Abstract
With the rise of internet-based digital participatory cultures in India, social networks have become sites of volatile political discourse. As in other countries such as Brazil, China and Russia, this has led to the concurrent eruption of memes in India’s political landscape. This paper examines humorous politicized memes that are deployed to critique the Hindu right-wing in India. Through an examination of the formal nature of the meme and its connection to other visual forms such as the caricature, the visual joke and the graphic novel, I demonstrate how seemingly frivolous objects can hold potential for serious discourse. Employing a mix of visual and textual analysis, as well as a survey of virally circulating memes on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, I forward the concept of “memetic visuality”—a mode of imagining the world and the political community through a series of intertextual connections. I argue that social media communication has led to the eruption of a memetic mode of engaging with political culture in India, in which virally fueled parody and satire infuses seemingly non-memetic objects with meme-like characteristics. In doing so, memetic political discourse in India becomes part of a larger global language of online political discourse.
Introduction: the visual pleasures of the political meme
In December 2015, India’s Press Information Bureau (PIB) released a photograph of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi seated in an airplane and surveying a flood-hit area. While this was released as a regular publicity photo, it soon came to light that that the image had been heavily Photoshopped (Figure 1, left). Social media users were quick to catch on to this and memes based on the officially released image soon began to go viral (Marszal, 2015). Some replaced the image of the flood with cats, dirty laundry, Wonder Woman, and even Vladimir Putin (Figure 1, right). The Putin variant was particularly interesting as the image of Putin that was chosen was itself a meme that took a dig at Putin’s 2012 publicity stunt, in which he flew on a glider alongside migratory cranes (Lipman, 2012). This particular variant then, worked as a sort of a meta-meme that pointed toward two important things. First, it assumed the existence of a visually and politically aware audience that was well-versed in the internet cultures of the meme. Second and relatedly, it indicated that the use of the meme as a form of political critique was part of a global culture of meme-making.
(Left) The original PIB press-photo (later deleted) tweeted Rahul M (Twitter screenshot: @twrahul, 2018), and (Right), the “meta-memetic” variant showing Modi staring at a flying Putin meme out of the plane window (Twitter screenshot, https://twitter.com/Myth_busterz/status/672724932346777600).
The quick, memetic response to the PIB image was particularly telling since Modi and his party—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had proactively projected themselves as social-media savvy during and after the 2014 electoral campaign, using Twitter and selfies to reach out to supporters. 1 Further, in a 2018 response to a Right to Information claim filed by journalist, Rahul M, the PIB went on to declare that the compositing was done “as per previous standard practice” (@twrahul, 2018). Thus, while official agencies and the government have tried to incorporate computer-based image editing (colloquially called “Photoshopping”) into its publicity practices, the memes presented a sort of a counter-hegemonic vision—a visual eruption of the carnivalesque that critiqued such government authorized visuality.
Perched at the interstices of textual and visual intertextuality, the meme emerges as a privileged object in the field of politicized communication. Humor, as Knobel and Lankshear (2008) have pointed out, is central to the functioning of successful memes, and ranges from “the quirky and offbeat, to potty humor, to the bizarrely funny, to parodies, through to the acerbically ironic” (p. 209). Although the authors do not state it directly, in the field of political humor, satirical humor becomes an integral part and parcel of the democratic ethos. As Lee (2015) points out, through mockery and transgression, satire symbolically dismantles “hierarchies of status and power” (p. vi). In sharing political humor’s satirical code, contemporary memes can often function as powerful agents in the digital public sphere, offering not only comic relief, but also influencing public opinion through a participatory culture in which “anyone could join in and make a contribution to the creative dialogue” (Mina, 2014: 367). Previous scholarship (Bozkuş, 2016; Chagas et al., 2019; Howley, 2016; Kumar, 2012, 2015; Lunardi, 2018; Punathambekar, 2015; Soh 2020) has connected this importance of political satire directly to media forms such as the television and the internet across countries such as the United States, India, Turkey, Singapore and Brazil. Political memes are not endemic to India, but one can see a rapid increase in politicized, participatory media cultures with the onset of the internet in the country (Kumar, 2015).
