Abstract
This chapter undertakes a critical analysis of the ‘Janata Curfew’ meme, a collection of images and videos circulated on social media platforms in India and beyond, which mocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi after he advised his fellow Indians to clap hands and bang plates as a sign of respect for medical workers fighting coronavirus. In seeking to study the ‘Janata Curfew’ meme as a symbolic totality, the chapter will analyse signs and codes employed in the visual content of the memes, arguing that online users in India derive humour and satire from cultural industries such as the nation’s film industry, Bollywood, and the existing socio-economic and political tensions. The chapter further demonstrates how armies of users—humans as well as bots—engage with such memes and indulge in both symbolic resistance and violence. As a consequence, it’s argued, the lines between humour, ridicule, comedy, trolling and threats blur in India’s emergent digital cultures.
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Notes
- 1.
A meme, following Richard Dawkins’ conceptualisation, is referred to as the viral spread of an idea (Dawkins, 2006). At the heart of the term is the Greek concept ‘minema’, which translates as imitation. Thus, meme as an idea “transforms from a single event to a shared social phenomenon through the process of imitation, copying, mimicking, remixing or repackaging” (Taecharungroj & Nueangjamnong, 2015). The Internet is viewed as a great site where memes carrying contagious cultural ideas undergo this process.
- 2.
India, with a population of around 1.4 billion, has been described as a ‘cell phone nation’ (Jeffrey & Doron, 2013). The mobile telephony is viewed to have led to a significant transformation in politics, business and the ordinary life. The sheer numbers are baffling. Towards the end of 2019, there were 687.62 million Internet users in the country (TRAI, 2020). This number, according to certain estimates, is expected to further increase to one billion users by 2025 (Statista, 2020).
- 3.
After the revocation of Article 370 of the nation’s Constitution, which granted the state of Jammu and Kashmir a semi-autonomous status with the Indian Union, the Government of India, fearing widespread protests, imposed months of curfew and a communication blockade, which was described as the world’s longest ever communications shutdown.
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Parray, I. (2021). Humour in the Age of Contagion: Coronavirus, ‘Janata Curfew’ Meme and India’s Digital Cultures of Virality. In: Mpofu, S. (eds) Digital Humour in the Covid-19 Pandemic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79279-4_13
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