“Why do Indians cry passionately on Insta?”: Grief performativity and ecologies of commerce of crying videos

ABSTRACT

The article attempts to explore the specific performative and digital practice of users sharing digital self-images and videos on social media platforms in which they cry, with or without a ‘tear filter’. In this article, the author employs Netnography (Kozinets, 2010) to look at social media accounts and online archives to track the origins of the trend of ‘crying videos on TikTok’ and through comments, reactions, and user interactions, attempts to understand how grief is performed on Instagram and TikTok. The article offers a diversion from the ossification of the current scholarship on self-images and identity construction on social media by looking at the marketability and entanglements in ecologies of commerce and sociality that the crying videos lead to.

KEYWORDS:

• Tear effect
• social media filters
• selfies
• crying videos
• performativity
• TikTok
• Instagram

Introduction

Sixteen-year-old Sagar Goswami, from a village in Koderma, Jharkhand, created his TikTok account in 2017, the same year Beijing-based Internet technology company ByteDance launched the short video streaming mobile application for the international market. In February 2019, his lip-sync of a Punjabi song, Teri pyaari pyaari do akhiyaan¹ went viral with over 1 million likes on TikTok. Soon, Goswami was acquired by an artist management company and started performing in various ‘cultural’ programs,² product launch parties, and political rallies.³ In 2020, Goswami continues to post videos, often performances or advertisements. He started getting invited for exclusive shoots with Bollywood artists for brand promotions.⁴ Search engines and social media networks throw up snatches of Sagar Goswami’s busy life.⁵ He had over 6 million followers when the Indian government banned TikTok and 58 other application on 29 June 2020. Goswami’s account, content, and fans moved to Instagram, photos, and video-sharing social networking services owned by Facebook Inc. Goswami’s popularity soared to the extent that his name is often used as bait for clicks in YouTube videos.⁶

Goswami’s Instagram account⁷ is now handled by a social media brand management company and is a live archive of his life. It tells a rags-to-riches story that countless of rural and semi-urban teenagers desire to live. Goswami shoots his earliest videos against a backdrop of an unfinished brick wall.⁸ His weather-beaten face is sweaty, and his clothes are shabby. Goswami's recent videos are shot in opulent settings. He's had a makeover. His clothes are fashionable; he does not sweat; and in his photoshoots, he is frequently seen standing beside luxury bikes and cars. In one of the photoshopped photographs,⁹ Goswami is seen standing on the edge of a cliff with a docile leopard. In his sparkling white hoodie, with his pomp faux hawk haircut, also known as ‘Chhapri style’ in local parlance, he looks at the horizon determined and focused. The image sells dreams, promises. Goswami is the initiator of ‘crying videos of TikTok’, the trend that I investigate in my article to understand how ‘crying videos’ or videos have opened up inroads into different forms of affective engagement and sociality. At this point, it is also crucial to state that even though the title mentions Instagram, the two social networking sites – TikTok and Instagram – are used interchangeably because at the time of writing the article, TikTok was banned in India and the users, along with their followers, migrated to Instagram with the same content, fans and followers. Most of the videos cited and analysed in this article were originally uploaded on Tiktok. They still bear the logo or watermark of TikTok but were accessed via Instagram which tweaked its features and interface to make the transition to the platform smoother. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Goswami’s Instagram photo uploaded on Dec 21, 2019.

In this article, I deliberately keep away from pathologizing crying selfies or self-videos and focus more on the economy of grief performativity on social media. A deep-dive into hundreds of videos on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, screenshots and memes on Google Images helped me trace some of the most popular ‘criers’ on social media. Marwick (‘Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy’ 140) argues that individuals use two self-presentation tactics to achieve status and attention online: becoming microcelebrity and self-branding. Microcelebrity is the status of being well-known to a small group of people, as well as the practice of presenting oneself as a public figure, forming emotional bonds with audience members, and viewing followers as fans. Self-branding is a concept taken from business self-help books that encourages people to advertise themselves as their 'personal brands' to potential clients or employers. Both are examples of marketing and consumer culture influencing individual self-presentation, and are aided by social media tools that allow individuals to reach potentially large audiences. I discuss in this article how social media users or ‘artists’, as these micro-celebrities prefer to be identified as, use the tropes of a pining or jilted lover or a devoted son and cry to ‘affectuate’ a bond with the viewers as an attempt to build their personal brands.

Tracing the trend of crying videos

The song, Teri pyaari pyaari do akhiyaan that Goswami lip-syncs to was released on 3 February 2013. In the 3.17-minute song, sung by Bhinda Aujla and Bobby Layal,¹⁰ a couple are seen in exotic settings singing each other's praises. The couple sings throughout the song about how they cannot live apart and how their beloved's stunning eyes keep them up at night. The song was released in 2017, however it gained popularity in 2018 after a TikTok remix was released. In his TikTok video shot in 2018,¹¹ Goswami’s eyes are moist but he smiles and sways to the song, during the female playback. When the male playback begins, Goswami's face transforms into that of a tortured lover, crying as he sings in memory of his lover. Tears stream down his cheeks. The video stayed dormant for some time till it was picked up in March 2019 by another TikTok microcelebrity and influencer, Faisal Sheikh,¹² or Faizu as he is popularly known in the TikTok circuit. Sheikh employs the app's duet option, in which half of the screen is dedicated to Goswami and the other half to himself. He performs his version of the song while lip-syncing to it. The video sparked a chain reaction in which numerous popular TikTok users replicated the crying sequence with Goswami, making him famous. Goswami is recognised as the performer who rose to fame and virality by crying.