While the nature of memes as digital objects has been studied extensively (Shifman, 2014; Milner, 2016), in this paper I focus more closely on what I call “memetic visuality”—a particular mode of inhabiting the digital that ties visual and textual codes in an intertextual relay. I draw the concept of the intertextual relay from Lukow and Ricci’s (1984) work on cinema, where they describe this relay as a relationship with the cinema that includes the “force and attraction of all prior elements in the system (posters, trailers, titles, etc.)” (p. 30). In the world of the meme, such an intertextual relationship evokes “a heritage of spectatorship” (p. 29) passed on from meme to meme—what Soh (2020) describes as an inter-citational relationship in a “mimetic chain” (p. 1119). Apart from humor, Knobel and Lankshear (2008) have identified such “wry cross-references to different everyday and popular culture events, icons or phenomena” to be crucial for the success of memes (p. 209). Further, as Milner notes, memetic culture is driven by “the creation, circulation, and transformation of collective texts” (p. 3). In a digital context, the “heritage of spectatorship” entails a relay of the meme-text through repetition and transformation (the Putin insertion in the aforementioned Modi meme is a prime example of this). While the political context that informs this paper is from contemporary India, my theoretical points and formal analyses are more broadly applicable.
In her work on memes, Lunardi (2018) locates the particularities of Brazilian memetic practices through the culturally specific concept of the “zoeira”—a kind of humor that makes “fun of something tragic or controversial, something you are not supposed to mock” (p. 27). Readers elsewhere may or may not find linguistic equivalents for “zoeira”—but what Lunardi notes as the kernel of Brazilian humor online, resonates with the subversive potential of memes in other cultural contexts as well. Memes of course are a “global” format in as much as the internet itself is a kind of globalized network of things and ideas—but the key task lies in tracing how such global objects become localized as they merge with the specificities of each cultural iteration. In focusing on the Indian context, I demonstrate the ways in which the global format and aesthetics of the meme are transformed into a kind of digital vernacular that speaks specifically to an Indian audience. As Howard (2008) has noted, the designation of “vernacularity” in the term electronic vernacular points toward the fulfilment of “the local or ‘homeborn’ expectations of a particular human community” (p. 203). Thus, we could call vernacularization, localization through practice. The localization of laughter within the modular format of the meme is central to its resonance for such homeborn expectations. A word of caution here—invoking the vernacular should not lead us into thinking that the Indian (or any other national/cultural) context is merely “an exception or a site of cultural variation,” (Punathambekar and Mohan 2019: 3) but rather that the digital vernacular is a site constant negotiation. In their comparative study of memes in different national contexts, Nissenbaum and Shifman (2018) note that meme diffusion on the internet not only fosters the creation of global digital cultures, but they may “also be used to construct local digital cultures, in which attributes specific to a certain cultural setting are highlighted and maintained” (p. 294–295). While their point about localization is one that I ascribe to, one encounters a strange slippage in their articulation of difference when they write: “Chinese memes are not based on these global/American templates but rather use local resources almost exclusively” (p. 306). This conflation of the global with the American (“global/American”) privileges logics of scale and unilateral media flows. While Chinese or Indian memes may indeed draw on culturally specific nuances, their designation as globalization’s other, reinforces a hierarchy in which things trickle down from core to periphery (Punathambekar and Mohan, 2019: 8). The local and the global are not opposing points in a scalar relationship (global > local, institutional > vernacular), but constitute degrees of exchange, translation and repurposing in a global media network. Thus, Indian meme culture is global, just as American, Chinese or Brazilian memes also constitute global meme culture. The intertextual frame becomes doubly crucial in tracing these processes of exchange, translation and repurposing within the body of the meme as well as in its circulatory networks.
Simultaneously, I also map out a taxonomy of memetic visuality and demonstrate how memes occupy an economy of informal political labor through the activation of what Olesen (2018) has identified as the “aesthetic-political qualities” of images and their memetic circulation online (p. 661). However, because of their framing as objects of mere entertainment, it is often easy to overlook the actual work memes can accomplish in a digitally mediated political ecology. The broader question here, is about the formal nature of the meme. Etymologically, the word meme shares its root with the Greek “mimesis”—imitation. Shifman (2014) describes the Internet meme as a collection of similar, related objects that are “circulated, imitated and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.” (p. 7–8). It would seem then, that the meme is viral in its contagiousness. Shifman however, distinguishes between the meme and the viral. According to her, while the viral comprises “a single cultural unit (such as a video, photo, or joke) that propagates in many copies, an Internet meme is always a collection of texts” (p. 56). Such distinctions are destabilized if we consider memes and virals as modes instead of objects. If the meme describes a mode of propagation through differentiated repetition, then virality could be said to describe a condition of hyper-fast digital circulation rather than an object itself. Thus, a meme can also circulate virally under the right conditions, swelling in its intertextual capacities and accumulating meaning as it spreads. Through viral circulation, memes foster a kind of political community centered on shared codes of viewing/reading practices.
