It begins, as it almost inevitably does now, with memes. Recently, as West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and Kerala headed into heated political seasons, another parallel campaign surged to life online. Within minutes of a speech, a slogan, or a slip-up, the meme machine kicked in, flattening complexity into something instantly consumable, endlessly shareable, and often far more memorable than the original moment. For instance, Mamata Banerjee’s loss in the recent West Bengal Assembly elections has sparked a massive meme fest, with scenes from films and shows like Dhurandhar, Panchayat, and even Mahabharata reworked into meme templates. Her viral “hamba hamba ramba ramba” remark from a 2021 Murshidabad rally resurfaced, slipping from political rhetoric into meme folklore. Raghav Chadha’s exit from AAP and switch to the BJP didn’t escape the treatment either. He was promptly cast as the lead in “Hum 7 Saath Hain,” a tongue-in-cheek jab at his political reshuffle with six more MPs.
Elsewhere, the internet found its own shorthand for diplomacy. The much-photographed camaraderie between Narendra Modi and Giorgia Meloni was swiftly rebranded as “Melody”—a portmanteau that turned statecraft into fandom. And then there are the slips that refuse to stay slips. When Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta mistakenly referred to Subhas Chandra Bose as “Netaji Subhas Palace,” the internet exaggerated and remixed. Even gestures aren’t spared. When Rahul Gandhi hugged Narendra Modi in Parliament, it was quickly reframed online as awkward intimacy, fodder for endless captioning and GIF loops. In the south, figures like Pinarayi Vijayan and MK Stalin are similarly caught in this cycle—every expression, pause, or phrase feeding into a constantly evolving meme archive that reshapes how they are seen and remembered. And then, just as this hyperlocal meme churn reaches saturation, the frame widens. A child’s plastic steering wheel—bright, toy-like, utterly unserious—is clipped onto a real car dashboard. The caption reads: “The Strait of Hormuz will be controlled by me and the Ayatollah.” No official statement, no diplomatic rebuttal—just a perfectly timed visual punchline posted by Iran’s Embassy in South Africa, echoing US President Donald Trump’s claim with disarming absurdity. At a time when doomscrolling is as much a lifestyle as it is a symptom of screen addiction, memes have become a tool for narrative-building, marketing strategy, coping mechanism, and of course, political propaganda. We don’t just experience events anymore; we template them. The power of memes lies in their supposed unseriousness. What looks like humour often carries durable political meaning. Rahul Gandhi’s “Pappu” image, for instance, was an accumulation of memes that solidified into perception. “Memes are propaganda’s ideal delivery system for the social media age,” says Anunaya Rajhans, Visiting Faculty at Nayanta University and a doctoral candidate studying memes and their political implications at the University of Amsterdam. “They are compact carriers of political messaging that exploit both platform architecture and cognitive vulnerabilities.” Their strength lies in what he calls “context collapse,” where disparate references, emotions, and ideas converge into a single, viral frame.
The meme-verse never really stops. Even as the Indian government asks platforms such as Facebook, X, and Instagram to take down content critical of the government, something else always comes up. Recent reports indicate that takedown orders have targeted posts featuring criticism and satire of the Prime Minister as well as memes, with action reportedly taken under Section 69A of the IT Act. When a parody reel of Narendra Modi hugging world leaders went viral, Facebook took it down. Modi baiter Dhruv Rathee, who had downloaded and reposted it, asked his followers on YourTube to repost it again.
In spite of the take down, memes continue to make people laugh and politicians mad. “Posting political content is always a risk, but I also see it as a reward in terms of engagement,” says the admin of MemeMandir, a page with 935K followers on Instagram and 74K on X. “I see memes as democratised newspaper comics—a way to create awareness, critique policies and ideologies, and make sense of what’s happening,” the admin says. MemeMandir began as a political gesture. Its Ayodhya-based admin, who requested anonymity, conceived the name as a pun on the Ram Mandir, which dominated headlines at the time. “It was around 2018, and Ram Mandir was everywhere in the news, so I started MemeMandir to critique the political developments,” he says. In that sense, memes do what editorial cartoons once did, but at a speed and scale traditional media cannot match.
