present essay,
I see no reason to maintain a distinction between these two, as for me, humour
will not be complete without a degree of laugher. Plato was very specifc when he
noted in Laws, “no composer of comedy, iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted
to hold any citizen up to laughter, by word or gesture, with passion or otherwise”
(Morreall, 2016, p. 32). So comic performance in this case was a matter-of-fact
performance, not as a means of letting one lose control in the midst of laughter.
Thinkers after Plato also continued to perceive laughter in a negative sense.
Even though Aristotle thought of wit as an important aspect of conversation, he
was in agreement with Plato that laughter is a matter of scorn (Morreall, 2016).
Even wit, he still considered as ‘educated insolence’ (Ibid.). In Nicomachean Ethics
he notes, “most people enjoy amusement and jesting more than they should . . .
a jest is a kind of mockery, and lawgivers forbid some kinds of mockery – perhaps
they ought to have forbidden some kinds of jesting” (Morreall, 2016, p. 44). In
other words, Plato was advising rulers of the need to control humour, particularly
publically expressed humour.
This rather negative position on humour exhibited by infuential Greek thinkers
also impacted the thinking of early Christian thinkers as well as European culture
more generally (Morreall, 2016). This tradition seems to have infuenced early
social sciences, too. For instance, though folklorists did write about humour in the
context of their writings more generally on folklore, this was not a theme broadly
covered in mainstream sociology or anthropology from the initial times of these
disciplines to the present. Laughter, when it did capture the interest of scholars,
tended to be often located in the realm of psychology as an emotion or as a mat-
ter of catharsis while humour in the same sense has been a focus in the realm of
philosophy and literature, and not in sociology and anthropology.
Powell and Paton, in explaining this lacuna in sociology, note that humour has
been commonly seen as an individualistic and spontaneous expression embedded
in creativity, in the context of which the social, structural and processual param-
eters of this creativity have been understood as “much less tangible and hence
not readily amenable to sociological conceptualisation and theorising” (Powell and
Paton, 1998, p. xi). They also fnd it unfortunate that sociologists have maintained
undue fears about intellectual creativity in some domains, and humour is one such
domain, which many sociologists believe should be “left to the realm of free will”
(Ibid.). That is, in addition to the burden of the western canon, what has gone
against the study of humour in social sciences in general and sociology in particular
is the assumption that it was too ‘soft’ or ‘irrelevant’ in terms of its intellectual value
in the same sense as post-1960s anthropology and sociology looked at photographs
and images more generally in the context of both research and writing (Perera,
2020).
Powell and Paton argue that this neglect, or what they call the ‘imbalance’ that
overlooks the social aspects of humour in sociology, should be rectifed (Powell
and Paton, 1998, p. xii). But up to contemporary times, sociology in general or
sociology in South Asia in particular has not found it necessary to address this issue.
This general disinterest in humour is also evident in the social sciences in South
Asia – as a collective enterprise – except in situations where humour was part of
ritual practices. As such, except in such specifc contexts marked by religion and
ritual, humour has not been seriously engaged within the region’s social sciences.
Moreover, the possible correlation between humour and politics has seen even
lesser engagement in intellectual terms so far. Sri Lankan social sciences are not an
exception in this context. As such, the presentation in this chapter has to be under-
stood within this somewhat obvious absence in South Asian knowledge production
in social sciences. In this situation, any reading on the social and political implica-
tions of humour have to be undertaken in this relative absence of taking humour
seriously in social sciences.
Humour in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has a long tradition in humour in general and political humour in par-
ticular, despite the fact that both have not captured the attention of formal social
science curiosity as referred to earlier. In making this generalisation, however, my
focus is on Sinhala society. One of the most obvious repositories of humour is
Sinhala folk verse, which are generally verses sung when peasant farmers keep vigil
over their plots in the night, known as pal kawi, those sung while traveling long
distances in caravans, known as gal kawi, and verses sung when transporting goods
in rafts and boats via internal waterways, known as paaru kawi. Humour in these
verses is often not a major consideration, but it emerges as a subtle undertone when
referring to issues such as love, boredom, life and so on. As a result of this under-
tone, humour in these kinds of texts has not received the attention of scholars or
even popular commentators, even though there has been an interest in these genres
of verse in general from a conventional scholarly point of view.
However, many Sinhala folktales are replete with subtle and not-so-subtle
humour where levity appears as a major focus of the texts. The best known among
these are the stories of a character known as Mahadena Mutta, which can literally
be translated as ‘the elder who knows everything’. In these stories, fve disciples
always accompany Mahadena Mutta. As the stories go, “Mahadena-mutta thought
he knew everything” and “he thought he was very wise.”7 Mahadena Mutta was
essentially a giver of free advice in situations of village crises. Wherever he went, his
disciples carried a big book, which contained solutions to possible problems. In the
best known of the Mahadena Mutta stories, a goat owned by a farmer in a faraway
village felt thirsty and found a clay pot with water. The goat put his head into the
pot and drank the water, but could not take its head out. The farmer also tried to
help the goat, but had no success. So he consulted Mahadena Mutta. He came to
the village with his disciples, and consulted his book of solutions. After consulting
the book, he ordered the farmer to bring a large knife and asked him to cut the
neck of the goat carefully. Once this was done, he asked the farmer to crush the pot
and take the head out.8 As in this story, the solutions given by Mahadena Mutta for
problems in society were both destructive and counterproductive, emanating from
112 Sasanka Perera
his lack of intelligence as well as commonsense. As noted by Sumedha Manabarana

in her retelling of the story in English,
there are people who think that they are experts in giving advice. However
popular they are, there is also a possibility of these people giving you absurd
instructions. In doing so, they may put you into more trouble in the end.
Also, there are enough people in this society who would blindly follow these
instructions.9
This story is one of the stories that were regularly narrated to young people in
junior classes in school by teachers as well as elders in home circumstances.10 It
was reproduced in some Sinhala-language textbooks, too. There were minor per-
formative elements embedded into these narrations, while the story was also often
enacted as a short play in school drama competitions and other such events, making
it the best-known Sinhala folk story in circulation.
Another series of stories with a focus on humour are woven around a char-
acter called Andare, who is depicted as a court jester. Unlike Mahadana Mutta,
Andare comes across as someone smart, witty and perfectly capable of outsmarting
the king and his advisers as well as ordinary villagers. Andare stories in general
mostly “highlight the mindlessness of others” and “his ability to get away with
sheer mockery directed at even the King.”11 Andare stories were also well known
until recent times, not only because they were an integral part of discourse, but also
because they were a part of textbooks and were often reproduced in newspapers. In
the 1990s, an attempt was made to literally historicise this mythical character with
political sponsorship by designating a village in southern Sri Lanka as his birthplace
and constructing a monument in his memory. Irrespective of the anti-historical
approach of this attempt, it nevertheless shows the importance of Andare and his
exploits in Sinhala common sense.
In a sense, stories such as these, where there is considerable overt concentra-
tion on humour, are stories about people in power, authority and those endowed
with knowledge. But when it comes to stories such as Mahadana Mutta’s, despite
these attributes embedded in the main characters, they nevertheless come across as
unintelligent in terms of their actual actions, and they are often considered stupid
by people as well, even though they may superfcially be treated with a veneer
of reverence. But the focus of ridicule in such stories was not only on people. It
could be on an ordinary peasant, an animal, a king or a nobleman. Andare stories,
however, depict Andare as truly gifted in terms of both intelligence and humour,
and his exploits usually are about subtly outsmarting people with more power or
simply being smart. It seems to me the basic structure of these stories is consistent
with narratives of Sri Lankan political humour of more recent times, as a cursory
comparison of the Mahadana Mutta story with the ‘JR joke’ presented earlier
would indicate.
Beyond these stories from the repertoire of folktales, Sinhala ritual domain is
also an important and consistent repository of humour. As Walters has noted, one
can identify two main strands of religiosity in the practices of Sinhala Buddhists,
which involves what he refers to as a pre-Buddhist theistic layer and a more con-
ventional Buddhist layer (Walters, 2010, pp. 123–139). As he further points out on
the basis of conversations with Sinhala ritual specialists, levity plays a crucial role in
the theistic layer, though it is almost completely absent in the Buddhist layer (Wal-
ters, 2010, pp. 123–139). In the theistic domain, gods tend to tease and joke when
enacting the performance of possession, while they also indicate their expectation
for receiving oferings from humans for their own entertainment and fun (Walters,
2010, pp. 123–139). It is in such contexts that gods demand various things, mostly
food and specifed action in order to leave the bodies of those possessed. The same
process takes place with regard to demonic possessions, too. Because of this, the
entire ritual process of expelling gods or demons from the bodies of people who
have been possessed by them tends to become a process of negotiation, threat,
‘bribery’ and so on mediated by ritual specialists – usually in the presence of an
audience. It is in this context, within conversations and arguments between ritual
specialists and gods or demons in their possessed form, where humour and levity
manifest.
Referring specifcally to Sinhala exorcist rituals, Rhodes notes that humour is
one of the most striking components of these practices (Rhodes, 1983, p. 979).
She argues that in these rituals, the integration between humour and possession is
achieved via “the formalization and structural centrality of comic drama” (Ibid.,
p. 979). Kapferer similarly notes: “Comedy and humour, legitimately enacted
within particular episodes of a ritual, are regular features of large publicly per-
formed rituals to propitiate malign demons in the south of Sri Lanka” (Kapferer,
1979, p. 108). Furthermore, he notes: “Comic dialogue and action can, in certain
types of Sinhalese healing ritual, take up to half, and sometimes more, the usual
performance time” (Ibid.).
In the rather long and elaborate healing ritual, Kohomba Kankariya, that fnds
its origin in the central Kandyan hill region of Sri Lanka, the entire middle section
is a comic drama surrounded by long hours of dance, recitations and other ritual
elements (Rhodes, 1983, p. 979). In two smaller healing rituals Rhodes refers to,
originally derived from the more elaborate Kohomba Kankariya, the long complex
components of the original ritual had been dropped, even though “joking episodes
remain central and intact” (Rhodes, 1983, p. 980). With reference to her own
feld material drawn from the performance of ‘NiigaYakkama’ as part of the heal-
ing ritual ‘Viidi Yakun Pidima’, Rhodes makes the point that comic drama is not
necessarily primarily focused on the demon concerned, but instead “makes fun of
the entire notion of sickness as well as the practice of ofering alms, which is central
to Sinhala Buddhist practice” (Ibid.). Other joking episodes from the same ritual
include making fun of people’s “reluctance to give, the absurdity of the body” and
“the mocking of hierarchy” (Ibid.).
Raj and Dempsey note with reference to Shiva worship more broadly in India
and elsewhere in South Asia, a similar deployment of humour in the perceived
actions of the god. As they note, in many narrative traditions, Shiva tends to
114 Sasanka Perera
“display self-depreciating behaviour pulling gags or pranks to get devotees to pay

attention” (Raj and Dempsey, 2010, p. 15). However, as they point out, when situ-
ating narrative and ritualised festival accounts in the context of social and religions
hierarchies, they tend to show that “laughter is the domain of the dominant often
at the expense of others” (Ibid.). What Walters describes in the context of Sinhala
ritual practice in the more conventional Buddhist domain is the expelling of trap-
pings and varieties of ritual levity (Walters, 2010, pp. 123–139). This is because
the Buddha – unlike the gods – rose above these needs through his enlightenment,
which were more closely associated with humans and gods, and in that process
he encouraged following a process of moral discipline and asceticism that were
embedded in monastic rules (Walters, 2010). In such a context, humour had no
place. Though it is possible to make this distinction, as Walters has done in the
intellectual plain, ritual practice is not always so clearly defned as pre-Buddhist
theistic and Buddhist. As a result, rituals pertaining to possession in a single ritual
cycle would exhibit aspects from both of these domains. But clearly, humour and
levity are not associated with the Buddha, but it is when dealing with gods, demons
and humans.
These humorous aspects of rituals, particularly in the Sinhala context, are not
accidental elements or unnoticed by spectators. Ritual specialists ofer a variety of
reasons for these episodes, which include, “people are pleased by hearing jokes,”
“laughter purifes the minds of the patient and audience,” “when the mind is puri-
fed (by laughter) the blood is also purifed,” “laughter makes you forget your pain
and this purifes the blood” and so on (Rhodes, 1983, p. 981). Obviously, comic
drama and laughter are centrally implicated in the expectations of healing, but
there is no denying these comic elements built into the rituals are also public per-
formances meant to keep the attention of the audiences and keep them entertained
as well. It is in this context that some writers, as noted by Rhodes, have dismissed
such practices as “mere entertainment” (Ibid., p. 979). Insofar as I am concerned,
the entertainment value of these rituals as forums for the performance of humour
and critique of powers that be and dominant cultural practices that are usually
beyond criticism are crucial political spaces that also work as ‘weapons of the weak’
in the sense suggested by James Scott (1985).
In forms of traditional Sinhala theatre such as the kolam,12 humour is an impor-
tant aspect. This theatre practice is meant for community entertainment and not
for fulflling ritual expectations, even though its origins might be found in the rit-
ual arena. As noted by Gunawardena, what is also important in this context is that
“kolam denotes a further stage in the secularization of indigenous theatre” and that
“kolam is more secular in nature.”13 This transformation means that entertainment
has to be a core consideration, within which humour is an important condition.
At the most basic level, kolam is a form of folk theatre that originated and was
mostly popular in Sri Lanka’s southern and western coastal areas. It includes ele-
ments of stylised theatre, dance, masks, drumming and the intervention of what
might be called a master of ceremonies, who informally directs the performances,
and also often engages with the characters. The plot is usually based on a Buddhist
jathaka story that are renditions of the past lives of the Buddha, which brings
together a set of established masked characters who can be human, animal and
demonic. The characteristics of each character are pre-identifed and embodied in
the masks they wear, some of which – such as that of Jasaya and Lenchina (the village
washer-man and his wife) – are quite consciously caricatured.
The initial section of each performance, which works as a kind of introduc-
tion, is quite important from the point of view of humour. It involves “stock
scenes involving all layers of traditional Sri Lankan society,” such as “police ofcers
(polis karaya), villagers, a washer-man and his wanton wife, low-ranking courtiers,
soldiers, and various animal and demon characters” that “have their own, mostly
comical scenes.”14 The brief routine between the washer-man and his wife (Jasa or
Jasaya and Lenchina) is perhaps the most entertaining given its more pronounced
focus on slapstick humour and absurdity. As Gunawardena notes:
Jasa has brought a mistress to live with him. The wife Lencina, herself amo-
rous, laments her fate (for she has been married to Jasa against her will) and
complains to the Mudal, the village functionary. The case is tried, but not
before a good deal of farcical business has taken place.15
Because kolam is not a static performance, and allows for variation and interpreta-
tion within limits, it can become a forum where humour is embedded into the
performance and also becomes a forum for ridiculing characters with authority
as well as those without. It is in this context that a colonial police ofcer, or polis
karaya, is generally shown as dim-witted. Humour in this context emerges from
two sources, namely the caricatured nature of some of the masks as well as the
conversations between some characters and between characters and the master of
ceremonies, given the fexibility ofered by the loose plots.
By presenting this evidence of humour in Sinhala folklore, folk verses, ritual
practice and traditional theatre, my attempt is not to advance an argument that
contemporary political humour in Sinhala society can trace its genesis to practices
of humour and levity in these older Sinhala cultural practices in the distant past.
Instead, these older domains need to be understood as one of the contexts in which
contemporary humour in general as well as political humour in particular could
be located. That is, Sinhala folklore, theatre and ritual practice accepted humour
as an integral part of these practices geared towards healing as well as forms of
entertainment. What is important in the Sinhala ritual practices referred to earlier,
some of which are still practiced albeit often in abridged forms, is that the comic
routines have been maintained, incorporating contemporary language, situational
references and sometimes a degree of contemporary and local vulgarity as well.
The latter in terms of references to sexuality and aggression were also evident in
earlier practices (Rhodes, 1983). The point I want to make is that although incor-
porated within rituals or in folklore and folk verse, humour in Sinhala society has
been present over a long period of time as a matter public performance, a harbinger
of laughter, a means of community integration and a socially mandated situation in
116 Sasanka Perera
which fun can be made of people and situations usually beyond ridicule. I suggest,
structurally, these practices were open to perform acts of resistance not unlike the
‘JR joke’ I had referred to earlier and the memes I discuss later on.
However, when humour is performed today, it is not necessarily done with
a conscious knowledge of these older practices. But, contemporary humour –
whether jokes that circulate from mouth to mouth or cartoons that appear in
newspapers as well as memes and jokes that circulate online or specifcally via
forums such as Whatsapp, Telegram etc. – has to be located in this wider and longer
tradition of accepting humour as part and parcel of everyday life. Today’s humour,
including political humour, is clearly devoid of the ritual linkages of the past. For
instance, Said, in his 2016 essay on male sociality in southern Sri Lanka, based on
feldwork in a southern coastal village, refers to two kinds of ‘having fun’ among
males in day-to-day circumstances. These practices have nothing to do with ritual
or folklore, but specifc practices of sociality understood as ‘fun’. He refers to two
practices where humour and forms of deception are deployed, which are seen as
entertaining (Said, 2016, p. 97). More recent Sri Lankan repertoires of humour
include a number of very popular humorous flms in Sinhala since the 1970s as
well as an entire genre of humourous theatre productions. The latter continues up
to the present time. These are, however, examples of more generalised routines
of humour and cannot be seen as specifc presentations of political humour. Such
flms and dramas were important vehicles that brought humour into the midst of
Sinhala popular cultural practice and public domain in recent times.
But what about political humour as a specifc genre of discourse? How does one
understand it? Benton notes that political jokes are integral to modern dictatorships
of all political persuasions, and that they are the result of “acute tension and inhi-
bition” in society (Benton, 1998, p. 33). For him, these regressive conditions are
purveyors of this kind of humour, and despite the specifc grievances they might
refer to in given local contexts, they have a universal quality (Ibid.). Since political
jokes that refer to regimes or political actors within regimes are by their very nature
anti-systemic and counter-hegemonic, they almost completely circulate exterior
to ofcial media (Ibid.). While Benton’s explanations of political humour hold
true at the very basic level in many conditions, they also need considerable fne-
tuning. This is because his explanations take as their point of departure the idea of
the state, which does not always have to be the case. For instance, for a culture of
political humour to emerge, the existence of a dictatorship is not a precondition.
As Sri Lankan memes I will refer to later in this reading would show, and the JR
joke that I presented earlier also shows, restrictive political conditions clearly give
impetus to political humour to emerge. But there is a vast diference in concep-
tual terms between a straight dictatorship and a dysfunctional democracy, where
important democratic institutions might be consciously subverted as typifed by
most South Asian countries that verge on dictatorial politics. For Benton, political
humour is refective of a citizen’s eforts towards rebelling against the state’s eforts
at standardising their thinking and driving fear into them in order to ensure that
criticism of the regime and dissent are controlled (Ibid.). While this might well be
the case in such situations where repressive regimes hold sway, it can also be the
case that political humour can be a broader tool of dissent aimed at regimes as well
as oppositional politics, as the Sri Lankan memes would clearly indicate.
Seen in this sense, ‘formal’ practices of political humour have been an important
aspect of the Sri Lankan public sphere at least since the 1930s, but more clearly
evident since the 1950s. By formal, I do not refer to anonymously authored jokes
and yarns in free circulation or memes of contemporary times, but to texts such
as cartoons and less often columns in newspapers and magazines. These texts, par-
ticularly cartoons, have always been presented under the names of their creators,
and they have been published in established newspapers or magazines, giving them
a sense of formality. Hence in these situations, ownership of the texts is vested
with their creators while the responsibility for their publication and circulation is
taken by the publishers. Cartoonists such as Jifrey, Camillus Perera, Aubrey Col-
lette, Wijerupage Wijesoma and many others from the past, as well as Darshana
Karunathilaka, Winnie Hettigoda, Awantha Artigala, Gihan de Chikera etc., in the
present context are well-known for their biting and critical political commentary.
Since the 1960s, successive Sri Lankan governments have banned newspapers for
specifc periods of time, such as Attha published by the Communist Party of Sri
Lanka and Dawasa published by the Gunasena Group. Such closures often have
resulted from the political commentaries in their cartoons.
While there were well-known cartoon strips, most were visual-verbal commen-
taries incorporated within a single frame or image. As in the earlier word-of-mouth
‘jokes’ that circulated freely, cartoons also presented a very specifc and brief com-
mentary on a person or an event. Unlike the narrated jokes, however, cartoons
were more abstract, and yet their content was generally easily communicated. This
is because they were read in the socio-political and cultural contexts in which they
were created, and most readers were able to make sense of the cartoons because
they were essentially a part of the larger discourse, which gave them location and
sense. But cartoons until the advent of the digital age were relatively limited in
circulation. They had to be seen and read only via newspapers and magazines, and
never became narratable in the performative sense as in verbal jokes and humor-
ous yarns. This has changed in recent times as cartoons published in formal print
sources now also circulate freely online, attracting their own audiences who engage
directly with these commentaries in ways that were not possible in the print ver-
sions. The memes I will consider in the remainder of this chapter are essentially
the most recent incarnation of the establish forms of Sri Lankan political humour
briefy referred to above.
Sri Lankan internet memes as political commentaries

A meme can mean many things from biology to cultural practices. However, in
the digital era of contemporary times, a meme or more specifcally an internet
meme is simply an image, a set of words stitched together, an idea or a short video
that is circulated very quickly and widely via the internet. Memes often combine
118 Sasanka Perera
words and images though equally as often, they may consist only of words or only
of images. Memes understood in this sense are both cultural products and politi-
cal tools that cannot be seen as autonomous texts. This is because, like most texts,
they make sense and draw meaning from the contextual locations from which they
emerge. As such, the memes I will consider in this reading would make sense only
if they are read in the very specifc socio-political contexts within which they came
into existence. Compared to political yarns, jokes and cartoons I have referred to
earlier, which take considerable time to create and circulate, a meme can be cre-
ated and distributed very easily. Moreover, in contemporary times, the availability
of free meme makers16 online make the possibility of making a meme within reach
of anyone who has the interest in doing so. But memes are not only political tools,
they can also comment on anything from political processes to personal events such
as birthdays. However, since the expansion of the internet and the access to it has
been more democratised in recent times, memes have become an important form
of politics. That is because of the relative ease to create them and circulate them
instantly and the ability to acquire vast online audiences in this process.
In recent times, with reference to Sri Lankan politics, one can see an explosion
of memes far exceeding similar forms of earlier political commentaries such as car-
toons. Also, memes are often anonymous while some authors of memes prefer to
identify themselves by their names or a kind of ‘brand’ that can be a word or a sign.
Memes, more than any other form of political commentary, allow for anonymity
and safety on two counts – if creators so wish. That is, the anonymity of the creator
when memes are created without reference to the creators on one hand, and safety of
the creators not only through this anonymity, but also because of the fact they foat
freely on the internet and cannot really be identifed with a specifc entity such as a
known publisher or stopped by practices such as bans and censorship beyond a point.
However, this would have been possible if memes were presented via newspapers or
magazines with an established physical or online presence. Even if some memes might
be banned by restricting specifc websites or blogs that may carry them, they would
soon acquire other lives in other less-regulated domains of the internet, and may also
circulate via email, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and so on, within which regula-
tion would be extremely challenging if not impossible. In other words, the ability of
memes to make their politics be seen become a progenitor of discourse and to survive
the onslaught of restrictions imposed by dominant forms of politics including that of
the state is considerable. This overall context in which memes circulate today is of
crucial importance when it comes to memes’ political reach and discursive dynamics
in situations of political and social instability. The emergence of memes in politics has
not only broadened discourse but has also strengthened the practice of democracy.
However, this does not mean that memes do not have a downside. Depending on
who is using memes and what their political objectives are, the specifc politics of
memes can vary from political discussion and critique in general to intents such as
toppling regimes or outright racist or sexist propaganda.
The Sri Lankan memes I will consider from this point onwards are political tools
that have emerged in very specifc conditions, and need to be understood within
these conditions. Also, they have to be perceived in the broader circulation and
longer tradition of appreciating humour over a long period of time, as outlined
earlier in this chapter. That is, memes are not sudden appearances in the feld of
Sinhala humour. Instead, they are newer manifestations of a longer tradition of
appreciating humour in general and engaging with political humour in particular.
Memes in the context of the presidential election 2019

The eighth presidential election of Sri Lanka was held on 16 November 2019, from
which the incumbent Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was elected with a signifcant majority.
Throughout the entire campaign as well as soon after the results were announced,
numerous memes were in circulation commenting on diferent aspects of presiden-
tial politics. In general, they commented on some of the statements the candidates
had made or their personal backgrounds that people thought had a bearing on the
politics they represented. These were mostly about lampooning these people from
an oppositional point of view. One has to assume that many people must have
selectively circulated these memes depending on their political positions, while
there were also many others who freely circulated all of these memes irrespective of
their object of ridicule and commentary because they found them to be funny or
were keen to ensure that the political space was more democratic and multi-vocal.
One of the most powerful general commentaries on the election and the politics it
represents is a meme that critiqued the lack of serious choices in the election. With an
image of a bunch of rotten bananas with the caption ‘presidential election’ at the top of
the meme, a disgruntled man on the left side of the meme says in Sinhala, “this is like
asking to select an edible good fruit from a bunch of rotten ones” (see Figure 7.1).17
FIGURE 7.1 Sinhala-language meme on Sri Lankan presidential election, 2019.

