Insta Warriors of Chitrakoot

SONAM, 19, LIVES IN KHATIKANA BASTI, OFF the railway tracks in Chitrakoot district, Uttar Pradesh. The basti is home to around 200 Dalit families, many of whom work as waste pickers. We met Sonam on a spring day, post her morning shift, which started at 4AM and ended at 9AM. She had collected and sold household waste worth `200-`250 that day.

Now, she was busy with household chores—hand-pounding masalas on the silauti (stone grinder) for a frugal lunch of boiled offal. Her mother and sisters were carefully scraping meat off chicken skin, bones and feathers. For Sonam’s family, it is cheaper to buy meat waste from slaughterhouses than to afford oil and ba­sic vegetables. After lunch, Sonam was off to a wedding in town, where she was hired to wash, chop and peel vegetables, and roll out puris by the dozens.

The second of seven children, Sonam was once a prolific TikToker. Since the social media’s ban in 2020, she has been slow­ly finding her feet on Instagram. This has not been easy. “I make IDs and then forget the passwords,” she says, giggling. Baby-faced and baby-voiced Sonam has created and lost at least three online profiles in the last few months—one is named after Bollywood actor Sonam Kapoor, another is called Sonam ‘kuda’ after her waste-picking job, and another is an entirely different (male) identity. Much like her passwords, she has also forgotten how to read and write, since she dropped out of school after Class 5. But that hasn’t deterred Sonam. She has figured out social media by trial and error. In between work shifts and housework, Sonam sneaks off to a clearing behind her house or to the railway tracks, shoots quick dance videos, experiments with different filters and mouths filmy dialogues like, “A for apple, B for bewafa, C for…chal ho dafa,” with some serious swag.

In the beginning, things went awry often. The lip sync would be all wrong, “Gaana idhar bajta aur mera muh udhar chalta!” Elec­tricity is also rare in Khatikana, so Sonam tells us that they borrow it from a power pole at the railway station, charging their phones in the dead of night and uploading streams of videos by day. View­ers comment on her posts, but she is unable to read and respond. Sometimes, she asks people to read the comments to her, at least the nice ones. “Once I made a video sitting on railway tracks and someone commented that it was dangerous and I should get off or the train will take me with it…it made me laugh so hard,” she says.

Sonam’s social life is not exactly a secret; it is hidden in plain sight. Her siblings know what she is up to in her free time, she shares videos with her mother, who acidly remarks, “itna matkegi to mar jayegi (so much dance will kill you)”. Her father, howev­er, remains happily unaware. Then there are those interfering busybodies who enjoy flexing patriarchal control every time a woman asserts agency. Sonam says, “If I sat around listening to what people had to say about how I should live my life, I would just die hungry.” When Sonam was married off last year, she moved to Delhi to live with her husband and in-laws. Initially, Sonam says she liked her life in Delhi. She found work quickly enough, she liked her sasural, she and her husband even made videos together. Gradually, she found out about his substance ad­diction. They fought, he got violent. She continued to make reels, but he stopped featuring in them. “My mother-in-law used to get so irritated that I would disappear to make videos. She would take digs at me but I answered back. How could she tick me off when her son’s addiction was responsible for our unhappy state…I told her as much.” Sonam has now returned to her maternal home in Chitrakoot, while her husband’s parents have enrolled him in a de-addiction centre. Sonam remains uncertain and noncommit­tal about her marriage, but is not hopeless about her future. She says, “I am not looking to be a big star on social media. I am not educated so I will not have a career. However, I do want to make my own identity. I want to own a house and buy nice things for it. I want to make it on my own.”

STATISTICS TELL US that the digital gender gap in India is stark. According to the Mobile Gender Gap Report 2022, smartphone ownership for men has increased from 36 per cent in 2019 to 49 per cent in 2021, whereas women’s smartphone ownership in 2021 is only 26 per cent. Male users of mobile internet have grown from 45 per cent in 2020 to 51 per cent in 2021, but the figure for women remained constant at 30 percent. Reports also tell us that various factors affect the digital gender gap; rural, low-income, non-literate households show a wider gap. Gender norms also dictate access to smart­phones and mobile internet in India, where women’s access is controlled by male members of the family. While numbers reveal the gendered extent of digital inequity, what we found interesting is how women are still able to construct female subjectivities that are of their own making. Women in Chitra­koot that we spoke to are negotiating with and pushing back against traditional patriarchal power relations in their offline lives, while confronting newer and more complex forms of gender norms that are inextricably tied to their online lives.

Twenty-year-old Khushi only posts sad song videos against black-and-white backdrops, perhaps to reflect her current state of mind. She lives with her sister Shozi, 19, about 15 kilometres away from the district headquarters in Lodhwara, in a block of flats allotted by the state government to poor families. Their single mother often travels for work outside the district. Both sisters are enthusiastic content creators, drawing decent audience numbers, first on TikTok and now on Instagram. Khushi’s vibe is moody and brooding, whereas Shozi is outgoing and just a tad naughty.