Usually, virality denotes a kind of contagious circulation that follows no rationale or logic but swells and spreads with overwhelming magnitude (Boluk and Lenz, 2010). If political critique shows deliberation and intent, then how do we fit virally circulating objects such as memes into the frame of conscious action? To answer this question, we have to turn to the relationship between memes and other forms of humorous, visual political critique such as cartoons. I argue that different categories of political humor such as the visual joke or the cartoon can be categorized under the umbrella of the meme under certain conditions. Adopting Shifman’s concept of the a “hypermemetic logic”—a condition of digital culture in which every public event is deemed meme-worthy (p. 4), I suggest that the ontology of the meme has a direct relationship with its status as a shared humorous artifact. Even objects that might not look like memes at first sight, can behave memetically when they enter online circulation. For instance, a political cartoon may behave like a meme once it is exposed to the right conditions and stimuli—a critical mass of participatory audiences and correct timing in terms of the political event. This is why online platforms and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are volatile grounds for political warfare in India. Consequently, meme and satire accounts on Facebook and Instagram such as “Humans of Hindutva,” “Unofficial: Subramanian Swamy,” “Beef Janata Party,” “Unofficial PMO India,” “Cows of Benares,” “Internet Against BJP,” and “Official Peeing Human” have become major players in India’s meme economy, offering pushback to the BJP government and its hegemonic propagation of Hindutva (Hindu right-wing ideology). 2
While new media circuits are important to this examination, the viral work of the meme takes place on a visual plane—memes, whether pictorial or performative, are accessed visually. But, as Mitchell (2005) reminds us, “There are no visual media. All media are mixed media, with varying ratios of senses and sign types” (p. 345). Divisions between image and text in the context of the meme as we will see, are blurry, since memes are encoded for an array of visual and textual pleasures. Suffice it to say, that the meme’s code of humor shares strong resonances with other forms of political humor, albeit with formal differences. In what follows, I delineate three distinct modes of memes that can be seen commonly circulating in the service of such political critique—the visual joke, the cartoon or caricature, and the “digital-meme.” Focusing on the intricacies of each type through visual and textual analyses of cogent examples, I explore their function within the intertextual economy of contemporary Indian politics.
Motivated interference and the visual joke of the meme
One of the most prominent forms of the satirical political meme is the visual joke—a category of images that invoke humor through primarily visual means. Caricatures and cartoons also invoke visual humor. For the sake of differentiating the visual joke from cartoons, I postulate that the visual joke performs its humor through an assemblage of visual elements that taken together showcase incongruity and highlight the absurdity of their subject. Thus, a cartoon or caricature may also operate as a visual joke, but all visual jokes are not cartoons. To distinguish between these categories, I turn to a set of visual responses to a 2015 controversy involving the BJP-led state government in the western-Indian state of Rajasthan. It had been reported that history textbooks for high schools in the state were systematically purged of references to India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Coupled with other instances of twisting historical facts (such as the denial of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu right-wing nationalist, Nathuram Godse), this left no doubt as to the political motivation behind the move (Sharma, 2016). Two visual responses to this controversy clarify the differences between the cartoon and the visual joke. Both these images have circulated on Facebook and Twitter and have also been shared on the page “Unofficial: Subramanian Swamy.”
In the first image (Figure 2), by the cartoonist Sandeep Adhwaryu, we see a history textbook (“History of Modern India”). The top left of the image contains the text “In Rajasthan.” The top right features a hand holding a pair of scissors over a book. The name of the book appears on the left and on the right, we see a silhouette of Nehru’s face that has been formed by cutting out the pages. While this image is satirical, it shares its code with the political cartoon rather than the meme. The humor in the image is intertextual, but not purely visual. In fact, the text within the image anchors the image’s political context and urgency, helps “choose the correct level of perception” (Barthes, 1977: 39), thus shutting off alternative meanings. One could of course, argue that text too, is a visual medium. But unlike such anchoring text, textual elements can serve a graphical function in cartoons. For instance, in Jack Ohman’s commemorative cartoon of Nelson Mandela in The Sacramento Bee the caption “It always seems impossible until its done” graphically blends the image’s textual and visual functions. The “O”s in the words “imp
Post in “Unofficial: Subramanian Swamy” showing the Nehru cartoon (Facebook Screenshot: https://www.facebook.com/SusuSwamy/photos/a.1438827716375814/1731089777149605/?type=3&theater.). Original cartoon by Sandeep Adhwaryu for Times of India (@CartoonistSan, https://twitter.com/CartoonistSan/status/729886546309066752).