120 Sasanka Perera
The critique here is not about any one individual candidate or specifc policies
they might represent. Instead, it is about the lack of signifcant alternatives or ideas
with regard to all candidates in the fray. It is a general statement of dismay at and
discontent with the nature of politics the election represents.
A series of memes that were extremely popular were designed as movie posters
depicting each of the main candidates. When Sajith Premadasa, the candidate of
the United National Party, announced that if he was elected president, he would
distribute free sanitary pads to all women in the country, he was immediately
dubbed the ‘Pad Man’, and many memes emerged from this context. One of them
was a movie poster–like meme with Premadasa as Pad Man (see Figure 7.2). In
FIGURE 7.2 ‘Pad Man’ meme.

it, Premadasa is depicted holding a sanitary pad with the caption, ‘presented by
Sirikotha flms’. Sirikotha is the headquarters of the United National Party, which
he represents.
The meme’s poster-like representation, as well as the words ‘Pad Man’, were
inspired by the Lakshmikant movie of the same name directed by R. Balki and
released in India in 2018.18 Even though the Hindi movie was inspired by a sig-
nifcant intervention by a social entrepreneur who invented a machine to make
cost-efective sanitary pads, the Sri Lankan meme was aimed at ridiculing Prema-
dasa because of what many considered to be his sense of naïve politics. Given the
onslaught of negative commentary on this matter including the memes, Premadasa
was moved to respond that he would stand by his position.19
Another widely circulating meme at the time was a combination of the Pad
Man meme with another termed the ‘Van Man’ (see Figure 7.3). In this meme, in
addition to the image of Premadasa holding a sanitary pad on the left side of the
meme, a somewhat menacing-looking Gotabaya Rajapaksa on the right is depicted
carrying a gun and brief case with a white van covered with the US fag in the
background. On the top are the words ‘Van Man’ with the captions “I have a van”
and “Wanna ride” (see Figure 7.3). Rajapaksa is created in the image of the kind
of violent US movie characters such as Dirty Harry or more generally as a ‘secret’
agent type. The symbolism of the ‘white van’ and the US fag can only be specif-
cally understood in the context of recent Sri Lankan politics. In the previous two
regimes headed by Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005–2010 and 2010–2015), Gotabaya
FIGURE 7.3 ‘Pad Man vs Van Man’ meme.

122 Sasanka Perera
Rajapaksa was the Secretary of Defence in the context of which he had an unas-
sailable reputation for promoting political violence in addition to his more broadly
appreciated role among the Sinhalas for winning the war against the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Elam. There have been numerous cases of political critics of the
government who disappeared20 without a trace after being kidnapped in white
vans. Many have pointed to Rajapaksa as the man responsible for this state of
violence, even though no defnitive action has been concluded in courts.21 The
white van in the meme and the words ‘Van Man’ refers to this background. The
US fag refers to his US citizenship, a matter that was still not fully resolved in the
public consciousness at the time of the election, and was an oppositional election
slogan that was widely used against him. In these slogans, he was often painted as
an American agent.
In this meme, the basic approach is to stress two perceivable qualities of the two
candidates: the relative lack of intelligence when it comes to politics, on the part
of Premadasa, and the relative propensity for ruthlessness on the part of Rajapaksa.
Another set of widely circulating memes from the same campaign had to do
with commentaries on a statement Premadasa had made at the time, in which he
claimed that he woke at 4:00 am every morning and went to bed at midnight.
What he meant to stress is that all of his waking hours were set aside for public
service. Taking this public statement as a point of departure, the memes that opted
to comment on this statement made fun of it by simply ridiculing it (see Figures 7.4
and 7.5). One of these (Figure 7.4) depicts a screenshot purportedly of the news
conference in which Premadasa made this statement, followed by a commentary in
Sinhala, which says, “If he worked like this during his school time, he would have
even passed his Ordinary Level Examination.” There has been considerable public
debate on Premadasa’s educational background, which also became a campaign
issue for the opposition. Though he claims to have a degree from a British univer-
sity, this has become debatable. Hence the statement, if he had been this diligent in
his school time, he may at least have been successful at a government examination
prior to the more competitive university entrance examination.
Another in the same series of memes takes the same statement Premadasa had
made as its point of departure and has added the caption, “If this is the case (not
sleeping much), the most suitable to be President is our younger sister’s little one.
He never sleeps at night or in the evening, and he is only fve months old” (see
Figure 7.5).
Both memes and all others in the series at one level lampoon Premadasa for
making a somewhat unbelievable statement in that not sleeping much is hardly
considered a qualifcation to be president. In a country where education and lit-
eracy are highly regarded, the former meme (Figure 7.4) specially pokes fun at the
candidate’s dubious claims for a background in higher education that does not seem
to exist in real life.
In the next meme I want to place in context in this section, an image of Gotab-
haya Rajapaksa is presented with a caricatured face of a man with two statements.
The one on the top says, “Our men leave their wives and children in this country
FIGURE 7.4 Meme No. 1 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate, Sajith
Premadasa.
and go abroad to make money,” and the second statement at the bottom says, “But
Gotabhaya Rajapaksa leaves his wife and children in America and comes here to
make money” (see Figure 7.6).
The main purpose of the meme is to make an association with Rajapaksa’s link
to the United States through his American citizenship, further stressed by the fact
that his wife and child have been based there as well for a long time. Moreover, it
is also a reference to a purported non-citizen coming to exploit Sri Lanka. In com-
parison to this, the frst statement makes a claim to ordinary Sri Lankan citizens
124 Sasanka Perera
FIGURE 7.5 Meme No. 2 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate, Sajith
Premadasa.
who leave their families behind to go in search of employment abroad in difcult

conditions. The meme is trying to make a comparison between a ‘real’ sense of
citizenship and a ‘dubious’ sense of citizenship in a situation where one of the most
vocal positions of Rajapaksa’s campaign was patriotism.
The fnal meme I want to comment on in this section began circulating once
Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was installed in ofce. It became very apparent soon that there
were considerable diferences of opinion between the president and his brother,
FIGURE 7.6 Meme No. 1 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate, Gotabhaya
Rajapasha.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, whom he had installed as prime minister in a caretaker gov-

ernment. This was very clear in the delay in the president’s ofce in confrming
political appointments to statutory bodies that the prime minister had proposed, as
well as the president’s disagreement with specifc actions of the prime minister. In
one well-known case, the prime minister had sanctioned the declaration of a Muslim-
dominated local council area as a Muslim-majority municipality in the eastern
province known as Saindamarudu. The area had become notorious in 2019 as one
of the places where a number of military operations took place in the context of
apprehending and eliminating the supporters of the suicide bombers who attacked
a number of hotels in Colombo in April 2019.22 Despite this notoriety, a gazette
notifcation was issued by the government to enact the prime minister’s decision.
But no sooner than this was done, under the president’s insistence, the cabinet
withdrew the gazette notifcation.23 In the context of this competition between
the two brothers at the helm of Sri Lankan afairs, a number of memes appeared
126 Sasanka Perera
that referred to this behavior. One of the most popular was created in the form of a
movie poster, which had as the title of the movie the words, “Can’t Do This With
the Elder Brother” in Sinhala (see Figure 7.7).
It had prominent images of the two Rajapaksa brothers in diferent moods vary-
ing from argumentativeness to anger as the main focus, and the entire family of
Mahinda Rajapaksa towards the bottom of the meme. The movie title was accom-
panied by two additional lines, which said, “Family Movie” and “Now Being
Screened” (see Figure 7.7). In the Sri Lankan context, one did not need ‘subtitles’
FIGURE 7.7 Meme No. 2 on 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election candidate Gotabhaya
Rajapasha emphasising nepotism and intra-family competitiveness.
to fathom what this meme meant. Unlike most memes, this is signed by a person
named Udaya, ofering some sense of the identity of its creator. But given the fact
it is a very common male name among the Sinhalas, this identifcation is as good
as being anonymous.
Independence Day celebrations

Sri Lanka’s Independence Day Celebration is held on February 4 to mark indepen-
dence from Britain in 1948. Like all such celebrations earlier, in 2020 too, it was a
nationalist moment with national fags, military and cultural displays and so on insofar
as the government was concerned. But beyond the government’s own take on Inde-
pendence Day, traditionally this has also been a time when the country’s ‘progress’
had been critiqued by cartoonists with a sense of humour while political commenta-
tors had done the same with their columns. Since more recent times, memes have
also begun to play an important part in this continuing critique. One meme that was
in circulation just prior to Independence Day 2020, which only features words along
with the caricatured face of a man, made the following observation: “we celebrate
on 4th February the Independence that was received from the white man. In the rest
of the 364 days, we dream of going to that white man’s country” (see Figure 7.8).
This meme is signed by its creator with the words, “Short Uncle” (see Figure 7.8).
FIGURE 7.8 Sinhala-language meme on Sri Lankan Independence Day.

128 Sasanka Perera
FIGURE 7.9 English-language meme on Sri Lankan Independence Day.
Another widely circulating Independence Day meme with a focus on graphics and
a minimum use of words made the critique of the idea of independence more con-
temporary (see Figure 7.9), and this is one of the few local political memes that I have
seen in English. It is basically a comparison of what independence meant in 1948 and
70 years later, in the present. According to the narrative of the meme, up to 1948 the
country’s independence was only compromised by the British, symbolised by the map
of the country covered with the Union Jack. But today, that sense of independence
is undermined by the interests of India, China and the United States, represented by
the national fags of these countries covering the map of Sri Lanka, in the context of
which the Sri Lankan national fag has lost its centrality and is almost invisible. The
symbolic representation and the political meanings of this meme are clear enough.
Memes in the time of COVID-19

In the immediate aftermath of the global spread of COVID-19 being declared
a pandemic on 11 March 202024 by the World Health Organisation, the virus’s
impact was seen in Sri Lanka and was widely covered by social media and news
media, and a furry of memes started circulating. This was mostly via Whatsapp
and Facebook, but also through other means such as email. While some of these
referred to the virus’s global connotations, most dealt with very specifc local con-
ditions. One of the frst to emerge carried an image of the Sri Lankan Minister
of Health kissing the Chinese national who was the frst identifed COVID-19
patient in Sri Lanka upon her release from the hospital and getting clearance from
Sri Lankan health authorities. Other related memes included images of the minister
holding the hands of the former patient (see Figure 7.10).
The meme also carried a sentence in Sinhala that read, “The Great National
Celebration of Releasing the Patient.” Of course, the Sinhala version has far more
punch given its closer linkages to local politics via specifc nuances in the language.
Though the minister’s public performances involving the former patient had to
do with expelling fears that were arising as a result of the spread of COVID-19,
the meme’s punchline poked fun at the use of various events and people by politi-
cians for their own political mileage. In contemporary Sinhala parlance, a ‘great
celebration’ or mahothsawa is usually a religious or political event, or a cultural event
with political patronage. In all of these events, politicians are usually involved. The
meme therefore was referring to the release of the Chinese national and the minis-
ter’s presence at her release from the hospital within the popular meanings of these
well-known practices. In other words, the meme castigated the minister for using
even the release of the patient for her own political gain.
Another popular meme pertaining to COVID-19 with images of the health
minister and the Chinese patient takes its politics to another level of engagement.
This meme is created by a person who identifes himself with an image that looks
like the well-known British comedian Rowan Atkinson and the Sinhala word
nosandalaya, which means something similar to ‘wild fellow’. One image at the top
FIGURE 7.10 Meme on Sri Lankan Health Minister’s Covid-19-related public performance.
130 Sasanka Perera
of the meme shows the minister kissing the patient on the forehead. In the second
image just below the frst one, an image of the Chinese president Xi Jinping is
reproduced with a Sinhala-language sentence attributed to him that reads, “kissing
is ok, but don’t you forget to pay your loan instalments” (Figure 7.11).
Here, the meme refers to the serious debt trap the Sri Lankan government
has got the country into by borrowing heavily from Chinese sources to build
mostly white elephant projects such as the international airport and harbour in
Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka, neither of which generated adequate trafc
and revenue.25 The latter has now been leased to the Chinese for 99 years, which
generated considerable anxiety in Sri Lanka due to the impact it has on Sri Lanka’s
FIGURE 7.11 Meme on Sri Lanka’s increasing debt to China.

sense of sovereignty. Seen in this sense, though the meme’s point of departure is a
moment in the time of COVID-19, its actual punchline has to do with the debt
trap Sri Lanka fnds itself in today.
Many of the COVID-19-related memes also contained only words – and these
were among the most powerful. One of these emerged in a context when newspapers
reported early in the COVID-19 crises that Sri Lankan businesses were mistreating
their Chinese customers. Sri Lanka hosts about 400,000 Chinese nationals engaged
mostly in construction-related projects in the country. The news reports noted that
some of these people faced local hostility when taxis and busses refused to provide
them transport and when restaurants refused to serve them. All of this occurred due
to fears that they might infect locals, which led the Chinese embassy in Colombo
to unofcially seek the intervention of the Sri Lankan government.26 This led the
government to issue a public request to local people asking them not to discriminate
against Chinese nationals. In this context, one simple meme with black writing on
a yellow background noted in Sinhala, “Lankan fellows will not die of corona. They
will die of trying to hold their breath where there are Chinese” (Figure 7.12).
FIGURE 7.12 Anti-Chinese Sinhala-language meme in the context of the COVID-19

pandemic.
132 Sasanka Perera
The fnal words-only meme related to COVID-19 that I want to present in this
discussion is somewhat diferent in the sense that it ofers crucial advice on staying
at home rather than lampooning a politician or an incident. Though the Sri Lankan
government advised people to stay home to avoid the spread of COVID-19, which
was later followed up with a curfew, many people opted not to heed this call in the
initial stages. In addition to what appeared to be a lack of common sense and an ill
understanding of the severity of the virus’ potential destructiveness, this also came
from matters of faith. It is in this context that thousands of Buddhists thronged the
holy peak known as Sri Pada, compounded by the refusal of the head priest of the
ofciating temple to close the shrine or advise people not to come. Structurally,
this was not dissimilar to the service held at the Philadelphia Missionary Church
in the northern city in Jafna, even though the numbers involved in the church
service were much less than the former gathering. In this case, the pastor was later
identifed as infected with COVID-19, which led to the quarantining of some
members of the congregation.27 In this situation, the meme with black writing on
a white background advises people in fve diferent ways in the Sinhala language to
stay at home, and ends with a line that says, “there are no other ways to say this”.
The politics represented in this meme is very diferent from other memes con-
sidered so far. Here, the aim was a matter of direct public service by ofering crucial
advice in a global emergency with serious national consequences. But instead of
mere direct advice to stay home, as was ofered by formal health authorities, here it
was done with a subtle degree of humour via the use of language.
Concluding thoughts: why memes?

It seems to me, in the context of what has been presented here, that one can pose
two important concluding questions as a means of bringing this discussion to a
close: 1) how can one understand the humour generally represented in politically
motivated memes; and 2) why have memes become so powerful and prolifc in Sri
Lanka in recent times. But the answers to these simple questions cannot be found
merely in the Sri Lankan socio-political milieu. Though this is certainly one of the
important contexts that will provide meaning to these questions, such answers also
have to come from a more general milieu as well, informed by the very nature of
memes and the technical environment within which they have come into being
and are circulated.
When looking at political humour, it would not be helpful to assume that
humour is something trivial, a feeting moment in mundane discourse. Rather,
as Ross suggests, “humour is infuential,” whether political satire or simple jokes,
because it is a means of “establishing friendships and excluding others” (Ross,
2005, p. xii). The political memes I have presented in this discussion are clearly
about inclusion and exclusion marked by borders of political afliation. Targeting
and ridiculing a specifc politician or his/her practices and background invariably
works towards excluding those who support him/her from the discourse a specifc
meme might aim to create. By the same token, those who share the meme and
engage with it in ways supportive of it would be bound by a political ideology the

criticisms generated by the meme represent. It is in this context, as I have noted
earlier too, that the context of humour becomes important in reading the moods of
memes as well as the broader political conjuncture from where they emerge. This
is about fguring out how and why an individual would fnd something amusing
or not (Ibid., p. 7). That determination in the process of reading memes would
help in identifying specifc political communities, support bases and the nature of
antagonisms between these.
This is related closely to what Powell notes, in making a case for a phenomeno-
logical reading of humour in society – among other things – where he argues for
the centrality of humorous responses as important components of social resistance
and control (Powell, 1998, pp. 86–105). This is one crucial way of understanding
political memes, too. When a meme comments on a specifc political position, it
creates a binary between the political community that supports that position and
others who oppose it. For those who identify with the meme, the very act of
creating it and sharing it online, and generating commentaries for it, is a matter
of registering opposition. It is also a means of control in the sense that all memes
are about controlling specifc narratives, and thereby controlling specifc political
currents and movements.
At another level, political memes can also be understood in the sense Benton
has described political jokes more generally. That is, as a tool that the politically
powerless utilise “to pass judgements on society where other ways of doing so
are closed to them” (Benton, 1998, p. 33). But as we will see in the Sri Lankan
situation, it is not only the politically powerless who have become entangled in
the discourses generated by memes. They also include political actors who are
not necessarily powerless in the sense outlined by Benton, but are in competitive
claims over national political power, who would nevertheless prefer anonymity.
As Dundes and Hauschild noted when describing Auschwitz jokes, “nothing is so
sacred, so taboo, or so disgusting that it cannot be the subject of humour” (Dundes
and Hauschild, 1998, p. 56). This kind of ‘anything goes’ attitude typifes political
memes when they are considered as a broad genre of political discourse.
Let me now come to the second of the concluding questions posed earlier,
which was about the popularity and discursive power of memes in Sri Lanka since
recent times. Though humour continues to be an important aspect of Sinhala,
as well as more generally Sri Lankan life and culture today, the space for political
humour is now more prominently claimed by mostly unknown people hiding
behind virtual shadows in the vistas of the internet. And the main instrument
through which this claim is made is memes. This does not mean that the more
traditional and what I had earlier called ‘formal’ forms of political humour, such
as cartoons and columns or infrmal forms suh as yarns, no longer have legitimacy
in society and politics. But clearly, yarns have already become a thing of the past,
narrated seldom by people of older generations who remember them and their
contexts. Cartoons are still produced by conventional newspapers and magazines in
their print versions, and are also presented via their e-versions online. In addition
134 Sasanka Perera
to this, cartoonists make their creations available via their own websites, blogs
or other social media portals.28 As a result of this availability, cartoons have now
become quite similar to memes when it comes to their availability and the ability to
circulate across wide readerships. The crucial diference, however, is that cartoons
still are openly identifed with their authors while memes to a great extent are not.
This ability to be anonymous is an important consideration when one attempts to
understand the popularity memes have acquired as a fexible, potent and humorous
political tool. This is particularly so in countries such as Sri Lanka that have a con-
sistent recent history of political instability as well as restrictions to press freedom.
According to Reporters without Borders, Sri Lanka ranks 126th out of 180 coun-
tries with regard to press freedom.29 These numbers, along with Sri Lanka’s history
of political violence over the last two decades, indicate a signifcant erosion with
regard to not only press freedom, but also freedom of expression in general, par-
ticularly when it comes to commentaries on political issues. Moreover, this is not a
matter of continuous danger, but a danger that arises according to the relative intol-
erance or tolerance to public criticism exhibited by diferent regimes. The previous
two Mahinda Rajapaksa regimes prior to 2015 were specifcally challenging to
journalists and political critics. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists,
25 journalists and other media workers were killed in Sri Lanka between the years
1992 and 2020,30 but the regime that took over from Rajapaksa in 2015 and held
power tenuously until November 2019 created a more conducive environment for
these freedoms, despite the general political wilderness in which it was lost more
generally. One of the fears many commentators raised in the aftermath of Gotab-
haya Rajapaksa’s win in the 2019 presidential election was whether serious erosions
in press freedom and personal liberties would return under his leadership.31
Given these conditionalities, memes ofer a number of in-built characteristics
that guarantee a unique ability to work in conditions of political instability, as typi-
fed by Sri Lanka’s situation. Memes do not require the identity of the creator to
be published, unless one chooses to do so. This is an option that creators of most
political memes we have seen in this discussion have exercised as a matter of rou-
tine. Those who have signed with a brand, a sign or a common personal name,
however, enjoy the same kind of anonymity guaranteed when no such identity
markers are used at all. This anonymity, which exists prior to the memes becom-
ing public, are further entrenched once they are in public circulation based on
the nature of this ‘public’ sphere. This is because they are often published in social
media forums such as Facebook, which does not require the personal details of the
authors of memes in order to be published. Also, they are equally as often distrib-
uted via electronic means including email, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc., which also
do not require such details. The responsibility for posting these memes online or
distributing them electrically is borne by those who post and distribute them as a
matter of routine, not by their creators. Censorship at this level is extremely dif-
cult to maintain. This allows meme creators to inherit a personality not unlike that
of a guerrilla or a mythological invisible warrior who can wage ‘battle’ and not be
seen or recognised by the ‘enemy’.
There is another important consideration to take into account when we explore

