If you scroll through your social media feeds for more than five minutes, you will inevitably run into Ravi Kishan. The actor turned into politician, Ravi Kishan has accidentally become the internet’s favourite meme god nowadays. Having checked off the classic Indian celebrity bucket list of fading from movie screens first and then pivot into the lucrative world of populist politics, he now spends his time trying to command the public’s attention through a microphone. In one legendary viral clip, he sits with eyes closed, bringing in divine focus, only to belt out a highly enthusiastic and aggressively off-key rendition of a devotional song.

Yet, while his vocals wander into unknown terrains of musical science (and musicians pleading to let them remain hidden), his hands remained absolutely certain. They sliced through the air, curled into invisible mudras, traced unseen mountain peaks, and eventually mimicking the fluid arcs of an absolute maestro. The internet laughs became a sort of confidence of his limbs so much so that he tried it again only to outpace the auditory delivery of his throat. Other actors and creators too can be seen copying the dramatic, sweeping gestures of hands while singing, turning them into a shorthand for unearned swagger.

But beneath the laughing emoji, there is a ghost. We are laughing at a profound cultural contradiction. What looks like a comic to a generation raised on smartphone screens is actually the distorted surviving echoes of a thousands of year old relationship between geography, sound, and the human body. A relationship that was systematically fractured by history.

To understand why an Indian singer’s hand refuse to stay in their pockets, you have to look first the soil, the sky, and the clothes on their back. Long before concert halls existed, music of the subcontinent developed in tropical open space like courtyard baithak, shaded mango groves and stone temples. In a hot, humid climate, the body’s natural ecological instinct is to open up, that is, to extend the limbs outward to dissipate heat. Then traditional attire also adapted beautifully to this. Loose, unstitched garments like dhoti, sari or breezy kurtas offered zero friction. When an ancient or medieval vocalist sat cross-legged on a rug, their lower body was firmly grounded, but their upper torso, arms, and wrists were entirely free to slice through the warm air.

This wasn’t just random decorative flailing. In these expansive, sometimes noisy and open-air environments, music became a fully somatic and visual event. Because Indian music relies on improvisation that involves navigating the abstract shifting curves of a raga without written sheet music, the hands evolved to act as a parallel visual channel for the sound. Singers began to physically map out melody using their hand gestures, like sculpting it in three dimension. A sweeping hand is used to trace a continuous microtonal glide (meend) and a rapid, fluttering wrist is a mimicry of a complex vocal loop (gamak). Simultaneously, the hands helped in keeping a measure of time by using precise grammar of claps, waves, and finger counts to maintain the cyclical rhythm (tal). Thus, the limb movement was the melody that was made visible.

But there’s more to it.

This tropical freedom met an icy and catastrophic roadblock during the British Raj. The Victorian administrators who arrived in India have carried along with them the physical anxieties of their own freezing northern European climate. In cold climates, the body’s survival instinct is to huddle inward by keeping the arms tucked tight against the torso and hands buried deep inside pockets to conserve thermal energy. Eventually, this very stillness and emotional restraint with a rigid spine became internalized as the supreme aesthetics of a “civilized” human being. To the colonial eye, the animated or dynamic gesticulation of Indian performers looked erratic and dangerously unrefined. In our musical and dance performance, they saw chaos, a lack of self-control. Western classical music had cultivated an ideal of the perfectly motionless singer who stands straight to maximize chest resonance and kept the limbs quiet. The colonial masters and their gaze instantly reclassified the expressive native body as “savage”.

Then through the introduction of Macaulayite education in 1835, which was designed to create a class of English-educated clerks, the British didn’t just colonize Indian minds but they also disciplined Indian muscles. Missionaries and schoolmaster actively punished children for fidgeting or using expressive hand gestures. Thus, to be educated was to be physically inert.

This historical trauma was quickly internalized by elite, upper-class Indian families. Eager to project respectability to their colonial masters, they began a massive campaign of bodily amnesia by forcing their children to unlearn their traditional physical vocabulary. Rudyard Kipling is one such name or one such “dual-bodied” child with this “contamination”. Colonial parents aggressively segregated their children from Indian ayahs (nanny) out of sheer terror that white toddlers were learning to speak and gestures like natives.

This respectability politics turned deadly for the performing arts during the “Anti-Nautch” movement of 1892. Classical temple dancers (Devadasis), whose intricate hand gestures (mudras) had narrated spiritual stories for centuries, were branded as vulgar and seductive by colonial officials and Western Indian reformers. The dance forms were heavily suppressed and eventually banned. During that period, performance was aggressively separated from the body, that is, the body that moved too much was vulgar, and the body that remained controlled was respectable.

This brings us back to the spectacle of Ravi Kishan whose performance is a fascinating, dual-layered paradox of modern pop culture.

On one level, it is completely performative. Kishan is a savvy operator in the late-stage digital economy and he know that pairing terrible singing with supreme confidence is the perfect algorithm for being “viral”. But when the hand gesture is completely severed from the actual precision of the sound, when the hand traced a majestic curve but the voice produced a flat note, the ancient somatic relationship is broken. The gesture become a hollow caricature, a gimmick that served up for online metrics. But look closer at the way he moves. His body language carries an unerasable muscular memory that cannot be entirely faked. He is a product of the rural Bhojpuri belt of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Folk singers there had to use loud, large and theatrical gestures just to command attention across an open field, unlike the insulated, quite, elitist auditoriums.

For decades, English-educated, metropolitan Indian elites have looked down on this regional and rural pop culture by labelling it as “crass”, “loud”, or “uncouth”, and using the exact behavioural adjectives once favoured by Victorian colonizers.

Conclusion

We live in a cultural moment of deep anxiety, where we are constantly trying to figure out what a “decolonial” life looks like. It is easy to think it only happens in textbooks or political debates. But true decloniality is also a bodily restoration. It is the realization that sitting cross-legged, allowing your face to contort with raw emotion, and letting your hands wildly track the air are not sign of a lack of civilization, but they are ways of being alive. The tragedy of the digital age is that a gesture once cultivated through decades of lineage can now be easily detached and turned into an empty internet trend. But the triumph is that the algorithm cannot kill the muscle memory, but number of likes and comments can.

Ravi Kishan is neither a flawless cultural hero nor a simple victim of the internet. He is a contradiction in motion. His hands remind us that our bodies remember the freedoms that institutions tried to make us forget. The real joke isn’t that Ravi Kishan moves his hands too much when he sings, the joke is on the history that tried to convince us to stand still.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, D. (1996). The magic mountains: Hill stations and the British Raj. University of California Press.

Kipling, R. (1937). Something of myself: For my friends known and unknown. Macmillan and Co.

Macaulay, T. B. (1835). Minute on Indian education. Bureau of Education.

Rahaim, M. (2012). Musicking bodies: Gesture and vernacular phonology in Hindustani vocal music. Wesleyan University Press [Rahaim 2012].