Kolaveri Di-- Phenomenon in Pan-Indian Identity



Aishwarya Dhanush singing Kolaveri Di

 This past month I was amazed—and vastly proud—to hear that one of the songs from the Tamil film 3 (Moonu) had made it as a vastly popular song in the subcontinent as well as in my local community. Generally, I don’t pay much attention to South Indian cinema, since my knowledge of Tamil and Malayalam is practically limited to how to read and a few words here and there, but this song has apparently taken the attention of desi communities worldwide. According to Khabar Magazine, where I originally heard of the song, if I hadn’t heard of this song yet, I must be in a coma. After reading that line, I remarked that no, I was not in a coma, but lived with a white family who wouldn’t know anything about this song anyway unless Dhanush himself appeared on American television to sing Kolaveri Di. But the song appeared to me in another way when I visited one of my desi friends, who asked if I had heard of Kolaveri Di; when he began to play a clip of the song for me, his sister mentioned, with slight annoyance, that in the past month she had heard this song over a thousand times. I decided, since I’d heard about it twice in that past week, to find out why it was so popular. My inspection began shortly at YouTube. When I viewed the video, I noticed that it had over 33 million views, and that in the span that I was watching it, four more comments had been submitted to the site.

While I was watching it, I wondered what there was in this song that would make it so popular in the desi world. Of course it is new, and filled with combinations of desi and Western influences (the nadaswaram oboe and tavil of the Deccan collaborating with the modern sounds of saxophone and piano), but I knew that there was something else to all of this. It didn’t take long for me to consider that perhaps one of the factors is that is sung in Indian English, that masala-filled dialect of English that makes Westerners’ heads spin.

            This is that one interesting fact about Kolaveri Di then, that it has gathered the attention of the desi communities not by the use of a local desi language (Gujarati, Tamil, Bangla), but by the use of the common bond of English, the language of the British Raj and the lingua franca of the modern world. And mind you, this is not the English that most Westerners are used to, but a singsong version sung in a South Indian accent (hence the “-u” at the consonantal ends of English words), with grammar that most English speakers would frown at trying to understand. But despite this, I find it has appeal, and mostly because of the rawness of the way that the English is used; it is not the English of the refined university student in India brought up drenched in Anglophilia, but the English of the common man, the English of the rickshaw-puller, the bania, and the local paanwallah. This allows it, from my perspective, to be more accessible to the desi populace, so that it can cross the language barriers between Panjabis and Marathis and come out as something that holds appeal to almost everyone who knows a little bit of English. Along with the popular theme of the heartbroken man leaning over his “glass-u scotch-u, eyes full-u tear-u”, I believe that the past integration of English into India has allowed for this song to become one of the most popular songs recently.