the popularity and power of political memes in the Sri Lankan context. While
many memes are creative in terms of language and the use of images, they do not
have to be as professional as cartoons or other political commentaries generally
associated with print media. A cartoonist and a columnist are professionals. This
is why criticisms of a cartoon or a political column will invariably involve their
authors. Comparatively, a meme creator is not necessarily professional in the same
sense. Many people create them as a matter of public or political interest while
engaged in other activities or work. For many others, creating a meme is merely
fun or a matter of politics, and not professional work or a full-time occupation.
This relative lack of professionalism was seen in the rough edges of some of the
memes presented in this discussion in the sense that they could have been better
edited, better-quality images could have been used, and language might have been
fner. All of these liberties were possible because of the anonymity of the memes’
authors. After all, the creators do not generally have to take responsibility for what
they create in terms of the messages or the professional dimensions of the cre-
ations. This also means that unlike cartoons and written commentaries circulating
in mainstream media that take time and efort to produce, memes take relatively
little time to create. They take even less time to ‘publish’ or circulate. All of this
assures an almost foolproof guarantee of anonymity and a vast readership and rapid
circulation.
Seen in this sense, memes are a veritable comfort zone or guerrilla staging
grounds for political commentary, public criticism of politics and political expres-
sion, which guarantees its creators safety while assuring their creations almost
unrestricted circulation online, and therefore wide exposure to the political posi-
tions they take. It is this state of afairs that the explosion of memes in Sri Lanka
has indicated. With approximately 34.11% of the Sri Lankan population having
access to the internet,32 mostly via smartphones, and 24.43 million people having
subscriptions to mobile phone connections as of 2018,33 memes come to the hands
of many people in a variety of unobtrusive ways. Equally as unobtrusively and
anonymously, they can engage with these by merely forwarding them to friends
with or without commentaries via email, Whatsapp and so on, thereby ensuring
that a discourse is created based on what the memes focus on. If one wants to align
oneself publically with these political positions more openly, the option is always
available to share these via Twitter, Facebook and other online forums that ofer
people the space to express their personal identities. This, however, is a choice,
not a mandatory requirement. While Sri Lanka’s digital divide is still substantial,
these numbers and possibilities suggest that memes have a much better chance of
coming to the attention of people than any other political texts in print media or
those that circulate via word of mouth, and access to them is generally free as long
as an internet connection is available. However, the actual extent of this discursive
terrain is much more complicated than these fgures suggest because they do not
indicate the dynamics of sharing memes among individuals, and the nature of
engagements they generate.
136 Sasanka Perera
Finally, political memes such as those described in this analysis can be under-
stood as a form of resistance of the future that is already well established. That is,
when open and democratic space for resistance and critical discourse in politics–has
shrunk, and when personal liberties are curtailed, anonymity might well be safest
form of politics available for most people. Political memes and the internet ofer
precisely this space.
Notes
1 J. R. Jayewardene ruled Sri Lanka from 1977 to 1989, initially as Prime Minister from
1977 to 1978 and as President of Sri Lanka from 1978 to 1989.
2 Reproduced from memory.
3 Reproduced from memory.
4 This yarn is reproduced from memory and corroborated by people in Colombo who still
remember it. I am particularly thankful to my friend, Prasanna de Zoysa, for corroborat-
ing this story and also for supplying many others from the time, which allowed me the
space to think through the politics of these stories as I wrote the chapter. Unfortunately,
there are no formal collections of these stories. They have also not become part of any
analytical attempt in Sri Lankan social sciences. Hence, the only recourse to such mate-
rial is memory.
5 This is quite possibly a reference to the 1978 cyclone and resultant floods.
6 The Mahaweli is the longest river in Sri Lanka, which was diverted as part of a major
irrigation development plan since the 1970s and was called the Mahaweli Development
Scheme.
7 www.scribd.com/doc/82688951/The-Goat-and-the-Pot-Mahadena-mutta-2 (accessed
23 March 2020).
23 March 2020).
23 March 2020).
10 A recent musical rendition of this story is available at the following link: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=aagpqKbQVl8
11 www.timeout.com/sri-lanka/sri-lanka-blog/andare-sri-lankas-beloved-jester-020116
(accessed 31 March 2020).
12 The other forms of traditional Sinhala theatre are sokari and nadagam. Nurthi emerged as
a typically urban theatre form in the late 19th century.
13 www.lankalibrary.com/rit/kolam.htm (accessed 31 March 2020).
14 https://disco.teak.fi/asia/kolam-masked-folk-theatre/ (accessed 31 March 2020).
15 www.lankalibrary.com/rit/kolam.htm (accessed 31 March 2020).
16 For example, Meme Generator (https://imgflip.com/memegenerator) and Kapwing
(www.kapwing.com/meme-maker) provide this service online free of charge.
17 The memes reproduced in this chapter are central to the text and are used here to illus-
trate their significance in political commentaries. Though I have made efforts in tracing
their origins, it is impossible to determine their authorship since these are freely circulat-
ing pieces and shared extensively on the internet and social media. I remain respectful of
the creative ownership of their individual creators and will be happy to include specific
acknowledgements if I receive further information. The memes used here are only for
educational and informational purposes and do not seek to infringe on any of the indi-
vidual creative rights.
18 More information on the Hindi-language movie Pad Man and the actual man who
inspired the movie is available on the National Public Radio website: www.npr.org/
sections/goatsandsoda/2018/02/08/583640537/pad-man-is-a-bollywood-movie-
about-a-man-and-his-menstrual-pads
19 www.sundayobserver.lk/2019/11/03/news/original-%E2%80%9Cpad-man%E2%80%9D-
lauds-sajith%E2%80%99s-stance-menstrual-hygiene
20 One of the best-known of these cases is the disappearance of cartoonist Prageeth Eknal-
igoda. The basic details of the case are available in the following document via Amnesty
International, USA: www.amnestyusa.org/pdfs/srilanka11.pdf
21 https://rsf.org/en/news/sri-lanka-harassment-journalists-surges-first-days-rajapaksa-
presidency (accessed 1 April 2020).
22 www.newsfirst.lk/2019/04/27/saindamarudu-operation-4-suicide-bombers-dead-
2-attackers-shot/ (accessed 31 March 2020).
23 www.hirunews.lk/234840/saindamarudu-gazette-notification-withheld (accessed 31
March 2020).
24 https://time.com/5791661/who-coronavirus-pandemic-declaration/ (accessed 30 March
2020).
25 For a commentary on Sri Lanka’s debt to China, please read: https://qz.com/1317234/
chinas-debt-trap-in-sri-lanka-is-even-worse-than-we-thought/ (last accessed on 10th
April 2020)
26 For more information on this local crisis and China’s concerns over it, please read: https://
newsin.asia/china-unofficially-raises-concern-over-its-citizens-facing-discrimination-in-
sri-lanka/ (last accessed on 14th April, 2020)
27 This incident has been briefly reported in the Tamil Guardian: www.tamilguardian.com/
content/pastor-tests-positive-coronavirus-after-church-service-jaffna
28 For example, cartoonist Awantha Artigala’s cartoons are presented on his own blog
(http://awanthaartigala.blogspot.com/), and many people freely download these and
distribute them via social media.
29 https://rsf.org/en/ranking (accessed 31 March 2019).
30 https://cpj.org/data/killed/asia/sri-lanka/?status=Killed&motiveConfirmed%5B%5D=
Confirmed&motiveUnconfirmed%5B%5D=Unconfirmed&type%5B%5D=Journalis
t&type%5B%5D=Media%20Worker&cc_fips%5B%5D=CE&start_year=1992&end_
year=2020&group_by=location (accessed 31 March 2019).
31 As if to give credence to this fear, within a week after Rajapaksa was installed in power,
police raided a media outlet in Sri Lanka. For more information, read: https://rsf.
org/en/news/sri-lanka-harassment-journalists-surges-first-days-rajapaksa-presidency
(accessed 1 April 2020).
32 www.statista.com/statistics/765516/internet-penetration-rate-sri-lanka/ (accessed 31
March 2020).
33 www.statista.com/statistics/501125/number-of-mobile-cellular-subscriptions-in-sri-
lanka/ (accessed 31 March 2020).
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8
HUMOROUS MASCULINITY
Nepali men in mediated Indian male gaze
Sandhya A.S. and Chitra Adkar
Media has become one of the key platforms through which communities commu-
nicate and make sense of socio-cultural groups other than their own. The “pictures
in our heads” of other communities and their mediated representations are never
‘neutral’ and are embedded in ideologies and existing power relations (Lippmann,
1922). Stereotyped representations, which are mass consumed, contain a system
of evaluation of diferent social groups and therefore are a potent tool to exercise
hegemony (Seiter, 1986). The academic attention given to sex-role stereotypes and
race-specifc stereotypes in diferent kinds of medium point towards the gravity of
the issue at hand.
While stereotypes about diferent socio-cultural groups may be consumed in
a variety of forms, we focus on humour as a way to normalise stereotypifcation
in media and see how humorous depictions of characters appeal to the common
sense of the masses, especially the ones who defne their own identity in relation
to the one stereotyped. Using the lens of superiority theory of humour (Monro,
1988), we throw light on how the humorous depiction of Nepali man in the
Indian subcontinent is characteristic of a perceived sense of superiority of the
Indian male gaze. ‘Laughing at’ here has a distinct function of diferentiation and
exclusion as compared to ‘laughing with’ or ‘laughing through’, which could be
used to strengthen camaraderie, build social bonds or cope with existing ordeals
and unpleasant situations.1 We demonstrate how the act of laughter in mediated
social platforms reproduces and legitimises existing power relations through the
‘soft blow’ of humour and narratives of ridicule.
In this chapter, we examine the formation of specifc stereotypes about Nepali
men that appeal to the Indian male gaze. We show that humour makes stereotypi-
fcation aesthetically more consumable and therefore acceptable to the recipient
of the joke,2 which in this case is the Indian consumer at large. The image of the
stereotypical Nepali man often derives humour from his portrayal as a bhola-bhala
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-11
140 Sandhya A.S. and Chitra Adkar
(loosely translated as naïve), his extreme loyalty and the desire to be subservi-
ent, coupled with his accent and his overall demeanour that is perceived as one
with ‘incomplete masculinity’ (Banerjee, 2012). Here, the act of stereotypifcation
around the ‘incompleteness’ of masculinity is in relation to the assumed supremacy
of the Indian consumer that makes the Indian man embody hegemonic masculinity
(Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005) and perform it through humour to legiti-
mise his position in the social hierarchy. We thus seek to not just understand how
humour is used in the discursive representation of a Nepali male character, but also
to examine how the Indian male gaze performs its perceived superiority by the
means of humour and stereotypifcation.
We use the category of gaze to problematise the construction of the stereotypi-
cal Nepali male character. The conceptual category of the ‘male gaze’ in feminist
scholarship has elaborately explained how women come to terms with their por-
trayal in popular culture and therefore internalise their representation through the
male gaze. The idea builds itself upon the existing power dynamic between the
one who gazes and the one who is gazed upon. We show how the Indian male
gaze is embedded in the colonial history and imagination3 and how it uses humour
to maintain socio-cultural boundaries with Nepali men. The perpetually oscillat-
ing representation of the Nepali man – from being martial yet feminine, loyal but
untrustworthy, as well as brave but naïve – merely extends the colonial-racist logic
of social hierarchy. These boundaries are continuously drawn and redrawn, con-
tributing to an active process of othering towards maintaining a defnition of one’s
own identity as the superior other.
In the following section, we look at two sites in which various kinds of
humour, which places the Nepali male at the centre of the joke, is produced and
performed. Therein we question the stereotypical use of humour in text-based
jokes, or ‘chutkule’, as circulated on social messengers and the representation of
Nepali male characters in popular Indian cinema that blatantly associates Nepali
men with certain menial occupations and ascribes to them a general attribute
of servitude. In the next section, we explore a third site to bring out a slightly
diferent form of humour through the medium of cringe pop found on social
media and demonstrate how the content created by a Nepali artist is consumed
by an Indian audience through the exact same hegemonic gaze in that the artist
is evaluated and ridiculed for his linguistic abilities and accent, demeanour, body
and body language. These sites of humour that place the Nepali male character at
the centre constantly attempt to bring to the surface the perceived superiority of
the Indian male who consumes these representations, evaluates and legitimises the
diferences between the groups.
Representation of Nepali men in the Indian media

The 19th century changed the way humour was consumed – from primarily oral
to more mediated forms of communication – as Kessel and Merziger note in ‘Poli-
tics of humour’ (2012). Stereotypical humour targeting various social groups in
Humorous masculinity 141
Indian media is as common as stereotypes themselves. Caricatures of socio-cultural

and linguistic4 groups such as ‘Madrasis’ (people from the former Madras, but also
an umbrella term for all South Indians), Bengalis (people from the former Ben-
gal) or Marwadis (business and trading community from Rajasthan) are excessively
used in Indian cinema and commercial advertisements. Another widely consumed
character is the ‘Sardar’ (people from the Sikh community of the Punjab). Sardar
jokes have been circulating in diferent forms, portraying Sikh men as innocent,
stupid, technologically naïve, anxious and confused about rapid urbanisation and
modernity, linguistically challenged but ‘happy-go-lucky’ and amiable people
(Hall, 2019). Hence, consuming such detailed descriptions of subjugated identities
is not new to the Indian male gaze.
But what is particularly fascinating about the representations of Nepali men
is that most depictions portray them as workers, and mostly as menial workers,
often in relation to an Indian master or mistress. Rajendra Dhakal (in Subba
et al., 2009) points to this issue, albeit only cursorily. While bringing in the
examples of stereotypical representation of Nepali men in Bollywood cinema
and Bengali literature, Dhakal remarks that most portrayals of Nepali men are,
in fact, as doormen, coolies, soldiers, peons and security guards (Ibid., p. 154).
The trope of Nepalese as ‘useful workers’ delves on certain class assumptions,
as we see in the next two subsections. And this class-based portrayal makes
their representation diferent from other communities, such as the native Indian
groups mentioned earlier. In the next two subsections we look at these humor-
ous depictions closely from the sites of text-based forward messages and popular
Indian cinema.
Nepali chutkule: a critical analysis of three text-based jokes

‘Chutkule’ in Hindi loosely refers to brief humorous narratives, mostly oral.
While the essence of these jokes has changed only a little, the manner of pro-
cessing, circulating and consuming them has transformed with the internet,
social media and instant messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. A freely avail-
able mobile app, WhatsApp has revolutionised the way people communicate in
groups, enabling instant circulation of a message in groups as well as from one
person to another.
What is interesting about these free messaging application is that it enables a
(re)telling of these chutkule in a manner that makes each forward5 a performance
of storytelling (James, 2010), each forwarder a storyteller and each receiver of the
message – who usually responds with a laughing emoticon – an audience and a
potential forwarder. The use of emoticons and/or popular internet acronyms such
as LOL (Laugh out Loud) or ROFL (Rolling on the Floor Laughing) at the end of
the jokes simply reafrms the reader to let his/her guard down and laugh, thereby
softening his/her response and developing compliance toward the jocular narrative
(Skovholt et al., 2014). Here, we will be looking at three such Nepali chutkule6 that
would provide more clarity on the stereotypical representation of Nepali men and
then analyse them to bring out the similarities in terms of the discourse in which
they embed themselves.
a. A Nepali (man) once found a magic lantern on his way. He rubbed the lantern and a
Genie came out of it.
Genie: “I am very happy today (to have come outside of the lantern). I shall grant
you three wishes; your wish is my command, Master.”
The delighted Nepali (man) says: “(I want) 1. a big bungalow, 2. with many
wealthy residents in the house and finally, 3. make me the security guard
of that house.”
ROFL! (Rolling on the Floor Laughing)
Joke (a)7 hints at the limitations this stereotypical Nepali man can have in terms
of his desires with regards to class mobility, status and aspirations. In addition to
the anticlimactic nature of his aspirations, which are refected in the narration, it is
clear that his Hindi, tainted with a Nepali accent, is supposed to tickle the funny
bone of the Indian reader.
b. The rich officer’s wife to the Gurkha servant: “I am going to take some rest now. I have
placed the pressure cooker on the gas (stove). Switch off the stove as soon as you hear
three whistles.”
Servant: “Okay, memshaab” (madame)! But...
Officer’s wife: What is it?
Servant: “Will you be the one to whistle or shaab (sir)?”
Joke (b)8 rests upon the assumption that the Nepali naukar (domestic helper) knows
only one thing about the seeti (whistle) – that it is, at times, blown orally by watch-
men – and as a Nepali, he is by default only familiar with this imagination. Rather
than being unaware of the whistle a pressure cooker can have, it plays upon the
quick association that this stereotypical Nepali watchman is bound to make as he
can’t presumably imagine otherwise.
c. Nepali servant in the morning: “Oh shaab (‘sahab’ in Hindi, ‘sir’ in English)! The
motor has gone bad!”
Sahab (sir) panics.
Sahab: “What will I do now! How will I take a bath?! Why did this
unfortunate (electric water) motor have to stop working only this
morning?”
Nepali servant: “What should I do shaab ji? Should I throw it away now?”
Sahab: “Are you crazy? I will get it repaired by the evening.”
Servant: Okay, shaab ji. So, then . . . today . . . I will just add cauliflower to
the potato dish instead of the motor (matar in Hindi, pea in English).”
Joke (c)9 plainly rests upon the mispronunciations a Nepali domestic helper cannot
help but make. The calm and innocent responses have a simplistic nature that pairs
well with the stereotypical occupation assigned to the Nepali male.
Extension of colonial imagination to post-colonial

social relationships
The frst common theme is the servant-master relationship in these three chut-
kule. Unlike many other jokes, such as the Sardar jokes (Handoo, 1990), where
the conversation of the sardar either happens with an ally, friend, wife or some
rational person in a position of authority such as a doctor, bank employee or a
policeman, in most Nepali jokes, the Nepali man’s character is developed in rela-
tion to his master/mistress. The portrayal indicates the power diference between
the Nepali male worker and the Indian employer. While in jokes (b) and (c), the
Nepali worker appears to be a house caretaker and a cook respectively, in joke (a),
the character is suggested to have a willingness towards working as a chowkidar or
a security guard under a rich Indian employer. While the latter two jokes merely
describe the condition of work in the household, the frst one interestingly throws
light on the limits to aspirations of the Nepali worker character. This also makes
suggestive indications towards their choice, status as a worker and their lack of
interest in class mobility, indicating their supposed ‘natural’ inclination towards
being servantly and obedient. It also simultaneously assumes how the Nepali men
aspire to belong to this class and fll this socio-economic role in the Indian society.
It normalises their association with menial occupations, mostly found in informal
sectors, and justifes their hierarchical social and economic relationship with the
Indian employer.
At this juncture, it is important to dig deeper and question why only certain
stereotypes deriving from the Indian male gaze are found to be funny to the
Indian masses.10 As discussed in the introduction chapter in this book, several
philosophers have studied humour through a theoretical lens, and the oldest of
the theories explaining it is the superiority theory. Superiority theory explains
how humour is used to perform one’s superiority over another group and laugh-
ter becomes an act of this performance whereby the status quo of the participants
is reiterated (Meyer, 2000). In this context, it appears that the stereotypical
representation of the Nepali man as brave, efeminate, loyal and submissive is
found to be humorous because of its deviations from the hegemonic notion of
masculinity, which the Indian male is assumed to embody. Here, this imagined
deviation becomes the source of laughter and the working class becomes the
object of humour. It has been marginally noted by some scholars that working-
class categories may incite mimesis for their supposed efeminate and infantilised
qualities, in relation to the employer who embodies hegemonic ideals of mascu-
linity (Uprety, 2011, p. 9). It has been similarly noted that employers associating
these inferior demeanours to their workers, typically from migrant communities,
also beneft from such stereotyping as it helps them socially distance themselves
from their workers and establish a socially ‘legitimate’ hierarchical relationship

(Näre, 2010).
This is then tied to the second common theme running through the jokes. The
jokes about Nepali men circulated among the Indian users of digital media draw
a caricature of the Nepali men as naïve, simple and at times imbecilic or intel-
lectually inferior. While this caricature borrows heavily from the British discourse
on Gurkha men, it simultaneously places Indian men in a position of intellectual
superiority. Towards establishing the masculinity of the coloniser as superior, the
British ‘recognised’ and categorised the many masculinities among the colonised.
What is interesting here is to note that the British defned the native masculinities
on a spectrum in relation to their own. At one extreme of this spectrum were the
British colonisers who represented ‘true virtues’ of masculinity. Most of the Indian
male subjects, particularly the Bengalis and South Indians, were considered efemi-
nate and timid and were put at the other end of the spectrum11 (Uprety, 2011).
The British colonial imagery of Gurkhas constructed a homogenous identity of
Nepalese, subsuming their class, caste and clan diferences to produce one ‘martial
race’. This military imagination thrived in diferent kinds of documentary records,
including ethnographies, autobiographies, travelogues and memoirs. It perceived
the Gurkhas as exotic, brave and hard-working men with ‘warlike’ ferceness. In
the spectrum of masculinity, the Gurkhas were very closely placed with the British
colonial masculinity and were considered the oriental counterpart of the British
ofcers (Uprety, 2011). Also close to this position were the other Indian ‘martial
races’ such as the Sikhs, Marathas and Rajputs.
The martial races of the Indian subcontinent, however, were only considered
physically masculine and were characteristic of ‘incomplete masculinity’ as they
allegedly lacked intellect and rational worldview, thereby making them even more
suitable for the army (Banerjee, 2012). They were considered to be brave, fearless
and loyal, but intellectually inferior, and irrational as against the complete mascu-
linity of physical prowess and intellect of the British men (Ibid.).
These representations continued to work even in post-colonial, independent
India where the hegemonic British male gaze was simply translated into the hege-
monic Indian male gaze, which continued to view Indian men as more masculine as
opposed to their Nepali counterparts. Parallel to this development was the post-colo-
nial structural transformations in society, by which many Nepalese were migrating to
India through social networks for employment in informal sectors. The post-colo-
nial Indian male gaze, embedded in the colonial history and imagination, othered
the Nepali men as one with incomplete masculinity and one who is therefore now
well-suited for menial occupations and servile positions. The altered socio-political
reality of India, the infow of Nepalese as settlers and migrants and the structural
compulsion of a majority of them to obtain informal employment in Indian cit-
ies (Basnet and Sandhya 2019, 2020), together reshaped the colonial imagination
of masculinity and constructed the jocular imagery of the Nepali man. It becomes
important to remember here that stereotypifcation is a mechanism to not just rep-
resent and defne the stereotyped community, but also to defne the subjecthood of
the hegemonic group. It is thus a relative process of mutual defnition and restora-
tion of existing hierarchy. As Perkins says:
There is a male (he-man) stereotype, an upper class (leader) stereotype. These

stereotypes are important because other stereotypes are partially defined in
terms of, or in opposition to, them. The happy-go-lucky negro attains at
least some of its meaning and force from its opposition to the “puritan” char-
acteristics (sombre and responsible) of the WASP.12 Positive stereotypes are
an important part of ideology and are important in the socialisation of both
dominant and oppressed groups.
(Perkins, 1979, p. 144)
The perceived naïvete of the Nepali men also resonates with their social status as
migrants. To look at these jokes from the lens of superiority theory of humour,
the characteristics associated with being an outsider in India by default become the
characteristics of a man who is, putting it simplistically, less than. The very nature
of this Nepali man, his mannerisms, his responses and other traits that emerge out
of the diferent accent, come out to be inferior to the Indian male. The popular
conception of the new migrant is tied to his/her lack of cunningness and simplicity
that is (stereo)typical of village life. The bhola-pan or bechara-pan (loosely translated
as naïvete or lack of cunningness) of the Nepali men is considered to be their trait
as a migrant to the city. While the simplicity is admired at times, it is also ridiculed
such as in the jokes. Joke (a), for instance, makes fun of the accent of Nepali men
by using the word bara instead of bada in Hindi or ushka as against uska in Hindi.
Similarly, almost all jokes have the Nepali addressing his master as shaab instead of
the Hindi-Urdu sahab (master). While jokes (a) and (b) make fun of the accent of
the Nepali man as a supplement to the core narrative, joke (c) constructs its core
narrative around this malfunction in the accent of the worker by his pronunciation
of matar (pea) as motor (the electric device). These diferences in pronunciation,
while not alien to the ears of an Indian, are supposed to incite laughter. This Nepali
man of the Indian imagination is always the ‘butt of a joke’ and hence the needlessly
prolonged ‘oooo’ and ‘shaabjiiii’ are the only version of these mispronunciations
one hears. The consumer of these jokes learns to read out the dialogue of a stereo-
typical Nepali male worker in a similar manner, like the voice of an ‘innocent’ or a
‘foolish’ man; the way it was intended to sound as per the creator of the joke and in
the eyes of the Indian male, who gazes at this Nepali man in a certain way, which
will be discussed in detail further.
‘Seeing is believing’: the Nepali man in Indian cinema

Indian cinema also often had stereotyped Nepali characters in a similar fashion. It’s
been noted that Indian cinema in particular and South Asian cinema in general
plays with diferent kinds of emotions, such as anger, love, compassion, hatred
etc., to deeply engage the audience and that stereotypical representation in these
cinemas particularly are “embodiments of these emotions in variable proportions”