Walk the Talk
Sankalp Samant, co-founder of Idiotic Media, a firm that handles multiple meme pages, calls memes a language of the internet, layered with culture. “If something has not turned into a meme, it simply doesn’t exist in popular imagination,” he says. “Be it war, an LPG gas crisis, a scandal, a controversy, or a personal experience—everything is meme-worthy for this generation, because it takes away the complexity of the situation and presents it in digestible, humorous scenarios.” Samant’s meme page, Log Kya Kahenge, with over 2.5 million followers on Instagram, posts as many as five memes every day, often blending them with news, professional life, sports, and politics. “In one week, we get 100-plus million views and 4.5 million engagements. That’s the scale of just one page. We have many other pages focusing on Bollywood, topical content, politics, and the news cycle.”
India’s meme economy, while still loosely defined, was already estimated at around Rs 3,000 crore by 2025, according to equity firm Equentis. Smaller meme pages charge a few thousand rupees per post, while larger accounts with over a million followers can earn lakhs a month. “A page with one million followers can earn up to Rs 10 lakh per month,” Sankalp says. Its real scale lies less in formal valuation and more in reach. It is an economy built not just on money, but on attention—fast, reactive, and endlessly reproducible.
Long before memes came to define how we communicate online, the word itself was coined in a very different context: evolutionary biology. Darwinist author Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, deriving it from the Greek word mimesis, meaning imitation. He described it as a “unit of culture,” much like the gene is a unit of evolutionary life. Says Rajhans. “Historically, culture has been produced top-down. But with internet access becoming widespread, cultural production became more democratised, and the idea of memes came back in. Common people may not write novels or make films, but they make memes, which is also a form of expression. They are now equally producers of culture.”
What memes have also done, in a way, is globalised humour. Before the internet, humour was often local, rooted in local politics and societal norms. A person from Bihar, for instance, would often make jokes about Lalu Prasad Yadav, or of the cultural landscape peculiar to Bihar only. With memes, people started to understand the context of other cultures, and jokes around them.Anunaya Rajhans, Visiting Faculty at Nayanta University and a doctoral candidate studying memes at the University of Amsterdam
In India, there is a meme for almost every situation, in every format. It is at once organic and organised. Images, videos, GIFs, AI-generated edits—humour is the common thread. This circulation is sustained by meme template websites and tools—platforms like Imgflip, Indian Meme Templates, and Kapwing make formats easily reusable, while apps like Canva and CapCut enable quick adaptation. The latest in the trend are AI-generated slops—a term used for digital content of low quality—of vegetables, fruits, and food items portrayed as characters of short, wacky stories. The script is always unbelievably ridiculous. A cauliflower’s marriage is fixed with a pea, but she is in love with a potato. A strawberry cheats on an orange with a banana. The brainrot is endless and addictive. “I can’t just stop watching these videos. They are the best content for doomscrolling after a busy day at work,” says Suhail Noshai, an engineer from Uttar Pradesh.
Then there are evergreen templates. A line from the show Panchayat—“1-1 cup chai aur bola jaye?”—becomes shorthand for everyday indulgence. An Arab man exclaiming “Technologia” finds new life in Indian timelines, repurposed to comment on everything from gadgets to jugaad. A sixth-grader’s bewildered “Aayein” travels across platforms, used for confusion, disbelief, even the horror of reading a family WhatsApp forward. The contexts differ, but the instinct is the same: to translate experience into something instantly recognisable. “The moment I wake up, I go to every social media platform—YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit—and look at what’s trending, and then I try to create my own content out of it. I am always looking for humour in every situation,” says Bengaluru-based Sudarsan Das (Sid), admin of the famous meme page, Indian Memes, which has over 407K followers on Instagram. Das runs five such meme pages. “The idea behind memes is to create content that is relatable, accessible, and funny,” he adds.
Neel Anil Shah, Gujarat-based admin of the meme page Log Kya Sochenge, with 7.3 million followers on Instagram, echoes Das, “I decide something is meme-worthy if it’s relatable, quick to understand, and tied to current trends.” Currently, the page reworks IPL scenes into meme-worthy content. “The space is very competitive now, and everything becomes a meme because people use humour as the fastest way to react and connect online,” Shah adds.
