Low Brow: A column by Pranavesh Subramanian
Two young men drive a Mahindra Bolero to a brick kiln. Six men are sitting around a charpoy, drinking tea, smoking hookah, and laughing. A bearded man standing atop the kiln spots the Bolero: he looks worried. He calls one of the six revelers, their de-facto leader, a man in a yellow string vest. Their faces fall. We pan back to the Bolero: there is a man tied to the bonnet of the car. Our two young rabble-rousers, ultimately, get into a fight with the six men, comfortably taking them on.
This sequence is the music video for Gujjar Sher (Neeraj Pepsu Dil Me Base) (Gujjar Lion Neeraj Pepsu resides in my heart) by Mayank and Nitish Baisla. Set to a folksy dhol beat with electronically manipulated synths, we hear a tinny voice, heavily autotuned, lip-synced occasionally to our two protagonists, whom the video introduces to us as Mayank and Nitish Baisla. One of the Baislas twiddles his moustache as he mouths the chorus, pointing a gun at the man tied to the Bolero, while the other Baisla flexes his biceps:
Neeraj Pepsu dil me basey
Jaane se bhai ne saara jahaan
Gujjar sher se is sheher ka
Yeh pilla banenge kya don yahan?
(Neeraj Pepsu resides in my heart,
Since his departure,
Will this Gujjar lion of our city
Now be replaced by dogs?)
I first encountered this song on my Instagram reels feed, as a meme: a video of a Travis Scott concert set to this song. The caption said: “Travis Scott paid tribute to Neeraj Pepsu in his concert <3”. Then, I began to see reels on my feed where young, muscular men, speaking in khari boli — sat around a microphone, Joe Rogan style — about a man they referred to as Neeraj Pepsu or Neeraj bhai. In one such reel, a man spoke about how their Hyundai Accent was stuck in a ditch. Four men tried, for hours, to remove the car but to no effect; Neeraj Pepsu single-handedly lifted the car by the bonnet and pulled it up. Another man in a similar reel spoke about how Neeraj bhai would, without hesitation, round up a squad of henchmen if a friend was ever caught up in any trouble.
I had never heard of Neeraj Pepsu before; and it turned out I was one among many: the first Google search result for his name is a Reddit post titled ‘Who the fuck is Neeraj Pepsu?’. It turned out that Neeraj Pepsu was a bodybuilder from the Gujjar caste who lived in the urban Delhi village of Asola in Fatehpur Beri. The village has a strong grassroots wrestling ecosystem, and in the 2000s and 2010s, the village became famous for producing bouncers. As Delhi’s nightlife scene blossomed, Vijay Tanwar, a professional wrestler, identified the economic window for strongmen in the city. He established himself as a bouncer, and several others in the community began to follow his path. Tanwar claimed in 2014 that over 300 men from the village were working as bouncers in Delhi.
Much like these men, Neeraj Pepsu was physically gifted, and initially worked as a bouncer before starting a food business. Pepsu was especially well-built, and began to post pictures and videos of himself working out: first on Facebook in the mid 2010s, and then on Instagram in the late 2010s. This catapulted him to a degree of virality, initially among his own village’s dominant Gujjar caste. Several accounts describe Pepsu as someone who occasionally found himself involved in violence, gradually becoming a local goon. In early 2020, Pepsu found himself in a bad place: his closest friend had passed away, his business was struggling, his father was diagnosed with cancer, and he himself had a serious leg injury. In March 2020, he died by suicide.
Pepsu’s death was a big event in the Gujjar community: several hundred men gathered around his house when he died. While his Instagram account was popular, his death propelled his internet fame further within the community. What started initially as bereaved men commenting on his old posts soon turned into songs about his strength or grieving his death.
There are curious parallels and departures between the cult of personality around Neeraj Pepsu, and that of two other celebrity pandemic deaths in India: the Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, and the Kannada actor Puneeth Rajkumar. While Rajput, who died by suicide, became a subject of rabid uproar, with news channels running a witch-hunt for his ex-girlfriend; Rajkumar, who died of a heart attack at the gym, became immortalised in unconventional ways (on a visit to Bengaluru in 2022 I saw Rajkumar’s face not just on the back of autorickshaws and cars, but even a still of his from a film in an Army uniform used in a poster outside a millitary training institute). Much like the death of Princess Diana in the UK, the deaths of Rajput, Rajkumar, and to an extent Pepsu, have sparked waves of shock.