(Pathak, 2017, p. 35). One can argue that these emotions that the cinema elic-
its, including the emotion of humour and laughter or hasya, deeply engages with
the common-sensical worldview of the audience and restores their existing beliefs
about socio-cultural groups other than their own. It actively infuences the general
public opinion and mediates the ‘pictures in our head’ about certain communities
(Lippmann, 1922), to the extent that the visual of the character and the sound of
the dialogue, including their accent and overall demeanour, stays with the viewer
for a longer period of time even after the immediate cinematic experience.
Amongst the many mainstream Indian flms that have the character of a security
guard resembling a Nepali, with the accent imitated in whatever little dialogue the
person is allotted and the typical shaab-ji and bahadur conundrum, we here analyse
two flms or rather two characters in two flms: one from a Malayalam flm Gandhi
Nagar 2nd Street (1986, remade in Tamil as Annanagar Mudhal Theru) and another
from a Marathi flm Navra Maza Navsacha (2004). The reason for this selection is
straightforward; both characters have signifcance beyond just their presence. While
in the former, the protagonist attempts to become a Gurkha chowkidar (watchman),
the Nepali character in the latter too plays a signifcant guest role and has given
recognition to the actor Johnny Lever for his dialogues.
In Gandhi Nagar 2nd street (1986), a middle-class neighbourhood, there is a rise
in petty criminal activities such as theft. The residents feel the need to secure their
surroundings with the help of a ‘Gurkha’ guard and decide to pay him a relatively
higher wage because a ‘good Gurkha’ will not be available for a lesser wage. Listen-
ing to this, a resident says “Why a Gurkha? Why not a ft and healthy Malayali?”
To which the Madhavan, a leading resident character answers “No, no, our people
(petty criminals) will only be scared of Gurkhas, not of Malayalis. Moreover, police
do not litigate and fle cases when Gurkhas stab or get killed.” A third resident
pitches in and says, “Ahh! Yes, yes. Gurkhas have this speciality!” Understand-
ing this sudden need for a Gurkha in the residential colony, Madhavan brings
in his friend Sethu, a Malayali in dire need of a job, and they decide that Sethu
can pretend to be the Gurkha. Madhavan guides Sethu to wear khaki attire, the
typical guard topi and lathi, wear a red tika on his forehead and carry the khukri, a
traditional knife carried by Gurkhas, along with using a few Hindi words he learnt
while looking for a job in Mumbai. On the next day, Sethu starts marching on the
street randomly with the occasional shouting of aage mud (forward turn) peeche mud
(backward turn) and does a few martial art enactments, seeing which the surprised
residents gather around him. Sethu declares himself as ‘Ram Singh, Bhim Singh ka
beta (son of)’. When one of the young residents doubts his nationality, an old man
comes ahead and inspects his body by touching the chest and biceps and declares
that he is “genuine Gurkha.” Following this, the colony secretary declares “Sriman
Ram Singh as the Gurkha of our colony,” who was designated the duty of bringing
groceries for the colony, would work 24 hours and never sleep at night. On the
second day, Sethu complains to his friend Madhavan that the load of work is too
much, and he doesn’t understand what these people did before Sethu came in. He
comments, “It’s no less than a betrayal, you know. What do these people think?
Am I a stupid Gurkha hailing from Nepal?” Later in the flm, Sethu aka Ram Singh
is also asked to clean the streets, take care of children in the community creche
and protect the vulnerable young women from the poovalan or firtatious men and
stalkers. The character also displays afection towards children and women fnd
themselves safe in his presence. He, in the course of the movie, confesses that he
is enacting the role of a komali, meaning goon, silly and eccentric person, for his
hunger and inability to get a job in Dubai.13
On a similar note, Navra Maza Navsacha (2004), a Marathi flm loosely based
on the Hindi flm Bombay to Goa, brings in the Nepali character who joins the
bus ride, which is already flled with disparate and peculiar characters with equally
peculiar histories and stories. The Nepali character, however, does not occupy the
narration fully like Sethu in the former flm. He is just a passenger and is not shown
to have a name. However, the character is fully alive in terms of acting, body lan-
guage and dialogues and has been widely appraised by the audience. The moment
he enters the bus, the conductor physically evaluates him and questions: “How did
this Nepali manus (man) get into the bus?” When asked to buy the ticket he says, “I
want to go to Kathmandu” in a bus that is going to Ganapati Pule in Maharashtra,
painting the character as stupid, imbecile and naïve. The conductor then directs
him to sit near the door of the bus, and when the Nepali character retaliates, the
fellow passenger replies “arre you are a Gurkha therefore you will sit near the
door na.” He then, while talking about his family of Gurkhas, mentions about his
brother who has the business of godi (horse), and when asked for clarifcation the
passengers understand that his brother repairs ghadi (wristwatches), ridiculing the
accent and pronunciation of the Nepali character. He further describes his brother
as very rich and that he has a “big house, a stall outside the big house, a stool near
the stall and he sits there at night to guard the house . . . because this is our param-
para (tradition).” And when the passengers get irritated upon his blabbering, one
of them tells him to sit near the door, to which he feels insulted and says, “I will
take out my khukri.” Another passenger who attempts to pacify the situation holds
his hands and tries to calm him down by saying, “No no bahadur ji.” To this the
Nepali says, “How do you know my name?” The passenger replies by curiously
asking: “Are there other names among Nepalis?” The angry Nepali takes out his
khukri, which turns out to be a book on cookery. Explaining the importance of
the book, the Nepali says “If I don’t become a singer, I will become a cook. I will
have a Chinese van, and (I) will make good-good Chinese food. I will make veg.
hakka noodle, chicken hakka noodle, mutton hakka noodle, hakka hakka noodle,
but will not become a watchman!” To this, the fellow passengers ask, “But why
won’t you become a watchman?”, to which he replies by singing a song that makes
little sense to the passengers.
The movie Gandhi Nagar 2nd Street stereotypes the look, attire and accent of
Nepali men, also showing the ignorance of Indians and their fondness and trust
towards Gurkha guards, while simultaneously showing the character in a comic
light with the protagonist saying that the enacted role is komali or that of a goon, a
silly and eccentric person. The second flm delves unabashedly more on the stereo-
types, and while associating the Nepali character with security guarding, bahadur tag
and stupidity, it also simultaneously shows the inclination of Nepali men towards
cooking Chinese food and singing western-styled songs. This stereotypical rep-
resentation portrays Nepali working-class men to be versatile in doing petty jobs
and happy in fulflling the unrealistic expectations of their Indian employers. The
Nepali guard is shown as a man who aspires to opt for lowly paid and overworked
security jobs. When employers sleep without fear as he patrols, he calls out jagte
raho (stay awake/ be alert) and taps with his wooden stick or lathi from time to time,
and he is shown to take pride in the belief that their safety is in the hands of the
‘bravest of the brave’ men (Caplan, 1991).
Both of these flms play with the essentialised ‘martial’ qualities of Nepali man
and also their ‘natural’ feminine traits, such as caring for children, making women
feel safe and expertise in domestic chores, which are also interestingly associated
with other South Asian migrant communities (Näre, 2010). This androgynous rep-
resentation of the Nepali man, oscillating between the masculine and the feminine,
the meek and the strong, the fearless and the naïve, creates an array of portrayals that
comes across to the reader as ambiguous and at times even contradictory, thereby
eliciting laughter. While discussing the question of racial othering, it is interesting
to note that neither of the actors portraying the Gurkhas in these two movies have
any bodily features of a stereotypical Nepali man. This casting technique does not,
however, deter the process of reproducing stereotypes. Instead, it works for the plot
of Gandhinagar 2nd Street, because the honorary Gurkha title Sethu receives comes
with everything else that the stereotype holds barring bodily features. Despite the
acknowledgement of hard work and labour, it is shown that the type of masculinity
he could have, as a Gurkha security guard, is skewed from a ‘normal’. Also, given
he possesses all other characteristics the Gurkha is supposed to embody, those who
feebly cast doubts upon the authenticity of him being a Gurkha are brushed aside.14
From what we learn of the stereotypical representation of Nepali men in textual
and visual media, the gaze onto the object in question has more than one dimen-
sion: associating particular menial occupations in the informal fold with the Nepali
male character can be seen as having its roots in colonial imagery associated with
the community, whereas the androgyny, rather the imaginings of it, is a product of
gendered attributions. What stands out about the Indian male gaze is that in addi-
tion to having the characteristics of being looked at from a male perspective and
for male pleasure, the epithet denoting the question of nationality brings the issues
of race and masculinity to the table.
If one asks what is ‘Indian’ about this Indian male gaze, one would be propelled
towards a dissection of an imagined Indian man, who seems to be the point of
reference to establish deviations from masculinity. Once the Indian male gaze is
cast onto the Indian man, a set of expectations in terms of behaviours, language
and bodies would come to the forefront, thus defning the norms and deviations.
How would this gaze reinforce existing hierarchies and explain what is contained
in the idea of subjugated masculinities is a question to be dealt with. The following
section analyses social media as a site to complicate our present understanding of

this Indian male gaze by looking at content produced by a Nepali man and con-
sumed by the Indian male gaze.
Nepali content and Indian consumers: cringe pop

and the comedy of awkwardness
In this section we study cringe pop on social media for seeing a more comprehen-
sive picture of humour involving Nepali men. Cringe pop, a neologism, one could
argue is a sub-genre in cringe comedy; however, the way in which this category
has evolved a life of its own on social media websites and apps on the internet
distinguishes it from other forms of cringe comedy in distinct ways. Cringe pop is
a vast category of songs and music videos that are popularly classifed as awkward
and are essentially ‘bad’ art. These songs are produced and created by content
creators on the internet and widely shared on social media. The element of how
‘cringeworthy’ the music comes out to be is a factor that determines the virality of
the content. One must note, however, that the characteristic that demarcates them
from other productions that could be perceived as awkward is that they are created
with an intention of producing this awkwardness.
Before ‘cringe pop’ established itself as a genre in these apps, cringe pop songs on
YouTube were instrumental in determining how this awkwardness is constituted.
Reaction videos were created by popular YouTube content creators, also known
as YouTubers, which involved a live reaction to watching a viral video, mostly for
the frst time. In addition to reactions, ‘roasts’ as a genre of YouTube comedy also
gained popularity. Unlike a classic roast, that involves a guest of honour, who is to
be mocked, and a roast-master, who invites people to mock the guest of honour,
roasts on YouTube simply contain commentary on a popular video, which isn’t
shown in its entirety. The YouTuber summarises the content for the viewers, while
including snippets, and his reactions contain the jokes. Thus, we entertain the pos-
sibility that creators of such content, which is mocked in roasts, do not necessarily
produce their content as a joke.
One such content creator whose songs are regarded as cringe pop is a Nepali
man called Bhim Niroula. He has composed and acted in many English-language
songs such as ‘Sunday Morning Love You’, ‘Give Me Tablet’, ‘Dancing All Night’,
etc. We discuss how his songs were picked by a popular Indian roaster Carry
Minati, whose roasts of other cringe-pop artists such as Taher Shah, Dhinchak
Pooja, Swagger Singh, etc. have become an ersatz repository of cringe pop in
South Asia. The Google search engine characterises Bhim Niroula as a musical
artist as opposed to a playback singer, musician, songwriter, etc., the kind of terms
used for established and even less popular musicians. His content is available on
Google Music, Spotify and several channels on YouTube, with most popular songs
belonging to a channel called Music Nepal 1. The channel has uploaded his songs
from as early as 2013, a time when reaction channels and roasts were not a phe-
nomenon on YouTube.
In 2016, Carry Minati, an Indian YouTuber, roasted two of Niroula’s songs

‘Sunday Morning Love You’ and ‘Give Me Tablet’, but the original roasts were
removed from the channel by Carry Minati himself and are now re-uploaded by
non-commercial YouTubers as demonetised videos. Niroula’s most popular songs
are characteristic of grammatical mistakes in the lyrics (which are in English), non-
choreographed moves with mismatched rhythm and grace, extensive use of green
screens, autotuned playback and amateur sound production. Niroula looks like a
man approaching middle age and doesn’t have a professional wardrobe or makeup
in his videos. In ‘Sunday Morning Love You’, the actress in the song, who happens
to be the singer’s love interest, is a conventionally attractive woman. The actress
and the singer have not actually shared screen space while shooting, but instead
they have been put together with amateur green screen editing. Niroula dances
in front of various backgrounds that are achieved by the same efects, including
the Egyptian pyramids, the Sphinx, Las Vegas gardens and a digitally created foral
background and upbeat brick wall. We look at the roast of this song by Carry
Minati, not the song itself, as roasts such as these are instrumental in the songs
being classifed as cringe pop. The reactions in the commentary track given in the
roast also act as a refection of how the audience receives the song and shows how
this reception makes it humorous. The following is an excerpt15 from the roast that
will be the subject of our analysis:
“Hey chamar! [name of a caste belonging to the Scheduled Castes; used as a slur]
Totally, as if, I swear, you have made such a horrible face like morons.
Tcch, the song isn’t any good, the playback isn’t any good.
At least you should have a decent face, it’s like a chamar’s face.
The combination (of face, voice and melody) should go well together. It looks
as if someone has shoved a lollipop up his ass.”
These comments were followed by a few more comments,16 some indicating how
repulsive the singer’s physique is and how the commentator wants to hit his face
with a shoe.
This commentary in Carry Minati’s roast shows that in the absence of the most
common stereotypes, ridicule can operate in a similar fashion. Niroula’s clothing
or oral expressions do not match with the stereotypical Nepali man, yet his body
and his language brings the ‘something ludicrous’ to the Indian male gaze (Scho-
penhauer, 1818). His songs that have been roasted on YouTube are not in the Hindi
language. His English generates laughter as it is also an aberration of an ‘attractive’
man at the centre of music videos; it almost makes up for the absence of words like
shaabji or bahadur. Ridicule is invoked here on the basis of linguistic abilities, accent
and pronunciation, as profciency (or lack of it) of language is often used to evaluate
civilisation, mind and intelligence (Mintz, 1996; Weaver, 2010). The aspiration to
travel, to be in the company of a beautiful woman and to be the ‘star’ of a music
video adds to this ludicrousness, thus generating more ridicule from the consumers
of the roast as well as the song itself.
To understand this Indian male gaze further, one must break down the ‘Indian’
in it. One fnds that this gaze is cast onto oneself just as unto others. In the case
of Bhim Niroula, nowhere is he mocked for being a Nepali in the roast. Yet the
mockery roots from the hegemonic ideas of masculinity that are projected through
this gaze. It is crucial to acknowledge that even when stereotypifcation isn’t taking
place, the subject onto whom the gaze is cast becomes the object of ridicule on
account of being seen through this gaze. The creators of cringe pop, unlike Niroula
who intentionally produces awkward songs for the purpose of going viral, bring
more clarity to this point. For example, Taher Shah, who is a cringe pop artist
from Pakistan, known for his songs ‘Eye to Eye’ and ‘Angel’, also plays upon the
exact same deviations from the hegemonic masculinity viz language, grammatically
incorrect English to be specifc, androgynous fashion and mannerisms and body
language (projecting oneself on a larger-than-life scale in an arrhythmic fashion).
Prima facie, one can see no racism, in roasts of cringe pop artists, perhaps because
the mockery isn’t purely or independently occurring on account of their race and/
or nationality alone. Yet there is mockery, laughter is generated and that, ipso facto,
creates humour that is racist in character.
On social media platforms, the multitude of these users seem to have the free-
dom to believe something isn’t ludicrous merely because everyone else thinks so,
yet one can observe a majority of them operating on the same principle of defn-
ing normal on the basis of a hegemonic understanding of masculinity internalised
by all. It is possible that mockery of the marginalised groups across geographical
borders is essentially contingent on a power relationship and comes with a plethora
of expected behaviours from the marginalised. It is interesting that even when a
Nepali man doesn’t exhibit a set of characteristics as expected of the stereotype of
bahadur, the ways of othering the traits constituting his masculinity come up from
the same expectation of hegemonic lens. One could perhaps argue that the subju-
gated masculinity does not comprise a set of behaviours that the subjugated group
actually exhibits or is perceived to exhibit, but rather acts as a negative defnition
of what hegemonic masculinity is not. It then attempts to capture the traits of the
marginalised group as a deviation from the normative and uses humour as a tool to
explain and legitimise that deviance, albeit in a non-threatening and less-aggressive
manner.
Conclusion
If one were to paint a picture of the stereotypical Nepali man that has been sown
into the Indian imagination through varied forms of media, one would see more
than the caricature dawning a watchman uniform appearing in the movies or
the heavily accented shaab ji or jaagte raho read out, performed and forwarded
through text-based messaging platforms. This caricature of the Nepali man is
developed with intrinsic and repetitive details that are embedded in the colo-
nial history of the subcontinent and his contemporary status as a working-class
immigrant in the Indian society. The attributes of naïvete, simplicity, servitude,
humility, innocence and a general infantilised demeanour that are associated with
the Nepali man runs through his portrayals, as discussed at length in the previous
sections. These portrayals refect the process of cultural and social othering of
this migrant community and the performative reproduction of their status quo
within the Indian society by the means of humour. Humour in this context is
hard to separate from ridicule, in which the object of amusement is perceived
as inferior in relation to the laugher or the initiator of the joke (Bardon, 2005;
Duncan, 1985).
We argued that breaking down the process of stereotypifcation creates the need
to examine why certain attributes are associated with stereotypical characters. A
question to ponder upon would then be, could one easily visualise a caricature of
stereotypical individuals embodying the characteristics of hegemonic masculinity?
Or is it simpler to visualise the subject with subjugated masculinity? This line of
argument could redirect one’s attention from the one who is gazed at and bring it
back to the one who gazes. The gazer carries out the process of othering and a set
of expectations that lies at the core of this process. What is left out after othering
everything ‘deviational’ could be the starting point in understanding how stereo-
typifcation works for the Indian male; else questions about how we understand the
non-deviational as the ‘normal’ seem moot.
We showed that the Indian male gaze can be seen operating even when some
stereotypical associations are not at play as in the case of Bhim Niroula, adding
further complexity to the matter at hand. The notion of hegemonic masculin-
ity, as defned by this gaze, systematically and discursively otherises all those who
exhibit characteristics of deviation from the perceived norm. Humour in this
case is derived from this very deviation, and the act of laughter becomes a ‘harm-
less’ performance of demonstrating the superiority of the gaze. The element of
humour in these cultural narratives also acts as a cushion against the harshness
of the othering process. Humour portraying the working classes as objects of
ridicule builds upon existing social hierarchies that legitimise the attribution of
characteristics associated with inferiority to them. The Nepali worker’s language
and mannerisms being deemed as ‘inferior’ to that of the masters would remain
unquestioned with the use of humour. One must note that the object of laugh-
ter that lies within its representation is rendered powerless to alter its image; this
imagined Nepali man is a product of a ‘superior’ gaze that comes from the Indian
male who others him.
This analysis paves the way to generate a wider and more complex set of ques-
tions about how humour, ridicule, trolling and mockery in social media is an
important site to examine the working of this hegemony, something that future
research could address. It is equally important to explore who sets the gaze upon
whom, and how and in what way does one become aware of it. Studying the
role of all stakeholders in the constant validation of this gaze would substantialise
our understanding of power relations between various socio-cultural groups in the
society and throw light on the processes through which hegemonic discourses are
performed and reproduced, with or without laughter.
Notes
1 For instance, Ostrower (2015) uses ethnographic narratives of Holocaust survivers to
show how humour helped them cope with the atrocities they experienced and how they
developed laughing as a defence mechanism to survive.
2 Duncan (1985) notes that humour tends to have an initiator or a person/group that cre-
ates the joke/or joking relationship for the larger publics or a targeted group of persons.
There is also often a ‘butt’ of the joke or the object of humour at whose expense the
humour is produced and performed. This object of humour is performatively distanced
from the initiator and the recipient of the humour.
3 The idea of a post-colonial gaze that looks at the ways in which the colonised is otherised
has been explored by several scholars. Prominent among them is E. Ann Kaplan (1997),
who investigates the ‘imperial gaze’, where the ‘white western subject’ remains central.
Kaplan further explores this imperial gaze in the representation of non-western cultures
in Hollywood cinema.
4 Much has been written about ethnic jokes about Polish, Irish, Belgian, Pontian and other
social groups fon their linguistic challenges and perceived ‘stupidity’ and the role these
jokes play in their marginalisation. See Davies (1987) for instance.
5 Forwarded messages on Whatsapp are generally referred to as ‘forwards’. We use the same
terminology in this chapter.
6 All of the translations in the essay are done by the authors.
7 Original forward: (a) Ek baar raste se jate hue ek Nepali ko ek chirag mila
Usne usko ghisa to usmein se Jinn nikla aur bola.
Jinn: “Aaj main bahut khush hun, main tumhari 3 murade puri karunga, hukam
mere aaka”
Nepali khush hota hua: “1. Ek bara sa bangla, 2. Ush mein khub daulatmand aadmi,
3. Ushka chokidar humko bana do” ROFL!”
8 Original forward: (b) Ameer officer ki patni gurkha naukar se: Mein araam karne ja rahi
hu. Gas par cooker chadhaya hai, teen seeti sunte hi gas band kar dena.
Naukar: Ji memshaab!
Officer ki patni: Kya hai?
Naukar: Seeti aap bajayega ya shaab?
9 Original forward: (c) Nepali naukar subha: O shaab ji! Motor kharab ho gaya!
Sahab ji bada pareshan!!Sahab: Ab kya karu! Nahaonga kese?! Iss kambaqt motor ko
bhi subha hi kharab hona ta . . .
Nepali naukar: Kya karu shaab ji? Faik du ishko kya?
Sahab: Pagal hai kya? Karwata hu shaam tak theek.
Naukar: Theek hai shaab ji. Toh fir . . . aaj . . . aalo me motor ke badle gobhi daal
deta hu shaab ji.
10 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, it may also be interesting to study how such
stereotypical humour is received by the stereotyped community. Näre (2010) and Basnet
and Sandhya (2019, 2020), for instance, show that while these stereotypical ideas about
their community may be offensive to many people, it may also be used strategically by
others to meet certain immediate needs.
11 Uprety (2011), for instance, points out that while ‘babu’ was a word used to describe
Bengali clerical men in the British administration, it was later extended to include all
working-class Indian men as someone who was effeminate and superficial.
12 WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and is often used derogatorily to refer
to communities of privilege.
13 This trope further plays on the idea that the ideal, aspirational job for a Malayali is a job
in Dubai.
14 The movie doesn’t do much in directing the audience to question this, what could be
termed a flaw in the plot. One sees that the residents of the colony accept their honorary
Gurkha and authenticate his identity with extraordinary ease.
15 Original excerpt: “Abey chamar! Bilkul katai bejaaron ki tarah kasam se itni buri shakal
banai hai tune. Tcch, gaan toh accha hai hi nai bhai, awaz toh acchi hai nai, Lekin bas
shakal bhi toh honi chahiye na chamaron jaisi hai, Combination baithna chahiye sahi
wala. Aisa lag raha hai lollipop de diya ho saale gaand me kisi ne.”
16 The original upload of the song has over 6 million views and over 8,000 comments. Most
of these comments contain a mockery of some sort; even the appreciative ones acknowl-
edge that the cringe factor provides them entertainment. It isn’t the song itself that is
humorous but instead the consumers of the original roast who have been redirected to the
original song who contribute to the jokes that keep the cringe comedy alive.
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9
POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE
AND PERFORMANCE OF
POLITICS
Analysing stand-up comedy in the
Indian context
Sukrity Gogoi and Simona Sarma
Laughter and humour have often been used as essential mediums to speak truth
to power. From Charlie Chaplin’s comic take on the Industrial Revolution and
the parody of Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940) to the current satire of John Oli-
ver,1 the medium of humour often provides a platform for comedians to question
the contemporary socio-political climate. Throughout history, several theorists
have emphasised the importance of laughter in reversing the social order. Mikhail
Bakhtin, for instance, in his notion of “carnivalesque” has mentioned how carnival
may present moments of rupture in the authoritarian Catholic order through the
medium of laughter and satire. According to him, the temporary abandonment of
moral rules through carnivalesque humour often liberates society in unprecedented
ways (Ferguson, 2019). This liberating function of humour, as expressed through
stand-up comedy, will be an important entry point in this chapter.
Similarly, writing on the importance of jokes, Sigmund Freud argued that jokes
seem to give humans the pleasure of overcoming their inhibitions (Horlacher,
2009, p. 22). Taking this forward, it will be interesting to explore how comedians
use political jokes as a medium to question power and authority. Political humour
as a comic genre has been quite famous across the world. It has manifested itself in
several forms such as cartoons, sketches, theatre, movies, stand-up comedy, etc. Its
major aim has been to bring forth the inconsistencies and inadequacies of political
decisions and acts, and the recklessness and corruption of political leaders. They
have attempted to shed light on the incongruous political realities from time to
time. As a performance, stand-up comedy is one of the most interesting genres to
explore how live-laughter sessions can successfully joke about the political regime
and other societal issues.
However, congruity between the structure of the joke and that of society is an
important property of such satire. As Simon Critchley noted in On Humour (2002),
“there must be a congruence between the structure of a joke and the structure of a
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-12
Politics of performance and performance of politics 157
society for the incongruence of the joke to generate a laugh” (as cited by deSouza,
2016). In other words, humour of this kind is very often carefully crafted to remain
in tandem with the audience’s mood. Thus, the audience’s reception also becomes
a site of study to unravel the relationship between a joke and the society in which
it is produced. At the same time, it brings forth the possible congruity that exists
between the ‘laughter-maker’ and the ‘laughing audience’. Given that the bonding
efects of laughter might lead to the formation of rhetorical or discursive commu-
nities, it remains to be seen if stand-up comedy leads to a conformist or a subversive
space (Horlacher, 2009, p. 25). By tracing the shift in humourous expressions from
print to television to digital space in the Indian context, this chapter will explore
how this art form of stand-up comedy creates a performative space to critique cur-
rent political structures. Additionally, the politics inherent within such spaces will
also be briefy touched upon later. To focus on the instances of stand-up comedy
in India, it is pertinent to situate it in the larger historical framework.
Comic traditions in India: an historical overview

