The Korean wave has entered Indian homes

Last week, I discovered that Shah Rukh Khan and I have a thing in common. Our daughters are both secretly in love with South Korean men they haven’t actually met.

The 18-year-old Ms Khan recently revealed that she would like to date a certain Mr Kim Jun-myeon, alias Suho. Ms Pai, a few years younger, has not disclosed the identity of her crush, but your columnist suspects that it is one Mr Park Ji-min. If you are wondering who these guys are, why they’ve captured the hearts of our teenage children and why this might affect the future of Indo-Pacific geopolitics, read on.

Suho and Jimin are Korean pop (K-Pop) stars, and Hallyu, the Korean wave, has not only touched our shores. It has entered our homes. It might have entered yours too, if you too have teenagers connected to smartphones.

K-Pop is by far the biggest component of Hallyu and, to me at least, appears to be slickly made-up Korean boy and girl groups doing Bollywood-style dance numbers in candy pop settings. But don’t say this to your teenager, unless you want to be at the receiving end of a violent eyeroll.

Anyway, it, as they say, is a thing. And it’s giving South Korea a disproportionate level of soft power, allowing it to compete with more established Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese pop culture exports.

Popular culture has long been commercialised around the world; but K-Pop takes it to an entirely different, industrial scale. A handful of firms dominate the industry, picking young talent, putting artists through a tough training regimen, assembling them into groups and managing them regimentally. The music videos are distributed on YouTube and cleverly marketed through Instagram and other social media, creating a fervent fan base across the world.

Thanks to South Korea’s rapid adoption of broadband in the early 2000s, the artistes, producers and distributors are digital-natives with no legacy issues to hold them back. K-Pop videos on YouTube get hundreds of millions of views, which is how Indians usually watch them. Fans primarily associate online, creating their own tightly-knit “imagined communities” that then connect at offline events and concerts.

In 2016, the industry earned over $5 billion in revenues and, according to the Korean government, contributed over $11 billion to the economy.

 

Now one new K-Pop company is attempting to consciously globalise the phenomenon: by creating a multinational K-Pop band, tied together with its own cryptocurrency-based economy to buy digital goods, physical merchandise, concert tickets and so on. Two young people from India have been selected to be part of separate seven-member boy and girl bands, and their first albums should be out soon.

This experiment is ambitious, for non-Korean artists have not received popular acceptance in Korea. Nevertheless it is remarkable for its attempt to consciously wrap people from other countries into the Korean world. Think about it: When was the last time Hindi films offered serious leading roles to, say, Indonesian or Malaysian actors?

Because Hallyu in general and K-Pop in particular appeal to our big young demographic, they have the potential to draw India and South Korea closer together in the future. When BTS (Bangtan Sonyeondan), a boy band, released their first movie — a documentary biopic — in cinemas in November last year, INOX had planned two screenings at 36 locations across India. However, demand was such that they ended up doing multiple screenings at 45 locations, presumably metros.

Like with other boy bands, the BTS fad too will pass, but Korean pop culture is making inroads into India. Last month, Indian Express reported a steady growth in the number of students learning Korean at the Korean Cultural Centre in New Delhi, and around a thousand young people are taking language proficiency examinations this year. Many cited K-Pop as a reason for their interest, as is the case in your columnist’s household.

From a structural geopolitical perspective, South Korea, like Japan and Vietnam, has the potential to be an important ally of India. Yet, we have found it hard to connect with the three countries at a popular level. Some of this has to do with language barriers, some with culture. So it is good news if the younger lot is learning the language and building bridges.

For their part, the two governments have identified the importance of cultural connections in the bilateral relationship. Prime Minister Narendra Modi just got back from Korea, where he gifted a sapling of the Holy Bodhi Tree to the people of Kimhae, to commemorate a princess from Ayodhya who started a dynasty in that city two thousand years ago.

That’s all very well, but when I asked my resident expert in Korean affairs what Prime Minister Modi and Korean President Moon Jae-in must do to bring the countries closer together, she immediately replied that the ARMY of fans would love it if BTS and other K-Pop groups could do live concerts in India. That, I’ve got to admit, is a very good idea.