On the other hand, the second image by cartoonist Sajith Kumar (Figure 3, top) relies more heavily on visual incongruity than on textual anchorage. The humor and pleasure of Kumar’s cartoon derives from the incongruities presented by the clash between government-sponsored ideology and historical fact, lending credence to Marcus and Singer’s (2017) assertion that the “incongruities represented by the media” serve as the basis of memetic humor (p. 349). The image is a modification of a historical photograph (See Figure 3, bottom) of Mahatma Gandhi with Nehru. The visual reference to “cutting-out” Nehru from the textbook remains in this image as well; the Nehru image has been literally cut off from the image using a computer-based photo-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. However, this time, the cut-out portion has a cartoonish figure pasted over it. Dressed in a black hat, khaki shorts and a white shirt, and sporting a Hitler-style moustache this cartoonish man seems to be greeting Gandhi (“Howdy?”). Anyone with sufficient knowledge of the Hindu right-wing in India would realize, that this is not only an image of a member of the Hindu right-wing organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in official uniform, but that it is specifically a caricature of Nitin Gadkari, a Union Minister.
(Top) Kumar’s image on the “Unofficial: Subramanian Swamy” page (Facebook Screenshot: https://www.facebook.com/SusuSwamy/photos/a.1438827716375814/1730794437179139). Original image by Sajith Kumar (@sajithkumar, https://twitter.com/sajithkumar/status/729536103254908928). (Bottom) the original photograph on which it was based (Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jawaharlal_Nehru_with_Mahatma_Gandhi.jpg).
While Kumar’s post on Twitter claims this as his “latest cartoon,” the total image is only partly cartoonish. Considered in isolation, the caricature of Gadkari is a political cartoon, but it is the stark difference between the colored, drawn cartoon and the black-and-white archival photograph that is the source of humor and critique here. This stylistic incongruity alerts the viewer to the unreal, ahistorical nature of the assemblage. While in the previous cartoon the text escorts the viewer to the political context, here the viewer has to be someone who has already arrived at that context—“Howdy” and “Pardon” after all, are not textual anchors, and this seemingly innocuous shorthand conversation between the two serves to highlight the incongruity of their “meeting” within the space of the image. Although cartoonish, at a formal level Kumar’s cartoon is a visual joke.
The photograph of Gadkari in full RSS-attire already has a memetic life of its own, being ridiculed in many memes including one that compares Gadkari to Sharon Stone’s leg crossing scene in the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct (Figure 4), and was also the profile picture of the page “Humans of Hindutva.” In that sense, like the insertion of Putin into the airplane window in the Modi meme mentioned earlier, Kumar’s visual joke is also meta-memetic and imbued by the “force and attraction of all prior elements” (Lukow and Ricci, 1984: 30) in the memetic ecosystem.
Meme comparing Gadkari’s crossed legs to the scene from Basic Instinct (Twitter screenshot: https://www.facebook.com/338650732885126/photos/a.338729452877254/371926666224199/?type=3&theater).
If the photograph is an index of an actual moment in time (Bazin, 1960), then the juxtaposition of the political cartoon with the archival photograph interferes with the privileged relationship between the image and its historical signified. This is particularly true of image manipulation on computer-based editing tools such as Photoshop that, as Jones (2013) points out, “magnify tensions around photography’s connection to the factual” (p. 19). Notably, the tool’s interference in the factual is also seen in the Modi image released by the PIB; but unlike the PIB image that tries to hide its status as non-indexical, memes like this foreground and highlight what Manovich (2001) has called Photoshop’s “cut and paste logic” (p. 131). In such images, it is the foregrounding of motivated interference that performs the job of political critique. By motivated interference I refer to a creator’s conscious, deliberate act of making “anomalous juxtapositions” (Knobel and Lankshear, 2008: 209), which alerts us to the historical or visual incongruity within the image. Through the incongruity produced by motivated interference, the meme begins to function as a visual joke. It should be pointed out that the visual joke is not peculiar only to the meme. Kaufmann (2009) points out that the 16th century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s capricious portraits composed out of assembled images of non-human objects such as fruits and vegetables, books and utensils also functioned as visual jokes that were “playful or serious at the same time” (p. 11). Contemporary social media has little in common with 16th-century Italian paintings, but the idea of the “serious joke” provides us with a useful analytic to view these images. For instance, the Modi memes mentioned in the beginning are serious jokes that point toward a political climate where an official government news agency releases a recognizably fake image of the Prime Minister. Such memes self-consciously play on the presence of fakeness in public culture; creative juxtapositions of cats, dirty laundry and other unlikely objects in the memes exaggerate this through humor. Given that Modi, the BJP and their allied organizations have been implicated in multiple instances of organized violence in the country (the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition and the 2002 Godhra riots, for instance), their attempts to project a clean image in public relation (PR) campaigns is highly ironic. By foregrounding the motivated interference of their creators’ intent, memes destabilize the clean façade of such PR imagery. As visual jokes, memes condense multiple layers of historical and cultural meanings into one image. In this, the political meme differs from regular memes such as cat-memes (Figure 5) that are funny but not necessarily serious jokes. As a visual joke, the political meme is necessarily a serious joke.
