Raw and real: How travel influencers package the nation.

Abstract

This paper delineates how Indian travel influencers construct and morph the tourist gaze of the domestic viewer. The author argues that through Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and vlogs, domestic travel Social Media Influencers (SMIs) propagate a skewed understanding of the nation—one that necessarily (a) claims to offer a glimpse of unseen and authentic India that exists outside of where the viewer resides; (b) can be discovered only in remote, interior parts of the country such as towns/villages or larger neglected, peripheral regions such as the North-East; (c) consists of people who are uni-dimensionally kind, generous and happy—living in peace and harmony with no conflict. Anything that does not fit this paradigm is edited out and not presented to the viewers. Thereby these SMIs articulate an imaginative geography of the nation that not only echoes their ideology but frequently melds to become a constitutive component of the very spaces they imagine.