To explore the nuances of comic performances in the South Asian context, one
could draw an understanding from the classical tradition of Rasa theory in Bharata
Muni’s Natyashastra2 (frst compilation estimated between 200 BCE–200 CE).
According to Bharata Muni, humour (hasya) is one of the eight rasas (mood efects)
that can be created through drama (Kumar, 2013). In Natyashastra, ‘juxtaposi-
tion’ and ‘mimicry’ are considered as two primary devices through which laughter
is generated (cf. Kumar, 2013, p. 81). Bharata identifed six types of laughter,
namely: Smita (gentle smile), Hasita (smile), Vihasita (laughter), Upahasita (laughter
with ridicule), Apahasita (uproarious laughter), and Atihasita (convulsive laughter)
(Muni, 1951). Within the scope of this chapter, we will delve more into upahasita.
Cultural critic Lee Siegel, who has drawn his understanding from Sanskrit
comedic literature, has argued that “ridicule became an art” when Bharata’s sons
directed their satire upon the Divine Sages (Siegel, 1989, p. 57). According to
a myth, every satirist is a bastard son of Bharata, and Bharata claimed to have a
hundred sons who read and drew inspiration from his work Natyashastra (Ibid.).
This myth has been used by Siegel to provide the Indian defnition of satire as “an
aesthetic mode of attack, directed against culturally esteemed objects and charac-
terised by degrading vulgarities in which comic laughter arises out of a sudden
perception of the ridiculousness of what has been traditionally idealised” (Siegel,
1989, p. 57). Their satire is believed to have angered the Divine Sages, who there-
after condemned the sons of Bharata to be born on Earth as members of the lowest
caste. In the contemporary context, an analogy can be drawn between the sons of
Bharata and our present-day comedians who might face a similar form of banishment/
repression of free speech from the Divine Sages (read powerholders) due to their
satirical commentary.
This tradition of satire and political humour found its continued ascendance
even during the British rule in India. There were several instances in the news
158 Sukrity Gogoi and Simona Sarma
media when British rule was resisted through the use of satire, leading to the
earliest charges of sedition and instances of press censorship. For instance, Awadh
Punch, a weekly that began in 1877, marked the beginning of India’s political satire
magazines (Kumar, 2013). This Urdu magazine published pieces that voiced their
dissent against this colonial rule. Its prominent contributors included the novelist
and editor Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar, who was well-known for his work Fasana-e-
Azad (The Tale of Azad), and Akbar Allahabadi, an Urdu poet whose forte was in
the genre of satire.
In the realm of modern theatre in India, several plays were enacted that served
to bring forth the oppressive nature of the British rule. From using theatre as
a means to spread the bhakti movement of Hinduism across India between the
15th and 18th centuries; to imbibing a nationalistic fervour during the 1940s in
the backdrop of the Indian independence movement; to the central government
using theatre to serve democratic socialism in the 1950s, theatrical performances
have proven to have quite an impact on our societies (Richmond, 1973). Some
of the plays staged in this period were also highly satirical in nature. For instance,
Kulin Kulasarvaswa (1857) by Ram Narayan Tarkaratna was one of the frst social
satires that exposed the practices of early marriage, a rigid caste system and dowry
(Sundar, 1989, p. 126). Another play by Deenbandhu Mitra, Neel Darpan (1860),
portrayed the exploitation faced by indigo farmers during the British era in India.
The staging of other satirical plays such as Gajadananda O Yubaraj (Gaja and the
Prince), which made fun of the visit of the Prince of Wales to the home of a promi-
nent Bengali lawyer, grabbed the attention of the Government, which ultimately
led to the invocation of colonial law, the Dramatic Performances Act, 1876 (Ibid.,
p. 127). It was brought about “to police the ‘seditious’ theatre in the undivided
subcontinent of India” (Pathak & Perera, 2018).
In the pre-liberalised period, Doordarshan3 also aired several comedy serials
during the 1980s. For instance, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi (This is Life) was a popular serial
with its hilarious take on a domestic setting that revolved around a married hetero-
sexual couple and the wife’s unemployed younger brother. Then there was Jaspal
Bhatti’s Ulta Pulta (Topsy Turvy), which was a satirical take on the everydayness of
Indian society and also its political happenings, delivered as monologues in Hindi.
By the 1970s and 1980s, it was assumed that the poor “angry young man” is the
primary audience of the popular cultural industry (Rao, 2007, p. 59). When we
fast forward to the post-liberalised times, we see similar satirical TV shows such
as Gustakhi Maaf (Excuse the Transgression) launched in 2003 and The Week That
Wasn’t launched in 2006, which have used humour to comment on political events
(Kumar, 2013). Apart from satire and socio-political commentary, a newer format
of comedy shows on television began to emerge during the 21st century in the
Indian entertainment industry. The post-liberalised economy led to the growth of
the Indian middle classes such that their consumption patterns began to undergo
various shifts. Along with trade and commerce, cultural transformations also began
to emerge in a globalised world. The tastes of the urban niche audiences began to
be considered primary (Ibid., p. 61). As a result, comedy sitcoms such as Khichdi
(2002), Sarabhai versus Sarabhai (2004) and Taarak Mehta ka Ooltah Chashmah (2008)
served as a form of entertainment for the emerging Indian middle-class audience.
Although such comedy serials per se have become less popular, reality shows such
as The Great Indian Laughter Challenge (2005), Comedy Circus (2007), Comedy Ka
Maha Muqabala (2011), and so on are now heavily consumed by the general public.
In most of these reality shows, numerous comedian-contestants compete for a title.
These shows are now increasingly a medium for Bollywood actors to promote their
movies. Primarily aimed at Indian families, reality shows and sitcoms often use the
conventional sexist and disparagement humour to garner laughter. The target audi-
ence is so vividly the ‘family’ that there emerged a spinof from Comedy Nights with
Kapil (2013) to Family Time with Kapil Sharma (2018), hosted by popular comedian
Kapil Sharma.
With the advent of the digital revolution towards the end of the 20th century,
the entertainment industry has gone through several transformations. The comedy
culture has also evolved from prior reality shows to independent performances by
comedians. These online videos, which get circulated via social media channels
such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and over-the-top (OTT) plat-
forms such as Amazon Prime and Netfix, majorly cater to a younger audience
who have access to the internet. Given the current upsurge in the stand-up comedy
scene in India, the following section will elaborate on stand-up comedy as an art
form that has now become a cultural phenomenon.
Stand-up comedy as a cultural phenomenon

As already detailed, humour, in general, may allow individuals to play with the
values, norms, and meanings of society. Performance of stand-up comedy becomes
a more organised and institutionalised means to do the same. Stand-up comedy
shows are essentially live shows, with the comedian performing in front of an audi-
ence, such that the performance space remains ‘real’. This art form originated in
the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As argued by Lawrence
E. Mintz, “stand-up comedians entertain us, allowing us to let of steam and to
relax, but they also articulate our values, beliefs, and concerns, and they permit
us to express ourselves both consciously and subconsciously” (Mintz, 1977, p. 1).
Such performances in public spaces foster a feeling of community among the audi-
ence present in the events (Mintz, 1977, p. 3).
In India, comedy clubs such as the Canvas Laugh Club4 and That Comedy
Club5 are some of the popular venues in Mumbai, the hub of the entertainment
industry, where such shows are frequently held. They are often small spaces that
can have a maximum of 50 audience members at a time. Hence, they usually
have a number of shows for a particular event. The prices of tickets often range
between Rs. 350 to Rs. 1000, such that a select composition of audiences gets to
attend these events. While the Canvas Laugh Club in Mumbai is located in the
Palladium Mall of Lower Parel, the same club in Gurgaon (national capital region
abutting Delhi) operates from the DLF Cyber Hub, a huge corporate park. In
other words, the elitism of the spaces is evident both spatially as well as through
the kind of audiences they cater to. Being a closed space, the possibility of interac-
tion with the audience is high. Comedians are, therefore, seen interacting with the
audience members, adding a convenient informality. With diverse content, they
attempt to target the youth of this country, unlike the family-oriented shows of the
previous decades. Nonetheless, through these shows, several stand-up comedians
have attempted to create subversive narratives in this ever-booming terrain of the
comedy industry. This is, however, a debatable idea of subversion. Some of the
comedians whose work will be elaborated on in the next section include Kunal
Kamra, a Mumbai-based comedian famous for his political satire; Varun Grover,
another prominent stand-up artist now turned screenwriter and lyricist; Aditi Mit-
tal, an expressive comedian, writer and actor; Biswa Kalyan Rath, an IIT6 graduate
turned stand-up comic; Vasu Primlani, a satirist who also recognises herself as an
environmentalist; Sanjay Rajoura, who is largely into political satire; and Neeti
Palta, another comedian who has recently risen to fame. Among them, Kamra
and Rath have more than a million followers on their Twitter accounts, making
them household names among the youths in contemporary India. Experimenting
with diferent forms of comedy such as political satire, comic sketches, resistance
humour, improvised comedy, etc., they strike a chord with the audience (both
virtual and live). We note that a lot of contemporary issues of the country fnd
representation in their comic narratives. We will attempt to unpack selected stand-
up comedy performances that have emerged in the past half a decade in the Indian
context. During this period, one can notice an increase in the stand-up comedy
scene in India that marked a return of political satire. This can be partly attributed
to the changing political regime in the country. The focus will be on critically
looking at how this art form creates a subversive space to critique current political
structures at play.
It is worthwhile to mention here that we do not intend to romanticise the
aspect of resistance in any way. As cautioned by Lila Abu-Lughod (1990, p. 41),
“despite the theoretical sophistication of many anthropological and historical stud-
ies of everyday resistance, there remains a tendency to romanticise it. I argue instead
that resistance should be used as a diagnostic of power.” Following from this, our
intention of analysing stand-up comedy stems from the fact that it brings to the
fore several aspects of power relations that are currently operating in our society.
We are also aware of the unequal power relations that are inherent within the com-
edy industry. While we strive to highlight some such instances, our larger goal is to
gauge this art form as an avenue that speaks truth to power.
Given the fact that stand-ups are now increasingly disseminated through digital
platforms, it is important for us to delve a little more into the linkages between
stand-up comedy and the digital space. Many proponents of cyberspace represent
it as a ‘utopian environment’. Furthermore, with its lack of visible and audible
cues, it could have the potential to be a “post gender, age, disability and ethnic”
environment (Ward, 1999, p. 96). However, Ward (1999) goes on to question if
cyberspace is superior to the physical space. The online violence replete across the
gender spectrum tells otherwise. Since such performance-based arts are no longer
limited to physical, live events, their move to a new space like the internet leads to
newer questions about accessibility and power politics. For instance, this space is
essentially gendered in character. A research study conducted on YouTube statistics
in India illustrated that 62% of digital users are male and only 38% are female. It was
also stated that men spend 60% more time on the internet than women do (Kay,
2018, p. 23). Selected groups like women and queer groups often face exclusions
and violence online. Hence, it becomes imperative to understand the diferent
contexts in which these art forms travel through various mediums of dissemination.
When female performance artists use social media as a space for resistance, they are
sometimes met with rape threats from the audience.
Similarly, on the question of becoming “viral” on the internet and the underly-
ing politics of it, the male performers seem to have a wider audience than their
female counterparts do. In an interview with flm critic Anupama Chopra (What’s
It Like Being a Political Satirist in Election Season), Varun Grover acknowledged his
privilege with regard to his gender, caste and religion in the Indian stand-up com-
edy scene.7 Before starting with his answers, he said:
I think one thing we have to apologise for is the panel right now. We should
start with that. There is no female comic here, which is kind of a function of
our privilege being men that we can afford to do political comedy because
it involves lots of risks, lots of abuse, lots of hate online, which I think only
men can afford. That too, only Hindu men can afford. This is why, it is also
unfortunate that there are only men in this panel.
A gendered analysis of performances online signifcantly showcases the hierarchies

that get produced in the process. For instance, the performances by male comedi-
ans receive a higher level of audience response as compared to that of the female
comedians. If we take a glimpse at the number of views received on the satirical
videos uploaded by Vasu Primlani, there are close to 30,000 viewers as compared
to millions of views on any video uploaded by Kunal Kamra.
Interestingly, popular comedians like Kunal Kamra also face hateful and abusive
comments, sometimes from anonymous or fake account holders. In the current
volatile political climate, political humour is specifcally met with negative conse-
quences, ranging from rape threats to death threats. In one such instance, Kunal
Kamra had used his Instagram handle to launch a campaign with the tagline ‘Don’t
Vote for Modi’ just before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.8 He posted photographs
of himself holding a placard with the same tagline where he stood on random
streets to spread the word. Kamra also photoshopped himself with the placard onto
various settings such as a scene from Game of Thrones (a popular television series
produced by the American network HBO) to historic photographs of political
rallies and gatherings to even standing in front of the Bombay Stock Exchange
building. Such blurring of lines between his jokes during comic acts to taking real-
life action countering the right-wing government seemed like a desperate attempt
to build a certain consensus among the public, which accentuated the hilarity. On
top of the ‘Don’t Vote for Modi’ placard, he also had a placard stating, ‘But, Also
F*ck Congress’, which removes doubts (if any) about such acts being propagandist.
Some audience members interacted with this post through comments like “Aaenge
toh modiji hi” (Modiji will only return to power) and “no matter how many time
dog barks . . . Vote for Modi.” Hence, the digital space leads to anonymity making
threats and abuses the ‘new normal’. These online abuses, however, are no more
implicit as the ‘victims’ themselves expose such comments and talk about it openly
as ‘naming and shaming’ has acquired new currency. Kamra very often shares the
threats he receives on Instagram stories for his followers to see and aptly replies to
them, albeit in a jocular manner.9
It is important to note the power politics of performance spaces, as such
forms of violence are limited to the online space only. There have not been
any reports regarding violence in the physical, live events, which mostly take
place in city spaces and caters to an urban audience who are more familiar with
this form of comedy and can aford to pay to watch these popular comedians
perform on stage.
Within a framework of cyber-ethnography, we will subsequently analyse the
emerging narratives of stand-up comedy performances that get circulated through
the digital space. Since the online videos are live events recorded and then dis-
seminated onto the virtual medium, using this method we aim to understand how
online communities interact with the stand-up comedy videos that generate ‘shared
laughter’ both online and ofine. According to Katie J. Ward (1999), the virtual
community is a “hybrid space”, which goes beyond the traditional understandings
of space and time. Moreover, it is difcult to separate the physical and virtual realms
as it is important to identify the “encroachment of the virtual realm on to our
physical space” (Ward, 1999). In cyber-ethnography, the participants (performers
and audiences online, in this case) take the lead role to establish the “reality, status
and principles of the group as they are dispersed or fragmented as well” (Ibid., p.
96). As researchers, we have used the internet for this study to analyse the comic
performances as text. We have also included selected interviews with stand-up
comedians available online, their social media handles, their professional web pages,
and audience reception by studying some of the virtual comments, to explore the
various perspectives about the stand-up scene in India.
What is so funny? Analysing comic narratives

To reiterate, the stand-up comedy performance videos of selected Indian come-
dians available on YouTube channels and OTT platforms such as Amazon Prime
and Netfix underpins the analytical deliberation in the following section. The
works of Aditi Mittal, Kunal Kamra, Varun Grover, Sanjay Rajoura, Vasu Prim-
lani and Neeti Palta are the mainstay of this discussion, which leads us to explore
how humour as a form of resistance operates within the current socio-political
context.
Humour against power

“The satirist strips away the guises, and in the cool laughter generated by the spec-
tacle there is a redistribution of power” (Siegel, 1989, p. xviii). This quote seems
apt in the present scenario where laughter as a social practice has the opportunity
to break the shackles of continued political repression. One such comedian, Varun
Grover, has become famous for his continued dig at the ruling party. He is one of
the co-founders of the group Aisi Taisi Democracy (This-That Democracy), along
with Rahul Ram (the lead vocalist of a folk-fusion band Indian Ocean) and Sanjay
Rajoura (another political satirist who will be discussed later). This group indulges
in stand-up comedy as well as satirical musicals that directly draw attention towards
diverse political issues of the country. They have done satirical sketches on Swachh
Bharat Abhiyan, songs on pollution, Indian elections, etc.10 Varun Grover often
remains at the forefront of calling out the political wrongs. Primarily communicat-
ing in Hindi, he reaches a wide audience such that his YouTube videos reach up
to 10 million views. Interestingly, he was also invited to an India Today Conclave11
in 2016, where he openly mocked the coming of “Ramrajya” (Kingdom of Ram/
Hindu Nation) into India. While justifying his cynicism, he argues that he per-
forms comedy as he is from the state of Uttar Pradesh. He says:
main cynical isliye hun, seedha sa karan hai uska, mai Uttar Pradesh se hun. Jo UP
se hoga wo samjhega. UP waale cynical nahi honge toh kya honge! . . . cynicism
waha hai. Waha hai. Kyuki main UP ke trains ke baat koru toh sirf UP mein hi
aisa hota hai, UP ke trains mein app jayenge toh toilets mein aap jaaye aur hagge ka
magga bhi lohe ke chains se bandha hota hai. Itna kam bharosa hai logo ko ek dusre pe!
I am cynical because the simple reason is that I am from Uttar Pradesh.
The ones from UP will understand. If people from UP aren’t cynical, what
will they be? Cynicism exists there. It is there. To talk about UP trains, if you
visit the toilets, even the mug used for shitting is all chained up. That’s the
level of trust people have over each other!
(Translated by authors)
Such statements point towards a blatant form of disparagement regarding the piti-
able condition of the state. It is important to note that Uttar Pradesh has been
infamous for its various problems, including high rates of infant mortality, skewed
sex ratio, extremely low literacy rates, and so on. Interestingly, Grover argues that,
despite being in the comedy industry since 2005, it is only since 2016 that people
have started to talk of comedy as dissent. He goes on to say that this role of comedy
or laughter is very crucial. He says:
comedy is liberating. Dissent is liberating. Not just for the person who is
saying it, but also for the person who is listening to it, as there is some form
of verbal communication that is happening. Through the form of a cultured
dialogue, communication happens.
This direct pronouncing of comedy as a tool of dissent in a crowd full of famous

personalities points towards his unapologetic use of this medium to critique the
establishment. Additionally, he uses the quote by a famous comedian that “a per-
fect joke is one that makes ffty percent [of] people applaud and the rest shocked.”
This, according to him, can only happen when one jokes about the establishment.
However, apart from criticising the political class, Grover in a recent YouTube video
titled How Indians Outrage,12 released in May 2018, also made a mockery of how
some Indians, at little ofense, go out to set vehicles on fre as a sign of protest. This
was with reference to the release of the movie Padmavat (2018), which was met
with a lot of resistance because of its apparent misrepresentation of the Rajputs. The
Karni Sena in particular, a faction of the Rajput caste based in Rajasthan, began to
shower threats and demanded its subsequent ban. They even went on to burn buses
on roads as a sign of public outrage. Grover made fun of this act by saying,
India mein sabse bura janam aapka tab hoga jis janam min aap State Transport ki
bus banke paida honge. Har koi aapko jalayega aake. Ye haalat ho gayi hai, koi bhi
Sena aati hai, Bus bolta hai “hume pata hai kya karna hai”, wo self-immolate ho
jaate hai!
In India, the worst rebirth will be when you are born as a State Transport
bus. Everyone will come to burn you. In fact, when any Sena comes, the bus
will say “we know what to do” and they self-immolate!
His jokes on these societal elements portray his condemnation of incidents that
are reckless. Pointing out the social evils of this country, Grover also directly com-
mented on the rampant casteism that is prevalent throughout the Indian elections.
He says, “if caste is taken out of the election question, Indians will all become
crazy. They will not know whom to vote!” Picking out headlines from the daily
newspapers, he mocks the various methods being used to garner votes during the
elections. Mocking Hema Malini13 and her public relations stunts and sarcastically
commenting on the current ruling party’s manifesto for their promises of temple
construction and newer jobs, he gives the audience a hearty laugh. He throws jokes
at people without himself laughing at them. He places the words strategically and
slowly (as if to give the audience time to absorb them) and funnily moves his body
while performing the comedy. With a straight face, he is quite poetic in his delivery.
His poetic character has been on full display during the protests against the Citi-
zenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that
were initiated by the BJP in 2019.14 Being a lyricist himself, he penned a poem titled
Hum Kaagaz Nahi Dikhayenge15 (We will not show our Papers), which taunts the govern-
ment and outrightly rejects the NRC process. He also performed this poem in the
Spoken Fest, 2020 held in Mumbai, India. A few lines from the poem are as follows:
Tana shah aake jayenge, hum kaagaz nahi dikhayenge

Tum aansu gas uchaloge, tum jeher ke chai ubaloge
Hum pyaar ke shakkar ghol ke usko, gat gat gat pi jayenge,

