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Journalism of Courage
A phone propped against a metal plate catches the morning light on a verandah. A pressure cooker lets out steam, a scooter coughs to life, and amid this domestic scene, someone claps once for focus. The “studio” is a courtyard. The crew are neighbourhood kids and siblings. The budget is whatever the month can afford. And yet, by evening, the clip has reached a cousin in Dubai and a classmate in Dehradun.
When Jyoti Bhatt uploaded her first skit, filmed by her sister, on the internet in 2021, she hadn’t imagined the response it would get. The video, entirely in the Kumaoni language, had over 5,000 views in just 30 minutes. Bhatt was motivated to continue with a mission in mind — to keep her mother tongue alive, preserving it in digital records. Today, she has over 14,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel.
Bhatt represents a tiny but significant chunk of India’s growing creator economy: the nano or micro influencers. A May 2025 report by the Boston Consulting Group found that India has 2-2.5 million ‘influencers’, and about 50 per cent of them are nano or micro influencers. These creators have anywhere between 10,000 (and sometimes even fewer) to 100,000 followers.
They may not have high reach, but their value lies in their rootedness. They act as local media nodes. They keep dialects alive by using them, lodge soft grievances about everyday power without turning them into battles, and stitch together dispersed communities into an audience that recognises itself. Reach helps, but credibility, continuity, and civic impact matter just as much.
Preserving language
When Bhatt began creating content, one of her first challenges was strikingly ordinary, yet significant: She had a 1 GB daily data cap, which often meant freeing up space by deleting previous cuts. That wasn’t all — she faced trolling, and comments correcting her dialect would hurt. “It was demotivating, but it made me better,” she said, explaining how the same feedback now works like a community edit desk.
Keeping an old tradition alive — of ancestors passing down language, lore, and customs — Bhatt’s most trusted collaborator is her mother. Bhatt’s mother tells her Kumaoni phrases that she can use and checks her videos.
Bhatt said her core audience is Uttarakhandis who have moved to other states or abroad. “They find a video and then watch many more,” she added. Today, she has invested in a tripod, but continues to edit on a small scale without a team. She gets invitations to several cultural events. She recalled that the most cherished invite came from her former school, where teachers asked her to take photos with them. She finds time between her semester exams (she has an LLB and has worked part‑time with Akashvani) to upload content. She sticks to just one rule: originality first, even if that means fewer videos.
Similarly, Karan Joshi or ‘Kedarnaad’ of Uttarakhand’s Almora, is keeping the language alive one song at a time. “I read poems on Uttarakhand by local writers when I was down in the dumps, and I saw Uttarakhand in a new light,” said the 33-year-old.
He started in 2019, setting the poems of the legendary Girish Tiwari, fondly called Girda, to music. His composition, ‘O Digo Laali’, reached listeners far beyond the state. Joshi began uploading more music videos. And it worked. His work featured on BBC Hindi and Akashvani Uttarakhand during the lockdown. However, an unexpected copyright strike took the channel down, and Joshi lost 6,000 followers overnight. “I became depressed,” he said. But he decided to rebuild from scratch, taking up his guitar and keyboard once again, using foam to turn his room into a studio. When video wasn’t an option, he paired songs with a static image and kept posting.
“I only had a laptop in 2019. Now I have a studio,” he said. He teaches and takes up gigs at cafes alongside his content creation. Determined to keep his art rooted in his native hills, he travels through villages, listens to how people speak, and weaves Hindi and Pahadi into his lyrics.
Local connect
Another content creator from Uttarakhand, Pankaj Pathak, known for his ‘Pahadi prank calls’, makes content squarely aimed at hill life. He features issues that reflect local grievances: Clinic hours that lag, roads that don’t finish, and even the story of a son who went to the plains and can’t quite afford to return. “I also use the platform for social causes, such as healthcare in rural areas,” he said.
Pathak recalls that watching a Kumaoni singer perform at a festival in Ghaziabad gave him the confidence to start creating content. “I thought I could perform too,” he said, and with a phone pinched between two sticks in a forest, he recorded his first video in 2019. The journey was anything but smooth. His early videos were rough, and some prank calls fell flat. “You have to watch what people like; you never know when something goes viral,” he said.
The numbers are modest, often a few thousand, but the comment sections are remarkably constructive, and the impact shows up offline. Pathak, who also works as a pandit, is tethered to his village. “Everyone dreams of the city,” he said, “but I want to return to my village.” In fact, when work took him to the plains, he saw views dip. His location is not merely background, but a part of the trust.
In another corner of India — Nimapada, a town in Odisha’s Puri — Arya Aradhna Routray is similarly attached to her native town. She started creating content during the Covid pandemic-induced lockdown. But she never dreamt of “becoming an influencer.” She started because the semester never shifted offline, and the house was too quiet. “I was bored,” she said, with a laugh, crediting her sister for the nudge. The first video was minimal: a birthday mystery box, the rustle of tape, an off‑camera voice completing a sentence. “My strength is making people feel they are right here with me,” she said.
Her follower count is modest, but the value is different: an accessible style of vlogging for young women in her town and a record of the charming mundanities of small-town life — how a mother bargains, what a local snack costs, and how a decision is made at the kirana. The setting is ordinary — and that is the invitation.
Bringing local to digital
When it comes to these small-town creators, dialect turns into an asset instead of an obstacle. It is preservation by use. Language is kept alive because it does practical work in a social media feed. The geography and the accent are all part of the attraction, bringing viewers in.
Pathak’s skits offer a “deniable” way to keep pressure on everyday governance, addressing issues from lack of water lines to missing school windows. And the audience that forms is not only local; it includes those who have left. A 30‑second namaste in Kumaoni may matter more to a security guard in Gurugram than a polished campaign in standard Hindi.
These creators often tackle scarcity — from limited data to lack of equipment — to bring their audience content. These limits often shape style and content strategies.
Asked what “success” looks like, the responses are practical. Pathak, Bhatt, and Joshi outline the same wish list: a modest equipment grant, a bookable district studio open to all, introductory workshops on subtitles, consent, and safety, and cross‑regional exchanges. They want to see Kumaoni skits in a Bundeli village or an Odia vlog in a Garhwali town. None of them talk about moving to a big city — the goal is to get infrastructure that allows them to stay.
The story of small-town creators is one of visibility, where success is measured not by “how many” but by the impact: A festival invite in the home district, a proverb revived in the comments, a clinic that opens on time after a skit, and a poem that finds a new ear on a bus ride.