After Teri pyaari pyaari do akhiyaan, Goswami posted videos in which he sobs and cries while lip-syncing to other sorrowful love songs. This trend led to many TikTokers crying while lip-syncing to melancholy songs and Bollywood dialogues.¹³ Crying on Tiktok became a formula for virality.¹⁴ On another video platform, YouTube, users started posting tutorials on how to cry or induce tears without looking fake on TikTok. They used lemon juice, glycerine, onion, petroleum jelly and honey. Some YouTubers even started applying Vicks, over-the-counter medications, into the eyes¹⁵ to induce tears. It is uncertain if ByteDance woke up to the hazard this trend posed to the TikTokers, but it soon launched the ‘tear effect’, to simulate cyring with the use of augmented reality (AR). Till early 2020, Snapchat and Instagram had also introduced their versions of ‘crying effects’ or filters to integrate 3D rendered tears into real-time videos and images. Crying selfies started getting viral and are also being used as a formula for quick virality or ‘Instafame’ as Marwick (146–148) calls it as she writes about the ‘attention economy’ of selfies and tropes of microcelebrity cultures. While the term by Marwick is apt to describe social media self-representation images and videos, the crying videos of TikTok are different. The trend Goswami started evolved and reshaped itself on the internet, where consumers are often producers themselves. (Figures 2 and 3)

Figure 2. Thumbnail of YouTube tutorial titled ‘Crying eyes tear eyes TikTok musically video tutorial - Sagar Goswami crying eyes’ uploaded by Tech Takneek on April 24, 2019.

Figure 3. Thumbnail of YouTube tutorial titled ‘How to get the crying filter/effect on TikTok’ uploaded by EM Videos on Jan 14, 2020.

Filtered emotions and mediated bodies

The physiological basis for human interaction with technology is not based primarily on language, but rather to a certain extent the ‘shock’ and the experience (Hansen 261). Walter Benjamin (217–251) argued that the interactive realm of experience precedes linguistic expression and phenomena that cannot be expressed in words need not be in-cognitive. Benjamin’s reading of Freud separates voluntary memory from the psyche and stresses corporeal agency and digital memory to help understand how digital enables technological reproducibility. Not only does Benjamin call for reconsideration of agency in terms that are appropriate to our increasingly inhuman world, but he also provides a manual for adaptation, allowing us to maintain our human perspective during the anxious moments of algorithmic autocracy. The curated videos offered to us by TikTok or Instagram are based on algorithms based on our previously liked videos, trapping us deeper into a filter bubble. Often, the videos that we are least likely to see reach us through content that appropriates them as we see in the case of parody sites that deride the crying videos. Hansen puts forth ‘a process of embodied reception – of reception as embodiment – that culminates in a nonrepresentational experience of embodied physiological sensation’ and argues that technology is a thing in itself and it does not have to be a representation. Networked technologies or social media networks play an important role in human culture and manifest their embodiment in a variety of cultural productions. Contrary to the popular belief that technology cannot exist outside social networks, they often allow the very construction of the social. Liberated from logocentric limitations, technologies generate newer types of human (or post-human) embodiment that should lead us to question the privilege we grant thought in determining what constitutes identity or agency. This idea throws open the possibility of a new contract between the human and non-human that refuses the division between knowledge of people (power) and knowledge of things (science) and thus produce the materiality of a shared world. Insistence on distinguishing the virtual technologies that materialize our consensual hallucination from the content of that hallucination (cyberspace) is rooted in denial and is inseparable from the politics of representation that technology encodes and seeks to erase.

