But the crowd on Instagram is different from TikTok,” said Pooja, explaining how TikTok had more people from her socioeconomic background. “I have 8,000 followers on it (Instagram) and Umesh has about 20,000. But Pooja and Gunjal sometimes feel they do not belong there.
So we no longer get the engagement we used to get.”įor now, the couple has settled for Instagram. “The crowd that was under one roof of TikTok got divided between several apps. And then there were Indigenous Indian apps such as Chingari, Mitron, Roposo, Bolo Indya and others that rushed to capture the void created by the absence of TikTok.Ī post shared by Pooja Umesh Gunjal Gholap it isn’t the same,” Pooja told Al Jazeera. In the past year, Gunjal and Pooja were among the TikTok stars who tried to find other substitutes for the popular app.įacebook-owned Instagram released a TikTok-like Reels feature shortly after India’s ban. June 29 this year marks a year of India banning TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps.
The ban was in retaliation to the killing of 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese troops in hand-to-hand combat on a disputed Himalayan border between the two nuclear powers in June last year. TikTok helped thousands of such people gain confidence, experience moments of joy, and earn respect.īut just as TikTok stars such as Gunjal and Pooja, had begun to get used to their stardom, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned the app, along with 58 others, amid deadly border tensions with China. India soon became TikTok’s biggest international market with 200 million users, most of them coming from marginalised backgrounds that did not have an online platform or any digital access to showcase their talents in a society that remains stratified with caste and class. The app’s tools were simple to use for those who do not speak or read English or Hindi, and it worked well on low-speed internet. We became confident human beings … It wouldn’t have otherwise been possible for street food vendors living in a small town like Beed.” Community of unlikely starsĮver since its launch in September 2016, TikTok’s popularity exploded across the globe, leading to an enormous, mystifying but unique community of unlikely stars who shot to fame with their 15-second videos. But more than money, TikTok helped us earn respect in society. “The first wave had not spread into rural areas, so the two of us could move around a bit, dodging the cops,” Gunjal said. With most of their following concentrated in Beed, the couple managed to get through last year’s pandemic lockdown because of the orders they received from their fans. We felt like celebrities,” Gunjal told Al Jazeera. People recognised us in the streets and asked for selfies. Some of their videos also included slapstick humour, turning them into local celebrities. Gunjal knew he could depend on the Chinese-owned app, where he had gathered a following of more than 200,000 fans by uploading 15-second videos of himself lip-synching to Bollywood songs with his wife, Pooja, who also had 150,000 followers of her own. Pooja, left, and Umesh Gunjal had tens of thousands of followers between them He put out a message on TikTok, offering to deliver street food at customers’ doorsteps.
While figuring out a way to ensure his modest earnings of $300 a month did not disappear entirely, Gunjal had an idea. “And the stall is my only source of income.” “Nobody could step out of the house,” he told Al Jazeera. The federal government had imposed a nationwide lockdown in March 2020, which forced the 31-year-old to pack up his street food stall in Beed, a decrepit town in western India’s Maharashtra state. Mumbai, Maharashtra – When COVID-19 first broke out in India last year, Umesh Gunjal could see his survival hanging by a thread.
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