“Invisible Bike” cat meme (Know Your Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/invisible-bike).
Caricatures, cartoons, and comics as memetic modes
Sajith Kumar’s Gadkari-Gandhi image makes it evident that the distinction between the cartoon and the political meme is one of degrees of relation, and the limits of these categories can overlap online. Political caricature in India has a long history, and the blending of memes and caricatures must be read within that context. Writing about the specificity of the Indian context, cartoonist Laxman (1989) notes that Indian cartoons, while “always political [. . .] satirize without shrill calls to action” (p. 69). Instead, Laxman locates the importance of the political cartoon in its ability to provide collective relief and voice via subtle humor. Laxman himself was responsible for revolutionizing political cartoons and caricatures in India, critiquing political events through the character of “the common man” (Chatterjee, 2007; Devadawson, 2014). While Laxman’s work is not memetic in any sense, his visual and comic styles still influence much of the political cartoons and caricatures being produced in contemporary India. This can also be seen in the work of cartoonists such as Sandeep Adhwaryu, Sajith Kumar and Satish Acharya.
Sometimes, a single cartoon or caricature, while not initially memetic, can become part of a much larger memetic relay. A cartoon by Acharya that has as its subject, Gyandev Ahuja, a BJP legislator from the state of Rajasthan makes this clear (Figure 6, top). Like the earlier cartoons explored in this paper, this cartoon has also circulated on Facebook and Twitter. Acharya’s cartoon closely follows the visual codes of political caricature with crisp outlines, exaggerated features and an emphasis on punchlines to deliver political critique. The image was produced in the wake of allegations of “anti-nationalism” made by the BJP-led Government and right-wing elements against students of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in early 2016; this was part of a consistent attack on student resistance since the coming of the BJP to power. The cartoon comments on the JNU controversy and specifically targets Ahuja, who, in a widely circulated and controversial TV interview, accused JNU of being a den of vices where on a daily basis one can find “2000 Indian and foreign liquor bottles, 50,000 big and small bones of animals, 10,000 butts of cigarettes, and about 3000 used condoms and 500 abortion syringes” (Firstpost, 2016) (Figure 6, bottom). The tongue-in-cheek humor in this cartoon is not memetic, but accumulates memetic value once shared over social media. Images such as this form part of a memetic relay in which every satirical artifact contributes to the larger economy of memes, consisting of both cartoonish and non-cartoonish images. For instance, in another non-cartoon meme referring to the same issue Ahuja’s caricature does not appear anywhere; instead it features an image of the political strategist and author of the third century B.C treatise Arthasastra, Chanakya (Figure 7). Unlike the earlier cartoons, here the image becomes subsidiary to the text—“Chanakya” becomes a memetic signifier, a shorthand for political critique while the actual work is done by the text itself. This satirical artifact is a pure meme—the image is conceived of, created and circulated as a meme, whereas the two political cartoons mentioned earlier can also as work as standalone political cartoons within a non-memetic logic.
(Top) Cartoon of Gyandev Ahuja on Satish Acharya’s blog (http://cartoonistsatish.blogspot.com/2016/10/cartoons-from-february-2016.html.). (Bottom) Screenshot of Ahuja’s speech on the NDTV YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNAMKRQrgOI).
The “Chanakya Neeti” meme referencing Ahuja (Twitter Screenshot: https://twitter.com/jairajp/status/702399584014884866).
On the other hand, memes can sometimes function with a caricatural logic, even when they are not originally conceived of as caricatures. I want to point out one last meme related to the Ahuja instance to illustrate the point. In this image (Figure 8), Ahuja’s face appears in all its representational indexicality—only, it is pasted onto the body of Daniel Craig as James Bond in Quantum of Solace. The image is a pure meme, but contains all elements of a traditional caricature, which as Wecshler (1982) points out, are threefold: the “portrait charge” that depends on the exaggerated depiction of the human subject, the “allegorical interpretation of public events” that works by emblematizing political events into visual codes, and “social caricature” that deals with the “satirical presentation of typical characters in everyday situations” (p. 14). Additionally, Navasky (2013) has pointed out that another function of the caricature is to reveal “the shortcomings of, and occasionally to humiliate, its subject” through humor and distortion (p. xviii).
The “Condom of Solace” meme in “Unofficial: Subramanian Swamy” (Facebook Screenshot: https://www.facebook.com/SusuSwamy/photos/a.1438827716375814/1695489807376269/?type=3&theater).