The crying videos of TikTok form a ‘telematic embrace’ (Ascott 232–246) with the viewers. Mediatised self-representation in the form of selfies or videos is a dramaturgy of every day as Tembeck (‘Selfies of ill health’, 2–4) observes. The crying effect and the filters that create an illusion of crying through virtual augmentation is such a construction of the self. While some TikTokers imitate crying, others use filters of crying effects preloaded in the application to follow the trend. Different kinds of users have different motives to construct identity – one as an actor or micro-celebrity, another as someone who simply wants to be noticed.¹⁶ A large section of scholarly work that focuses on these dramatizations of body, representation of self and constriction of identity end up assigning hierarchies to ways one construct self on social media platforms. In my article, I draw from Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ (1983) to argue that every figment of self on the internet is like our mirror image but not us. In the floating netscape, every bit of image is an object in itself with its economy and politics which cannot be disinterred if we continue to use the lens of analogous perceptions. Sagar Goswami’s Instagram account archives his TikTok videos. The account is managed by a digital marketer. He started his career with a crying video but in his Instagram bio, he describes himself as a producer of comedy content and an influencer. He portrays himself as a fun-loving individual who enjoys his life. In most of his photos and videos on Instagram, he appears enjoying his time with his friends. Almost all videos on his Instagram account have thousands of comments in the form of fire and heart emojis or a few words like ‘Mast’ (rollicking), ‘OSM’ (abbreviated form of awesome) and so on. The interactions and comments on his videos show an active engagement of social media users. The comments lack literary sophistication, but they do indicate a strong emotive link with the content and the creator, as well as followers emboldened by the platform's affordances making an attempt to comment or react. Goswami’s followers laugh with him, cry with him.¹⁷ Goswami’s crying video of teri pyaari pyaari do akhiyaan helped him gain this large fan following that is roused by whatever he does on social media. Social media handles of artists like Goswami are a rich repository of ‘worldly sensibilities’ (Hansen). On social media, the self is a form of currency that is exchanged, its value varies, and they build innumerable circuits of sociality that seep into popular culture as much as popular culture seeps into them.

To determine if my own aesthetic biases influenced my reading of these artefacts, I shared a video by another artist with my parents who are new social media users. The smartphone, with the various possibilities it offers, is still an object of technological wonder for them. They are still uninitiated by the social cues on networking sites. So, to understand how they react to a crying video, I asked them to narrate their thoughts, separately and in isolation, as they watch keeping in with the ‘walkthrough method’ (Light et al.). I shared with them a video by Sawan Mahali from Jamshedpur who uses hashtag #Gareebboy (poor boy) with his name on Instagram and cries in all videos as he delivers emotive social messages. He is also called ‘motherman’ or ‘motherman7’ for his crying videos professing his love for his mother. In this video,¹⁸ Mahali acts out an imaginary conversation with his ailing mother that he has got her medicines despite severe financial hardships. My mother began watching the video while holding the phone securely with both hands and putting it closer to her face, aware that I intended to include her reactions in this article

Mother: who is he? … tch! His mother is sick. He’s such a young boy. Is this acting or real? [she does not wait for my answers as she thinks aloud]. He is acting … [she looks sad watching the video and her face is sympathetic, her lips curve and quiver and for a moment it appeared she would cry too but the video ends] … Good acting! He will get a chance to appear on TV one day. Good, we have social media now.

After watching the video, she implores me to like the video so it reaches more people. This transaction of emotions consolidates my arguments about the affective bonds that these crying videos establish with viewers. My mother knows the video is a performance but is moved by the melodramatic representations and ‘nostalgia of values’ (Dey). I show the same video to my father who does not know that I did this same exercise with my mother.

Father: [with a scorn on his face] who recorded this video? [he looks at me and I ask him to continue watching. He missed a few seconds so we play the video again. As the video plays, the scorn on his face disappears and he looks moved. The video ends and he plays it again and starts scrolling to read the comments]. Oh, this is not real? Overacting!

My parents, who are aware of my gaze during the walkthrough, negotiate with different constructs and representations - a stern male family head and a softer female carer, even as they fail to escape the video's ensnarement. Even though my father pretends to be dismissive of the video, I subsequently find him watching Sawan’s other posts and clicking likes on them. A few days after the interview, he shared a video¹⁹ of Sawan with me in which the artist is crying and saying, ‘we love those whom we cannot have in our lives’. My father sent the video link on my WhatsApp number and asks, ‘such a small boy and he has a girlfriend?’ Even though my father feigned dislike, he engaged with the videos and on social media platforms, as several scholars have argued, attention drives the economy. Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram offer opportunities for continual self-representation and selective information use, dividing the virtual environment into ever contracting circles inhabited by distinct groups and subcultures. Through crying, a strong display of emotions, the artists or microcelebrities captivate the viewers momentarily and often succeed in extracting a response, be it liking, sharing, commenting on the video or just giving it attention. Discussing these infrastructures of digital intimacies, Nikunen (158–160) argues, social networking sites not just enable individualization of the public sphere but also bring new and more personal modes of self-expression. She cites an example of more provocative, explicit and sexual photographs and confessional discourses shared by individuals to the public as an example of new forms of self-expression. I base my case on the same argument. The performance of grief or crying on the short video-streaming platforms are also forms of ‘empowering exhibitionism’ (Koskela 199–215). Lasen and Gomez-Cruz (205–215) in their study on the public and private divide in digital photography and picture sharing problematize the notion of the body as a private domain recapitulating the concepts of the ‘mass self-communication’ (Castells 55). They argue that images shared between users redefine the relations between privacy and intimacy and empowering exhibitionism is more about the power replete in sharing intimate emotions publicly. These performances call into question the conventional concept of the power of observation, or, as I suggest, just viewing crying videos on TikTok or Instagram, as well as the divide between public and private territory. The crying videos are empowering because they liberate the users who perform such intimate moments or scenarios such as unrequited love, loss of parents and daily struggles, to establish an affective bond with the viewers. Discussing ‘selfie activism’ by refugees in a fast-changing political climate in Finland, Nikunen (164–165) argues that selfies, that have expanded the spaces of visibility and appearances, provoke a counter-gaze by viewers who are being gazed at, challenging the fears about differences in social and financial positions. Some of these videos even start with the artist saying, ‘I know you will not like this video … ’ or ‘before you scroll away … ’. In some videos, the number of likes, usually a very high number, is overlayed on the screen to motivate users to hit like or implicitly demand a reaction from the viewers who may not even identify with them but invest any kind of attention or reaction out of pity.