The moment I wake up, I go to every social media platform—YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit—and look at what’s trending, and then I try to create my own content out of it. I am always looking for humour in every situation.Sudarsan Das, admin, Indian Memes
Some communities shape and sustain this ecosystem. Sports memes remain among the most dominant. Pages such as Out of Context Cricket and Crazy Cricket Memes turn stray moments on the field into endlessly reusable formats. Bollywood, meanwhile, continues to be a near-inexhaustible source—dialogues, expressions, and even off-screen gossip feeding a constant churn of content. What begins as a scene quickly detaches from its origin, circulating as reaction, commentary, and inside joke. “What memes have also done, in a way, is globalised humour. Before the internet, humour was often local, rooted in local politics and societal norms. A person from Bihar, for instance, would often make jokes about Lalu Prasad Yadav, or of the cultural landscape peculiar to Bihar only. With memes, people started to understand the context of other cultures, and jokes around them,” says Rajhans. This has led to the communities of like-minded people beginning to form.
Pages like Mad Mughal Memes rework Mughal and Rajput history into humour, while Archive of Cringetopia documents the everyday absurdities of Indian life, from viral videos to hyper-local oddities. All India Dank Memes, a Facebook page with over 301K followers, operates within what is known as “dank” meme culture—a subculture built on layered references, irony, absurdity, and deliberately low-quality visuals. Unlike mainstream memes, which aim for instant relatability, dank memes demand prior knowledge of the format. The humour lies not in the event itself, but in recognising the meme reference behind it. “If you don’t know the lore behind a dank meme, you won’t find it funny. It’s the opposite of a ‘normie’ meme, which is made for a general audience,” says its admin, a Ranchi-based advocate, who prefers to remain anonymous.
The examples are often simple but disorienting. A classroom prompt—“Teacher: How do natural numbers start?”—is followed not by an answer, but by a clip from Linkin Park’s song In the end, cut precisely when the singer says, “it starts with one.” The humour lies in the delay, in making the viewer wait for the punchline. In another, the phrase “I miscalculated” is reworked as “When you miss your friend named Calculated,” turning a common expression into a literal, absurd scenario. “In such memes, meaning is secondary; recognition is everything,” adds the admin.
Samant started working in the meme-making landscape in 2017, as an intern of the platform RVCJ, which was previously a Facebook page called Ravikant Vs CID Jokes. “When I started, memes were considered jokes. They were supposed to be funny and meaningful, and needed to land. Now, they have completely evolved. Today, they have become a layer of culture, happening in real-time, which keeps getting upgraded every hour,” he says. Santa-Banta jokes have been replaced by dank memes; Devar-Bhabhi forwards that once travelled through SMS have now been replaced by layered, self-aware formats. Where a simple setup-punchline joke once did the work, today even a broken image or a confusing reference can land, provided one recognises it.
Behind the humour, the process is far from casual. “A typical meme page runs like a newsroom,” says Samant. Often staffed by two or three people, these pages track trends, monitor reactions, and convert them into content in real time. “For serious meme pages, speed is everything. The moment something breaks, we start working on it.” Larger pages, like Indians with over 8.7 million followers on Instagram, may have teams of up to 10 people. Yet, unlike influencers, most meme-makers choose to remain anonymous. “The meme is the face, not the memer,” says Das. “People connect with the content, not the creator. The moment you put a face to it, it simply doesn’t work. Perhaps because people look at memes as participatory content.”
Various studies suggest that memes are not just online artefacts, but are actively reshaping intimacy, with sharing emerging as a way to build and sustain emotional bonds. Take Vaishnavi, for instance. She met her husband, Gautam, on the dating app Tinder. During an idle sleepover, a friend swiped right on her behalf. What followed was not an immediate conversation, but a slow, endearing exchange of memes after they began following each other on Instagram. “We were both shy, so we didn’t talk instantly. We just shared memes,” Vaishnavi says. “We both loved cats and dogs, and we were vegan, so it started with memes around veganism and animals.” Over time, memes became their shorthand. “It turned into our secret love language. I knew exactly what Gautam was thinking when he sent a meme, and he knew what I was thinking,” she adds.