The “Condom of Solace” image satisfies the clauses pointed out by Wecshler and Navasky. The image is an exaggeration, it satirizes and even “humiliates” Ahuja’s Hindutva-fueled rant. Colorful condoms laid out like Olympic rings, and text that reads “3000 and still counting. . .” highlight the extremity of the hyperbole. Unlike the signed and singularly authored cartoon produced by Acharya, the “Condom of Solace” is an authorless image, but such memes operate in a caricatural mode, even when they are not strictly produced by a known author, or not even drawn. However, if memes are about repetition with difference, then the Ahuja cartoons, the Chanakya meme and the “Condom of Solace” image belong to the same hypermemetic relay. Thus, two important aspects mark the relationship of the caricature to the meme. First, the caricature can perform as a meme when it circulates in a viral relay of memetic artifacts, and second, some memes are marked by a caricatural mode in their level of exaggeration and the intention behind their production.
Caricatures are not the only ways in which visual political satire functions in a cartoonish mode. Some memes also draw on the language of comics and graphic novels. In the wake of the JNU controversy, Indian graphic novelist George Mathen (pen name: “Appupen”) started a web comic titled Rashtraman that also circulates within the same memetic ecology as these earlier images. In Hindi “Rashtra” means “nation” and “Rashtraman” literally translates as “man of the nation.” But the suffix “man” also draws attention to Rashtraman’s connection to the superhero tradition with many comic book superheroes being “men” of some variety—Superman, Batman, etc. (and the nod to the Nazi Übermensch will not be lost to readers aware of the history of fascism). Rashtraman then is satirical from the very outset—or as Mathen states, it is “the grand personification of the ‘extreme, barely sane type of nationalist’ that George Orwell tried to warn us about” (Irani, 2016).
Mathen’s status as an established graphic novelist with four graphic novels to his name—Moonward (2009), Legends of Halahala (2013), Aspyrus (2014), and The Snake and the Lotus (2014)—embeds Rashtraman within India’s graphic novel landscape. Rashtraman is now a published comic book—the first collection was published as Rashtrayana: Trouble in Paradesh in 2018, and the second edition has just recently started online as Rashtrayana II: Divide and Fool (with plans for publication as a book later). 4 However, despite this, Rashtraman’s popularity depends on its political urgency and quick delivery online under the auspices of Brainded India (a platform started by Mathen for visual art, satire, and comics), rather than sales in the consumer market. Instead Rashtraman functions as what I call an “artist’s meme” that circulates virally in a hypermemetic ecology. Embedded within the circulatory logics and sharing practices of Instagram and Facebook, Rashtraman works within the same intertextual economy as that of the memes mentioned earlier. Some Rashtraman artifacts operate like comic strips, showing narrative progression across panels. But there are others that operate as standalone images. In one standalone image (Figure 9), Rashtraman is seen proclaiming that plastic surgery, air travel and photoshop were all created in the land of “Rashtriya.” Unlike a Rashtraman comic strip that spells out its connection to politics through narrative progression, this image is subtler and requires some prior knowledge of political events. The text in this image is a clear allusion to recent political absurdities. The allusion to plastic surgery points to Modi’s proclamation that the mythical creation of the Hindu deity Ganesha by affixing the head of an elephant to the body of a man was a sign of ancient Hindu civilization’s medical advancements (Rahman, 2014). Similarly, the allusion to air-travel references a claim made at the Indian Science Congress in 2015, that the mention of flying chariots in mythological and religious texts points to the existence of air-travel in Vedic times (Arora, 2015). Finally, the mention of Photoshop in this image is an allusion to the criticism of the BJP for its fervent, often idiosyncratic use of photo-editing software, as for instance in the flood image released by the PIB.
Rashtraman (Facebook Screenshot: https://www.facebook.com/inHalahala/photos/a.1700446946843930/1701585856730039). Image courtesy of George Mathen.
Mathen, of course is not the only graphic novelist doing such work. Mention must be made of the prolific illustrator and artist Orijit Sen, who regularly delivers similar memetic responses to India’s right-wing political climate on Facebook and Instagram. While Sen is best known as a co-founder of People Tree, an Indian fair-trade apparel company and the author of one of India’s first graphic novels, River of Stories (1994), his online posts often display images that are imbued with memetic urgency. For instance, the following two images (Figure 10, left and right) give a sense of the range of styles that Sen’s work encompasses. On the left, the image is composed of a photograph overlaid with text. The image of the fly in the coffee is supplemented by the text that goes: “Manager, there’s a Bhakt in my newsfeed!” Although the Hindi word means “devotee,” in contemporary parlence, “bhakt” is a pejorative term reserved for blind followers of Hindutva. Coupled with the rampant spread of fake news and trolling by volunteers of BJP in the last few years, this image equates the fly with the bhakt and comments on the corruption of news culture in India. The image on the right is closer to the graphic novel mode. Recognizably, the image is that of Frankenstein; the visual gag here is the saffron scarf and a saffron dot on the forehead that contrast strongly with the otherwise monochromatic image, thereby highlighting the Hindu-right’s militarization of the color saffron (Hansen, 1999). The text “Bhaktenstein” again harks back to the terminology of the bhakt, and by deploying a Frankensteinish image, Sen also comments on the mindlessness of Hindutva followers.