Cry for clicks, clicks for currency

As the TikTok videos auto-scroll on the smartphone screen, it is clear that the app was also utilised as a venue for auditioning by those who did not have the reach or access to formal auditions for broadcast performances. The crying videos of TikTok that I discuss in my article is a sub-genre situated within a range of genres of TikTok performances. There are doppelgangers of popular Bollywood superstars, singers, comedians, people who create spoofs. The application has provided them all with an easy way to break the barriers and market themselves effectively. Becoming a celebrity or an influencer on social media platforms has become a promising career in India. Influencers are legitimized members of the workforce that drive the economy. Goswami, from an impoverished village of Koderma in India’s Jharkhand, now rubs shoulders with Bollywood stars and performers. He is signed up for events, performances, and even advertisements. Millions of TikTokers have witnessed the meteoric ascent of regular people around them, read about these success stories, realise the potential of social media platform likes and follows, and mimic the style or type of video that has attained virality. As a result, TikTok develops into a platform that not only strengthens but also democratises connections between media practises and the business.

In 2016, Reliance Industries launched Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, a telecommunications company, and later, low-cost transitional handsets called JioPhones. The low cost of data-enabled handsets shattered the telecom corporation's monopoly on data plans. TikTok launched in India in 2017 had been downloaded 467 million times, nearly one-third of its total download worldwide. What makes TikTok popular in India is not just the low-cost data accessible widely but also a design interface that overcomes dependence on language proficiency and typing skills for communication. Many videos that are deemed ”cringe-worthy” by countless online blogs typically feature people acting out-of-norm for virality, such as crying or even pleading for likes. TikTok provided a wide range of filters and effects and filtered voice in the form of songs and dialogues to be lip-synced. A construction worker who earlier did not have the means to have a photoshoot done can use the filters, a rickshaw puller who could act but never found the courage or the means to audition could now upload a snippet of himself on the social media platform. Short streaming video platforms’ features allow creators to construct and propagate ‘multi-layered, affect-laden messages with varying degrees of earnestness, humour, and ambiguity’ (Hautea et al. ‘Showing They Care’) and even grief and heartbreak. On these platforms, audio-visual manifestations of personal engagement and awareness show how media affordances may aid, enhance, and obfuscate conversations about personal and public issues. But, whatever they do, there is always a flow of attention and emotive transactions.

Crying videos have a different clientele. The videos are consumed even if they are not seen to be appreciated but derided. Internet archivists who curate such videos also get likes and shares, monetized or not. There are unnumbered talent management companies, brand builders, photographers, photo editors, and agents who feed on the traction that these ‘cringe-worthy’ videos generate.²⁰ The photo of Goswami with a leopard carried a watermark of Prince Editz. Several pictures on his Instagram profile are edited and photoshopped by the same firm. These businesses aren't found in Google searches, but they thrive in small-town squares and account for more than 80% of India's unorganised workforce. A crying video on TikTok is like a blueprint for several TikTokers and several small firms that have now ventured into ‘handling’ these micro-celebrities. These unorganized industries that revolve around social media micro-celebrities thrive the same way pirate markets do, as Brian Larkin writes in his seminal book, Signal and Noise (2008), exploring the hidden economy of pirated audio goods in the markets of Nigeria. Ravi Sundaram drives the point home as he uses piracy as a vantage point to explore the intersection of a postcolonial city with media proliferation. Pirate modernity, an illicit form of urban globalization, is not just a challenge to the state’s infrastructural technocracy but also a way for the more impoverished urban populations, or the subaltern, living in non-legal spheres, to enter the legal mainstream. However, the ‘technological glare’ of the mainstream exposes the subalterns to constant attacks from elites – people, courts, media industries. From reflecting on Delhi’s contemporary history to examining conflicts between the postcolonial establishments and the shadow markets of piracy, Sundaram moves on to enumerate piracy’s new cultural and political connections. Elites have always derided TikTok, but the application liberates the subalterns from the text-based technocracy of other social media platforms. Even in derision, these subalterns have become visible, they can no longer not be seen, and they are not shy of using whatever means they get of being seen. The crying videos of TikTok are a stark reminder of this. Each form of a crying video is a cultural artefact, each redraws the relationship between the self and the represented. In this ever-expanding mediascape, forms of media products or artefacts keep changing. An Instagram photo of a human crying could be animated using in-built application ‘effects’ to convert it into a looping video, as seen in several posts on TikTok and Instagram. A screenshot from a video could be turned into a meme. Soon after Goswami became a micro-celebrity, another TikToker, Arun Kumar,²¹ emerged as a potential contender to Goswami in producing crying videos. His videos were shared widely across platforms, but the kind of popularity he achieved was very different. Kumar’s crying videos and snapshots of the videos started to be picked up by meme-makers. Crying videos are circulated and recirculated on different social media platforms curated by collectors, and people derive different meanings out of them. While Arun Kumar’s images started to be used as memes, several YouTubers posted videos in the split-screen of both Kumar and Goswami, comparing their ‘acting talent’.²² Grief passes from one text to another. Performances of grief by Goswami, Mahali or Kumar have multitudes of meanings as users share the videos with their own captions that could be funny, sarcastic, empathetic, angry and so on. (Figure 4)

