Indian Emo Bois

It started as a Facebook page. In 2017, college friends Pratyush “Prat” Raj and Vishu Tyagi began “documenting unhinged things happening on the Indian internet”. Nine years on, it’s evolved into an Instagram channel—Emo Bois of India (@EmoBoisOfIndia)—that curates “real, rooted [content] uninfl uenced by the western gaze”.

While others were frothing over glamorous Holi celebrations at the City Palace, the duo showcased incredible scenes of girls chasing down men with sticks during the festival of Lathmar Holi, and psychedelic packs of chrome-painted boys on silver bikes swarming the main drags of small villages.

Then, as now, the content they were serving was a window onto pockets of Indian subculture that couldn’t be found elsewhere: “India the way we actually live it: loud, emotional, chaotic, dramatic, and, honestly, very funny”, as they tell me over Zoom. Over the years, Emo Bois has become a cultural touchstone that, Tyagi says, “takes the moments everyone is quick to call ‘cringe’ and treats them like what they really are—cool”. The worldview of Emo Bois unfolds on rooftops, roadsides, construction sites, and in gullies—anywhere a phone can be held at arm’s length. It’s a sort of universe—a genre unto itself.

What might be understood as “emo” in the western sense is read here as a central character within a creative milieu. It stretches from skyscraper hair with customised fits to mini-melodramas (highly styled, of course) and prophecies spray-painted on the back of an auto-rickshaw: “DON’T LISTEN TO EVERY ELDER’S ADVICE, EVEN FOOLS GROW OLD.” In many ways, the account serves as a tribute to the short-lived glory of TikTok in India (it was banned in 2020 due to national security concerns), and as a testament to the subcontinent’s unrivalled uptake of the smartphone—second only to China. Unlike Instagram with its aspirational,English- speaking, metropolitan users, TikTok was—briefly—the voice of the heartland, where perspectives from Tier-2, Tier-3, and Tier-4 cities were amplifi ed, and hierarchies of culture and class dissolved. A place where a sabzi wala (vegetable vendor) in a small village could lip-sync and perform melodramas to an audience of millions.

The classification of cities into “tiers” in India is crucial to understanding Emo Bois, as they exist in a kind of slipstream between these worlds. Tier-1 refers to elite urban enclaves within major metropolitan cities, such as Mumbai and Delhi, where Bollywood greats, industrialists, and a select few lay claim to being the cultural gatekeepers. “Anything you see that comes from influencers from Tier-1 cities is polished and solely for that [same] audience. It’s likely a rip-off of a trend that started on American TikTok and then somehow made it to Indian Instagram,” bemoans Tyagi. “Ninety per cent of India does not live in Tier-1 cities.

What emerges is a visual language that answers to no notion of “good taste” and refuses even to aspire to it. Think Dragon Ball Z hair on digital creator Uman Sayyed (@uman_mickey) as he poses nonchalantly on “Mickey”, his crotch-rocket motorbike wrapped with Disney imagery. It’s Versace dupes taking the Medusa logo out of context. It’s side bangs galore and jeans so slashed that the ratio skews 80% leg. It’s Ranjeet Rajak (@ranjeet_rajak_15) of The Ranjeet Salon who creative-directs clients—whether regular guys or Emo Bois—with signature razored sides and tops coiff ed into vertical shapes, often peroxided or dyed in acid technicolour, revealed to the beat of “rave dhol” drumming. Beyond aesthetics, it could simply be a vibe, like a two-star review by Gulshan Singh on Kohinoor condoms: “Phat gya [it broke]… became a dad now.” Five people found this helpful.

It’s counterculture in its purest form, an IDGAF attitude towards well-heeled fashion types, and an indiff erence, quite literally, evidenced by the fact that getting Sayyed or Ranjeet the barber to pose for portraits proved harder than getting Naomi Campbell to a studio on time. And why should they care? The World Bank proclaimed India will continue to be among the world’s fastest-growing major economies, at a rate of growth that predicts it will be the third-largest global economy by 2027, according to EY. Everyone is thirsty for India right now. This thirst, however, runs parallel to the lived reality of a far-right nationalist climate.

In reality, far removed from the rhetoric of an economic superpower, staged lovers’ quarrels, moral mini-epics, and the joyous abandon of cosplay and hyper-aesthetics become a rational form of escapism. So, what makes the cut on Emo Bois? “Honestly, there is no selection criteria,” they insist; it’s simply whatever the boys enjoy—content that feels uniquely Indian.

One distinction is that Emo Bois are not making a mockery of anyone, a critique that has occasionally been levelled at the account, and one Raj and Tyagi are quick to dispel: “The kind of content we post is not watched by the ‘creamy’ audience that usually engages with mainstream content. A lot of people have this misconception that we post this to make fun of the people creating it, but that’s not the truth. We post it because we genuinely enjoy it. We’re there to laugh with them and not at them.” In so doing, the Emo Bois have opened a portal into how Indian youth culture expresses itself, revealing a new vernacular where kids are creating their own mythology, on their own terms.

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