Less than a month ago, Khushi got into a violent fight with her brother over her online presence that landed her in the hospital. He had hit her with a pressure cooker. “Strangers have positive or encouraging things to comment on my videos, it is family that says stuff that hurts. Eighty per cent of my family is blocked on my socials,” says Khushi. When a male acquaintance moved into her colony recently, Khushi offered to help him set up. They goofed around and clicked photos. It did not take very long for false rumours to reach her mother’s ears that she was locking lips with this boy to post a video online, which was a viral trend at the time. There was a time when Khushi made videos with friends, friends of friends, both girls and boys. But not any longer.

“Now I make videos by myself and nobody can find that objec­tionable. My online space is where I am fully present. If people say something, it is on them, they are coming into my space, I’m not in theirs.” This 20-year-old aspiring influencer from Chitrakoot is echoing the words of Elsa Majimbo, the same aged Kenyan social media sensation and subject of a recent documentary, whose family is similarly heartbreakingly embarrassed about her online persona.

“Social media is where I live, unedited and un-erased,” Khushi says. “My videos can’t be deleted by my controlling relations. They want to edit what I wear, where I go, who I meet…in some ways, my online profile has preserved memories of these objectionable parts of my identity. My grid will forever show people that I wore jeans, that I went someplace. I am online because this is where I’m truly happy.”

For sister Shozi, who is using her social media to further an acting and modelling career, living well is the best revenge. “Main sabko apni kamyabi se jawab dena chahti hoon (I will show people who I am with my success),” she says, wisely. It takes less than a minute for Shozi to make and upload a video, she knows what is trending, how to work camera angles, and the right filters to use. “Making videos is easy but dealing with what happens after is all consuming,” she says. She has saved screenshots of numer­ous people sliding into her DMs, who call her a slut, harlot, and shameless, or to ask for sexual favours. She is hypersexualised by some, and blasphemous to others, all in the same video. Looking at how calmly Shozi navigates through online abuse and adula­tion, it is easy to forget sometimes that she is just a teenager, who is nervous about her first job as a salesgirl in a mall, where there are no mobiles allowed, no weekly offs, 12-hour workdays, and few possibilities for social mobility.

“Ham apne aap ko azad samjhte hai, ham fully free hai, bas kuchh galat na kare to theek hai (We are fully free, we have freedom to do what we want, but we must be careful not to do anything wrong),” says Nikita, a 20-year-old from Chitrakoot who is currently in Class 10 and is also training as an artist on the side. We encoun­tered multiple versions of this statement—fully free but will not overstep limits—from many women we talked to, particularly when they spoke of their virtual lives. What is ‘galat’ or wrong to you, we asked them. We heard an apocryphal cautionary tale about a popular TikToker in the district who was married off a few years ago and whose online presence has vanished without a trace. M was a young woman in her early twenties who garnered a wide audience on social media for her slapstick comic videos. At the height of her popularity, M had at least a few lakh follow­ers. Local press courted her and she had begun to make money off her online presence. She expanded her team to include a few new members. They called themselves ‘143’ (aka, I Love You). They were often spotted in Ganesh Bagh—a popular historical hangout in Chitrakoot—armed with equipment to shoot vid­eos, mostly humorous little skits and love stories. One day, the unthinkable happened. M fell in love with one of her castmates and they eloped. She was a General caste girl, he wasScheduled Caste. A case was filed, the boy was arrested. M’s mother may or may not have lost her job in the fallout. M herself was whisked away and hurriedly married off to a suitable boy. It is said that she is now a mother of an infant. It is also said that M is not allowed to talk about her previous life.

Families in Chitrakoot appear to live in constant fear that this might happen to their girls and women if they have active online lives. For every M who dares to live and love online, the Indian family tightens their control over women’s lives. In Shivkali’s case, the policing has not stopped even after marriage. Shivkali has been married for almost seven years, a relationship that began with a love affair she describes as “khatarnak”. Shivkali has studied till Class 11, but is struggling to find regular work. Occasionally, she gets work as a typist in offices. A self-confessed Bhojpuri and true crime fan, she is glued to her mobile phone round the clock. She consumes as much as she creates. Seeing her constant online-ness, well-meaning neighbours (read men) have taken it upon themselves to warn her husband. “She spends too much time on her mobile, why have you given her a phone, do you know what she is doing there—these people are always in my husband’s ear,” says Shivkali. “But these are the same peo­ple who will comment on my posts and slide into my DMs. I’m fending off these men offline and online.”

In Neelam’s case, the policing has continued even into widow­hood. Thirty-five-year-old Neelam lives with her two children in Lodhwara. Her husband passed away a few years ago, in fact, she has no immediate family left. Neelam has not been to school, but somehow has figured out social media. “I also don’t know how I am on it,” she says, laughing. Neelam is a big fan of music—Bho­jpuri, Hindi and lokgeet. In her videos, Neelam is mostly dressed in lehenga-cholis, gently dancing to music in her house, or lately, in the fields where she goes to work as agricultural labourer. Despite having no family, Neelam attracts a lot of criticism. As a widow, she is defying societal expectations with her online presence. “I used to feel ashamed. I used to hesitate so much. Dancing and singing have been my passion since I was a little girl, should I stop doing what I love because a few people say so,” she says. After constructing a moderately successful online presence over some time, Neelam says, “I am shameless now. I dance in my house, outside, where I work. I am without any shame.”

Chitrakootgender normsInsta Warriorsmarket reachsocial mediaWomen Issue 2023