India’s ban on TikTok deprives the country of a favourite pastime

IN INDIA, AS elsewhere, TikTok looks like a cornucopia of bright and busy nonsense: an endless, blooming, buzzing confusion of shaky videos and cheap special effects, dispensed free of charge in 15-second doses. But time spent on the app—or on its Chinese-owned peers, all of them abruptly blocked by the government on June 29th—had a way of leading curious users far from the big cities and celebrities that typically define Indian pop culture. Not just TikTok, but also Helo, Likee and Bigo Live, were virtual highways to places no actual highways serve, in small-town and rural India. They revealed a part of the country that is changing rapidly.

Thousands of people around India appear to have made a living recording and broadcasting short videos, mostly of shimmying, lip-synching and prat-falling, for millions of other Indians to whom they would otherwise have remained utterly obscure. TikTok had about 1.2m content creators and 120m monthly viewers. A striking proportion of the creators hailed from marginalised groups. A scrawny cloth-seller from a small city could start an overnight dance sensation; swaggering young Muslim comics found audiences as big as those of mainstream Hindi films; transsexual performers shared make-up tips with fans and gawkers; rural grannies taught cooking and a girl built a fanbase while lip-synching to a rap...