Singing Kokborok, dancing Bollywood: Neo-Bollywoodized Tripuri identities and indigenizing the global in contemporary Kokborok music videos

This article critically examines how contemporary Kokborok music videos from Tripura, Northeast India, mediate the fraught dialectic between safeguarding Indigenous Tripuri cultural identity and negotiating mainstream Bollywood influences. Tracing the ‘Bollywoodization’ of these vernacular screen texts, it explores how traditional Tripuri expressions intermingle with Bollywood modalities, forging hybrid ‘neo-Bollywoodized’ subjectivities. While this hybridity facilitates a commercially inflected recalibration of popular aesthetic codes to integrate Tripura into the Indian cultural mainstream, it risks attenuating Tripuri indigeneity, as these virtual representations eclipse and estrange themselves from lived realities. The article contends that these videos enact a dual process of ‘double indigenizing’ and ‘double fetishizing’, not only Indigenous Tripuri culture but also Tripura itself vis-a-vis mainstream metropolitan India – internalizing and reinscribing the very colonial gaze they ostensibly resist. It situates this phenomenon within discourses of cultural imperialism and contested identities, interrogating whether this ‘indigenizing the global’ ultimately debases or reconstructs Tripuri indigeneity amid globalization’s homogenizing tendencies.