Posts from Orijit Sen’s Instagram feed (@orijitzen). (Left) A meme styled post (Instagram Screenshot: https://www.instagram.com/p/BqUc6OlHOSV/). (Right) A graphic-novelish image. (Instagram Screenshot: https://www.instagram.com/p/BjCLN_gl8M7/). Images courtesy of Orijit Sen.
The work of artists such as Mathen and Sen allegorize contemporary India’s climate of intolerance and hatemongering. While their images could very easily pass off as comics or graphic novels, the speed of their circulation over social networks and their close connection to political events allow them to work with hypermemetic urgency. Together with caricatures that form part of memetic relays, and memes that adopt a caricatural mode, such artist’s memes complete the map of the meme’s caricatural topology.
“Digital-memes” (in the language of new media)
The final category of memes that I want to draw attention to is what I call the “digital-meme.” While all memes digital at their point of emergence, I reserve the term digital-meme specifically for those that work playfully with the language of digital media and cyberculture. These are pure memes that as they do not share codes with other forms of visual humor such as cartoons and caricatures. But they are also a special category of pure memes that represent the confluence of new media practices and the task of political critique. Take for instance, the following image that was repurposed to show support for the students of JNU in the wake of the 2016 controversy (Figure 11).
The “undo, delete, save” meme from the “Stand With JNU” Facebook page (Facebook Screenshot: https://www.facebook.com/standwithjnu/photos/a.1258266454187510/1282545525092936/?type=3&theater).
The image displays no attempt at naturalism or exaggeration, no allusion to real politicians, or any attempt to humiliate or satirize a human subject. However, the image plays with the visual icons of the digital age. Simple in its visual construction, the image includes just three easily recognizable signifiers of computer functions—“undo, ”“ “delete,”“ and “save.”“ But when juxtaposed with other text, the buttons are endowed with vibrant political energy. The resulting juxtaposition of text and image reads—'undo discrimination,” “delete sedition law” and “save democracy.” The humor of this juxtaposition is subtle—more like an intelligent nod, than a peal of laughter. The resulting meme addresses the contemporary political climate in India, where the archaic sedition law continues to be used indiscriminately to silence any form of political protest or dissent. Here, the language of digital media becomes intrinsically woven into the politics of protest.
Similarly, other memes often reference the ubiquity of image-editing software such as Photoshop. In one image (Figure 12), we once again find an allusion to the BJP and Narendra Modi’s reliance on photo-editing to create a “clean” public image. Here the image is meant to emulate an advertisement for Adobe Photoshop. The humor of this image emanates not from Modi’s image on the right, or from the Adobe Photoshop title and logo, but from the subtitle that runs: “Making Prime Ministers since 2014.” At the top the words, “Your nation’s development just one click away. . .”alludes to the BJP government’s emphasis on “development,” which has often meant economic development for certain classes and religions. The allusion to Photoshop references the many instances in which the BJP is found to have faked PR images.
The Modi Adobe Photoshop meme (Twitter Screenshot: https://twitter.com/simplyirfan/status/903658429733937152/photo/1).
In another meme (Figure 13), the image of Narendra Modi is surrounded by text in Romanized Hindi. The text goes “Mitron, Photoshop experts bano. . . Degree toh saali jhak marke peeche aayegi” which literally translates as: “Friends, become Photoshop experts. . .the bloody degree will follow.” The use of the Hindi word “mitron” (friends) is deliberate, as Modi often uses it in his public addresses. The statement itself is modeled on a dialog from the 2009 Bollywood film 3 Idiots that focuses on a character who finds educational success and fulfilment through hard work (the original dialog in translation runs: “kid, prove yourself capable and success will follow”). Further, the term “Photoshop” stands in as a linguistic signifier of inauthenticity, especially since the rest of the text alludes to the recent aspersions being cast on Modi’s educational qualifications, which have been alleged to be “fake” (Surendran, 2016). While such memes draw on and contribute to the larger intertextual economy of political critique, they deliberately employ the language of digital visual culture to do so.
Another Modi “Photoshop” meme on the “Unofficial: Subramanian Swamy” page (Facebook Screenshot: https://www.facebook.com/SusuSwamy/photos/a.1438827716375814/1727408587517724/?type=3&theater).