To make more sense of the parallels between their deaths, I draw upon the theoretical framework of hauntology, posed initially by Jacques Derrida and later by Mark Fisher. For Derrida, the phrase is a combination of ‘ontology’ and ‘haunting’ — of how metaphorical ‘ghosts’ from the past ‘haunt’ the materiality of the present. Mark Fisher’s conception of hauntology builds on Derrida’s, but Fisher is interested in the idea of a ‘lost future’ — for Fisher, hauntology mourns the many alternative futures that could have been possible, but have been lost with time. Pepsu (as well as Rajput and Rajkumar) are fascinating in this sense — I pose that the shock around their deaths was amplified by their age, gender, and the timing of their death. They became emblematic of loss in the pandemic; for several middle-class and working-class families, they represented the future: as young able-bodied men. They became an object of projecting grief across communities — not just for mourning family members, but economic loss, and the intangible loss of a future. Neeraj Pepsu’s popularity, when seen through the lens of hauntology, can thus be pinned down to the timing of his death, as well as the lost futures of Gujjar masculinity that he stands for.
However, Neeraj Pepsu’s death departs from the shock around Rajput and Rajkumar in a crucial way: universality. The shock around his death is more provincial than universal, and this could be for a confluence of reasons: from his caste location, to the ‘low-brow’ nature of his social media feed and the local aspect to his celebrity, to the framing of khari boli as an improper, chaste compatriot in contrast to Hindi or Kannada. However, this very departure is telling of the ways in which caste subcultures are emerging through the internet: Pepsu’s fame during and after his life are a consequence of the internet; even the songs about him on YouTube have raked in millions of views and hundreds of thousands of comments. The subculture around him, is therefore, significant as it points towards a shift in how the internet functions in India: algorithmically hidden away from the class-blind, sanitised mainstream, there lie several pockets of the internet that are actively shaping and re-shaping what it means to embody gendered, caste-ized selves.
Finally, the emergence specifically of music around Neeraj Pepsu and Gujjar identity is an especially interesting development in the current political moment in India. Kunal Purohit, in his book H-Pop, documents the rise of Hindutva-popular music, including subaltern-produced music that is ideologically aligned with imagining India as a Hindu ethnostate; more often than not calling for violence against minorities in India. Purohit specifically looks at the musician Kavi Singh in this light. Singh’s music is very bodily, bass-heavy, effectively designed to provoke a mob to action; her lyrics are incendiary, calling often for killing Muslims, or of politicians opposed to the cause of Hindutva, or to the destruction of mosques. A common theme across all the music that Purohit categorises is the building up of Hindu valour in opposition to an ‘other’ — be it religious minorities, protestors or opposition politicians.
This is where the music — and indeed the lore— around Pepsu poses a curious departure. Gujjar caste pride, in this work, does not exist through the creation of an ‘Other’ who is berated, but through valorisation of the self. Pepsu is not spoken of in terms of his beating up of minorities, or showing a rival caste their place. Instead, he is constantly shown as a ‘lion’; a physically strong man who stood up for his friends when he was needed. Ultimately, the subculture around Pepsu serves to project the Gujjar caste as a strong, powerful but ultimately self-sufficient, self-reliant caste.
In writing this, I have wriggled down internet wormholes that have given me a glimpse of how practices of self and meaning making in India have become intricately digitally mediated. When I moved to Delhi first as an eight-year old, my interaction with the display of caste-pride was limited to ‘Gujjar’ and ‘Jat’ stickers on the back of car windshields. Over the course of two decades, this same act — through the democratisation of technology of at least the facade thereof — now involves a complex creative process with a degree of technical and media literacy. What else can be emblematic of the Indian narrative of technological adoption if not for its tight intertwinedness with caste? For the one Neeraj Pepsu I have written about, there are hundreds of Neeraj Pepsus algorithmically hidden from me; and several thousand Neeraj Pepsus waiting in the wings.
Thank you to Rahul Singh Bisht for his input.
About the Author
Pranavesh Subramanian is a writer who teaches critical thinking at Ashoka University. He is @pranavesh on Instagram and @pranxvesh on Twitter.