Glitch in the matrix: The Bajis and Indian Digital Space

Abstract

In “Performing Marginality,” Gilbert explores how gender is negotiated, performed, and contested in everyday life through comedy. This paper extends this scholarship by examining digital comedy by Indian Muslim women as a ‘glitch’ in the increasingly Hindutva-centered digital space. While contemporary scholarship engages with explicit displays of defiance, such as street protests, enacted by Indian Muslim in resisting right-wing fascism. I move away from these obvious (but important) demonstrations to less visible ways of registering Muslim presence in the Indian public sphere. This paper undertakes the task of analysing the understated resistance through comedy by Indian Muslim women that is shadowed by the categorically demonstrable forms of protests in the Hindutva regime. By situating comedy within everyday politics, I argue how the seemingly mundane and inconsequential act of content creation doubles up as a mode of political engagement.  I take up the comic duo The Bajis (Shazma and Soha) as my case study to explore how their content contributes to a radical redefinition of the Indian digital space. I do this by closely reading their performances and looking at them as acts of memorialising a Muslim past. This is particularly significant given the subject position of the The Bajis – as women in a historically male-dominated art form of comedy and coming from a minoritized community in the current socio-political landscape. The paper also looks at how the bond between the audience and the creator becomes grounded in a shared memory of everyday familial interactions within a Muslim household. This shared experience forms a crucial foundation for the creators’ connection with their audience and in turn shapes a unique Muslim aesthetic within the Indian space. Finally, I conclude by showing how ordinary resistance through comedy allows these women to assert their existence in a majoritarian nationalist culture