Not all forms of political critique of the Hindu right wing in contemporary India are humorous or memetic. Public lectures, music, political anthems and pamphlets still hold sway over political discussions in the contemporary. But, where lectures ask the audience to think, anthems encourage the listeners to agitate, memes allow the audience to laugh. This does not necessarily make memes any less important in the digital ecology of political critique. Such humorous artifacts demand an immersed and aware audience that is adept both in the political vocabulary and gestures of dissent, as well being well-versed as in the visual culture of the Internet.
Conclusion: In praise of light critique
Humorous memes exist, and they generate laughter and discussion. . .so what? Political critique and dissent are goal-oriented and geared toward practical solutions to tangible problems. Just as the visual culture of the meme eludes the ethos of capitalist labor (the production of a consumable object), it also eludes the practical ethos of political protest. Memes don”t topple a government, or change policy. . .so what do they do? One way of answering this question is by turning to Mitchell’s (2005) notion of visual culture, that “extends to everyday practices of seeing and showing, especially those that we take to be immediate or unmediated” (p. 343). If visual culture refers to the “visual construction of the social” (p. 343), then we can think of memes as a certain humorous visualization of everyday political anxieties. Memes can often be very easily dismissed as “immediate and unmediated,” but their social and ideological value lies in their intertextual capacities and their ability to allow us to be affected by the issues at stake. Memes play an important role in the rhetorical economy of political struggle by performing the tasks of persuasion and stimulating public discourse.
In her work on memes and censorship in China, Mina (2014) points out that the memetic “micro-actions of media remixing and sharing, are particularly important” in conditions of heightened state power and censorship that seek to stifle public discourse and debate (p. 362). While India’s internet environment and conditions of censorship are not (yet) as stringent as China’s, the policing of online spaces has spiked since the coming of BJP to power, with over 50 arrests between 2017 and 2018 for social media posts—“among those arrested over the past year, almost all are very poor; most are illiterate; over half are Muslims; and many are recent Internet users” (Masoodi, 2018). It is also noteworthy that many of the administrators of the Facebook meme pages mentioned here, prefer to remain anonymous. “Official Peeing Human” is an outlier in this regard, as it is openly run by Ramit Varma, who has also worked with the stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra. More recently in 2020, the administrator of “Unofficial: Subramanian Swamy” revealed his identity as Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of Alt News, a leading fact-checking website. 5 Thus, while meme and parody page administrators do generally choose to stay anonymous because of safety issues, such connections to the wider struggle against misinformation and toxic politics proves that online memes do not “exist in isolation, but achieve their effects in relation to other forms of social action” (Soh, 2020: 1118)
Varma and Zubair, however, are exceptions in this culture of anonymity. Such work often involves real risk as seen in the first, temporary closure of “Humans of Hindutva” in 2017 when the administrator received death threats (Bose, 2017). In 2020, after a series of reactivations and closures, “Humans of Hindutva” was finally delisted by the administrator because of both, Facebook’s frequent suspensions of the page due to mass reporting, as well as continuing death threats (The Wire, 2020). But at the same time, there is also real political potential. As Varma has stated: “Internet media is the only hope of any democracy in media and media upholding democracy” (DA Staff, 2019). Like the anonymous Chinese artist Crazy Crab whose work Mina investigates, the administrators of such meme pages broaden “the visual language of dissent through a key form of the creative vernacular of the internet” (Mina, 2014: 368). The political effect of this digital vernacular is what I call “light critique.”
I use the term “light critique” to differentiate the work of the meme from let’s say the work of a political pamphlet or public speech. The meme is “light” critique in two senses—first, it is concise and literally lightweight in its rapid dissemination and consumption. Second, it is lighthearted critique, which does not necessarily mean inconsequential critique. The light critique of the meme aligns with what Hartley (2010) calls “silly citizenship”—the propulsion of “comedy, send-ups and spoofs to the centre of the political process” (p. 241). But as Willems (2011) has pointed out in the context of political cartoons in Zimbabwe, such humorous artefacts don”t always offer direct political resistance, but sometimes play a “self-reflexive role in which those subject to power reflect on their own powerlessness and lack of agency” (p. 128). This self-reflexivity is key to the light critique of the meme. Even as lighthearted critique, the political meme can engage an audience, stimulate a discussion or elicit a reaction. The meme then, is a way of not merely laughing at, but a form of laughing with a certain community of ideological peers. Media forms, as Anderson (2006) has demonstrated, are crucial to the imagination of such political communities. Thus, while memes incorporate a variety of visual, textual and intertextual codes, they work at the level of the imagination; or to modify a quote from Heidegger (1977), the fundamental event of the digital age is the conquest of the world as a meme. 6 The political meme is usually humorous and mostly light. . .but it is always dead serious.
