Satiric parody through Indian English tweets in Twitter

• Main Author: Kathpalia, Sujata S.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Humanities::Linguistics; Indian English; Satiric Parody
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/161977
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper examines satiric parody in Hinglish tweets that users created in response to the censorship in India of the James Bond movie Spectre. The analysis reveals the creativity with which users conflated two different cultures (Indian and Western) and languages (Hindi and English) in their tweets for a parodic portrayal of James Bond in an Indianized avatar and a satirical criticism of the underlying conservative ideology behind the censorship of the movie. Rather than taking the form of acrimonious debate on the issue of censorship, the #SanskariJamesBond tweets show how users dealt with the issue through satirical user-generated Twitter memes. This study demonstrates that parody through code-mixed tweets is an effective way of highlighting controversies, taking a stand on them, and, simultaneously, countering conflicting views through a collective public response on a social media platform.