Figure 4. A and b screenshots of Arun Kumar’s videos turned into political memes; found on Google terms with search terms ”Modiji crying meme”.

The social media artists mimic Bollywood male leads. The trend of Bollywood heroes crying started way back in 2000 (Deshpande), renegotiating the portrayal of masculinity on screen. Even though the movies glorified patriarchy and misogyny, the heroes cried. Bollywood mega-star Shahrukh Khan, Amir Khan, and Salman Khan’s performances of crying seeped into the popular culture. Their video compilations and archives on internet archives such as YouTube have cult-like status. These seepages are witnessed still in TikTok and Instagram. Asked about his hero crying, Rohan Sippy, a Bollywood director, told a journalist, ‘I think tears are very macho … suffering is very heroic’.²³ The songs and dialogues that artists lip-sync to are mostly from this epoch or from low-budget films with explicit yet non-pornographic content that still follow similar tropes. The trend of crying on social apps is new but the performative tactic has a long precedence. Melodramas have been an established genre in televised performances. Melodrama and over-acting have also characterised old, analogous forms of performances (Gandhi) and even Indian folk art. The crying videos of short streaming videos use the same devices as they display emotions on the small screen of a smartphone. Moreover, the short streaming videos inherit the vine culture with a smoother interface that encourages scrolling from one video to another. In this sense, the display of extreme emotions on these short video streaming platforms is similar to what Griffiths describes as ‘energetic modernity’ reflecting on energy regimes on social media that drive modernity. As TikTokers or Instagrammers re-perform emotional scenes from old Bollywood movies and song albums in their crying videos, they also create a distinction between the moment the scene was initially recorded and the replication they present on the platforms. They appropriate the scenes, ascribing their language and understanding to it. Their overacting layers the original clip with newer meanings and contexts. This offers a newer reading into their subjectivity and identity through the videos. They destabilise the subject positions and re-align truth and experiences. This does raise questions on the earnestness of their expression but then, in these videos, the expressions emerge from a different position and embodiment of suffering. Artists rehearse the scenes before recording to perfect them and in the process create several different versions of them. These videos are frequently taken up and amplified by other more popular micro-celebrities who use the platform's duet function to recreate what the artists have made in their own unique style. This shows the replicability, recyclability and remediation of the act. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli studies artists Pia Lindman’s acts in which she reperforms images of grief for the New York Times to argue that the artist’s work shows emotional expression cannot be immediate. In the recreation of images of grief, identity and subjectivities are negotiated to blur the difference between actors and situations, leading to ‘theatricality of political gestures that seek to conceal themselves in the image of someone else’s pain’. The crying videos of TikTok and Instagram are a perfect case for this argument.

Texts, including include smiles, traffic signs, paintings, films, performances, books, and even multimedia and hypermedia forms, are multimodal artefacts because they are apparent expressions of discourses and discursive practises. Intertextuality is the study of textual structures and voices that cross boundaries. Multimodality, or the use of symbolic forms that simultaneously draw on multiple material and semiotic resources, is an aspect of culture that goes beyond textuality. As digital media are rapidly incorporated into a variety of representational and production spaces, the materiality of culture is undergoing rapid change (Azcárate). The study of intertextuality and intermediality helps understand how authorities are negotiated not only between characters in fictional texts, but also between author and reader, or rather ‘user’ in digital communication a media artefact is reproduced or remediated. For instance, the name of the song Teri pyaari pyaari do akhiyaan is Sajjna (beloved) but it is always mentioned or identified with the help of a line of the song instead of its name. The song was originally released in 2013 under the label of a home music company, Amar Studio, and later, redistributed by a digital music company, Mad 4 Music,²⁴ which currently has 6.86 million subscribers on YouTube. The original song Sajjna has 1.3 million likes and 14,000 dislikes on YouTube. 21 February 2019, was significant for this song when Goswami’s TikTok video went viral. This forced both Bhinda Aujla Production²⁵ and Mad 4 Music to release a remix of the song by Funky Boyz,²⁶ a band based that describes itself as the ‘best DJ based band in North India’ on their Facebook page²⁷ with a mere 580 followers. The song got Bhinda Aujla Production 5300 likes and 262 dislikes; Mad 4 Music garnered 13,000 likes and 1900 dislikes. Several other YouTube users reshared this song on 21 February 2019, in different forms – by adding it as a background score to their favourite romantic scene from another movie or music video²⁸ or even singing their own versions of it.²⁹ Google trend keyword search function shows the sudden increase in the search of the phrase ‘teri pyaari pyaari do akhiyaan’ in early 2019 in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha even when the song was released in 2013 in Punjabi, a different language.³⁰

