Sexualise, dehumanise Northeast people—Indian YouTubers have a new formula for more views

The Print

18 hours ago

Vishnoi is currently in the eye of the storm for his views and commentary, but his modus operandi taps into the Northeastern boilerplate that most mainland Indians subscribe to. Several thumbnails on Vishnoi's videos objectify tribal women, while the videos deliver every conceivable racial idea about Northeast India. Sexually liberal women with agency — some below 18 — presented as spectacle? Check. Culinary culture that includes dog meat and insects designed to trigger revulsion? Check. Narratives of drugs, squalor, and trafficking? Triple check. The accompanying titles provide the expected misogynistic flourishes: ' Shaadi ko taras rahi patriyon par jawaniyan ' and ' Jawan ladkiyan nahi pehenti kapde .'
Bhanwar Lal Vishnoi, a former math teacher from Jodhpur, Rajasthan, understands this well. His YouTube channel, 'Yatra Guru Ji', has 6.8 lakh subscribers, who follow the exploits of the one-man stereotype factory. Vishnoi, in a recent video about his travels through Nagaland, claimed , 'I find it difficult to differentiate between faces in Nagaland, because almost all of them look the same.' This might be one of the least disrespectful things he has to say about the Northeastern state.
Racism against Northeast Indians used to be casual entertainment for bigots. But the budding stars of the attention economy have realised that prejudice is very profitable in the 'cash for views' model. A special kind of entrepreneurial spirit is egging young men to look at Northeast India as the motherlode of content, waiting to be strip-mined for YouTube popularity… and the algorithm rewards this vision handsomely.
Walking through a Nagaland wet market, he gestures at local produce and tells his audience, 'Doston aapko yahan China dikh jaayega.' That one comment encapsulates the entirety of Northeastern discourse in some circles: Complete ignorance presented as cultural insight, delivered as a joke to an audience hungry for confirmation of their biases.
As expected, there was a backlash from Northeastern viewers and creators. It forced Vishnoi to issue a six-minute apology, which also tanked. A YouTuber, with a channel named MrYimkhong, said in his video with 66k views that the apology was not sufficient because 'mainlanders anyway assume the worst about people from the Northeast and their food'. Still, apologies are part of a monetisation strategy. Six days ago, Vishnoi uploaded another video travelling aboard the Kamakhya-Jodhpur Express, featuring a semi-naked woman on the thumbnail. In the video are sleeping women, unaware of Vishnoi shooting them. The 'patri pe jawani' theme continues in Delhi and Mewar.
A familiar script
Vishnoi is hardly the only offender. Pranshu Sahu launched his channel, 'BagPackker Pranshu', in June 2022, and in three years, has extracted content from Northeast India's 'otherness'. His recent video, titled 'Full Day-Night Enjoying With Arunachal Girl | Arunachal Girls Abused me', features him hitchhiking on an Arunachali woman's scooter, edited to sexualise her interactions with him. His travels through Kumbh, Shillong, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, and Kargil follow a familiar script: Approach locals feigning innocence, extract favours, then edit the footage to conform to a titillating storyline.
'TheTallTrotter', with 5.15 lakh subscribers, was similarly under fire recently. His AI-generated thumbnail with the text 'How Christianity Has Changed Nagaland' depicts a man surrounded by human skulls, in line with colonial-era headhunter stereotypes about the state. Another video promises 'Naga Girl took me to her village, and…,' while older content labels Nagaland 'The smuggling border of India.' The same formula is applied in the YouTuber's international portfolio. Most of his videos from Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda feature women from each country supposedly asking him to marry them.
Travel was meant to broaden people's perspectives, but that lesson has entirely bypassed these creators. Why bother with depth or understanding, when the route to viral success runs through thumbnails fetishising women and titles that entice viewers with the prospect of cultural boundary-crossing?
In a book titled Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail (2012), Duncan McDuie-Ra writes about the four categories of stereotypes that people from the Northeast are subjected to. These are: backward and exotic, anti-national, anti-assimilationist, and loose and immoral. 'Through their physical appearance, Northeast migrants are not simply viewed as others, but their otherness is also associated with the ways the Northeast frontier is understood and misunderstood socially and politically in the Indian mainstream,' he writes. 'In the course of a single journey across Delhi in a bus, a Northeast migrant may be judged as immoral and sexually promiscuous, a backward subject from the misty jungle, an anti-national rebel, a Chinese national, and a privileged elite benefiting from government reservations.'
These YouTubers are simply the latest iteration of a racism so normalised that it erupts predictably whenever Northeast India enters national headlines. The recent murder of Raja Raghuvanshi in Meghalaya was the perfect illustration of how the state, which had no part to play in the conspiracy, was up for vilification.
Raghuvanshi, a businessman from Indore, was allegedly killed by his wife and accomplices during their honeymoon. What should have remained a criminal investigation quickly transformed into an indictment of an entire region. Before the conspiracy came to light, social media exploded with posts that plumbed the depths of mainland prejudice. One tweet read: 'NE is full of ooga booga jungalees, never visit there. Normies who fall for sweet NE propaganda end up getting f$@#*d like this.' Another declared, 'Northeast tribals are savages, only eliminating is the solution.' One went so far as to misdiagnose racism with, 'That's why Northeast also faces discrimination in other parts of India. Many gangs are active in the northeast state who kill people for money.' The commentary ranged from calling the Northeastern people 'cannibals' to 'human traffickers'.
Not to be left behind, national media branded the state 'crime-prone hills'. Karma Paljor, founder of EastMojo, had then written in an op-ed, 'When is a crime just a law and order situation? Because it seems in the Northeast, the reaction to a murder is directly dependent on who the victims are and who the perpetrators are… You see, the lives of tourists are always valued more than those of locals — and nowhere is this more evident than in Northeast India. In this case, the Sohra locals were not only accused but convicted by the national media even before the bodies had been found.'
Plajor said it didn't matter that Sohra locals and police worked day and night to locate the bodies. 'Racism is not just discrimination against someone based on their color or features — it is also the dismissal of their narratives. When locals pleaded innocence, it was met with cynicism rather than compassion.'
Also read: 'Chinky is what they say, still we fight'. A bold song from Northeast is calling out racism
Making hatred profitable
What hope do regular people have, when mainland Indians are unafraid of ridiculing politicians? In 2021, Paras Singh, a YouTuber with a significant following, called Arunachal Pradesh MLA Ninong Ering 'non-Indian' and claimed the state was 'part of China'. Similarly, YouTuber Elvish Yadav mocked actor and Bigg Boss season 18 contestant Chum Darang's name and ethnicity during a podcast. It required intervention from the National Commission for Women to extract even a grudging acknowledgment of wrongdoing.
The attention economy has solved racism's problem of how to make hatred profitable at scale. An investigation by non-profit Mozilla found that 71 per cent of problematic videos were suggested by YouTube itself. We saw this play out during the horrific riots in Manipur, when existing tensions were weaponised by social media, forcing the government to shut down internet services entirely. Meanwhile, the MP Bezbaruah Committee's recommendations — formed after 19-year-old Nido Tania from Arunachal Pradesh was beaten to death in Delhi in 2014 — gather dust in government files. The committee had proposed anti-racism laws, specialised police units, and educational reforms.
Instead, we are now served racist, dehumanising content, faster than ever. Northeast Indians, othered in plenty of ways over the years, are now baits for engagement farming. YouTube creators have a word for this: Growth.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)