Triumph of Simplicity: Indian Comedian Saloni Gaur

“I have been practicing crying for so many years, so I thought: How long will I cry on reality shows? Why won’t I cry during my own farewell? And the best occasion for a farewell is… a wedding!” 

That’s how Saloni Gaur, an Indian comedian, mocked a female Indian singer. The young Saloni Gaur has become an internet star in India. Her rise has defied dominant trends.

The internet is giving talented people a tremendous opportunity to achieve fame without money and connections. The glass ceiling is still firmly there, but cracks have appeared and through them skilled and smart people are able to squeeze, gaining popularity and earning money through a combination of sheer talent and internet know-how. They don’t have to patiently scale career ladders or bow down before the establishment of a given trade. A brilliant middle-aged woman cook from a small town may start a YouTube channel and earn handsome amounts through advertisements, never even needing to meet a single globally recognized chef. A young graphic designer from an underdeveloped country may post his amazing art online until a leading company offers him a job.

It seems Saloni Gaur is on that path. She hails from the middle-sized city of Bulandshahr in the crowded Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. She does not come from a famous, wealthy, and well-connected family. Until recently, she was pursuing political science and economics at Delhi University. She was supposed to work in a bank (“My mother wanted me to be a banker so that she doesn’t have to wait in queues to update her passbook,” she said in an interview for The Hindu with Neeraja Murthy). As a student she started to upload short funny videos of herself talking from her hostel room to Instagram. She reportedly began to polish her skills by mocking her teachers in front of a bunch of her classmates. From there, her success was built through social media. Her largest following is on Instagram, where it has crossed the half-million mark. Now, however, she is taking the next big step by launching her own web TV show, “Uncommon Sense.”

She mostly impersonates famous people or creates aliases for herself – characters that are based on social stereotypes, such as aadarsh bahu (a model daughter-in-law) or pados wali aunty (a neighborhood aunty). With these starting points, she usually covers pressing challenges, such as women’s issues or the role of the media. Gaur often strikes so hard and is so bitter that one is unsure whether to laugh or to cry. “How can my relative Kashish dream of becoming an astronaut,” she asks in of the videos, “if her family does not let her go out of her own house dressed in shorts?”

I must admit that I was at first unconvinced by her style and sometimes found it slightly irritating. When her videos started to gain viral fame, I could not understand why people liked them so much. However, not only are my personal tastes irrelevant here but I have come to realize that it is exactly her style that makes Saloni Gaur so original and appealing. 

She speaks quickly, in seemingly careless Hindi, sometimes peppered with rustic dialect forms (which she has an amazing capacity to copy). She could have chosen more Anglicized Hindi or even chosen to speak in English (which she seldom does) to sound more high-class. She has instead stuck to the language of the street, the language of the common people. Her most famous alias so far, and the one that speaks on current issues, is Nazma Aapi – a Muslim woman dressed in traditional clothes, seemingly a less safe choice in the current political climate of India. Some people on social media apparently even believe that this is her true identity but, as the surname Gaur implies, she is actually from a Hindu upper-caste family. To add to these uneasy choices, while as a proper comedian she makes fun of nearly everyone, it is clear she is targeting the media allies of the ruling establishment more often than other political camps. 

Most importantly, she does not make a star of herself, does not try to overwhelm the viewers with dazzling clothes or background – she keeps her image very simple, and probably the people watching her can feel she is one of them. She did not let her character be drowned by fame either, did not fall in love with herself as many stars do, did not forget that a comedian must be ready to make fun of oneself. A video that advertises her new show focuses not on her but on the price of the camera she will be filmed with. Appearing shy and lost on the big and flashy set, she asks the cameraman: “Did you pay for it in one go or in monthly installments?”

Saloni Gaur thus has achieved viral success by going against the trends. Her journey has been the opposite of the way she mocked the Indian singer – she said that the singer used to pretend to cry on reality shows so long that she decided to do the same in real life, during her wedding. Gaur, in turn, took her real life with her into a virtual show. She, a young woman from a middle-sized town in an underdeveloped Indian state, will hence join a growing hall of fame of people who made holes in the glass ceiling with the hammer of social media. She has achieved this not only in spite of starting her career as a common person, but because she has clearly shown that she remains a common person.