Hum kaagaz nahi dikhayenge . . .
Dictators will come and go, but those Papers we won’t show
You blind us with tear gas and boil poisonous tea,
But our love will sweeten that tea, which we will drink in one go,
But those Papers we won’t show . . .
(As per subtitles in the video)
This also brings to light how some comedians indulge in blurring the lines between
diferent performative genres to resist authoritative rule through their art. It is
important to note here that the audience present during the live Spoken Fest were
constantly cheering and showing their support every time the line Kaagaz Nahi
Dikhayenge was read out loud. On the contrary, when the poem was frst released
on Twitter by Grover on 21 December 2019, it received a multitude of responses,
including “revenge poems” that were deriding his whole agenda. For instance, one
person wrote, “Hum mandir wahi banaayenge, hum paidal paidal aayenge, hum mandir
wahi banaayenge” (“We will build the temple there, we will walk and come and
build the temple there”).16 Similarly, another one wrote, “Hum Desh bhakt baad
mein, intellectual pehle banke dikhaayenge, kyunki janta toh bewakoof hai hi, aur banaate
jayenge” (“We are patriots later, frst we will show our intellectualism, as audiences
are anyway fools, we will keep fooling them more”). In fact, most replies to his
Twitter post were flled with threats and sarcasm. This suggests that the kinds of
audiences that attend the live performances are often the ones who conform to
the performer’s ideologies, unlike the diverse audiences that exist on social media
platforms such as Twitter.
In an episode of Bharat Ek Mauj17 (India is a Joke), Varun Grover along with San-
jay Rajoura are again seen discussing the aforementioned changes along with the
illegal detainment of students at Jamia Milia Islamia.18 The discussion was a direct
onslaught on the ruling government. Most of the comments on the video were,
however, on a positive note agreeing to their arguments. There were comments
like, “Proud of myself for not voting BJP” and “Those supporting BJP needs to
understand. BJP MANIFESTO IS NOT ABOVE INDIA’S CONSTITUTION.”
Hence, in the current political climate, comedians are actively creating content on
political decisions and schemes that might initiate critical thinking to some extent.
Political satire isn’t just limited to male comedians. In one of the most satirical
videos of recent times, Vasu Primlani has given an interesting take on the name-
changing spree of the ruling government.19 With reference to the names of states
such as Allahabad and Faizabad being changed to Prayagraj and Ayodhya, respec-
tively, she has set forward other possible complex words such as ‘Mum-bai’ and
‘Diw-ali’ that could be changed to sound more sanskritised (given that Mumbai
has ‘Mum’ and Diwali has ‘Ali’, which are both non-Hindu/Hindi words). Apart
from names, she sarcastically condemns the use of missiles and bombs as weapons
and rather suggests the use of Brahmastra, as the former weapons are non-Indian in
nature. These taunts made with a serious face generate a diferent form of laughter.
Also known as the ‘green comedian’ for being professionally involved in generating
environmental awareness, she recently released a video titled PM Alert.20 Under the
garb of Particulate Matter, which is a primary pollutant in the environment, she
takes a dig at the Prime Minister of the country. Using an environmental analogy,
she deliberately spoke of the omnipresence of this PM. Releasing the video right
before the Lok Sabha elections of 2019, she says,
Bharat ki PM ki wajah se hazaro logon ki jeewika cheen lee gayi hai, logon ki jaane
gayi hai, iss PM ki wajah se aap saans bhi nahi le paa rahe hai. . . . Humare PM
ki wajah se purn tarah se Bharat dushit ho gaya hai, par iss samasya ka kewal ek
samadhan hai. . . . Iss PM ko nikal bahar kare, tabhi hamara Bharat swaach Bharat
ho payega.
Because of India’s PM, thousands of people have lost their jobs and lives
too. Because of this PM, you aren’t able to breathe. Because of our PM, India
has become completely polluted. There is only one solution to this. This PM
has to be thrown out, only then can a ‘Swachh-Bharat’ be achieved.
Given that “Swachh Bharat Abhiyan” was a cleanliness drive started by the
Narendra Modi government in 2014, such sarcasm is used by Primlani to com-
ment on the political situation of the country. Since Primlani has a lesser fan base,
she has received only around 3,000 views on this video. However, most of the
comments, such as “Oh, what a roast”! and “Ma’am, never seen such a satire”,
point toward the fact that they have been received well and have stayed true to
her intentions.
Primlani has also sarcastically made a video on the importance given to caste
in India.21 This has come after a recent controversy that called Rahul Gandhi
(party president of Indian National Congress, the prime opposition to the ruling
party) Gotra-less (caste-less) as he is the son of Sonia Gandhi (who is of Italian
descent). Such attacks have been made at the Congress party members for a very
long time to debilitate their ‘Indian-ness’. Taunting the current political lead-
ers, she also mentions how they might not be able to tell us the present human
rights condition or the GDP of this country, but they will very well tell us that
Hanuman (a mythical character in a Hindu sacred text) was a Dalit. In a mocking
proud tone, she says that, unlike western political leaders who focus on foresight,
our leaders go into hindsight to make arguments. Her continuous rant (which
does not at all seem like a rant given her style of speaking) attacks the current
political leaders.
Moving on, Kunal Kamra broke the internet by releasing his famous stand-up
set Patriotism and Government in March 2017.22 Garnering over 8 million views
on YouTube, the video scofs at the hyper-nationalist Indian who uses the army
as a defence for the government’s shortcomings. The punchline in the video,

“Siachen mein hamare jawan lad rahe hai” (“Our soldiers are fghting in the borders at
Siachen”) – an excuse used by the government to mask the real problems – became
viral soon after. This line of thought is extremely relevant post the Pulwama crisis
of 2019, when the public and the current political regime were using the lan-
guage of revenge and violent patriotism to garner praise. He also mocks the media
and the public who have made Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) an issue and
branded their students as ‘anti-national’.23 He says,
Why is JNU an issue? Why? They are f***king University students, why
is that an issue? They say, “JNU waale anti-national hai” (“JNU students are
anti-national”). I am like, students hai (they are students). Then they say, “ye
log desh ko girayenge” (“they will bring this country down”). I am like, inka
canteen mein udhaari hai (they have debts in their canteen!).
In this quote, the lines “JNU waale anti-national hai” and “Ye log desh ko girayenge”
are mimicked using the same tone as the people who come up with such criticism.
Throughout his set, Kamra maintains an incisive tone and doesn’t hesitate to ques-
tion the authorities. Using the tool of impersonation, he mimics the sentiments
of the political personalities and those in support of the government. This helps
in attaining a parody sort of humour to entertain the audience. The live audience
in the venue laughs and cheers throughout his jokes and punchlines. The online
comments on his video are, however, a mixed bag of gaalis (ridicule) and support.
It ranges from comments such as “yes it’s me, I hate this man, his hatred towards
India, need to kick him out . . . bloody pig” to “keep it up. People like u are ‘Moti-
vation’ to everyone who ‘questions’.”
Flaunting a t-shirt that has Wah Modiji Wah (Wow Modiji Wow) in big bold let-
ters, he released another video in March 2019.24 He often uses this phrase in most
of his videos and wears this t-shirt to several of his comic acts, to cynically rebuke
the current Narendra Modi government.
In this set, Kamra starts like this:
Ek baat batao, ye mere aur Ambaniji ke beech mein, Modiji kya kar rahe hai? Main
seedha Ambani ko vote kyun nahi de sakta? Apne ko koi problem hai kya Ambani
se? Banao na PM. Ambani ke paas wo sab kuch hai jo mereko chahiye! Metro,
kapda, petrol, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi toh free mein diya hai yaar. Itna dayalu aadmi dekha
hai. Bete ko job lagwana tha, pure desh mein wifi baat diya.
(Kamra, 2019)
Just tell me one thing, what is Modiji doing between me and Ambani? Why
can’t I directly vote for Ambani? (The crowd roars with laughter and cheers
for almost a minute such that Kamra has to wait for them to finish and then
continue). Do we have any problems with Ambani? Make him the PM!
Ambani has everything that I want. Metro, clothes, petrol, wifi. In fact, he
has given us the Wi-Fi for free. Such a kind person. To find work for his son,
he gave the whole country free Wi-Fi.
Drawing on the private industrialists’ connection with the present politicians,

he mockingly says that the industrialists should stand for elections since they
can bring about ‘real development’. This is a clear attack on the government,
who works only for the interests of this capitalist class. He also touches on
the Ram temple controversy that the current Hindu right-wing government is
vehemently in support of. Citing the example of Uttar Pradesh, where hospitals
do not have oxygen cylinders (this is in reference to the recent mass death of
children in Gorakhpur, UP, due to a shortage of oxygen despite repeated warn-
ings given to the state government about the same), he derided the people for
focusing their energy more on temple construction rather than on serious issues
such as death, which equally amounts to murder. Notwithstanding his light,
breezy tone and perky body language, his attempt at criticism and exposition is
efectively visible.
His openness to change is similarly noticeable when he calls for the public to
think critically rather than emotionally. However, Kamra recognises the pitfalls
of being politically outspoken (including eviction, last-minute show cancellations
and rejection), and has now acquired an attitude of indiference and amusement
(Chatterjee, 2018). To give an example, in a tweet on 18 December 2019, Kunal
Kamra wrote, “Economy fx kardo bhai,” which essentially translates to “Please fx
the economy, brother.” The statement was followed by three laughing emoticons
(suggesting a humourous statement).25 This comes in response to the failing Indian
economy that is being discussed by several media houses and economists of the
country. For instance, on the prior tweet, Kamra received a reply from Mohit
Bharatiya (the General Secretary of BJP, Mumbai) that said “Take my Words U
will also be Fixed Soon.” He then went on to say, “I am a true patriot and will keep
voicing my opinion against you and your so-called liberal but actually Urban Naxal
gang who is misleading & trying to destabilize the country.” To this Kamra replied,
“‘Mark my words one day you’ll be fxed’ is not voicing an opinion it’s giving a
threat. . . . If I’m ‘destabilising’ the country & misleading people with my ‘content’
take me to court not kangaroo court.”26
Neeti Palta too, on her Amazon Prime special show titled Almost Sanskaari,27
while commenting on her Indian parents and their extra-cautionary behaviour
concerning their children, casually talks of Narendra Modi and how he visited his
mother to get her blessings after becoming the prime minister. Since a picture of
that was circulated through every major newspaper of the country, she jokingly
argued: “Pyar bhi tha PR bhi tha,” which translates as “There was love and there was
PR (public relations).” She waited for the audience to react to the joke – and they
did. However, the reaction was gradual and not an immediate cheer to laughter,
unlike the audience composition in Kamra’s shows, who already expect political
jokes from him. Then, she immediately says, “Bombay, I made a joke, you laughed
on it, we are together in this, remember!” She literally tried to wipe of the joke
because of its political character. This also brings to light how female comedians
remain a little more cautious while making bold statements against the establish-
ment. Interestingly though, her personalised website (http://neetipalta.com/)
introduces her by saying that
Neeti brings to the English comedy scene in India what it sorely lacks – a
female perspective. Therefore, she has the unique advantage of being able
to present a female point of view on a variety of subjects from the life of a
woman in India, Indian idiosyncrasies, to daily irritants, current affairs, etc,
while indulging in a spot of poking fun at men (ok, a lot of that!).
Clearly, she uses her gender as a strong point in advertising her comedy as well as
her jokes. However, her use of mostly English means that only a select audience
gets to engage with her comedy.
Gender and humour

Humour and comedy are gendered felds as well. An analysis along the line of gen-
der reveals that female comedians are usually perceived as being ‘unfunny’. Initially,
the Indian stand-up comedy scene emerged as a male-dominated space, whereby
sexist humour and misogynist jokes generated laughter. Vasu Primlani, who self-
identifes as queer, in a conversation with the Times of India on 28 December
2017,28 expressed concern at the absence of female comedians in any list of ‘top
comedians’ of the country. But such narratives are being upturned with the grow-
ing presence of female stand-up comedians, who are spreading feminist messages
through their performances. With female comedians having their individual social
media channels and shows on Netfix to the comedy talent hunt show, Queens of
Comedy, where female comedians contested for the title, there is a gentle shift.
Richa Thakur (2017) highlights how Neeti Palta subverts ‘wife jokes’ to state that
employing women as investigators will prove to be more productive instead of
being in the domestic sphere. Vasu Primlani’s take on men in Delhi ogling at
women in public spaces is another case in point. Primlani also openly talks about
homosexuality, sexual violence and rape in most of her stand-up sets. In one of her
videos named Demonetisation,29 she also uses a sexual analogy to explain the process.
Being a female comic, she tries to shatter all limits to freedom of expression with
such openness towards the issue of sexuality. Thus, women artists do use this comic
art form as a tool for social change. Moreover, jokes about the everyday experi-
ences of women, from wearing a bra to using sanitary napkins, by Aditi Mittal and
Punya Arora respectively, help in countering the over-sexualisation of the woman’s
body (Thakur, 2017). Such jokes that ridicule the patriarchal mindset are highly
relatable for the audience and are not just for casual laughter. As Lizbeth Goodman
articulates, “women ‘break the silence’ by speaking for themselves, and often by
saying things which may be considered ‘taboo’ subjects in other contexts” through
stand-up comedy (Goodman, 1992a, p. 285).
Comedian Aditi Mittal tackles the gender question head-on in Why Women
Have a Sense of Humour,30 a video released in 2019. She declares how annoyed she
is about journalists asking women how they decided to take up stand-up comedy
as a career. Mittal points out how her male counterparts are never asked the same
question. Drawing a parallel between cooking and making jokes, she asserts how
male chefs get the limelight in public spheres, whereas women have been bound
to kitchen spaces in the domestic sphere. Likewise, she goes on to assert, “And
that’s the same thing with a sense of humour, is that men may do it to show of and
attract babes and get into the newspapers but women have to do it for survival.”
Before this, the audience applauded when she declared the Indian media to be
dead. Taking it forward, she said, “They can’t talk about Adani, Ambani, Aadhar,
and Amit Shah. So they will talk about anything else.” And to this “anything else”
is what she said she owed her career.
In another piece titled Bra Shopping,31 as part of breast cancer awareness month,
Mittal talks about the experiences of Asian women when they go shopping for a
brassiere. From casual remarks and whispered concerns about the bra strap show-
ing, women go through such instances daily. Mittal remarks,
breasts are basically a large conspiracy to keep the safety pin industry in func-
tioning. Because we all know that naa, that one button oddly placed with,
where it’s just sticking out, and you’re like ahaa, from inside, from above,
from below.
While saying this she puts her hand inside her dress to show how women struggle
to pin up their blouses to keep the breasts within their limits. She moves around
and uses her body quite a lot in all of her acts. In other words, she tries to afrm
how a small peek through an oddly placed button in a shirt or any clothing gets
connected to shame. Something as innocuous as breasts become a matter of great
discussion as she successfully spreads the message of body positivity along with
social awareness. Mittal also has an alternate onstage comic persona named Dr.
Mrs. Lutchuke, in which she drapes a saree and takes up a new accent. This new
character claims to be a doctor who deals with issues around sex and relationships.
In one such video uploaded on Quint,32 she takes up questions related to sex from
the youths. One question posed to her was: “On Valentine’s Day, my gay friend
accidentally touched me on my butt. I got an erection. Has his touch made me
gay?” To this, she replied,
See now, if being touched by people made you gay or straight or made you
change your sexuality, then every time you enter the Mumbai local, you
would be constantly fluctuating between gay, straight, bisexual, gay, straight,
bisexual. So it does not change like this!
In other words, through this persona, she shares her views on gender and
sexuality with a progressive stand, debunking the stereotyping notions preva-
lent otherwise. The comments on her video were also commendable. For
instance, one person wrote, “OMG Aditi Mittal you have broken boundaries
in India being a female artist here. Lolz.” This might suggest that the audience
is recognising her courage in humouring people with taboo topics regardless
of being a female comic in India. This also demonstrates how comedy on sex
and sexuality are often expected out of male comedians, unlike their female
counterparts.
In her Netfix special show titled Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say (2017),33
Aditi Mittal starts her set by introducing herself as a 30-year-old, single Indian
woman. By stating her singlehood, she takes a dig at the Indian sensibilities,
according to which a woman is expected to be settled into marriage and moth-
erhood at her age. Furthermore, she jokes about how women are catcalled in
public spaces, by enacting the way the perpetrators would whistle and call out
names in a sing-song manner. Such everyday experiences of gendered violence
are depicted through sarcastic humour. Mittal then declares that she is of mixed
descent, whereby she is half Sindhi and half Punjabi. Having direct interaction
with the crowd, she asks, “Any more half and half mongrels in the crowd?” To
this, one female audience member replies that she is half Bengali and half Maha-
rashtrian. Mittal then replies, saying, “You would be a mess in politics. You’re like,
should I burn a bus or write a poem?” This way she takes a dig at the regional
political regimes in the two states. Then she answers the question with, “Let me
write a poem on a burning bus.”
Similarly, Neeti Palta too outrightly poses several questions on sexism and
gender in her video Almost Sanskaari.34 With short hair and a cool demeanour,
she introduces herself by agreeing that she isn’t quite famous. Interestingly,
she playfully chips in the fact that when she released her video along with
a male comic on YouTube, the comments on her video were mostly dealing
with her looks rather than her comedy. Later in the video, she talks about an
incident of her going to buy condoms for her brother. While explicating that
incident, she remarks funnily, “In this country, a woman going and asking for
a condom is like an RSS dude asking for a beef burger.” Through this state-
ment, she brings forth sexism along with the food politics that is currently
circulating in the country.35 In another sketch, she speaks about how she is
often misunderstood as ‘unmarried’. Then she justifies that by saying, “It isn’t
my fault. I was allergic to all signs of marriage. Wore a ‘mangalsutra’, got a
rash. Put ‘Sindoor’, got dandruff.” Sarcastically commenting on the symbolic
burden of marriage, she also declared, “At the time of marriage, you know,
people say, ‘you have to deck up the bride’. So, they dumped all the family
jewellery on me. I looked less like a bride and more like a catalogue of Trib-
huvandas, a famous jeweller.” For a good duration of almost ten minutes, she
consistently blurts out the problems that a new bride faces both during the
marriage ceremony and after it. Pointing out the opposite treatment that the
groom receives, she makes fun of marriage as an institution and its fake prom-
ises. Later in the video, she asks:
Are there any newly married couple here? Cause if you are newly married
people, you will get hit by India’s favourite question. “Koi good news hai?”
(“Do you have any good news?”). India is seriously a result oriented country
guys! Worst are the matajis (mothers). Nothing better to do but to fantasize
about your sex life. All bloody retired Savita bhabhis (aunties)! (Savita bhabhi
is a pornographic cartoon character, posed as a housewife).
She goes on to talk of the pressure a woman goes through to deliver the “good
news” after marriage and how childlessness is seen as a “problem” that can
be solved through numerous methods. This brings out the manner in which
she is trying to resist the conventional symbols of marriage, both through her
demeanour and her humour. After all, the subversion of traditional jokes by
asserting one’s subjectivity allows for the liberating efects of women’s comedy
(Goodman, 1992b, p. 289). Interestingly, in a stand-up scene done for shaadi.
com (a matrimonial site),36 Palta explains how she does not know “how to be
a girl” because of being raised in an army family. Constantly drawing on prac-
tices she indulged in, that “good girls” aren’t supposed to do (like making the
frst move with a boy), she tried to garner laughter through a comedy based
on reversed gender roles. The video ends with shaadi.com giving this advice
to women, “Ladies, the stage is yours. Make the frst move.” In other words,
Neeti Palta gave this performance as part of a website to disseminate this social
messaging.
Comedian Sanjay Rajoura performed a piece titled Indian Mard (2019),37 which
critiques the idea of masculinity in the Indian context. He says,
Hindustani mard apne aap hi problematic cheez hai. Mard anyways problematic
hai but Hindustani mard ek alag hi species hai.
Indian males are inherently problematic. Although men are anyways prob-
lematic, Indian men belong to a different species altogether.
The audience laughs out loud at these statements. In fact, the camera turns to show
the audience clapping and cheering at his joke. He ridicules the drunk male who is
under the illusion that women are impressed by him being in an intoxicated state.
He then draws the analogy between women and Bhakts (dedicated followers of the
right-wing government) and between the intoxicated male and the prime minister
of the country. He then turns the joke on its head, saying neither have women
turned into Bhakts nor have these drunkards become the prime minister. His per-
formances are usually in Hinglish, a combination of Hindi and English, which
helps him overcome language and class barriers amongst the audience to a certain
extent. Rajoura goes on to criticise the idea of love and romance as popularised
by Hindi cinema, where the male fgures are shown to be harassing the women in
the name of love by stalking or making her uncomfortable in the name of romantic
pursuits. The comedian questions the normalisation of such behaviour and makes
a case for the #MeToo movement, when women voiced their experiences and
named their harassers publicly. This is met by huge applause among the audience.
He thereby reinforces the importance of consent. His tone and style of delivery are
done with all seriousness, yet it generates laughter.
The online reaction to his video is, however, not so rosy. Some comments
include, “Sanjay Rajoura is anti-national and anti-hindu, boycott him . . . true
bhakt” and “Right but he is a gay.” At the same time, some comments applaud him
for taking this topic up as a man. For instance, a person wrote, “India needs more
men with mentality like yours . . . excellent . . . only a real man has the power to
accept faults in their own gender.”
Conclusion
In a democratic country such as India, it is important to evaluate the critical role
played by a comic artist and its ramifcations in light of the online violence comedi-
ans face. Given that comedy serves as a crucial medium to express dissent and raise
awareness among people with the use of humour, it does lead the audience to think
critically on matters of socio-political importance, while generating laughter. But in
today’s political climate, the political leaders are not ready to take criticism in stride.
Historian Ramachandra Guha (2017) criticises the anti-intellectual social attitude of
the present right-wing government at the centre, which displays “an absolute con-
tempt for scholarship, literature, and the arts.” This also gets refected in the violence
comic artists face. What does it signify and how much is this a deterrent to their
performance politics? In his interview with Anupama Chopra, Kunal Kamra reveals
that the choice of jokes in certain events is dictated by its organisers. This means that
the intolerance showcased by the political class has instilled fear among the general
public to a large extent. On the genre of political satire, Kunal Kamra said that art is
more important than one’s opinions, thereby for him, political comedy is a by-product
of comedy (Kamra et al., 2019). Kamra does not consider himself as a harbinger of
change. In an interview with Livemint in March 2018, he mentioned, “Let me be
very clear – for me, Shut Up Ya Kunal38 is primarily interesting content that can help
fll seats at shows. Yes, you can bring about awareness, you can help change minds,
but it can’t be at the expense of not having good jokes.” In several other platforms
as well, he placed a greater emphasis on the craft of comedy than on being an agent
of persuasion. His views on the comic art form are quite distinct from those of Vasu
Primlani and Varun Grover, who consciously recognise the strong social function of
humour. However, it has been found that “if humour can playfully present informa-
tion or argument without eliciting a negative audience reaction, then employing it
could be a promising way to incite attitude change” (Young, 2017, p. 876). This,
however, is a bone of contention in the Indian context, where the comedians are
often met with negative audience reactions as already discussed.
Whether it is the hatred faced by Taslima Nasreen in West Bengal39 or the out-
rage against Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s flm Padmavati; be it the cancellation of Salman
Rushdie’s appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival40 to the death of journal-
ist Gauri Lankesh who critiqued the establishment, there have been numerous
violations on freedoms of speech and expression. “It is not just imperfect laws,
but the complex interplay of social forces, ideological biases, and political choices
that inhibits freedom of expression in India” (Guha, 2017). What does the phrase
‘freedom of expression’ actually mean looking at the debates on censorship that
are ongoing in the current scenario? Interestingly, Vivek Oberoi had used a similar
framework to promote his movie PM Narendra Modi (2019) right before the elec-
tions. Where do we draw the line then?
Throughout the chapter, we have attempted to unravel the various themes and
narratives that emerge within the feld of stand-up comedy in India. They are found
to be intertwined with our immediate socio-political realities such that humour
takes a political turn. While questioning the establishment through the medium of
laughter, it strives to dismantle the existing hierarchies. Thus, humour is a powerful
tool to creatively express one’s dissent against the social structure. It refects how art
has the potential of raising consciousness, in this case through laughter. However,
it is important to recognise that the performers also come from a specifc social
location to be able to acquire space within this entertainment industry. The social
categories of gender, class, caste, ethnicity, sexuality and ability play an important
role in determining the access and content of these comedians. Notwithstanding
these privileges, while the performer has a certain understanding of one’s purpose
and the expected response from the audience, the audience also must be a part of
this socio-cultural milieu with similar ideological alignment to fully appreciate a
performance of comedy. Hence, the humour that is being generated and its pos-
sibilities of resistance stem from the particular Indian context in which it emerges.
Notes
1 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is an American television show hosted by comedian
John Oliver, who uses comedy and satire to review the week’s events.
2 An ancient treatise on the theory of drama within the tradition of theatre in India.
3 Before the advent of cable channels on television, Doordarshan was the only broadcast-
ing television network founded by the Government of India.
4 www.instagram.com/canvaslaughclub/?hl=en (Last accessed on 1 March 2020)
5 https://twitter.com/thatcomedyclub?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7
Ctwgr%5Eauthor (Last accessed on 2 March 2020)
6 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are premier technical and research institutes
declared as ‘Institutes of National Importance’ under the Institutes of Technology Act,
1951.
7 www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbioiS7R6tk&t=45s
8 www.instagram.com/p/BwGldonlM_o/
9 www.instagram.com/p/BiRBHuAhoeh/?igshid=1ixiiz43d4nff (Last accessed on 2
March 2020)
10 www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH2RgOYz38M. This is a link to one of their songs on
2019 Indian Elections.
11 www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtpPgVhNvok&t=321s (Last accessed on 10 January

