About a year ago, Sangita Gaikwad’s teenage daughter Mona introduced her to TikTok. Like many new users of the quirky video-sharing app, Gaikwad, a housewife in a farming village in western India, was baffled.
What would she want with an endless sequence of 15-second clips showing strangers dancing, lip syncing, and recreating memes on their phones?
But when Mona insisted, Gaikwad, a cunning 35-year-old who once dreamed of becoming a television actress, began uploading her own short videos. One day she posted a lighthearted clip of herself on her way to the market to buy lamb.
The video was viewed 100,000 times.
Gaikwad didn’t get it, but he was on his way to becoming another unlikely star in the huge, highly addictive, and often bewildering universe of TikTok, the Chinese-made app that has skyrocketed in popularity worldwide.
Nowhere is this truer than in India, TikTok’s largest international marketplace, where its 200 million users include many villagers, low-caste Indians and others from marginalized settings for whom the app was a source of joy, self-esteem, income and even a measure of fame
Now, the social media habits of these Indians have become entangled in a geopolitical clash between the two most populous countries in the world.
This week, India banned TikTok and 58 other apps developed by Chinese companies, calling them threats to national security, in apparent retaliation for the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers in hand-to-hand combat with Chinese troops on the disputed Himalayan border of the countries two weeks ago.
The announcement struck China, whose tech industry is a source of national pride and a key competitor in an emerging Cold War with the US, but also illustrated how ubiquitous and influential apps and other digital products have become Everyone transforming lives even when rival governments worry about their potential for harm.
The success of China’s sophisticated smartphones and low-cost software has prompted warnings from the US and others who believe they are illegally mining user data and could be used to spy on the Chinese Communist Party. China and the companies have denied the allegations.
Indian officials had previously voiced concerns about Chinese apps for security and other reasons: Regulators briefly banned TikTok downloads last year out of concern that users were exposed to pornography and sexual predators, but that did not. affected its popularity.
With its 635 million Internet connections and a rapidly growing $ 3.7 billion digital advertising market, India represents one of the top countries for China’s new tech startups. In 2019, India was the only major developing economy where Chinese apps had a greater market share than American competitors, according to an analysis by MacroPolo, an expert group based at the Paulson Institute in Chicago.
Rush Doshi, director of Brookings’ China Strategy Initiative in Washington, described India as a technological “state of change” that is critical to China’s digital ambitions. With the app banned, Doshi tweeted, “That strategy is in grave danger.”
Although 90% of TikTok’s revenue comes from China, its parent company, ByteDance, had hired 2,000 employees in India and had planned to invest $ 1 billion in the market over the next three years. In April, TikTok said it had donated about $ 40 million to PM Cares, a fund established by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office to fight COVID-19.
The company moved quickly to demonstrate compliance with the ban, withdrawing TikTok from app stores in India and saying it was “committed to working with the government to demonstrate our dedication to user safety and our commitment to the country in general”.
Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said Beijing was “very concerned” about the ban and urged India to “defend the legitimate rights of international investors.”
The Indian nation TikTok has felt the sting.
“I am so despondent,” Gaikwad said by phone from Ambad, a cotton and millet farm town 200 miles east of Mumbai.
By Monday, the day the ban was announced, his account had amassed nearly half a million followers. That night, she hardly slept. She was mourning the loss not only of a favorite “time pass”, the Indian language for frivolous activity, but of a new way of looking at herself.
Gaikwad became known as the “lamb lady” after that early video and soon began posting multiple times a day, mostly snapshots of rural life, mixed with wacky comedy. Often she squats on a stove on her tile floor, stirring lamb cubes or kneading dough in her dark patterned nightgown. Or she’s syncing up her old Bollywood love songs, using her bewildered husband, Ankush, as an accessory.
In one clip, she is sitting on top of a brick wall like a Lucille Indian ball, mockingly yelling, “I’m trapped! How do i get off That garnered 1.4 million views.
Celebrity is not something Gaikwad hoped for: growing up poor in Maharashtra state and raising four children with Ankush, who makes $ 120 a month as a local government employee. When she goes to the market now, she said, people stop her to take selfies. Strangers ask to record videos with her. Some even come to their house.
“I never entered TikTok for money,” he said. “But I got respect, legitimacy and trust. We are poor people. We have never received any attention in life. All we have is contempt and contempt. TikTok turned it over.
Akash Jadhav, the son of a 21-year-old farmer who drives a rickshaw in the rural town of Beed, is a voice for social justice on TikTok, where he posts more than 284,000 sexual harassment, acid attacks, alcoholism and domestic violence. followers. .
He is now regularly invited to open offices and shops throughout the area, with his travel expenses paid. His parents, who have had financial difficulties due to a drought of years in the agricultural region, boast about him in front of his relatives. Born on one of the lowest rungs of India’s ancient caste hierarchy, he proudly described the friendships he had formed with a doctor, a lawyer, and a police officer, men whom he considered far above his social position in the Highly layered India.
“TikTok opened up a whole new world for me,” he said.
Jadhav said he expected India to come up with alternatives to the application. He added that Instagram and Facebook were “dominated by a completely different section of society.”
Nikhil Pahwa, founder of Medianama, a website covering the Indian digital industry, said TikTok’s intuitive full-screen design and emphasis on music made it a hit with rural Indians who found American apps too heavy or awkward. .
“TikTok specialized in being an accessible platform regardless of socioeconomic class,” said Pahwa. “So it has become a hub of creative activity for places we did not expect.”
Deepak Ghubade, a sugarcane farmer in western India, amassed 75,000 TikTok followers before deleting his account.
(Deepak Ghubade)
In January, around 2,000 people gathered at a farm outside of Beed for a local TikTok user convention. The gathering was the brainchild of Deepak Ghubade, a 33-year-old sugarcane farmer who had released the invitation to his 75,000 followers.
When he joined the site, mainly to upload clips of himself dancing to Hindi movie songs, people in his village made fun of him, Ghubade said. But encouraged by his wife, he continued to post.
Farmers and workers use TikTok to overcome loneliness and poverty, he said. “It gives us a break,” he said. “It is a platform where we belong and can express ourselves freely.”
After the death of Indian soldiers, the bloodiest incident on the border since a 1962 war, Ghubade first learned that TikTok was a Chinese app. He deleted his account, but created a new one after some followers asked.
In one of his latest posts, Ghubade, waving a white scarf, dances along a highway, lip-syncing with old, pitiful Bollywood lyrics: Your trap will kill me someday. At the bottom of the screen I had written, in English: “I miss you TikTok; I hate you China. “
Even among ardent TikTok users, there has been little rejection of the ban, widely seen as a necessary response by Modi’s Hindu nationalist party to Chinese aggression. India has also reportedly delayed customs clearance for some Chinese imports, indicating that the trade dispute could widen.
“Since the soldiers have been killed and sentiments are soaring, banning Chinese apps will be a popular move,” said Pahwa. “What we see are people looking for alternatives. If the situation is not resolved within the next month, the creators will have to find other platforms to migrate. “
This week, Gaikwad donned a black sari and gold earrings for the camera, touching his heart as he recorded his latest TikTok post.
“Thanks for all the love and support,” he said. “I met a lot of new people because of this. It became a kind of family where we could express ourselves and share our feelings. “
But like a true star, he refused to fade from the limelight.
“Now I have started a YouTube channel,” he said, closing the session. And stamped at the bottom of the screen was “sangitagaikwad17”: his new Instagram handle.
Special correspondent Parth MN reported from Mumbai writer and Times Bengali from Singapore.
