9. ‘Yeh Bik Gai Hai Gormint’ Understanding Meme Culture in India

This paper will try to investigate memes generated, enjoyed and popularized in India, and then largely through the study of the form of a meme, it tries to understand as to what makes a meme relevant. The ease of production and consumption and the popularity of memes in general, forces one to question, how a meme goes on to document seemingly fleeting episode present in public domain and through different social commentaries on the same episode, archives it into an ever circuitous and constantly recurring trope etched in cultural memory. The paper will also argue that these memes when read as instances of cultural politics hold a larger potential for academic research as it presents an untapped domain of rich cultural memory and collective identity that it envelopes within its not so serious garb of seemingly fleeting and ever drifting satirically dank social commentary.