2020)
12 www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwZcj1ISOa0&t=293s (Last accessed on 10 January 2020)
13 A famous movie actress who contested from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2019 elections.
14 This Act aims to grant citizenship to people entering India from Pakistan, Bangladesh
and Afghanistan before 2014 based on their religion such that it excludes people from
Muslim communities. Coupled with the country-wide NRC, it has the possibility to
create a huge chunk of Muslim populations that might be excluded from the Register if
they are unable to produce the requisite documents that prove their Indian citizenship.
The members of other religious communities will, however, be free of such exclusionary
practices through the use of CAA.
15 www.youtube.com/watch?v=USHluu-9cG0. This video is of Varun Grover performing
this poem in the Spoken Fest 2020. The English translation is as per YouTube subtitles.
16 https://twitter.com/varungrover/status/1208616669121105922 (Last accessed on 10
January 2020). This is in support of the ruling government’s agenda to demolish Babri
Masjid and to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya, claiming it to be the birthplace of Lord
Ram. In Ayodhya, Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 followed by communal vio-
lence. This matter was recently closed by the Supreme Court in the Ayodhya verdict,
2019.
17 It is a satirical news commentary show hosted by popular comedian Sanjay Rajoura that
is aired in NewsClick, an online news portal. He takes up various contemporary socio-
political issues pertaining to the country and discusses them in a funny manner.
18 During the anti-CAA protests, the police forcefully entered the campus of Jamia Milia
Islamia, a University located in New Delhi, in an attempt to silence the voices of dissent:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM6uapeYIIE (Last accessed on 30 March 2020) This is a
link to the discussion between Grover and Rajoura.
19 www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V4-rujOBuU&t=185s (Last accessed on 30 February
2020)
20 www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bn722c58OM (Last accessed on 1 January 2020)
21 www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFtrPTv3D1g&t=143s (Last accessed on 10 January
2020)
22 www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBbpFGGAkmo (Last accessed on 25 March 2020)
23 Because of its Left-leaning student politics and its constant critique of the government
policies, JNU has come to be branded as an ‘anti-national’ institution by the ruling
government.
24 www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Su_ydENa2w&t=164s
25 https://twitter.com/kunalkamra88/status/1207236890992230400
26 https://twitter.com/kunalkamra88/status/1207556197705900032
27 www.primevideo.com/detail/0RV88X9RLY68SYEFA567C7AIS6/ref=atv_hm_
hom_c_8pZiqd_2_2
28 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/a-famous-punjabi-stand-up-
comic-once-took-his-pants-off-in-my-hotel-room-and-lay-on-my-bed-i-sent-him-
packing/articleshow/62270251.cms
29 www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ZL7qa2Bxg (Last accessed on 10th January, 2020)
30 www.netflix.com/watch/81008313?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C1%2C132fb0cf-
99cd-4e29-95a6-40549c9cce9b-207960949%2C%2C (Last accessed on 20 March 2020)
31 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqiwwGOynQ
32 Quint is an online platform that makes videos on politics, entertainment, sports, sex,
technology, etc. The link to the video is:www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpwnktzlq8M
33 www.netflix.com/watch/80183329?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C1%2C8f4a83dbcf3
9cdd0fad96d87741fafd9344fa1a8%3A014e8cc1a3313ed5dbc118a41b4a358242878e15%
2C%2C (Last accessed on 17 November 2019)
34 https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0RV88X9RLY68SYEFA567C7AIS6/ref=atv_
sr_fle_c_Tn74RA__1_1_1?sr=1-1&pageTypeIdSource=ASIN&pageTypeId=B07ZV
MGBQC&qid=1634016069
35 There was a huge furor regarding the beef ban in India in 2017, which specifically tar-
geted the minority Muslim community.
36 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdKE7t3AWZc (Last accessed on 12 January 2020)
37 www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHJE-2w7fJU (Last accessed on 12 January 2020)
38 Shut Up Ya Kunal is a series of videos that Kunal Kamra released on YouTube where he
interviews specific public personalities on current affairs in a satiric way.
39 www.dnaindia.com/india/report-facing-bans-taslima-nasreen-says-no-hope-of-return-
ing-to-kolkata-1959059
40 www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/26/salman-rushdie-jaipur-literary-festival
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10
HUMOROUS PUBLIC IN
BANGLADESH
An analytical reading of mediated politics
Ratan Kumar Roy1
The emergence and development of television media in Bangladesh shares an

intimate relationship with political transformation like elsewhere in South Asia.
No wonder democracy has become an essential reference point for South Asian
mediascapes, but also a key concept for the global reading of media and com-
munication. Democracy has been conveniently looked at through the lens of the
political, resulting in the emergence of an ordinary division between the politi-
cal and cultural. Similarly, the freedom of expression(s), democratic practices and
politics in and around media are discussed in consideration of state control, policy
mechanism, regulation and censorship. The public is missing with its substance
and performance, actions and responses in relation to media and in reference to
media-related debates on freedom and policy. This chapter seeks to understand
public opinion and engagement with media in the form of humour. Primarily, it
illustrates those aspects of audiences in relation to TV news in Bangladesh. In addi-
tion, it captures some phenomenal cases in the digital domain that enables one to
argue for a humorous public.
The prevalent trend of dismissing humour in the ethnographic inquiry has been
taken into consideration in this chapter. An ethnography of audiences enabled
me to dig deeper into the cultural world of the people and understand their
worldviews. As Swinkels and Koning (2016) point out, the possibility of humour
emerging as a signifcant concept for research, as well as methodological insights,
can also help us to get familiar with the local forms and social norms. Humour has
been taken as a key category in this chapter that is inclusive of jokes, playfulness of
public and fctional thoughts and narratives (Rufell, 2011). It is to echo Driessen
(1997, 2016), who argued that humour is a form of critical anthropology where
“common sense is disrupted, the unexpected evoked, familiar subjects are situated
in unfamiliar, even shocking contexts in order to make the audience or readership
conscious of their own cultural assumptions” (Driessen, 1997, p. 227).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003097549-13
Humorous public in Bangladesh 179
The chapter frst introduces the mediascape with a particular focus on televi-
sion news in Bangladesh.2 Public perception and opinions, practices and playful
deliberations are discussed within the context of contemporary politics and culture.
This will follow a shift from broadcast media to a digital domain such as YouTube
and video meme-making app TikTok within the context of public engagement
to media and mediated possibilities. There is an attempt to engage with the idea
of public (as well as non-public) from the vantage point of mediated culture and
humorous public. Sufce it to say, the aforesaid humorous public can be located
through the ordinary acts, responses and reactions of the citizens toward the every-
day politics. The humorous public gains legitimacy by unsettling the political status
quo, formalised political behavior and politics of the elites through the acts of
mocking, examined in the realm of mediated communication in this context.
Television media culture in Bangladesh

The Bangladesh mediascape is constituted by the changing dynamics of public
engagement and a burgeoning market economy. This is owing to a traditional
elite Bengali culture, also known as literary culture, that had emerged in response
(or reaction) to the colonial legacy (Van Schendel, 2009). It is imperative to note
that the urban-centric cultural expression and changes in lifestyles to keep up with
the globalisation made the ordinary people skeptical about elite culture. The rural
people develop a discourse of ridiculing the urban lifestyle in the form of jokes and
light humours. Even, within the capital city of Dhaka, there is a sharp distinction
in tastes of consuming culture between the middle-class, elitist groups and wage-
earning mass people. As Azam (2013) points out the tendency of the Dhaka-based
Bhadralok section (middle-class and elitist groups) who pretend to be the saviour
of national culture and could seek out the true essence of art from culture. The
Bhadralok section often complain about the Bangladeshi commercial flms associ-
ating with rickshaw pullers’ culture and fnd themselves comfortable in watching
TV in opposition to going for cinemas.3 In recent years, a handful of movie theatres
could attract the Bhadralok section, as there has been a successful efort to produce
alternative and art cinemas in Bangladesh. However, a similar distinction in terms
of cultural tastes and consumption of entertainment is difcult in the domain of
television viewing because of the diversity and multiplicity of private channels.4
In the pre-independence era of Bangladesh, newspaper and radio broadcasting
played a signifcant role in generating a nationalist ethos. Post-independence, flm and
television media successfully entered into the public domain up until the 1990s (Raju,
2014; Shoesmith and Genilo, 2013). In the early 1990s, satellite TV channels entered
Bangladesh, but the local entrepreneurs of Bengali satellite channels took one more
decade to build its self-capability for dissemination and popularisation. Being a new
medium of visual communication for information dissemination and entertainment,
television gained popularity among the viewers. Bangladesh Television (BTV) had its
monopoly until the local private channels entered the market in the late ’90s (Roy,
2020). Midnight talk shows and poor varieties of news content have always been
180 Ratan Kumar Roy
a matter of concern for the television mediascapes of Bangladesh. Such concerns

and responses are in turn refected in the jokes, sarcasm and witty barbs within and
beyond media domains. Popular entertainment show Ityadi (Etcetera) carried a seg-
ment to portray the talk-show culture of television channels in a satirical way. Ityadi
is an entertainment and education-based magazine programme of BTV introduced
in the late ’80s with a satiric expression. It is not merely a comedy show but rather
the objective has been to disseminate information and cultivate awareness among
the viewers by pointing out various dissonance and paradoxes in the society (Shazu,
2012). The show has continued to maintain its regularity in pointing out the fimsi-
ness of a growing TV news industry and related practices in various episodes with
added wit. One such episode shows, in a sarcastic way, how a professed speaker of a
midnight TV talk show engages with a vegetable vendor in analysing the price and
quality of coriander leaves. People in the fea market got irritated as the analyst kept
stretching the matter in his habitual way and wanted to make it a topic for his next
episode of the talk show. Similarly, since 2006–2007, Ityadi carried various parody
clips to question the odd and depthless arrangements of destination live telecasting
by the newly emerged private TV channels. During the same time, private channels
entered within a competitive market of news broadcasting and continued to struggle
in coming up with convincing variations of content and coverage. An attempt at
mimicry of such a ‘rat race’ to make up news stories out of anything without proper
substance by a bunch of journalists from various TV channels got refected on this
magazine show. TV show Ityadi introduced a hilarious outft, a TV channel called
Kashem TV, that continued mimicking the television reporting, news broadcasting,
media trends and changes of media practices. The appearance and presentation of
Kashem TV are funny and un-smart, but full of the wit and sharp sarcasm of TV news
reporting. The news professionals of Bangladesh like to consider Kashem TV as an
example of shallowness, while viewers continue with mimicry and sarcasm in relation
to TV news culture, which will be elaborated in the next sections. The implication
of television in public life that has been illustrated in a satiric way by the TV show
Ityadi unfolded two critical points. First, a reality of people mimicking and reacting
to the contents and styles of television broadcasting can be charted. Second, a sense
of self-critical representation by the TV professionals can be identifed. The dual
observations within the context of television broadcasting and public engagement
will be supplemented by the digital media practices that enable a lucid understanding
about the formation of a humorous public. In the following sections, I will examine
the humorous role and playful actions of viewers in engaging with TV news. Such
attempts unravel the politics behind the making and viewing of news and help us to
fathom the political implication of media consumption.
Playful audiences
Are the audiences playful? Are they critical? Can the audiences become playful yet
critical? Ethnographic engagement with the television viewers afrms that they can
be critical but playful. Even the playfulness of the audiences can be read as critical
engagement and hence political in the ultimate analysis. Nevertheless, before going
into the discussion on possibilities of playful pleasure of television media, we should
briefy get a view of how to understand the audiences. It is also imperative to
make sense of the public in relation to television viewing in Bangladesh. Television
entered into the public domain of Bangladesh as a medium of not only informa-
tion dissemination but with various other elements such as fantasy, entertainment
and thrill. In the initial days, a handful of viewers justify serious engagement with
television by watching news and information-related shows while the mass viewers
fulfl their urges to be entertained by watching epic-based shows, dubbed serials,
drama, fction, flms and sports. They seek out pleasure not only in the process of
meaning-making of the contents, but also by developing imaginations about the
production of televisual elements. Such practice of speculation and judgment of
the television medium by the viewers became more prominent with the intensity
of television viewing after the arrival of private channels and wider connectivity of
satellite nationwide.
The audience remains an infuential category in conducting media and com-
munication research. Particularly, audience studies gained much signifcance in
studying culture after the arrival of television (Kellner, 1995; Morley, 1980; Sil-
verstone, 2003). For instance, David Morley’s (1992) small-scale ethnographic
investigation in domestic media consumption and Cohen et al.’s (1996) exploration
on local audiences in the context of a global newsroom help in understanding the
global–local dynamic of the media system. However, contemporary media prac-
tices are characterised by more diversifed and fragmented elements. Identity has
also been a major factor in apprehending the audiences, because it crosscuts many
identity positions. In studying viewing culture, audiences are being considered
as public, and there have been propositions of a ‘consumer-citizen’ framework
(Harindranath, 2009). Discussion and gathering knowledge about audiences are
crucial along with media and democracy for a consumer-citizen framework. This
framework helps in considering the audiences as citizens who are active partici-
pants in the civic politics, and at the same time consumers who maintain a certain
practice towards the media commodities. The negotiating strategies and complex
terrain of “consumer-citizen” have been explored in relation to television view-
ing and in the context of Indian political culture by Harindranath (2009). In the
context of Bangladesh, the crisis of ‘disconnect’ made a curious case of public
culture in exploring the citizen-audience-consumer interrelation (Azam, 2013).
In studying Dhaka-based cinema culture, Azam (2013) argues that due to the ‘dis-
connect’ between product and consumer, between elite culture and public culture,
the corporate-commercial media producers only aim at pleasing the “consumer as
audience” but not the “audience as consumer” (227).
The scholarly interventions found a debated relationship between the audiences
and public. One group is ready to acknowledge that “audiences are subsumed
within the broader conception of ‘the public’ or ‘publics’, while the other group
found them ‘mutually opposed’” (Livingstone, 2005). Daniel Dayan’s search for a
‘television public’ made the debate more complex because there have been further
182 Ratan Kumar Roy
contradictions to credit the television audiences as ‘fully fedged’, ‘proto-’, ‘quasi-’

or ‘pseudo-’ publics (Dayan, 2001; Livingstone, 2005). Keeping track of the con-
temporary debates on studying media and audiences, the present study has not
subscribed to an oppositional understanding between audience and public or citi-
zen and audiences. Rather, it credited the audiences as publics who have a certain
belongingness; as citizens they can form certain opinions, as consumers they are
capable of shifting their taste, and as masses they can express and resist (Roy, 2020).
In the latter part of the discussion, I will return to the point on the political merit
of the mediated public (with a provocative category of non-public) as well as the
audiences and their humour.
It becomes easier to understand the audiences and their engagement with
television when we refer to John Fiske’s idea of semiotic democracy of television
(Fiske, 2011). For him, the semiotic democracy of television enables the viewers
to be playful, extract the pleasure out and thus open up discursive possibilities
and practices of the viewers. The play and pleasure shall be read in relation to the
television representation and reception. The popular notion about the mediated
world often creates the binary between representation and real, which is for the
news television, news (factual) and fction (fctional). The play is in the actions
by the viewers to upset the binary, become creative and thereby, resistive. To
Fiske (2011[1987], p. 238), the “power of play involves the power to play with
the boundary between the representation and the real.” Pleasure is another socio-
cultural by-product that is inherent in the media culture because television is a
“producerly medium”5 that essentially depends on its viewers to produce diverse
meanings rather than the limited meaning given by the news-making people. So,
for Fiske,
A better explanation of the pleasures of television lies in understanding it as

a text of contestation which contains forces of closure and of openness and
which allows viewers to make meanings that are subculturally pertinent to
them, but which are made in resistance to the forces of closure in the text,
just as their subcultural identity is maintained in resistance to the ideological
forces of homogenization.6
The television media can produce playful pleasure and centralised pleasure. The
playful one is active pleasure and the centralised one is conformist; thus, playful
pleasure enables more democracy, heterogeneity, multiplicity and divergence in
power. This playfulness of television is considered as the sign of semiotic democ-
racy that allows the media participants to produce diverse meanings and the viewers
to draw pleasure. This is not far removed from the character of television media
culture of Bangladesh, thus uses the discursive power of meaning-making, involv-
ing the television producers and the audiences.
In the following section we will see with due reference to certain instances, how
the audiences are able to take out pleasure in the form of cracking jokes and mak-
ing fun of the television news.
Cracking jokes and making fun: politics and public of TV

People in the countryside started getting electricity and following satellite connec-
tion 2010 onwards; they became familiar with the day-long news and entertainment
programmes on Bangladeshi private channels. From 2012 to 2014, the attraction
towards television news was at its peak. But suddenly in 2015 and onwards the
enchantment went down and people started making fun of television journalism,
live shows, talk shows and overall 24/7 TV news culture.
One such humorous instance was the prevalence of a joke among the viewers of
Nilphamari, a small town of Bangladesh,7 which goes like this: ‘Bazaar Geile Silver
Carp, TV Khuille Hasinar Baap’. The prose ‘Bazaar Geile Silver Carp, TV Khuille
Hasinar Baap’ (the Silver Carp fsh dominates the market, and the father of Sheikh
Hasina dominates the TV screen!) is a joke that has been made out of the present
nature of television in Bangladesh by the viewers. Initially, I heard this from one
paanwala who was asked to express his opinion on television. He responded, ‘Mui
aar ki koim bahe! Mainshe kose, naki “Bazaarot Geile Silver Carp, TV Khuille Hasinar
Baap!”’ (What else can I say Mr! People are only saying that ‘the Silver Carp fsh
dominates the market, and the father of Sheikh Hasina dominates the TV screen!’).
I was surprised by the joke he made and the fact that other customers present
there took it lightly and broke into laughter. The joke was not only about the
nature of television programmes but also contains a reference to the father of the
nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who is the father of the current
prime minister of the country, Sheikh Hasina. In the contemporary socio-political
scenario of Bangladesh, diferent individuals have been facing unpleasant conse-
quences due to allegations of cracking jokes, or making derogatory remarks, or
acting in ways that can be perceived as disgraceful to the father of the nation.8
It seemed to me that these people are not informed of the consequences that
making such humorous remarks about Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib can bring about.
It also made me recall the trend of calling Sheikh Hasina as ‘Shekher Beti’ [the
daughter of Sheikh Mujib] by the local people, and it has never been considered as
ofensive. Rather, it exhibited a sense of familiarity and closeness attached to such
a humorous reference owing to the fact that the aged people who have lived under
the leadership of Sheikh Mujib perceive Sheikh Hasina’s appearance as a political
leader only in relation to her father, independent of her personal charismatic appeal.
But, in the present scenario, when the viewers address and utter the name of Sheikh
Mujib with reference to his daughter’s name, ‘Hasinar Baap’ (the father of Sheikh
Hasina), there is a slight agony attached. It also reminds me of the excitement of the
people from my hometown Nilphamari and the amused faces of the aged people,
including my grandfather, on Sheikh Hasina’s arrival for a public meeting 20 years
back. Even though the speech was scheduled for the afternoon, my grandfather
started getting ready since morning. He took me along and stopped at two diferent
tea shops, where I saw the excitement among people who were telling each other,
‘cholen bahe, Shekher Beti Hasinar Vashon Shunir Jai’ [Let’s go, guys, to listen to Sheikh
Mujib’s daughter Hasina’s speech] (for more discussion, see Roy, 2021).
184 Ratan Kumar Roy
Juxtaposed against that memory, the contemporary humorous address ‘Hasinar

Baap’ certainly reveals an evident sense of annoyance in their expression. Precisely
that anguish was to consume the excessive representation of government matters
on TV news. The remark of ‘Hasinar Baap’ is not a direct reference to the father
of the nation, but rather it is fraught with discontentment at the desperate and dis-
proportionate nature of publicity of the ruling party on television. For instance, in
the words of a respondent, ‘Khobort khali omare kotha koy, khali omare kotha!’ (There
is only their [government/ruling party’s] stories in the television news, full of their
news!). As I explored more such viewer narratives, and got to hear the same joke
repeatedly, it made me more aware of and conscious about the discomfort and
annoyance of the people toward the dominance of the ruling party on the televi-
sion screen.
The critical and playful minds of the viewers are not limited to cracking jokes
about the current status of TV, but are also refected through their practices of
making fun of the TV professionals. The following instance would help us in under-
standing the way in which audiences bring out the pleasure in public discussions.
Over time, television viewers have become very particular about watching talk
shows. Simultaneously, they have also become quite apprehensive about the qual-
ity, given the overabundance of this genre. To express his opinion about television
programmes on news channels, Kajal Adhikari said:
I have heard that in Dhaka, there are some ‘talkers’ who come by themselves
every evening near the TV station. They get prepared on their own with
make-up and wait to get a call from the TV channel. They are not invited
but make themselves available to the channels if there is a requirement of a
guest for the show. These people have taken it as their profession, and they
are available on demand.9
He did not wait for my response to it, nor did he ask for an afrmation, despite
knowing my familiarity with the TV channel. He made this statement in such a
manner as if it is a fact that he was sure of. The other two respondents accompa-
nying us, Monirul Islam and Bari Siddique, smiled at it but did not consider the
statement as entirely a joke. Instead, they also added their understanding on the talk
show culture of contemporary television.
Monirul Islam said, “My body does not permit me to watch these talk shows, I
actually cannot digest.” He meant to say that the timing and nature of the talk shows
did not suit his health requirements or routine. It has been observed that in small
towns and villages, people do not like to watch shows focussing on discussions at
nighttime, as most households stop watching TV by 11 p.m. The public gatherings
for watching news and talk shows disperse by 10:30 p.m. in Nilphamari town and
by 9 p.m. in the surrounding rural bazaar areas. Monirul explained to me that at
night before sleeping, he does not fnd it healthy to listen to ‘quarrels and insensi-
tive debates’. For him, these ‘verbal fghts’ are not at all constructive and do not add
any productive change to his life. The sarcasm surrounding midnight talk shows
and the depthless quarrel culture that was promoted by Ityadi almost two decades
back still remain a matter of concern for television viewers in present times. In one
of its shows in 2006, Ityadi refected that TV reporters from all channels were run-
ning behind a goat in search of a news item and ended up attempting to interview
it. Such jokes are not limited to the entertainment or comedy shows but are also
propagated by the viewers in various creative ways. Young viewers from the coun-
tryside of Bangladesh continue to point out the lack of balance, bias and depthless
news coverage by constant mocking of its contents. It is disproportionate, depthless
and disenchanting to them because signifcant issues of national and public interest
are not given sufcient attention or probed further by the TV journalists. Instead,
the news coverage remains invested into certain repetitive propaganda and routine
appearances with predictable statements from selective political faces. The internet
provided them with an alternative platform for expressing their dissatisfaction that
often takes the form of humour. Some amateur youth started operating YouTube
channels to circulate news reports on ministers or political leaders in the form of
comedies, remade from various TV news clips, while adding vocal mockery and
twisting the meaning. Some of these YouTubers create hybrid video clips that
are hilariously coherent despite being an amalgamation of completely unrelated
audiovisual images. Due to the apprehension that mainstream news bulletins in
the TV channels are unable to deliver factual truths owing to political pressure
and control, some of the digital activists belonging to oppositional political groups
launched mockery-based news channels on social media to disseminate content
with added humour and wit. One such YouTube-based and social media–led polit-
ically provocative comedy channel launched in 2014, called KoiyaDimu television.
KoiyaDimu (literally meaning “I will tell”) is a colloquial expression in Bengali of
the formal statement Bole Debo, which means “will be disclosed.” These funny
ensembles of YouTube-based channels make humorous news content, aimed at
ridiculing the government by providing viewers with provocative and hilarious
clips drawn from selective news reports and talk shows of mainstream TV through
hybrid remaking. It is, however, imperative to note that with due disenchantment
towards mainstream news channels, ordinary viewers are also shifting to the digital
domains, where they can make their own point in a much more playful manner.
Hence, the possibility of an emerging humorous public has become quite strong
with the media convergence in Bangladesh.
Digital platforms and (trans)formation of humorous public

