When EXO’s Suho, SHINEE’s Minho, Super Junior’s Kyuhyun, CNBLUE’s Jonghyun, and Infinite’s Sunggyu were hired to travel to Mumbai in 2015 as per request by KBS World TV, a South Korean television channel operated by the Korean Broadcasting System aimed at international audiences, they discovered just a single fan, Babu, who recognized them during their weeklong trip.
In 2018, however, the national popularity of K-Pop in Mumbai had increased from Babu to the thousands, as evidenced by the 24,000 followers of the largest Indian fan club of BTS on Twitter, @BangtanINDIA. The rise of K-Pop in Western countries could be one reason for its cultural expansion to India, given the fact that BTS topped the Billboard 200 twice which then attracted fans of Western popular music in India. This is the soft power of Hallyu, the high tide of Korean culture in non-Korean territories.
Interestingly though, India’s initial engagements with Hallyu in 2000 had more to do with local politics than it did with soft power diplomacy. The National reports, in 2000, the Manipur Revolutionary People’s Front, an armed secessionist group, issued a notice banning Hindi films and TV shows – as well as the use of Hindi – in an effort to fight the ‘Indianisation’ of the north-eastern state of Manipur. This political supression in cultural policy is reminiscent of Korea’s tight regulations concerning popular music censorship under the military and authoritarian Park Chung Hee government of 1961-79, which the process of Westernization and industrialization was thought to be a threat to the country’s national culture.
In Manipur, theatres and cable operators quickly agreed to the demand, and people started looking further east for entertainment. Korean TV channels like Airarang TV and KBS World started being broadcast in Manipur and other north-eastern states, and soon the region was awash with cheap pirated Korean CDs.
If KBS World found success with Indian audiences from Manipur as the most watched Korean television channel in the early 2000’s, it is no coincidence that when troubled by the lack of K-Pop’s reach in India, KBS World sent five of the industry’s top male idols to the country and thus created ‘Exciting India’ to be aired for their Indian and international audiences to view on their television and YouTube channels in the 2010s.
Minho, Suho, Kyuhyun, Jonghyun, and Sunggyu were trained to have mobility across the creative industry’s interdependent sectors (talk shows, dramas, music) in appeal to the industry’s larger efforts to streamline the nation’s human/creative resources, a concept JungBung Choi calls intermedia or intergenre pollination, which in itself resembles the unique social formation of such small nations as Korea.
As Choi states:
“Hallyu is not an organic manifestation of rational market exchange in a cultural economy, nor is it an upshot of the fortuitous crossing of cultural supply and demand…certain aspects of Hallyu can be seen as a bureaucrtic program operated from the stage of preproduction through the stage of marketing (Hallyu v. Hallyu-hwa, 44).”
Although Hallyu involves the exportation of culture as commodity, it is a national-institutional campaign as much as it is a transnational cultural phenomenon, a concept Choi calls the duplex governance system.
Discovering and reporting overseas fans’ engagement with K-Pop and TV drama has become routine of the government agencies involved. Because of this, casual viewers and commentators of KBS World in Manipur act unknowingly as cultural arbiters who heavily affect the government and mainstream media’s view of popular culture as well as the nation branding of South Korea.
The Politics of K-Pop 