The journey of the song Sajjna and its afterlife on social media platforms demands contemplation on the intertextuality of the media artefacts on short streaming video platforms and the sociality they affective bond they generate. The parody page on Facebook, Boys who Cry passionately on Musically India, reshares³¹ Gareeb Boy Sawan’s Instagram video with the caption, ‘Who hurt Motherman’. The caption reappropriates the video and layers it with meanings different from originally intended (Figure 5)

Figure 5. Screenshot of Google trends page that shows the sudden spike in public interest and search of the phrase “Teri pyaari pyaari do akhiyaan” in Feb, 2019.

in the shared video. Sawan is seen crying profusely in the video while clutching a laminated piece of paper, which could be an enactment of a scene in which couples gaze at a photograph or a love letter from a now-lost sweetheart. The video is an appropriation of another music video released in December 2020 by Rochak Kohli.³² The music video depicts a man romancing a woman who eventually abandons him. Sawan imagines what might have happened to the man in Kohli's video while the same song plays in the background. Followers of the Facebook parody page that reshares the Instagram video of a re-enactment of another video with an entirely different caption make fun of Sawan and write how the laminated piece of paper in Sawan’s hand could be his photograph, his biometric resident card, his school examination results and so on. The comment box leads to an endless loop of meaning-making and sociality. Even in derision, there is an exchange of emotions, transaction of attention and meaning making.

Of the several digital curations, a Facebook page, Boys who Cry passionately on Musically India, and Instagram account crying_tiktok_users³³ are perhaps the most extensive collection of crying TikTok videos. Two other Facebook pages - Reptiles of Kurla³⁴ and Emo Bois of India³⁵ – are a similar collection with different kinds of TikTok posts. All of these pages parody posts in which individuals are shown engaging in various acts in order to gain attention, which is a valuable commodity on social media. These pages repost TikTok videos with the intention of mocking them. The videos often have sarcastic captions. Except for the Instagram account, these appropriated pages have thousands of followers. They end up rupturing the filter bubble in which the videos they deride were earlier trapped, eventually contributing to the economy of the videos. This reminds me of Kuhu Tanvir’s arguments about the ‘pirate archives’ of the cinema. She argues that though copying or piracy exists as a crucial concern, the virtual ‘archival’ space has challenged the ‘guardianship’ and control of the documents in cinema. She writes that illegal, ripped, and erroneous material in the digital age co-exists with the ‘carefully constructed and preserved hierarchy of meaningful cinema’ by the official state archive, posing a challenge to the state archive’s performance of stability and its attempt to control cinematic history. Similarly, the archives of TikTok videos by other social media users play an important role even if they are appropriated. The increased visibility of the posts opens up doors to the politics of gender, class, caste, and sexual performativity. For example, the Facebook page Reptiles of Kurla posts a video³⁶ of a woman singing Lata Mangeshkar’s iconic song, Rula Ke Gaya Sapna Mera from the 1967 movie Jewel Thief as she sobs and wipes tears off her face. The post not just to deride the very act of crying on the camera but also body-shames the woman. There is politics not in the original video but the Facebook post that brings the woman’s facial features, her voice, what she wears, where she sits in what posture, her room, and even the light into the glare. The positionality of the page conveys a lot even without any textual description and, in doing so, draws attention to the aesthetics of the crying videos.

Hierarchies of aesthetics in crying videos

As Barthes would have agreed, viewers of the crying videos of TikTok reproduce meanings. Tanvir notes that authorial input to the pirate archives gives them an entirely new context and intent. This is evident in the case of the Facebook pages that archive the crying videos of TikTok too. There are many examples of these films on YouTube, where TikTokers' original uploads have been collected, combined, or edited to show how these crying videos are consumed. Millions of likes and shares of the crying videos are testimony to their popularity. These videos have an afterlife. They are appropriated continuously on different social media sites with different intents. Even those who ridicule the videos or claim publicly to not like the trend, watch it reiterating the affective engagement with illicit viewership or the joy of secret viewing that scholars such as Hilderbrand (2004) or Tanvir have discussed. The crying videos have a mass appeal because of their impropriety. Their impudence challenges the authoritative norms of screen performances and the dictations of what should be seen and shown and what shouldn’t.