At the outset of the 2018 parliamentary election (30 December 2018) of Bangla-
desh, a one-liner joke turned viral on social media domains. Khushite-Thelay-Ghorte,
literally meaning “out of joy, being pushed and to wander” started trending as
a Facebook banner, meme and TikTok video. TikTok is a popular mobile app
launched globally in 2017 (erstwhile popular in China) that enables users to create
short music and looping videos. The app allows the users to edit the videos, change
the speed, twist the sound and visuals, do lip-syncing and use various flters. The
186 Ratan Kumar Roy
most popular, trending feature of this app is to be able to add a newly recorded
video to an existing video clip, while simultaneously preserving its original audio.
Khushite-Thelay-Ghorte is one such video that began trending before the election
in 2018. The aforesaid election was condemned by the opposition as unfair and
non-participatory. The original video shows a live TV report, where the reporter
asked some women why they were standing in a queue outside the polling booth
despite it being visible that they have cast their votes. One of them replied that she
was feeling quite good staying there, while the other lady behind her enthusiasti-
cally said that she was there to simply spend time. In her own words, “just assume
that out of joy, being pushed and to wander.” Even though the original video clip
was from 5 January 2014 national election day (polling) coverage, it was shared by
thousands of YouTubers and remade by TikTok users amidst the national election
of 2018 (30 December) and continued becoming viral even towards the beginning
of 2019. Keeping the audio content of the original clip intact, users remade the
TikTok video, mimicked with an ensemble of everyday items such as a makeup
brush and a bamboo stick for a reporter’s TV microphone. Such remade videos
were shared widely accross various YouTube channels and on other social media
platforms. Facebook in Bangladesh was fooded by that one-liner taking up the
form of a pet joke and symbolic impetus. Humorously enough, people begun to
reply Khushite, Thelay, Ghorte either on social media platforms or in response to
any queries posed to them during everyday social interactions. If they were asked
why they did something or why they went somewhere, they would reply: Khushite,
Thelay, Ghorte!
This instance of humour was dissected rather unfavorably by the mainstream
media professionals and some critics who termed the act as shallow and thin. Other
criticisms of such a popular trend was analysed as a purposive attempt to politically
sustain the idea that rendered the manner in which the national election and poll-
ing was conducted in Bangladesh as questionable. Firstly, this is surely a political
message within the context of a dubious political scenario. But the practices of
mediation, making funny videos, taking humour as a pet sign for further mediation
and the process of symbolising a particular kind of humour, is not solely done by
the political cadres and activists. Rather, it was acknowledged, situated, revitalised
and re-generated by the common people who readily express their discontent and
dissatisfaction with the role of mainstream media such as television. TikTok video
and social media platforms enabled them to do political satire in their own ways.
These kinds of political satire amount to an alternative aesthetic of the masses and
enable them for political critique (Boyer and Yurchak, 2010). In his analysis of the
uses of ridicule and jokes in the context of Nigeria, Obadare (2009) has argued
that humour can be used to articulate the discontinuities in socio-political systems
as well as to create a ‘profane’ public sphere. The signifcance of humour can be
understood by looking at it as a tool for exercising agency by ordinary people, and
as a vibrant form of political participation.
Acts of mocking the political status quo, elites and existing power structures
have been widely examined to understand the potential of humorous public in the
margin (Bernal, 2013; Haugerud, 2013; Klumbytè, 2014). Mahiye Seçil Daǧtaş
examines the Turkish political humour to understand the political satire and the
role of humour as resistance and performance. In her view, “political humour
simultaneously enacts and subverts the everyday relations of power in which it is
entrenched” (2016, p. 14). Quite similar to what we have seen earlier – the case of
a shift from TV to social media platforms to invoke the satire politics and sarcasm –
Daǧtaş (2016) tells us how the alternative spaces are being used by the people
owing to the lack of perspectives in the mainstream news media. Referring to
Boyer and Yurchak (2010), she points out that social media users have been induc-
ing laughter and continued to be playful in the strict regulatory regimes and in the
time of multiple forms of censorship (self-censorship as well).
In this case, it was not only the failure of TV media, but also people’s urge to opt
for an alternative language of expression for their emotions or for contesting the
political culture and power structure, which are not expressed widely otherwise.
Use of the prose “Khushite-Thelay-Ghorte” as a common response to any mundane
question posed to a person may not have a political connotation if we take it out
of the context, but just using the prose for such ordinary and quotidian purposes
has an implicit reference to the national election and the nature of polling in Ban-
gladesh. It feeds into the claims of the opposition parties and also certain reports
that raised questions about free and fair nature of the election, which was allegedly
engineered by the party in power.10 Whether it is by the political opposition or the
ordinary public, the usage of such humour is a phenomenon of peripheral power
exercise. There is a civic group to criticise such phenomenon of a particular joke
becoming viral and consider it as a depthless practice. They may not fnd this to be
an intellectual and creative approach to utilise such shallow media element. But the
depth of such alternative satire and political (as well as politicised) humour can be
comprehended and measured by considering how such politically coloured media
elements become mundane, ordinary, handy, favoured and converted into easily
accessible content that anybody can make into their pet symbol (text, statement or
speech that has a symbolic stimulus).
Taking into consideration the role of media and mediation of humour, it can be
argued that there is an intimate relation in the formation between mediated public
and humorous public. For the ordinary public, humour has been a convenient
tool to participate and respond to the politics (Pathak and Perera, 2018). With the
modern media coming into play, enabling a domain where collective actions of
information dissemination, political performance and public opinions are carried
out, interaction among the state, politics and public became more dynamic. In
Bangladesh, the formation of a mediated public sphere can be visible by delving
deeper into the interface among media, public and politics that unfolds localised
characteristics (Roy, 2020). As a way to participate in constituting the mediated
public sphere, the audiences also turn playful and enable a discursive domain that
is creative and critical with the meaningful wits, sarcasm and ordinary jokes. While
the correspondence between mediated and humorous natures of public is rea-
soned, an evidently vibrant and meaningful form of humorous public is active
188 Ratan Kumar Roy
and functional within the mediascapes of Bangladesh. Keeping an eye on the cases
discussed in this chapter, it is not farfetched to suggest that the media convergence
has a vital contribution in the constitution of a humorous public. With the emer-
gence of social media platforms and access to creative apps on smartphones, an
intriguing transformation of the humorous public is evident in Bangladesh. The
playful practices by the ordinary internet users have a remarkable contribution in
this context. The playful media participants are a vital agent of change to the exist-
ing power structure, as Ardèvol et al. (2010) remind us that a playful dimension of
practices help in transforming the circle of cultural production as well as unsettling
the power relation within and beyond the cultural and media institutions.
Conclusion
The preceding discussion revolves around the mediated politics and humorous pub-
lic in Bangladesh, hinting towards an intimate association and negotiation among
media, politics and humour. Within this collaborative terrain, what remains at the
core is the ‘public’, which sought intellectual inquiry for conceptual clarity. It is
indeed pertinent to delve deeper into the contemporary debates on conceptual cat-
egories of full public, almost public and even non-public (Katz and Dayan, 2012).
Non-public as a conceptual category is provocative and productive for understand-
ing the practices and role of audiences. It can be seen as a default designation but
not as a reverse concept to the public (Bonaccorsi, 2012; Jacobi and Luckerhof,
2012). There is a trend of attaching a certain negativity to defne non-public that
is invisible (in public), incompetent (of seeking and gaining attention from others)
and incapable (of forming opinion) in opposition to the public who would be
visible, appear in public, raise demands and make points to be recognised. One of
the reasons behind such an unfertile split becomes dominant because of a careless
split between culture and life (Bonaccorsi, 2012). For us, it is crucial to examine
the cultural life as a broader unit and defne culture as the way of life. This would
enable us to see humour not simply as a cultural tool or symbolic marker but as a
politically impactful feature and medium for the people to communicate. It also
enables us to examine how humour adds value to the cultural life of people and at
once supplements the political mediation and expression.
For the ease of argument, we can consider a humorous public as a non-public
that “can be viewed as much as political mediation as a sociological one, a necessary
component of an ‘order of initiatives’ that not only identifes the targeted population,
but also proposes an interpretation of the public space in which the cultural institu-
tion is implicated” (Bonaccorsi, 2012, p. 25). The role of TV audiences in making
discourses, online activities of social media users in forming impactful trends in the
form of humour and jokes and their overall practice of turning playful with regard to
media (as an institution), help us to fathom the potential of non-public. This consid-
eration of audiences as non-public is an attempt of subversion against the dominant
trend of undermining the mediated public as full public or political public. As Dayan
(2005) points out, the mediated public (audiences) remains invisible until we initiate
a systematic investigation. The humorous public as well as mediated public can be

politically infuential and socially impactful regardless of the categorisation as public or
non-public. This chapter fags the political merit of humour expressed in the domain
of media practices justifying the signifcance of exploring the interactive dynamics
among media, politics and public (Roy, 2020). It unravels the role of media as a sup-
plier of contents and at once is a platform for mediation, which would be appropriated
by the public (TV viewers, non-viewers, social media users, non-users) in the way of
mockery, joking and making fun within and beyond the media platforms.
Notes
1 Acknowledgements: For initial comments and review, thanks go to Anakshi Pal and
Joyashree Sarma.
2 The chapter in some parts is based on my doctoral thesis, Ratan Kumar Roy, “News
and Audiences: An Ethnography of Television in Bangladesh,” Department of Sociology,
South Asian University (2018).
3 Azam (2013) offers an insightful reading of Dhaka’s film industry and related tension
of the elitist group who developed an aversion towards the commercial film industry
of Bangladesh by pointing out its “cheapness” and “vulgarity” that otherwise gained
popularity as the culture of masses.
4 A critical discussion can be initiated to examine how the class distinctions and consump-
tion patterns have been shifted and negotiated in the contemporary mediascape with
burgeoning television channels in Bangladesh, but this chapter limits it focus to investi-
gate the humorous public in relation to television media.
5 Fiske (2011[1987], p. 241).
6 Fiske (2011[1987])
7 The town is located in the northern part of Bangladesh where the researcher has con-
ducted an in-depth study among the television viewers. Some of the ethnographic details
in this section have appeared in (Roy, 2021).
8 Several cases have been reported where individuals were accused of defaming the father
of the nation, and in due course they have been arrested. There were cases not only
about the allegation of making any derogatory statements, but also charges have been
filed against the teachers for comparing Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman with
a local Union Parishad Chairman in the exam paper. There is a persisting threat to get
sedition charges if alleged to defame the father of the nation. See www.thedailystar.net/
frontpage/13-teachers-land-jail-1453237, www.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/article/
8466/%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%99%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%97%E0%A6%AC%
E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A7%E0%A7%81-%E0%A6%93-%E0%
A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%A7%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A8%E0%
A6%AE%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%
B0%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%87-%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%9F%E0%A6%
BE%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B7-%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%
BE%E0%A6%B0-%E0%A6%85%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%AF%E0%A7%
8B%E0%A6%97%E0%A7%87, www.bhorerkagoj.net/print-edition/2015/03/21/24525.
php (last accessed in January 2018).
9 Interviewed by the author in November 2017.
10 According to the opposition party’s political deliberation, in 2014 electorates did not
attend to cast their votes, hence to add legitimacy of the election, a power group organ-
ised some hired people to stage voter participation; while in 2018 the same power block
has conducted overnight vote casting by themselves and took away voters’ rights. See
www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/world/asia/bangladesh-election-violence-hasina.html
(accessed on 1 June 2019).
190 Ratan Kumar Roy
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INDEX
Abu-Lughod, L. 160 cartography 2

All the Year Round 33 cartoons 12, 26–34, 36–39, 41–43, 117,
Andare stories 112 118, 135
Anderson, B. 29 Chaplin, Charlie 156
anonymity 82, 89, 118, 133–136, 162 “Cigar-Smoking Lady, A” 41
anonymous power 107–137 Cohen, A. 181
anthropological framework 15, 16 colonial cartoons 18, 25–43
anthropology 11, 12, 14–16, 110 colonial imagination 143–145
anxieties 1, 2; in theorising humour colonial India 18, 20, 25–27, 29, 34, 36,
3–5 38, 43, 52
Apte, M.L. 15, 16 colonial politics 26, 27, 34, 42, 43
Ardèvol, E. 188 comedians 19, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162,
art form 34, 157, 159–161 163, 165, 169, 173, 174
art of cartooning 25–27 comedy 10, 11, 19, 156, 157, 159, 160,
Asoka 96 163, 164, 169–171, 173, 174, 185; of
Assam 20, 67–79; tea gardens 67–79 awkwardness 149–151
Azam, M. 179, 181 Comedy Nights with Kapil (2013) 159
comic narratives 162; gender and humour
Bakhtin, Mikhail 2, 7–9 169–173; humour against power 163–169
Bangladesh 5, 6, 19, 20, 178–183, comic traditions, India 157–159
185–189; cracking jokes and making fun contemporary humour 115, 116
183–185; humorous public in 178–189; Costelloe, Timothy M. 69
playful audiences 180–182; politics and COVID-19 9, 128, 129, 131, 132
public, TV 183–185; television media cracking jokes 182–184
culture in 179–180 Crisis of the European Sciences and
Barrow, Isaac 4 Transcendental Phenomenology, The 69
Behal, Rana P. 70 Critchley, Simon 156
Bengal Hurkaru 26 criticality 107–137
Bergson, H. 6 cultural politics 2, 8, 26, 27, 36, 42, 43, 45,
Borah, Prithiraj 8 49, 60, 61
Boyer, D. 187 cultural realities 81
Bryant, C. 76 Curzon, Viceroy Lord 27
Index 193
Daǧtaş, M.S. 187 Internet memes 19, 107, 117; political

Dalmia, V. 39 commentaries 117–119
Davids, R. 96
Davis, M.S. 11 jakari 83–92
Dayan, Daniel 188 Jha, Hari Mohan 47, 49–52, 59
digital media 82, 144
Doyle, John 33 Kaka, Khattar 45–63; Humorous Hinduism
dramatic Haryanvi humour 81–94 of 52–57
Driessen, H. 15, 178 Kamra, Kunal 160–162, 166, 168, 173
Kessel, M. 140
Eagleton, Terry 1, 2, 5, 12 kinship relations 59, 61
empire’s occidental gaze 28–36 Kobir Ladai 6
Evans, J. 70 Kulin Kulasarvaswa 158
Family Time with Kapil Sharma (2018) 159 labourers 19, 67–71, 73–75, 77, 78
Far Side, The 12 Larson, Gary 12
female comedians 161, 169 laughter 1, 2, 5–7, 10–12, 43, 71, 83, 85,
female performer 84, 88–92 87, 90, 103, 110, 114, 152, 156, 157
Fiske, J. 182 life-worlds 67–71, 77
folktales 5, 51, 53, 95–98, 103, 112 literary-cultural politics 45–63
fruits 54, 56, 72 literary culture 179
lokayat 48, 57–60
Gandhi Nagar 2nd Street 146
goddess 47, 48, 56, 57, 61 mai-baap 67, 72, 74, 76
gods 47–49, 53, 55, 61, 85, 91, 113, 114 male gaze 19, 139–141, 143, 144, 148–152
good humour 3–5, 10 marriage 72, 81, 86, 171, 172
Great Dictator, The 156 masculinity 72, 75, 83, 86, 89, 92, 93, 140,
grotesque realism 8 143, 144, 148, 151; humorous 139–154
Guha, A. 69 Medawattegedara, L. 97
Guha, Ramachandra 173 media 25, 26, 135, 139, 151, 158, 178,
Gurkhas 144, 146–148 179, 181, 182, 187–189
memes 2, 109, 116–122, 127–130,
Harindranath, R. 181 132–136; presidential election 2019
Hasan, M. 36 119–127
Hazlitt, William 4 Merziger, Patrick 140
Hitler, Adolf 156 Mitchell, W. 28
humorous public 178–189; digital Mitra, Deenbandhu 158
platforms and transformation 185–188 Mittal, Aditi 171
humorous tales 95–97, 102, 103 Mitter, P. 34
Morley, D. 181
incoherence 5–10 Moxham, R. 70
incongruence 5–10
Indian cartoonists 26–28, 43 national imagination 36–42
Indian cartoons 26, 27, 33, 36, 39, 42, 43 nation-states 17, 18, 95–97, 99, 100, 102
Indian cinema 141, 145 Natya Shastra 3
Indian consumers 139, 140, 149; Nepali Navra Maza Navsacha 146, 147
content 149–151 Neel Darpan 158
Indian Gazette 26 Nepal 17, 147
Indian male gaze 139–154 Nepali character 146–148
Indian Mard 172 Nepali chutkule 141–143
Indian media 140, 141, 170 Nepali men 139–154; in Indian cinema
Indian priests 37 145–149; Indian media, representation
Indian society 33, 143, 151, 152, 158 140–141
194 Index
Obadare, E. 186 shaab-ji and bahadur 146

One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Sharma, Kapil 159
Economy of Tea Plantations in Colonial Sholay 92
Assam 70 sociological-anthropological category
On Humour 156 10–16
‘On Joking Relationship’ 15 sociological category, humour 109–111
sociology 10–12, 14–16, 109, 110
Padmavat 164 spatial shift 98–100
Pathak, D.N. 77, 102 Sri Lanka 12, 19, 20, 95–104, 107, 111,
Perera, S. 77, 102 113, 128, 130, 134, 135; folktales and
Peris 96 humour 96–97; folktale tradition of 96;
physical audience 90, 92 humour in 111–117; Independence Day
Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Celebrations 127–128; Internet memes,
Electoral Politics in Assam 69 political commentaries 117–119;
Plato 11 memes, COVID-19 128–132; memes,
playful audiences 180–182 presidential election 2019 119–127
PM Narendra Modi 174 stakeholders 2
political cartoons 26, 42 stand-up comedy 156–176; cultural
political commentaries 19, 107, 117, 118, 135 phenomenon 159–162
political humour 111, 112, 115–117, 119, stereotypes 33, 139, 141, 143, 145,
132, 133, 156, 157, 161, 187 148, 151
political jokes 108, 116, 133, 156, 169 Stokker, K. 70
political memes 132–136 subversive Hinduism 45–63
political satire 9, 10, 132, 160, 165, 173, Swinkels, M. and de Koning, A. 178
186, 187
politicians 6, 9, 99, 129, 132 Tagore, Gaganendranath 41
possession 87, 113, 114 tales, tea gardens 71–77
post-colonial social relationships 143–145 Tarkaratna, Ram Narayan 158
power dynamics 100–101; irreverence tea gardens 20, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74–77
101–102 tea plantations 69, 70, 73
Pravada 12 television 9, 19, 157, 158, 179–184, 186
public performances 114, 115, 129 Tenniel, John 30, 32, 38, 42
text-based jokes 141–143
Rabelais and His World 7 Thakur, R. 169
ragni 83–92 Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say 171
ragni videos 82, 84, 87–89, 92 TikTok video 185, 186
Rajapaksa, Mahinda 121 truism 1
Rajoura, Sanjay 172
‘rasam pitwa rasam vadet’ 46 virility 84, 86, 87, 91
Ratnapala, N. 96 virtual audiences 88, 90
realities 28, 97, 100, 159, 162, 180 visual politics 27, 28, 36, 43
rebellion 30–33
resistance politics 69–71, 75–78 Ward, K.J. 160, 162
responsibility 57, 117, 134, 135 Weerasinghe, A. 98
rituals 15, 47, 50, 57, 72, 111, 113–116 Wit and Humour 97
women 54, 55, 70–73, 83–91, 107, 161,
Said, M. 71 169–173; workers 74, 75
Sale of English Beauties in East Indies, A 29 workers 8, 67, 69, 70, 72–74, 141,
Scott, James 6, 114 143–145
Scruton, Roger 100
Sen, Jatin 41 YouTube 82, 84, 87, 89, 91, 92, 149, 150,
sense of humour 1, 4, 11, 15, 17, 18, 41, 159, 166, 171
45, 52, 127, 170 Yurchak, A. 187

04 Sasanka Perera Humour and The Performance of Power in South Asia Anxiety Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times

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04 Sasanka Perera Humour and The Performance of Power in South Asia Anxiety Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times

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HUMOUR AND THE PERFORMANCE

OF POWER IN SOUTH ASIA

Sasanka Perera is Professor of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi,

Dev Nath Pathak is Assistant Professor of Sociology at South Asian University,

Edited by Sasanka Perera and

List of fgures vii

1 Introduction: cultural politics of humour in South Asia 1

2 Colonial cartoons: Punch and vernacular Punch politics of humour

3 Khattar Kaka’s subversive Hinduism: a case of literary-cultural

4 Tales from Assam’s tea gardens: when humour becomes resistance

5 Dramatic Haryanvi humour: a case of subversion in jakari

6 ‘A Sri Lankan Arrives in Hell’: a case of laughing at ‘Sri Lanka’

7 Humour, criticality and the performance of anonymous power:

8 Humorous masculinity: Nepali men in mediated Indian

9 Politics of performance and performance of politics: analysing

10 Humorous public in Bangladesh: an analytical reading of

1.1 A cartoon by Gameela Samarasinghe, Pravada (July-December 2001,

7.1 Sinhala-language meme on Sri Lankan presidential election, 2019 119

Prithiraj Borah is a PhD scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social

Divyendu Jha teaches political science as guest faculty at Kirorimal College,

Lal Medawattegedara teaches English at The Open University of Sri Lanka.

Sasanka Perera is a founding faculty member at the Department of Sociology at

University Established by SAARC Nations), New Delhi. His articles based on

Monika Yadav is a doctoral scholar in Sociology at the Department of Humanities

Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak

In the preface to his theoretical refection on humour, Terry Eagleton notes, “a

Anxieties in theorising humour

while concentrating chiefly on philosophical approaches to humour, this dis-

humour is so “versatile and multiform”, a phenomenon of which any

Given the polysemy of humour, Eagleton considered it foolhardy of theorists

inclined to the micro-narratives of interpreters, as announced elsewhere by the

(In)coherence and (In)congruence: humour’s characteristics

meaning-making, and the idea of coherence and congruity, or incoherence and

laughter signifies, then, but it also involves the breakdown of signification

Coherent or incoherent, congruous or incongruous, laughter nonetheless is not

subversive, disruptive, upside-down ‘second world’; in carnival the repres-

we do not wish to prejudge, by definition, the relation between what is said

alas, so straightforward that we can call what is said in power-laden contexts

However, a word of caution is imperative in order to keep the idea of humour

We think this distinction is an important one to make in both theorising and

Humour as a sociological-anthropological category

it creates a spectral methodological fear for anthropologists to take specifc cul-

FIGURE 1.1 A cartoon by Gameela Samarasinghe, Pravada (July-December 2001, Num-

contemporary times, sociology in general or sociology in South Asia in particular

humour should rightfully be taken seriously notwithstanding this so-called

Structure and fow of the book

Asian nation state. It is due to the impossibility of achieving this unimaginative

Cartoons and the empire’s occidental gaze

of notable attempts to generate a discourse on the fear of visuals, which could be

subjects. As an authoritative cartoon magazine, it inspired Indian cartoonists and

Punch regularly portrayed imperial politics and, in particular, caricatured colonial

FIGURE 2.3 John Tenniel, “Justice” appeared in Punch on 12 September 1857.

Furthermore, a cartoon by John Doyle named “Serpent Charmers: Exhibiting

FIGURE 2.4“Baboo Jaberjee,” an 1895 Punch illustration of Bengali Bhadralok parodied in

Cartoons and national imagination

attempt to drug Elokeshi with childbirth medicine before making an intimate

Dev Nath Pathak1

the least. This is signifcant in the wake of an exhaustive historical trajectory

He said, ‘gentleman, it gets profound as you go deeper with a deepen-

Hari Mohan Jha and Khattar Kaka:

Humorous Hinduism of Khattar Kaka

pathos and poverty gone. So Durgasaptasati is no diferent. The Hindu worshippers

Charvak’s lokayat and Kaka’s humour