Abstract
A BBC news story claimed, “This is a New India story—cultures clashing because of the unprecedented access the internet gives both creators and audiences” (Basu, Viewpoint: why is Indian comedy kicking up a storm?. BBC News. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36466444, 2016). To take this as a cue, the new India story as narrated by the new Indian comedians has been a process that is punctuated by fixed notions of what Indian social life means today, which are easily identifiable in Bollywood representations, and by fluid ideas of identity and nation.
This chapter explores how the comedians narrate the nation using strategies of intertextuality and deconstruction and how this is received by the Facebook sample group of millennials in a context where discourses of censorship and free speech are gaining increasing prominence.
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Notes
- 1.
This is a subject widely explored in a Being Indian originals documentary I Am Offended (2015).
- 2.
FIR (First Information Report) is a written document prepared by the police when they receive information about the commission of a cognisable offence prescribed in Section 154 of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973. It is generally a complaint lodged with the police by a victim or by someone on his/her behalf (Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative).
- 3.
This is a play on the skin-lightening cream, Fair and Lovely.
- 4.
Literally translates as mother/daughter-in-law, this is a genre of Indian television soap operas that for a long time were hugely popular but widely analysed as a regressive and backwards portrait of the Indian family.
- 5.
The literal translation is Democracy be Damned.
- 6.
Also known as post-millennials, this is a demographic cohort consisting of those born in 1995 or later.
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Kay, K. (2018). Riffing India Comedy, Identity, and Censorship. In: New Indian Nuttahs. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97867-3_2
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