Brands with low-budget marketing spend somewhere around Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh per meme campaign, whereas big brands spend almost Rs 20-40 lakh for one meme campaign, often collaborating with bigger pages.Vishal Sharijay, Founder & CEO, Hobo.Video
Ria Chopra, author of Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India’s Gen Z, looks at such intimacies more critically. She describes it as “microdosing” relationships—where sending memes, reacting to stories, or liking posts become soft check-ins that often replace full conversations. “Our network is larger now, and we’re in touch with more people, but are we making active memories?” she asks. Chopra calls this “bulletin bonding”—a mode of connection built on passing around information rather than consciously engaging with one another. “We often find ourselves passively consuming the lives of our friends through Instagram posts and stories,” she states. In some ways, she suggests, we risk slipping into something like parasocial relationships—not with strangers, but with our own friends.
It’s All About Money, Honey
With the ability to reach vast audiences organically, meme marketing has evolved into a full-fledged industry, with brands actively tapping into its reach. “Brands look at memes as a seeding strategy, targeting different communities within the meme ecosystem. A brand catering to women, for instance, will collaborate with women-centric meme pages,” says Chirag Alawadhi, Founder and CEO of Marketing Moves. This shift marks a clear departure from a decade ago, when brands were hesitant to invest in content built around humour. “Earlier, we had to explain why marketing through memes made sense. Today, if a campaign doesn’t include a meme strategy, it often doesn’t get approved,” he says. Zomato, for instance, has built an entire social media voice around topical memes—responding to everything from IPL matches to viral trends in real time. Swiggy follows a similar playbook, often turning app notifications and ads into shareable jokes.
Despite their short shelf life, memes serve a different purpose from traditional advertising metrics like ROI. Their value lies in visibility and recall. “It’s an attention economy—brands want to be where attention is,” Alawadhi adds. “Anything that captures people’s focus, they will tap into, regardless of whether it perfectly aligns with their product.” As a result, meme collaborations have become a standard line item, often accounting for around 10 per cent of a brand’s marketing budget—less about conversion, and more about staying present in the cultural conversation.
“Brands with low-budget marketing spend somewhere around Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh per meme campaign, whereas big brands spend almost Rs 20-40 lakh for one meme campaign, often collaborating with bigger pages,” says Vishal Sharijay, Founder & CEO, Hobo.Video.
Copyright issues are a big and recurring risk. “Brands now have what we call legal content teams that look at copyright issues, sensitivity, and controversy around the content,” Alawadhi says. For meme makers, too, this remains a major concern, especially on Meta, where the laws are stricter and somewhat arbitrary, according to memers. MemeMandir has deleted all its posts, except for a few, to overcome this. The All India Dank Memes doesn’t post videos anymore, as it fears being banned.
The same velocity that makes memes effective also dulls their edge. The constant recycling of serious events into shareable formats risks turning shock into familiarity, and familiarity into indifference. “In the meme world, war has become an irony, scandals a punchline, and tragedy shareable content,” says Sankalp.
Almost all the creators are aware of a meme’s tendency to reach quite far. “What creators, especially independent ones, do is create humour so insensitive to serious situations that the audience becomes desensitised to the issue,” says the MemeMandir admin, emphasising creating memes that are sensitive.
Rajhans sees this desensitisation as an “intimacy crisis” shaped by constant exposure to disturbing events on screens. “It’s not that people see everything as a joke,” he says, “but that we’re forced to move between war, tragedy, and everyday life within the same scroll.” In that churn, attention fragments and emotional depth thins out. Humour, he argues, emerges less as dismissal and more as a coping mechanism. “We live in a world where so much feels out of our control. Memes, especially absurd or dark humour, are one of the few ways left to process that anxiety.” What appears as indifference is often a byproduct of overload—a way of managing proximity to too much information, too quickly.
Memes have slipped past the role of commentary to become the very grammar of contemporary culture—how events are understood, emotions are exchanged, and attention is captured. They compress the overwhelming into the familiar, turning everything from geopolitics to private relationships into formats that can be instantly recognised and endlessly recirculated. In doing so, they democratise who gets to participate in culture while reshaping how deeply we engage with it. The meme, then, is not just a joke or a distraction, but the unit through which this moment is lived and remembered—and perhaps forgotten just as quickly.