Opinion | Columnists
Why a nonsensical 'soup song' turned into an online rage
Kolaveri Di stamped the English language's reclamation by the colonised as their own in front of a global audience
- By Priya Virmani
- Published: 00:00 February 10, 2012
A senseless Tamglish ‘soup song' sung by a ‘soup boy' instantly makes it to the echelons of global fame. Is this where the 21st-century psyche has led us?
I hear you ask: Tamglish? Soup song? Soup boy? If you happen to be among those not quite abreast of the latest internet trends, Tamglish is a conflation of the south-Indian language Tamil and English.
For those who are up to speed, it is synonymous with Kolaveri Di a song of rejection hummed by an inebriated jilted lover. A soup song sung by a soup boy. The song was released on YouTube last November, and the first two weeks of its life saw it clock up over 10 million views. It has now surpassed 41 million views.
Kolaveri Di, a moniker that in Tamil means ‘killer rage', has made history in more ways than one. Credited with being India's first social media miracle, a south-Indian song has for the first time transgressed the country's north-south divide by becoming a sensation throughout the country. It is now a mainstay in nightclubs across the length and breadth of India.
In America, viewers also shared the song widely on various social networks, making it an instant hit. Transcending cultural and geographical boundaries, the song quickly spawned myriad versions in Punjabi, Marathi, Japanese, Nigerian, Urdu and even reggae and rap.
How did this number that noted Bollywood lyricist Javed Akhtar has labelled "an insult to sensibilities" find its way to global fame? Dhanush, Kolaveri Di's singer and songwriter, had this to say on an Indian news channel: "The song is something God-given and unexpected and there's only one explanation some unseen energy, some unseen hand working in my favour. That's all I can come up with. It's a very, very simple song, a very, very silly song."
Unseen hand
But if we tried to make visible the ‘unseen hand', what would it look like? Well, how about the hand of Sony for starters? Sony bought the rights of the song and marketed it aggressively. Simultaneous to Kolaveri Di's YouTube release, it posted it on Tamil, Hindi and international Facebook pages.
Second, the trio with the most direct hand in the inception and creation of the song all belong to Tamil film industry royalty. The song is from an upcoming film called 3, directed by Dhanush's wife Aishwarya who also happens to be the daughter of Rajnikanth, the south-Indian superstar.
Shruti Haasan, daughter of another south-Indian megastar Kamal Haasan, stars opposite Dhanush. But while these facts upset the myth of an organic success story, they do not quite explain the song's success.
At the first attempt, Kolaveri Di comes across as nonsensical, randomly interspersed with words that end in the suffix ‘u'. Does it have a narrative after all? Well, it is a spurned lover stringing together, in a very James Joyce-like stream of consciousness, words that in their nonsensicality are actually metaphorical.
So he compares the physical beauty of his lady love to that of the ‘white-u moon-u' but her character is akin to the ‘black-u night-u'. Is this Joyce's 20th-century symbolist writing making a comeback in a 21st-century guise? What is most noteworthy is how the song plays on English. Regional English accents in India, Tamil being a case in point, are often caricatured by the ang-licised urbane India, and stereotypes of vernacular accents are often inserted in Bollywood films for humorous effect.
Kolaveri Di reverses this psychology; it challenges the sclerotic ownership of the English language.
In the tremendous popularity the song has achieved it has brought the peripheral ownership of English into the centre where the regional lingo is now standing proudly shoulder to shoulder with the mainstream both nationally and internationally.
The English language was a legacy bequeathed to India by 250 years of British rule, and Kolaveri Di stamps the English language's reclamation by the colonised as their own in the full view of a global audience. What makes this rendition most remarkable is that the song's international audience is wittingly participating in this reclamation.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Priya Virmani is a writer and academic. She is the founder of Paint Our World, an art project with street children in Kolkata.
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