The virality of crying videos of TikTok demand rethinking of the reasons for a media artefact’s existence, its forms, and the resultant impact on ways of seeing, kinds of leisure, and experiences of technologies. Lucas Hilderbrand’s essay, Grainy Days and Mondays: Superstar and Bootleg Aesthetics and Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image (2013), are significant contributions towards decoding the aesthetics of these videos. Hilderbrand disinters a student art film’s extraordinary afterlife of becoming a counterculture phenomenon partly because of its bootleg aesthetics. Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was singled out by Artforum in the 1980s as one of the two featured milestones for the year; Andy Warhol’s death was the other; not only because it represented an affective cultural memory of the 1970s but due to the malleability of the film in mass culture through the appropriation of the music and the images, audiences’ reproduction of the context of Carpenters’ music, and the film’s alteration after entering the networks of piracy. The Bollywood scenes of a lovelorn hero crying remoulded by continuous circulation and appropriation have trickled down to Instagram or TikTok in a completely different form. These videos strip away the glamour of the silver screen and expose the consumption variety of the masses. They are, as Hilderbrand notes about the washed-out picture quality of the film with barbie-sized dolls, “shorthand for expressing the characters’ emotional states and for producing audience affect”. This is the potential effect of material distortion in recontextualizing or appropriation, as Larkin also surmises. The crying videos offer a ‘haptic, melancholic empathy’ (Marks) with which the viewers form a range of intimate relationships. This affective engagement makes them see and circulate these videos even more, and the consumption of these videos reflected by the social media metrics drives their production.

The unique aesthetics of the videos make way for ‘cinematic identification’ (Metz) not because of the men or women who are crying but because the aesthetics and the ephemeral platform where each video lasts for less than 60-second manifest itself more than the actual content giving primacy to the viewer’s own gaze. Deleuze say all objects can gaze back because they have inner consciousness; they project their desire on others. By breaking down, they call attention to their thingness. In opposition to Lacanian fear of alterity, Metz and Marks acknowledge the subject’s agency in giving the object a new meaning. The multifarious pleasure or repulse in the aesthetics of crying videos as viewers recognize, determine, and acknowledge their own visceral experience. While a video of crying produced on TikTok may have some meaning, newer meanings are added to it as it is viewed in different social circuits. In doing so, these videos create diverse sociality around them. While some like the actor’s production efforts, others may like the way they act, and yet another may bond with the video’s critics. And so, these videos emerge as central to different forms of mediatized cultural assemblages on social media platforms.

The crying videos of TikTok are those mediated selves that are occupying the optics of our every day to challenge what we are used to seeing, the people whose existence we are used to acknowledging, negating. The filters and the effects are the little games we play with the technology, through the technology, till we embody it or it embodies us. Either way, the academia must be intrigued by both not by seeing them as a representation of each other but as separate identities who co-exist on the ‘plane of immanence’ (Deleuze). Till the time this article was written, Sagar Goswami, the starter of crying videos of TikTok and Instagram and who rose to fame by lip-synching to a music album, has recorded at least two low-budget, homegrown music videos. While the second song is released in 2021 by Eagles Production and is called Tera Ishq,³⁷ the first³⁸ was released in 2019 with just Kehar Sagar Goswami| Tik Tok स्टारसागरकानयागाना New Full Hd Song || Most Popular Full Song 2020 mentioned as the title of the YouTube video.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks creators of Instagram and Facebook pages, Boys who Cry passionately on Musically India, Reptiles of Kurla, Crying TikTok Users, Emo Bois of India and several other fans and parody social accounts for curating crying videos of TikTok and for inspiring the title and theme of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Soma Basu

Soma Basu is a doctoral researcher at Tampere University, Finland. She’s a Kone Foundation grantee. She also leads the social media research team for the project – Muslims in India. She’s a former fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University, and SUPRA fellow of Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen. Basu is an award-winning journalist with 20 years of experience. She was also the India editor of AFP Factcheck.

Notes

1. ‘Teri Pyaari Pyaari Do Akhiyan Ll Tik Tok Viral Boy Sagar Goswami’. YouTube, uploaded by mn, 16 Feb. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w1qXyy9Tqo.

2. ‘Sagar Goswami Live Performance||Sagar Goswami In JAIPUR||’. YouTube, uploaded by Sagar Goswami BTS, 30 Nov. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVAEkUBnihg.

3. ‘Sagar Goswami Event Show! Sagar Goswami Best Tiktok Actor & Dancer’. YouTube, uploaded by Td Arya123, 27 Nov. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULe7gaKNOik.

4. ‘Sagar Goswami & Neha Kakkar Best Video Ni Rab Tera Bhala Kare Best Tiktok Video’. YouTube, uploaded by Td Arya123, 14 Oct. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=F25oqd5W1rA.

5. Google search listings, https://bit.ly/34uJscx.

6. ‘Tik.Tok.Star ..सागर गोस्वामी आया मायावती की रैली मैं….Sagar Goswami.New Video’. YouTube, uploaded by Reenu Rj, 29 Mar. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGAff14yHBQ.

7. Official Instagram account of Sagar Goswami, https://www.instagram.com/sagar_goswami89/.

8. ‘Tere Bina Dil Naiyo Lagda Teri Pyaari Pyaari Do Akhiyan | Sagar Goswami’. YouTube, uploaded by sagar goswami1, 14 Feb. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=h366lE7xkTM.

9. Image of Sagar Goswami on his official Instagram account, https://www.instagram.com/p/B6VPldLp-ej/.

10. ‘Teri Pyaari Pyaari Do Akhiyan (Original Song) | Sajjna – Bhinda Aujla & Bobby Layal Feat. Sunny Boy’. YouTube, uploaded by Mad 4 Music, 4 Feb. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=37F8JT5pJWU.

