K-Pop, Bollywood, and How Fandom Connects Me to My Identity
In this op-ed, writer Anjana Pawa explains how her growing love for K-pop has connected her to her childhood love of Bollywood films.
It’s 2004. My sister and I are in our hometown of Bangkok, Thailand. In the drawing room of my uncle’s house, we’re with our cousins learning a Bollywood dance choreography from our new favorite Bollywood film, Main Hoon Na. The film tells the story of two long-lost brothers who are separated during childhood and reunited as adults, and it’s the only thing we’ve watched all summer.
At the end of our three months back home, we’ll put on a variety show to demonstrate our favorite choreographies and perform skits we’ve seen in the movies. Our grandparents, close family friends, and extended family will be invited to enjoy our DIY production and for a moment, I’ll feel like I’ve regained a sense of home, something I thought I had lost upon our move to the United States. Then, my sister and I will return to suburban Ohio, two of the 5 Indian kids starting eighth grade.
Fast forward to 2019. In the middle of a shoebox apartment in New York City, my friends and I are learning the choreography to Korean pop group SEVENTEEN’s “Don’t Wanna Cry.” There’s no final performance where we’ll invite all our friends and family, but we’re still impressed with our ability to grasp the difficult moves, made all the more impressive by the furniture we’ve Tetris’d around to make space to dance. It’s an echo of my childhood, a routine that recalls those comforting summers back home. That celebration of dance and community around pop culture is part of a world I thought I lost as I grew up, but now in my 20s, I’m rediscovering the joy I felt as a kid at home through K-pop and K-dramas.
Beyond my own nostalgia, however, it’s interesting to think about Bollywood and Korean entertainment existing on some kind of shared plane. K-dramas and Indian films seem to follow similar tropes: dialogues that follow poetic cadences which don’t always translate properly into the English language, paired with a love story that seems wildly unrealistic but still hooks the viewer. Watching Netflix’s Crash Landing On You invoked the same feelings for me as when I first watched the Bollywood evergreen love story Veer-Zaara.
Meanwhile, the catchy songs released in both industries have complicated dance choreographies associated with them that become instantly recognizable. “Fancy” and “Sheila Ki Jawani” are both choreographies fans have learned and cemented in their minds. Further, the production of the aforementioned songs blends genre lines, even as it evokes a specific cultural reference point. As Suga from BTS once noted, K-pop is not necessarily a genre itself, but an amalgamation of styles of music, integrated with elements of clothing, choreography, and a grand presentation. Bollywood follows this same path, with songs that blend pop, hip-hop, and classical sounds presented with elaborate clothing and backdrops. The aesthetic is crucial to the sound.
Both the Hallyu wave (a surge of Korean media and pop culture expanding globally) and Bollywood wave have ferociously crashed onto western shores in recent decades. The former began around the ‘90s and early 2000s with K-pop groups like Seo Taiji and Boys and S.E.S. and has expanded through to today’s biggest names like BLACKPINK, BTS, and EXO. With Bollywood, the movement has included the Oscar-nominated film Slumdog Millionaire, and big name Bollywood actors such as Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone making their way to Hollywood.
The West has seen a rise in content from these two industries in everyday entertainment. This has allowed for communities to be created in the fandom pockets of the internet that overlap one another, bringing together fans from all around the globe over similar interests.
Fans of K-pop groups from South Asia have become a community on the internet. BTS ARMYs from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh adorably call themselves Desimy; a portmanteau of the word “desi,” which is a word that some use to describe a person descending from South Asia, and the word “ARMY,” the fandom name for BTS fans. These fans on Twitter have noticed that choreographies of songs like BTS’s “Fire” and NCT U’s “Boss” exist perfectly with Bollywood music overlayed on top. These videos have become a trend on the social media platform and are both fun to watch and fun to make. I’ve definitely created a few of my own to bring together two separate but similar worlds that I hold so dearly.
Back in December, I attended the wedding of a Desi friend. The night before the wedding ceremony, close friends and family gathered to enjoy a feast and perform prepared dances to the latest Bollywood tunes to celebrate and congratulate the couple. Known as the Mehendi ceremony, it's an important tradition for those closest to the couple to wish them a happy life going forward, and the celebratory evening often continues late into the night.
My friend’s husband teamed up with her younger sister to prepare a dance to BTS’s “Boy With Luv” to perform in front of the crowd. The song’s upbeat, energetic tempo and the intricate dance moves fit right in among an abundance of Bollywood choreographies. Nothing felt out of place. “Boy With Luv” is, obviously, a song in Korean and English that has reached audiences across so many different cultures and nationalities. The song's success tells a powerful story of how music transcends borders.
As “Boy With Luv” played and the aunties and uncles around us enjoyed the performance, I was reminded of its impact, that a Korean language song is playing at an event where people's native language is Urdu or Punjabi. I thought back to my childhood, and how I have always existed in the world as a third-culture kid, a person whose contradicting identities come together to create an unconventional story. I’m embracing that history now: a Thai-born Indian kid who grew up in suburban Ohio, and who has grown to love K-pop — and through that, found a community of people who have similar stories.
I now understand why loving K-pop is so easy: it feels like home.
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