11. Sagar Goswami’s viral video uploaded on his Instagram account, https://www.instagram.com/p/BtbEIA6AQ9y/.

12. Sagar Goswami’s duet with Faisu uploaded on his official Instagram account, https://www.instagram.com/p/BtmpNn6g0tI/.

13. ‘Teri Pyaari Pyaari Do Akhiyan || TikTok Viral Video || Faisal Duet Boy || Who Is the Best’. YouTube, uploaded by Khatri Boyz, 12 Feb. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkcuIf_CHbE.

14. ‘Best Emotional Heart Touching TikTok Musically Videos || Best Of Sad Songs Collection Video 2019’. YouTube, uploaded by crush Creation, 18 Jul. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CueNk5fMbV0.

15. ‘Aankhon Mein Aansu Kaise Aate Hain | How to Make Crying Eyes | Red Eyes Video Kaise Banaye’. YouTube, uploaded by Ashish Monitor, 13 Nov. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=veINVV-z228.

16. Marwick (2010) distinguishes micro-celebrity as somebody who creates an ‘illusion of closeness’ to trade strategic information. Life streaming, on the other hand, is expressing self to people in one’s network in a non-enterprising way.

17. The comments on the videos are in emotive language with heavy use of laugh and cry emojis.

18. Sawan Mahali’s video on his Instagram page that I shared with my parents, https://www.instagram.com/p/CFFmTcrDga3/.

19. Sawan Mahali’s video that my father shared with me, https://www.instagram.com/p/CFhXa_XDDU7/.

20. Scripted video uploaded on Instagram by a celebrity management firm, Munch Media, https://www.instagram.com/p/B-vuI1pDuXD/.

21. ‘Tiktok Crying Boy’. YouTube, uploaded by Trading View, 28 Mar. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRsSj-r7VOg.

22. ‘Uday and Arun VS Sagar||Tik-Tok competition|| Tik-Tok sad Musically||’. YouTube, uploaded by TikTok official 2.0, 1 Apr. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_od_aEaI5o.

23. Jha, S. K. (2003, Aug. 25). Bollywood’s big boys do cry. Retrieved 23 Aug. 2020, from https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/bollywood-s-big-boys-do-cry/story-0Nd5m7O5RLZFMPf56jDlqJ.html.

24. Official YouTube channel of Mad 4 Music with 7.06 million subscribers, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChk0IxOyv4owBJg_IfurDkA.

25. ‘Pyaari Pyaari Do Akhiyan (Sajjna)’. YouTube, uploaded by Bhinda Aujla Production, 21 Feb. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoAdOM5cvGs.

26. ‘Teri Pyaari Pyaari Do Akhiyan | Official Remix | Funky Boyz | Bhinda Aujla & Bobby Layal |’. YouTube, uploaded by Mad 4 Music, 21 Feb. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=24tMsARfNrE.

27. Facebook page of Funky Boyz band, https://www.facebook.com/Buzz-Funk-Funky-Boyz-1564371507186599/.

28. ‘Teri Pyaari Pyaari Do Akhiyan Song’. YouTube, uploaded by Madan Lal Choudhary, 21 Feb. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=osx-Psh49o4.

29. ‘Teri Pyaari Pyaari Do Akhiyan Yaariyan Unplugged Viral Song of Tiktok Shriya Jain Official’. YouTube, uploaded by Akbar Ansari, 21 Feb. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGhJjSyKWKI.

30. Google trend shows a sudden spike in the popularity of the song in early 2019 and the regions it was the most popular in. Searched term, ‘teri pyaari pyaari do akhiyaan’ between date range 1 Jan. 2014, to 15, Dec. 2021. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-01-01%202021-12-15&geo=IN&q=teri%20pyaari%20pyaari%20do%20akhiyaan.

31. Facebook page of Boys who Cry passionately on Musically India that curates several crying videos circulating online, https://www.facebook.com/bwcpomi/videos/397760444838523/.

32. Original song, Intezaar Itna, by Rochak Kohli released on YouTube in December 2020 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZhN7JyYxCw.

33. Instagram page of crying_tiktok_users, https://www.instagram.com/crying_tiktok_users/.

34. Facebook page of Reptiles of Kurla, https://www.facebook.com/reptilesofkurlaofficial/.

35. Facebook page of Emo Bois of India, https://www.facebook.com/emoboisofindia/.

36. Video uploaded on the Facebook page of Reptiles of Kurla, https://www.facebook.com/reptilesofkurlaofficial/videos/1021607131608408/.

37. ‘Ishq Tera (Official Video) | Cover Song | Sagar Goswami | Manita Raaj | Flyingeagle Production’. YouTube, uploaded by Flyingeagle Music, 12 Feb. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=90N7jnELvxw.

38. ‘Kehar Sagar Goswami| Tik Tok स्टार सागर का नया गाना New Full Hd Song || Most Popular Full Song 2020’. YouTube, uploaded by Haryanvi Maina, 21 Dec. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJtELa0×GRY.